The Rest Is History - 113. Hallowe'en and modern paganism

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

In the first of a two part Hallowe’en special, Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Ronald Hutton to explore the history of modern paganism: from Wicca to Druids, and from Himmler to the Glastonbury Festival. Do its roots reach back to a genuine pre-Christian past? *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. And if you are listening to this the moment that the programme has dropped early on the 1st of November, then you will be listening to it on the night that traditionally has been regarded perhaps more than any other night of the year as especially numinous as especially dangerous we have just celebrated halloween um and the big question is dominic sandbrook yeah how far back does this celebration go oh it must go back to about the 1990s um as far as when people started seeing it in American.

I used to be a massive Halloween skeptic. I despised Halloween, absolutely despised it as an American invention. And then of course my, my son who's now nine came along and he loves, he's, you know, Halloween is one of his favorite days of the year and it's obviously,

it's swept all before it, hasn't it? But the interesting question is is this the re-importation back to britain of an originally british and irish um festival or is it pagan festival or so in other words does it is there something in it that takes us back to the mysterious kind of murky world of our pre-Christian ancestors? Or is it the creation of a Walmart executive in deepest middle America? Absolutely. And that's why today's program is going to be on the theme of paganism. I mean, a massive topic. I don't know. Stonehenge, druids, the Occult, Horned Gods, Mother Goddesses, Greek and Roman

paganism, Snake Gods yeah it's a massive subject it's it's a brilliant subject and I thought it would be fun so we're going to look at Halloween then we'll look at kind of modern paganism and then it would be quite fun to go backwards in time backwards in time interesting backwards in time yes backwards in time to the very beginnings of uh of paganism so if you're here for the druids um just wait we'll get there um we'll get there via wicker and all this other all this other stuff to answer that specific question about halloween and we have one here from tim vasby bernie um who is a friend of the show and i should say a vicar yeah he can't be a halloween fan if he's a vicar, surely.

He says, aren't a lot of these Christians took over pagan myths, ideas, fake, such as in the case of Halloween? Now there is really only one person, I think, to answer that question and to talk about paganism more generally. And that is the great Ronald Hutton, who, because today is a day where we remember the dead, I would like to remember my beloved uncle, David Gregory, who I think in, it must have been 1990 or something, gave me as my Christmas present, a biography of Charles II.

Oh, that's a great book. Ronald Hutton, by Ronald Hutton. And Ronald is a great historian of the mid 17th century, his most recent book, The Making of Cromwell, absolutely my history book of the year so far. But I was very surprised, I think in the, again, the late 90s, where I came across a book called The Stations of the Sun, which was about the ritual year in Britain. So it was exactly about these kinds of questions, is Halloween, does it go back to pagan times, Christmas, all that kind of stuff. And then subsequently, again, my uncle gave me what I think is the best named academic text I've ever come across, Witches, Druids, and King Arthur. And Ronald,

in that book, you finished it with a kind of incredible essay about the challenge of writing about paganism, in which you revealed something that I hadn't realised until that point, which was that you were actually brought up as a pagan. Is that right? Yes, in a very hazy kind of way, meaning that I was brought up in a household which depended on two sources of spirituality. The first was the Greek and Roman classics, the basis of an English education in the last 200 years. And the second was a love of the countryside, specifically the English countryside.

And the two were put together in a very Victorian Edwardian manner, a very wind in the willows manner to give an idea of the countryside as basically a sacred place full of spirits and populated by romping Greek and Roman deities and that really is a huge literature from the English in particular from the late 19th early 20th century to support this and I grew up on that and absorbed it thoroughly and it did mean that when I encountered

modern forms of paganism in my adolescence, they seemed to be natural outgrowths from this. And I think historically, that's exactly what they were. So I was quite disposed to be friendly to them. And is that what prompted your kind of academic interest in the subject? Yes, exactly. But all my academic interests are outgrowths from things that fascinated me between the age of 12 and 15. That's true. Middle age should be a revenge lifestyle in which you actually get to do everything you really wanted to do as an early adolescent. So what about this question that Tom kicked off with then, before we get into the issue of paganism more broadly? Halloween. So Halloween, is there any continuity really

between this and older festivals? Because the festival is Samhain. Samhain. Samhain, Tom. Which is, just before we started, I asked you how you pronounce it. Because it's actually, in English, it looks like Samhain,

which kind of sounds like a football manager or something kind of big sam um so so is there a link between sawin and halloween you bet there is uh first sawin is just the gaelic name for a festival found right across ancient Northern Europe to mark the division between autumn and winter. It's known to the Welsh, who are after all the native speakers of the original Britain, as Nose Galan, Winter's Eve, which is often forgotten now, but it's really beautiful. And as all hallows to medieval Christians. It's always had two aspects. One is that it's the time when there's

most plenty around, the harvest is in, the beer's been brewed, the cheese has been made, and so you actually have materials for a feast. And you slaughter the animals you can't feed through the winter, so it's one of the few times of the year when ordinary people can eat meat in abundance doesn't be to say that november is blood month yes blood month because of the slaughter no no more sinister reason but also it's on the verge of the most loathsome of all the seasons in the northern hemisphere it's a time when even if things are good you're going to suffer from claustrophobia boredom vermin cold mud interior dirt and tv specials and in bad ears and traditional societies from famine epidemic disease and hypothermia lethal hypotherothermia. So it's really scary. So the shiver of the risk of

death and the spirits of the dark hangs over this crucial juncture of the year. And that combination of the fun and the feasting and the merrymaking and the shiver of terror runs through Halloween now. But also there's a Christian dimension that building on this darkening of the year, around about a thousand years after the time of Christ, the Western Christian churches decided to have a feast there for all saints, all the saints they couldn't fit into other days of the year, especially martyrs. And they coupled this with a remembering of the dead, largely because of the new medieval idea around that time that most people don't go straight to heaven or hell, but have their sins burned away in a purifying granny in purgatory, and that would soothe their pain and get some time knocked off their sentence. It's the idea that it's a festival of the dead.

Is that specifically a Christian idea? Or is that one that we can trace back? It is, yes. Yeah. As far as we can reconstruct from older texts and general North European folklore. Before round about 1000 AD CE, Halloween wasn't really about the dead so much as about the fear of your own death, the fear of dying, the fear of the lethal season to come. So that's the winter element predominantly. That's right. That's exactly it. But winter was a killer until modern times, so that this is heavy stuff.

And it was the Christian church that introduced the idea of thinking about those who are already dead and caring for them and praying for them. And in Catholic countries, that goes on to the present. reason why Halloween is so big in America is the Irish, who remained majority Catholic, took it over with them big time to America when they emigrated there in their millions, and gave it to the Americans who commercialised it in the 20th century, and then sold it back to us in a classic colonial relation. So it's a kind of Catholic revenge on Protestant England for getting rid of it? Not really. It's just the fact there are certain things that Protestantism, like other religions, cannot reach. Yes, yes. And I suppose, I mean, I suppose this idea of this time of year as a time of dread

has kind of been revived by all the anxiety around COVID and the sense that winter is going to be a more dangerous time. Perhaps, you know, first time in a fair while, people are nervous of the winter in a way that they perhaps kind of gives us a very, very faint echo of how it used to be. Oh, absolutely. So for the last few years, even before the coronavirus struck, we've had the Vistra of the National Health preparing to collapse every winter. It's just serious stuff if you're on a stretcher. So winter is starting to look like a really scary big deal. And summer, like this brief interlude of happiness between two bouts of misery for the first time in over 100 years.

Can I just ask a question about the continuity? So when the great reformation, the great revolution happens in the 16th century, and the practice of praying for the dead is effectively outlawed, it's removed from the calendar. Are people, do you think, still doing it surreptitiously? Does it survive in kind of folk memory, do you think? or does it genuinely just disappear from England? It survives in folk memory for quite a while for example for a couple of generations after the reformation in Lancashire farming families would go out on Halloween night and they would ignite straw and hold it up on pitchforks and they'd be able to pray for the dead as long as the straw was burning because they couldn't do it in church anymore.

But generally, observance of Halloween died out in England and lowland Scotland for about 300 years, a couple of generations after the Reformation, leaving just this uneasy feeling about it as something when people did something you're not supposed to do anymore. But also the beginning of winter, Friesland. So that idea that I guess that in Protestant England, that celebrating this stuff is kind of papist. I mean, is that the kind of thing that essentially is underlying The Wicker Man? I mean, The Wicker Man is about a kind of a pagan tradition going on. But actually, I mean, the policeman who ends up being burnt, spoiler alert, he's a kind of very devout Protestant, isn't he? I mean, is there a sense in which it's Protestant anxieties about Catholic holdovers that then inform how in ghost stories and horror stories and so on, paganism is seen? A bit. Protestants simply have more problems with paganism than Catholics or even more problems,

because both pagans and Catholics are heavy on religious ritual and Protestants are not. So to a lot of particularly evangelical extreme Protestants, ritual in itself is something suspect. But the wicker man motif actually comes from something more modern and still pretty deep lodged. It appears in the 1890s, which is when for the first time, the English start to realise that a modern pagan revival might be taking place in their midst, the kind of paganism among which I grew up, in fact. And so there is a reaction among both devout Christians and people who aren't Christians anymore, but just don't want any more religion around, especially revived religion. And so this motif creeps into literature of the outsider going to a respectable looking rural British community

and finding out that the locals are still secretly pagans or have gone back to being pagans. And it almost always ends in tears because paganism reveals itself to be a bloodthirsty, terrifying religion. And sometimes there's a happy ending. John Buchan, the author of The 39 Steps and all those great thrillers, is very big on this. He wrote about it three times.

But always there's a strapping Christian hero who obviously went to a very good school who comes along and messes everything up for the pagans. So, Ronald, can I ask a question? I mean, this very nicely takes us to that point at the late 19th, early 20th century when paganism is clearly, well, it's either being revived or it's being invented, depending on your sort of historical perspective. So before we talk about

that, what is it about that moment? Is it to do with the anxieties of an urban industrial society? Is it to do with modernism, the First World War? What is it about that time that gives people this thirst for, you know, horned gods and mother goddesses and this sort of stuff? You're good, Dominic. You've managed to wrap most of it within a minute. It is about the anxieties. You can come again.

It is about the anxieties of urbanising, industrialising society, which produce this new sense of the country, something sacred, something alien, something endangered, for which Christianity doesn't really provide an adequate literature, or as ancient paganism does, with its sense of a sacred nature. But also it's the unravellling of mainstream British Christianity. We are turning into a post-Christian multi-faith society for the first time. We're getting large numbers of Jewish refugees settling among us. You have ideas coming in from the East for the first time on a large scale, forms of Buddhism and Hinduism that Westerners are finding attractive.

So there is this sense of a Christian consensus breaking down. And there's also a kind of middle class, upper class fear of the newly empowered swarming masses of the huge new urban working class with its trade unions and its music halls, and the sense that it might just shake off the middle class rather like a horse shaking off flies in George Orwell's image. And also that of this vast colonial empire with these huge numbers of subject ethnically different populations and this tiny precarious elite of Europeans governing them. So there's an enormous whirlpool of anxieties there with paganism bobbing around in it.

And is paganism satisfying those anxieties or is it generating them? Well, it has a double bonus. If you're part of the worried mainstream, then it provides a good punch bag. You can take out your anxieties upon it by writing novels like those of John Buchan. On the other hand, if you've been brought up on cold baths and preachers, the idea of an ancient religion with revered old, rather beautiful text and a tremendous art that basically tells you it's OK to roll up the grass, get naked, enjoy sex and have fun. Which Kenneth Graham's wife did, didn't she? And Kenneth Graham on their kind of wedding morning, they rolled around in dew. And he famously wrote in Wind in the Willows, wrote a vision of Pan, who becomes, I guess, a kind of emblem of that movement. Yeah, we're going a bit too far with the Grahams and their wedding day, to which I admit fault because I built them up in a book. Oh, he was too timid.

He was pagan in his instincts, but didn't want to upset the family. It was she, his wife, who really rebelled, didn't want a church wedding, refused to wear a ring, refused to wear a white dress. And on their wedding day, it was she who went out and rolled in her wedding dress in the dune and put a crown of flowers in her head to establish her identity as a pagan. And she turned up looking like a thundercloud in church in this wrinkled, sodden floral dress with this large bunch of lilting flowers in her head. And the marriage went downhill from there. But pan in the wind and the willows is really, really important. For a start, he shouldn't be there. He's not part of the story. And he disrupts the tone, which has been ironic, mostly, here the two, about the misadventures

of Mr. Toad, you know, a classic parable of nouveau riche bourgeois anxiety about what the working class stoats and weasels are going to do to you. And suddenly, there is this explosive chapter out of nowhere with this epiphany of a pagan god, realised in the most intense religious terms. And Graham can only get away with this, because he's ostensibly writing about animals, to whom Pan can be a god, as Jesus can be to us. But since the animals behave like middle-class Victorian humans, it's deeply ambivalent. Can I ask about another book of the late Victorian period, a book that I think you know an awful lot about? So I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but it's Aradia, or Aradia, I don't know which, by Charles Godfrey Leland. Now, you talked about the discovering of texts

underlying paganism, and this is in some ways, I mean, it's subtitled The Gospel of the Witches. And this is a book, I think, am I right in thinking you spoke about this when you were 20 or so in a public debate defending it and then changed your views? So this is a book that pretends to, or claims to be, rather, pretends is a loaded word, it claims to be the account of a surviving witch tradition in Tuscany and that this became a foundational text. Well, this did become a foundational text for modern paganism, didn't it? It certainly did. It deserves to be. It's beautifully written.

I was 19 and drunk on it, and I went up against Norman Cone, who was a great scholar of that period. And he wiped the floor with me. He did so very courteously. But it was the first time that I had an inkling that I might actually be wrong about this book. And indeed, I probably was. The late 19th century is the great age of folklore collecting all over Europe, in which urban intellectuals are going into the countryside and collecting stories and customs from ordinary rural people in the belief that they are living fossils of ancient belief and ritual. And one of

these is Charles Godfrey Leland, an American left-wing adventurer, a great radical, and a believer in revolution, who goes to live in Italy for a long time. And he comes out with a lot of Italian folklore, which everybody reckons is genuine, and a radia, which is supposed to be a gospel of a pagan witch cult. Now, the idea that a pagan witch cult had been there was something raised earlier in the 19th century. The idea that the people persecuted as witches in the notorious witch trials of late medieval early modern Europe where practitioners of a surviving pagan religion had been suggested from the 1820s onwards as one solution to the problem of why there were witch trials, why rational Europeans should do something so dreadful and stupid

as putting people to death for presumed satanic conspiracies. And what Leland did was produce what he thought was or claimed was the actual gospel of this pagan witch cult. Ever since then, A, no historian of 19th century Italy has come across any other evidence of such a cult. B, it's easy to see where the image in the book is coming from. It's coming from the portraits of the witch trials. The same cast of characters is there, the same motifs. And C, analysis of the manuscript shows that he did have a collector, a local, who came back with the stuff, but there's no proof she produced the manuscript. And it doesn't seem originally to itself have been composed by somebody who spoke Italian fluently or knew it. So the whole thing looks decidedly fishy. The good thing about it is, to go back to my original

statement, it is beautifully written and quite inspiring for those who want a rebel, counter-cultural witch religion meeting out in the woods. Right. And I remember in the 1970s, I think it was the Reader's Digest Guide to Folklore. It kind of had an image of a horned man on the front, and it had fabulous illustrations. And in that, there was the very exciting thesis that William Rufus, who is shot in the New Forest, that this had been part of a witch cult and that he'd offered himself up as a living sacrifice. That seems very implausible, Tom.

Well, we have the world expert on this. That's not true, is it? That didn't happen. I'm not a world expert on this. I don't think anybody should be a world expert on anything. But the hypothesis you're stating was that of a very remarkable person from the early 20th century, a very good Egyptologist called Margaret Murray, who, to put it bluntly, went on holiday, wrote books about the history of witchcraft, which were highly imaginative, highly speculative, and very popular. And it was she who took the 19th century idea that the people who had been prosecuted for witchcraft, allegedly,

had been surviving pagans, and filled it out with quotations from original sources from the period. Experts now reject the hypothesis, but she helped give birth to many of the defining strands of modern paganism. Because increasingly, she came to like the theoretical religion that she'd helped define as a boisterous, fun-loving, nature-loving, radical, popular religion. And as such, it had a great appeal to countercultures in the mid-20th century, including that which I embraced as a teenager. Do you think the fact that she was an Egyptologist also influenced it? No, not terribly, except that she was used to dealing with ancient paganism. What really influenced her view was that she was a lover of folklore. And indeed, she lived to be over 100. She was an amazing lady. She became present to the Folklore Society. And folklorists remember been looking for surviving paganism in the

countryside for around 100 years by her time. And she just pepped up this picture of the pagan countryside. Can I ask a question? You talked about Leland being left-wing and revolutionary. And when you talk about that counterculture, that sort of early to mid-20th century counterculture, it sounds very reminiscent of George Orwell's famously disparaging lines about the kind of people who he deplores that are attracted to socialism. So he says they're fruit juice drinkers and nudists and sex maniacs and pacifists, and we need to get rid of them if the left is to triumph in Britain. Is there a kind of left-wing dimension to the sort of corporate, increasingly sort of homogenous world of early 20th century Britain? notably left-wing, looking for a socialist utopia using the songs and dances of the common people, or they're notably right-wing, and the right-wing theme is initially dominant in the appearance of modern paganism. It's a wish for an idealized countryside in which everything, including the trees, know their place, but in which there is a

libertarian streak because the common people can still have their fun. Merry England, after all, is very much a conservative idea in the 19th, early 20th centuries, in which the Lord lives in his castle and everybody else dances around the napole and has a good frisky time at midsummer and is happy uh and you're free of all the angst of of revolution and socialism could you if you were doing a sort of family tree and i know this is a huge stretch is it is it a sort of cousin of or is it related distantly to kind of the kind of world of pre-Raphaelitism and William Morris and that sort of thing, do you think? Yeah, it is related, and not too distantly, to all that. So paganism, the barometer of the interest in reviving paganism, swings back and forth between radical

right and radical left from the 1800s, I'm speaking literally here, the beginning of the 19th century, onwards. And the first people to start celebrating bringing back paganism are the romantic poets. I mean, most of them. You said Keats and everyone. Yeah, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, especially Keats and Shelley, who were really, really big at this and actually worshipped pagan deities 100 years before Kenneth Graham met Pan beside the Thames, you get Shelley hanging up a garland to Pan in the woods and building an altar to him. There's that wonderful sonnet by Wordsworth about wishing he could see Triton and belong to a creed at war or whatever it is,

that the world is too much with him and i guess that must be a huge inspiration it is but wordsworth's as you've just said and that stands distinctly iffy about yes yes it sounds great but i i can't quite go there i've got to keep my boots my frock coat on but but keats just gushes love of paganism and also weariness with Christianity. And so does the arch rebel Shelley. Yeah, I think I think we should take a break here because you said that you needed coffee. So I think you should go and get a coffee. And when we come back, I think that could we look at the question that's kind of been hanging over this, which is, is this revival of paganism in the 20th century, is it drawing on ancient traditions that go back all the way to pre-Christian world or not? And if

not, then where does it come from? And what's been the story of its evolution over the 20th century? So we will be back in a few minutes. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip

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and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestistertainment.com. That's TheRestIsEntertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now, if you listen to our recent podcasts, you will know that although we are as critical of self-promotion and sponsorship deals as anybody,

we happen to be sponsored by an excellent online magazine aren't we tom we are for which both of us have written uh and um the name of that magazine is unheard it's online unheard.com uh and very germainly for our subject today um it has included susanna lipscomb who was um she's got an essay up there right now she did a feature for us on witchcraft and she's got one on why are women becoming witches which actually quotes from Ronald the great Ronald Hutton so it all connects and basically if you're listening to this podcast you can get a special deal with unheard you go to unheard.com slash rest and you get three months free membership so you don't have to pay anything and you can cancel it at any

time and you know the rubric. It's a sensational bargain. Sensational bargain. You can read lots of Tom Holland stuff and it's great. So go to UnHerd, subscribe. Your life will be all the better for it. Now, back to the show. Ronald, we have a question here,

a great question from Barry Grogan, one of our listeners, friend of the show. He says, does paganism in its popular understanding as exemplified by bearded men at Stonehenge bear any actual resemblance to the pre-Christian beliefs of Britain? Well, there are two different answers to that. First, is it invented in the 20th century? And the answer is yes and no, because there are streams of connection that come down directly from ancient to modern paganism. And they are created in the ancient world, they reflect the ancient world, and they connect straight to the modern. Like the custom of ceremonial ritual magic, invoking spirits using elaborate equipment and conjurations, like its downgraded but more useful folk equivalent of popular magic, simple spells and remedies used by cunning folk

and wise folk, like seasonal customs, because there really are calendar customs in Britain, which do come down from the pagan ancient world. And they come down to the present. Customs, dances, rituals. And finally, I think most important, the unending love affair of Christian Europeans with the pagan ancient world, particularly the art and literature of Greece and Rome, but also Irish medieval, Norse medieval mythology reflecting paganism. The crucial difference between this and modern paganism is that all these streams are carried on by people who seem to be, to some degree or another, Christian, whereas in modern times all four have been recombined and pagan goddesses and

gods put back in to create a viable and, in modern terms, completely authentic pagan religion. But also to look at this question of revival, most great religious traditions have a point in their history at which they go back to their roots. So Protestant Christianity is based on jettisoning about a thousand years of medieval Christian tradition between to go back to the ancient world and recreate it. And recreation movements have happened in Islam, in Hinduism, in Buddhism over the millennia. So it's not unusual to find religious people reaching back over a long gap in order to remake something in the present. And as for the people in robes at Stonehenge, we actually know so little about prehistoric British religion, especially that of the Druids, the priests of the Iron Age, that it's really almost anybody's guess which is right and which is wrong. In other

words, the modern Druids may have as good a chance of being authentic in their recreation of what ancient Druids did as anybody else. So it's a lot more of a free market than one might at first think. Yeah. You mentioned before the break that there was kind of radical left-wing and a radical right-wing enthusiasm for paganism. I suppose the most notorious right-wing enthusiast, certainly for the occult, and I don't know, maybe for paganism, would have been Himmler. What is the link between Nazism and paganism? Is that something that has deep roots, or is that kind of fabricated completely? It's neither fabricated nor deep-rooted. It's a very weak link. The idea of pagan revival is a language that's going around Europe in the early 20th century.

And so it gets into some Nazis just as it gets into some of everybody, right or left. And the Nazis actually outlaw paganism, modern paganism in Germany, along with Freemasonry, occultism, and indeed naturism, anything which gets people together in private societies in which they might just discuss politics that they wiped out. Himmler is really the only one among the Nazi leadership with any interest in paganism. And as you'd expect, perhaps, it's an extremely batty, idiosyncratic, vamped-up vision of paganism, infused with colossally unrealistic ideas about nationalism. And there's no leakage from Himmler's idea of paganism to anybody else's, except maybe among people, tiny groups of people, who are conscious recreationist neo-Nazis at the present time.

You mentioned Freemasonry and naturism, and that brings us quite neatly to the man who, probably more than any other, is seen as the father of British paganism or of revived or reinvented British paganism. He's a man called gerald gardner now he's an absolutely fascinating man he uh a freemason a child of a colonial family brought up in salon self-taught uh a volunteer in all kinds of things archaeology archaeological enthusiast egyptology enthusiast um sunbathing enthusiast, a member of the local conservative association.

So he is the man, isn't he? I mean, an extraordinary fellow. And would there be a sort of... So he's the father of Wicca. Would there be Wicca without him? Wicca, modern pagan witchcraft, would not really exist in its present form without Gerald Gardner. It would probably have existed in some form because of this immense popular belief, thanks to Margaret Murray and other writers, in pagan witchcraft as the basic religion of medieval early modern commoners. But what Gardner did was put a framework around it. He was definitely the publicist of Wicca, and he was definitely one of the creators of it whether he was the original one whether he was single-handed initially we don't know the evidence isn't there but without gerald gardner

we would not have modern paganism in its actual form and he sets it up in a in a former i mean and this this sort of people who know nothing about this will be unsurprised, I suspect, to hear he sets it up in a former naturist resort, does he? Is that where the first coven is established? Well, we don't know where the first coven was established, but his original one was set up in an actual, a living, a thriving naturist resort, or to be exact, on a piece of land in the corner of it, which he owns directly. So you've described Wicca as the only fully formed religion which England can be said to

have given the world. That may no longer be true as new religions are being born all the time. I'm perfectly happy to call it the first. I defend that remark against outraged adherents of almost every other religion by saying that until Wicca, Britain had produced extremely important variants of denominations of existing religions, such as Christianity. But Wicca was the very, very first religion that seems holy to have been born in England. And I stress England. I said there's a couple, well, maybe it isn't a paradox, but it's a religion that claims to be very ancient,

that looks back to the pre-Christian world for its wellsprings. And yet simultaneously is kind of emerges in 1950s suburban England. Is that a tension that kind of has run throughout the decades that have followed Gardner? It's a simple yes. It's a very dynamic tension. And Gardner himself had it both ways, which is a large part of the reason of his success. On the one hand, he says that this religion is what's been around since the Stone Age and was persecuted heroically and horribly in the medieval early modern period. On the other hand, once you're initiated into it, you're perfectly entitled to make up new bits of it or even scrap old bits of it according to your taste so it's at once immemorial

and ultra modern which is the perfect package for a dynamic new religion and by and large i've seen you um in print rejecting the idea that it's people who are fleeing from the modern world because you pointed out that wicker adher adherents are sometimes, you know, computer engineers or scientists or something. Is there a particular, from the 1950s or 1940s onwards, is there a particular social type that's been drawn to it, do you think? Or is it completely sort of variegated? I'd love to get away with saying it's completely variegated and keep everybody happy, but it's not. It attracts a particular type of personality and a particular politico-social group. The particular type of personality is somebody who's highly literate, self-confident, eager for novelty and personal growth and self-exploration and doesn't feel trashed by life. That's a

particular mindset. People with other mindsets are going to be attracted to other religions, but that's your classic pagan type, adventurous, self-confident, out to make something of themselves. And as for its socio-political appeal, overwhelmingly it's appealed to counter-cultural types people who are interested in radical cultural ideas it was a great thing among the hippie movement for example the 60s and 70s that gave it a quantum leap and it appeals to that sort of person today which is why the greatest weakness of modern paganism is that it has nobody from the elite anywhere openly a part of it. It doesn't have a single leading politician, leader of industry, pop star, high court judge. Has a pagan ever been on Thought for the Day?

I just don't know i just don't know i mean there is another side to this that's being counter-cultural as a self-fulfilling prophecy if you seem to be espousing ideas that are against mainstream ideas then the mainstream is liable to squash you and certainly i i know from bitter experience that even to be known to be studying or writing about the history of modern paganism can get you a lot of flack, disdain, horror, discouragement, let alone somebody who's actually out as a practicing pagan. So if there were somebody in the upper ranks of society, the economy, the cultural world who was a believing pagan, they'd be very brave to admit it. And you have also, I mean, on that theme, you've also written fascinatingly about the challenges of being an academic, a historian, writing about beliefs and attitudes towards the supernatural that in a way modern academics have no way of fitting them in. There's no way to explore the possibility, for instance, that they might be true.

Yeah, absolutely so. In an openly agnostic way, I leave it open as to whether deities and spirits actually exist, simply because I think it's the honest conclusion. I have encountered historically and in real life, huge numbers of people who claim to have met deities and encountered spirits. I never have. I have no evidence myself that they exist. And so because these are areas into which human beings ultimately can't go, there's no determinant, I leave them open. And that worries both believers and other religions and atheists alike when I do that. But I also get a double jeopardy in this kind of subject matter itself, in that those whom I might politely call pagan counter-revisionists, whom I'm tempted to call pagan fundamentalists, who really want to believe in the origin myths of modern paganism, the literal continuous survival of a religion that is theirs and like theirs tend to attack me savagely uh and people like me fortunately they almost always live in in different hemispheres from makes it a bit easier but uh really in the 2000s i i got a hate mail from somebody usually in america who's a pagan every single night i don't have my email box and there would be this heap of offal in the morning.

So you just learn to live with it. And this is because you were basically saying, because you dug into the history and you'd sort of say, some of these things are clearly invented or these are contingent and there's ambiguities and it's not as straightforward and it's not a religion that's been received all in one go kind of thing. Yeah, but there's also a big national difference. And that is that by the time that I was persuaded to write about this,

it was the 1990s, late 1980s, 90s, by which time the leaders of British paganism had already read the latest academic research and lost faith in their own origin myth. So there was now a vacuum where they didn't know where they'd come from. And I agreed to go into that vacuum and try and find the story, the history, or at least one that I could find in it, and provide them with a homeland from which they'd come and help an identity, which is why I was so supported and helped by British pagans and treated so well by them. But across the Atlantic, and especially in the United States, but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, there are lots of people who have only just been converted

to paganism by people who believed thoroughly in the origin myths. And so just after their conversions, they found themselves learning about my work and thought that I was attacking the very thing to which they'd just been converted. I was a religious enemy and, of course, blew up. But I must say none of the flak that I got from pagans, especially pagans abroad, really ranked for unpleasantness with just the ongoing grinding hostility of ordinary British people who were scandalised that somebody like me should take off time to write about this kind of stuff at all. And yet, I mean, I think you can convincingly argue that this is a kind of quite an important strain of modern British religious identity. And do you think that you see its influence in things that are much more mainstream?

So I'm thinking of, say, Glastonbury Festival, the Stonehenge Festival before it got cancelled, and perhaps in the environmental movement at the moment, that pagan ideas, if not exactly inspiring them, are definitely a part of the mix. Yes, they're definitely part of the mix for anything that's counter-cultural in its way. Stonehenge Festival was the shop window of the counter-culture of the time. That's why it got banned. And Glastonbury Festival has really carried on that tradition. And indeed, the layout of the festival site, especially its stern circle, is the work of pagans. But it also gives a kind of...

The pyramid stage? Is that... Vaguely. I mean, pyramids were built by pagans in ancient Egypt. But the idea that there is something inherently sacred in the structure of the pyramid is a kind of non-pagan American New Age idea. It's a different strand of esotericism. But also you get what I might call pagan leakage into mainstream culture. You find pagan ideas turning up beautifully satirized along with everything else in the best-selling novels of Terry Pratchett, who in the 90s was the best-selling British author of all. You get pagan motifs in the songs of the pretenders of Prissy Hynde in the 80s and Tori Amos in the 90s. So you do get a kind of spillover. In many ways, that's part of the normalisation of paganism as a single strand in a multi-faith society,

which I think is its destiny. Can I ask a very boring, mundane question about paganism and Wicca? Am I right in thinking that most Wiccans believe in, effectively, it's a dualistic religion, so a mother goddess and a male horned god. And if that is right, given that paganism is countercultural, does that mean that the current sort of, all the debates about gender politics and so on, have they had an effect on what British Wiccans believe?

They've had an enormous effect and vice versa. The deities of paganism are deities of the natural world. Every night on ITN News, we hear more about the fact the natural world seems apparently heading for shipwreck, for extermination. So these are big topical issues. The horned god, incidentally, is simply Pan, although nowadays often under other names. The three great modern ingredients which give paganism its life force are one, feminism, which is hugely important because ancient paganism did have goddesses as well as gods or instead of them,

and priestesses instead of or as well as priests, and so does modern paganism. There's a sense of an imminent divinity in nature, a beauty and a holiness in nature, which has obvious relevance to the present ecological crisis. And there's the idea in ancient paganism that deities don't give laws to humans, that in Europe they didn't create them. And they're actually not terribly interested in them. I lost the time. You have to get their attention. And that fits in very well with a modern world of personal growth, self-expression and freedom of choice based, and this is awfully important to modern pagans, on responsible social attitudes. In other words, to fulfil yourself and do what you like, but avoid doing harm to anything else, including the planet and anybody else in the process.

I reckon that we have, well, I mean, we've reached the 21st century. Ronald, if you are up for it, I think there's so much more to talk about that perhaps we could do another episode. And in that we could go back through time, we could go back through the Middle Ages, we could go back, well, ultimately, perhaps to the Paleolithic and explore what can be known of ancient paganism. Yeah, no, you're very welcome we will uh we will rejoin tomorrow uh and hopefully uh we will we will have you back then bye-bye goodbye thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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