The Rest Is History - 114. Stonehenge, ancient ritual and the origins of paganism

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Like Merlin, who lived his life in reverse, we go backwards in time as we continue our two-part series on paganism. Renaissance philosophers; green men; a pagan city in the early caliphate; hooded gods on Hadrian’s Wall; Stonehenge; cannibals (or were they?) in Cheddar Gorge; and the oldest evidence ever found of pagan practice in Britain. *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. Welcome to The Rest Is History. Yesterday we were talking paganism, horned gods, mother goddesses, Wicca and the world of 20th century witchcraft. And today we'll be digging back a bit further into that history with the same guest, Professor Ronald Hutton from the University of Bristol, who says nobody should be considered a world expert,

but since it's our podcast, we can decide. And I think if we want to crown him the world expert, we will, and we have. So, Ronald, what can we say with any certainty about pagan religion? Can we talk with certainty about it? I just removed my crown again. I'm stubborn on this. The answer is it depends which pagan religion you're discussing. Anything prehistoric is

anybody's guess because we only have material remains and they are mute. So you can reconstruct all sorts of religious scenarios, but also social scenarios and political scenarios from the same evidence. And also for Northern Europe, it's extremely threadbare because we don't have any written sources before Christianity. We have quite a lot for certain places like Scandinavia and Ireland, which is Christian but talking about pagan times, but we don't know how reliable it is. But we have a huge amount of evidence for the great classical civilizations in Mediterranean, where you actually have written sources with which you can interpret the material remains, and lots of art of different kinds representing rituals and deities. So we actually can say things with absolute certainty. in time and in kind of mental distance, that even though we have, let's say, all this Greek art

and all this fantastic sort of Greek literature, it's very, very hard for us to, I mean, we can know what people were doing, but we don't necessarily know what they meant by it or what was going on in their imagination while they were doing it. We can actually say this, I think, if only because they argued over it. Greeks would argue over anything. And so actually the Romans, but more as intellectuals. You get an entire book by the most long-winded and pompous intellectual of Julius Caesar's Rome,

who's Cicero, on the nature of the gods. That's a bit harsh. I think that's absolutely... I've been waiting all this podcast for somebody. I find he's so vain and pompous, isn't he, Ronald? I'm afraid that's true. I mean, also, he writes an appallingly difficult Latin, and any schoolboy who's trying to translate Cicero just yearns for somebody else. But anyway, he writes a book about the nature of

the gods in which he discusses every theory that's being aired about the divine and his time. So you can actually look at the arguments. So you don't just get people doing things without explaining them, which is the case in some other civilizations. You actually get people trying to explain what they're doing and wondering why and talking about it. So I think you do have windows into their souls. But Ronald, a very, very simple question here from Dick of Axe, who asks, what is paganism? And if I could just kind of broaden that out. I mean, the idea of a pagan is a Christian one, isn't it? Yes, it is. But it's a very handy term. It isn't needed until Christian times,

because everybody was a pagan. But once you've got Christians, paganism does become a separate category of religion. It's nice to have a term for it. And what's more, the term is not pejorative. It's actually quite specific. We've only really got to the bottom of what it meant in the 1990s. For a long time, it was thought it meant a country dweller, a bumpkin. Then we realised that couldn't be right because it was coined when most urban people were still pagan. And then it was thought it meant a civilian, somebody not enrolled in the army of Jesus, which again has a slight aspersion to it. But now we realize it just means people who carry on the religion of the Pargus, which is the local Roman unit of

government. In other words, those who follow the old religions, the rooted religions, the local religions, instead of the brash, new, missionary, aggressive religion of Christianity that transcends lands and boundaries. And as a definition of the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East as an umbrella term, it works perfectly. Okay, so we need this word because basically christianity is is emerging in late antiquity towards the end of the roman empire in the west um endures in byzantium and there's a very obvious question which i guess is anyone who's been to india for instance where gods that were worshipped centuries thousands of years ago are still

worshipped to this day. It's absolutely focused. And this is from, inevitably, Stefan Jensen, who, honestly, he just won't stop asking questions, but they're very good questions. So keep them coming, Stefan. Why did Christianity totally eradicate pre-Christian religion in Europe? Why aren't there any pagan remnant communities left in Europe after the Middle Ages? So I guess that's the big question. Why was, you know, in yesterday's episode, you're basically saying that there are no

kind of pagan continuities that run through the Middle Ages into modernity, perhaps from the kind of, we'll come to the one tradition that might. But why is it so successful? What happens? You can answer that question most easily by panning back to look at the world, because Christianity is not unique in world religion. It's one of a very unusual but extremely powerful subset of religions, which we call world religions. In other words, religions of salvation, religions of the general message for humanity,

carried by people who think humanity will be improved everywhere by converting to their religion. Islam's another, but also branches of Buddhism, Confucianism. And these religions are very effective steamrollers. Everywhere where they go, where they reach rooted indigenous immemorial religion, they tend to wipe it out. And they wipe it out in two ways. One is by converting the local leaders by offering them an enhanced role and also a place in the afterlife. And so that way you behead the traditional religions, which were carried on by the local political and social leaders. And that's exactly what happens in Europe. You go for the kings or the emperors

and the rest follow. But also there's a psychological thing that there's simply nothing inherent in indigenous religion to stand up to a religion of missionary work and conversion there's no tradition of answering these things because you've never had to and so they tend to go over because they have nothing inherent in them that tells them they can resist that habituituates them, which is why later when indigenous religions are revived, which happens all over the world, it's not just a British or European thing, they tend to be a lot tougher and take on some of the attitudes and the techniques of world religions. And that's just... Right. So yesterday you were talking about this gospel, the gospel of witchcraft, and you talked about conversion. So there are kind of echoes there of what Christian

missionaries were doing. Yes, that's right. Paganism never has scriptures, because pagans are not religions of the book. They're religions of ritual and contact with the natural world. So the term gospel or scripture applied to paganism is an imposition on it from an alien language. It's interesting that at the present day, although sometimes particular writers market their books, mostly to Americans, with titles like the Bible of the Witches or whatever. The sacred writings of modern pagans are books of ritual. There's no theology there at all. There are no laws telling humans how they behave in relation to the divine, as opposed to each other. So it remains a different concept.

But that is a continuity though, isn't it? I mean, is that a deliberate attempt to preserve the spirit of original paganism? It may just be a natural thing to do, because if you're going to be pagan, you have to model yourself on ancient paganism to some extent. And there are just certain things that are bred into it, like not having Gospels or Scriptures, but also having feminism, environmentalism and personal choice. Yeah. Just before we go to a break, there are two kind of traditions that people have argued did survive from pre-Christian times, pre-Islamic times, into the modern. One of them is raised by Joshua D. Terry, who asked, what should we make of pagan iconography in early and medieval Christianity, such as the green man? Does it reflect a covert resistance or intentional co-option? And I suppose there's the the sheila and the gigs aren't

there which are um ladies not being polite which you pick what you get in churches and so on you're being very coy about i am this is a family podcast um well let let let let me put it in a plainer way but one that still shouldn't be offensive. Green men are enigmatic faces gushing foliage often from the nostrils and mouth or framed in foliage. And Shielner gigs are much rarer, but they're still spread over Western Europe. And they are unclothed women squatting facing the observer in a way that emphasizes their sexuality. And these are indeed at first sight very weird figures to find in medieval churches. Unfortunately, although I think there are, as I said yesterday, continuities between ancient and modern paganism, these church figures don't seem to be those anymore,

largely because of research in the 1980s and 1990s. The idea that they were pagan images of churches is a product of the 1930s. It wasn't floated by experts in medieval art or indeed in the Middle Ages at all. It was produced by folklorists looking at churches now. Margaret Murray was one of them, wasn looking at churches now. Margaret Murray was one of them, wasn't it? Margaret Murray, she was the one who proposed the Shielaner gigs.

And it was an aristocrat called Lady Raglan, who in her one significant publication coined the term the green man taken from a pub sign for the foliate heads. We now have the research done. The green man comes from India. He is originally a pagan motif from India, from Hinduism, but becomes a decorative one, but then travels along this vast information superhighway called the Arab Empire, which stretches from the Indus Valley all the way to the Pyrenees. And it arrives in Spain, which is still largely Islamic, gets into Christian monasteries there, and spreads as a decoration for monks' manuscripts across 10th century Western Europe, and then gets into churches. And as far as we can see, yeah?

Yeah, it's purely decorative it has no yeah as far as we can see it actually has no meaning it's simply a decoration that's i love that it's attractive and you can put it it has different moods you it's especially suited to being put on on various bits of churches like tim parney and bosses roof bosses. It's different with the Shielner gig. She's part of a package, but the name is Irish, incidentally, but she doesn't start in Ireland. You just find her most commonly there. She starts in France in the 11th century as part of the package of movements for a decorative tradition we call Romanesque. And they're in pilgrimage churches along major pilgrim highways, and they teach moral lessons.

And so the moral lesson of the Schielner gig is sex is repulsive. Don't think about it. Think of higher things, which is why the ladies concerned are pretty well always grotesque. They're really unappealing. These are not. They're designed to put you off rather than entice you that's it but uh and it's quite a big but i said that they're more common in ireland

now than an eastern survival than elsewhere and in ireland they do seem to have a slightly different significance which could be plugging into native paganism, because they're found on secular buildings a lot more than they are elsewhere, and also in places where the human eye can't see them. And there does seem to be a recorded Irish folk tradition that a woman exposing herself would frighten off evil or a curse from recording. Right, so it's kind of like the evil eye. Yeah, that's right. It's an antidote to the evil eye. Okay, so the possibility there... Sorry, Dominic, I was interrupting you.

I was about to say, before we go to a break, though, that surely raises a much bigger question, which is how much does... So in the sort of folk imagination, if you like, in the popular imagination, there is now a sort of... Among people who've not read up on all all this there is this sort of vague sense oh christianity must have incorporated lots of elements of pre-christian religions and they survive and and there are lots of pagan bits

of of the christian calendar and all this sort of stuff i mean halloween people often think this about halloween don't they is that true did medieval christianity have lots of pagan had it taken over and incorporated when people often ask about the yule log and all these kinds of things is there any truth in that yes yes and yes uh i should have covered this earlier but i knew i was going on a bit anyway uh one of the ways in which world religions succeed is not just they stamp out the old faiths or the old traditions, but they absorb huge quantities of things from them, which is why, say, Tibetan Buddhism is riddled with deities and images from the pre-Buddhist religions. And in Christianity, even the very form of churches is taken over from pagan forms, the basilican shape of early Christian churches, hangings, incense, altars, carvings, sculptures, statues, icons in general.

All this is a direct takeover from the older religions. And we haven't even started upon the folk customs. And in many ways, developed Christianity just substitutes a Christian version for old religion. Instead of having many goddesses and gods, you have many saints of both sexes who patronize, look after the very things that pagan goddesses and gods did. In ancient paganism, seasonal festivals are the great religious occasions. The same is true of medieval Christianity. In ancient paganism, sacrifice, the offering up of foodstuffs to the deities, is the central religious rite. In Christianity, it's offering up the sacrifice of

the mass. The foodstuffs concerned are the body and blood of the saviour. And it goes on and on and on like that. This is how world religions succeed. Ronald, we've talked about maybe the kind of traditions that pass from paganism through Christian Europe. On the topic of other slightly more highbrow ideas, philosophical ideas coming from late antique paganism, could we go to the Middle East and one intriguing city, which basically, if there were pagans there into the Middle Ages, they had to survive not only Christianity, but also Islam, which is kind of slightly more robust in its attitude towards ideas of idolatry and paganism, perhaps even more than Christianity.

And that's the city of Haran, which was the city of Karai, which enthusiasts for Roman history will remember is the place where Crassus gets defeated by the Parthians. And this city, Haran, supposedly, right the way up into what, the 10th, 11th century, preserved a large community of pagans who kept there both the practice of pagan worship and also kind of ancient traditions, philosophical pagan traditions, which people have argued were adopted by Muslim scholars and then these traditions passed into Western Europe and so on. Could you just talk a bit about that?

Yeah. If you're going to look for medieval pagans in Europe and the Near East, there are two places to which you go. They're very separate. One is Haran in Syria. As you've mentioned, its ruins are still there in the northeast of Europe. And indeed, Lithuania lasts a lot longer than Haran. Haran is a near eastern city, which becomes a major Arab capital for its area. It's now in the southern part of Turkey, politically. And it seems that there is a fascinating community of surviving pagans there until the 11th or 12th century, who follow a developed kind of paganism based at least partly on Greek philosophy. Where that came from, we aren't sure. There's lots of ideas. What happened to them, we don't know, except by the 12th century, they're gone, and by the 13th the city is deserted. And some have argued that the idea of the Sabians of Haram, because that's the denominational name the Arabs gave them, influenced some branches of mystical Islam, like the Sufis. That could be true,

there are elements in common, or there may actually be no connection, it may be a coincidental resemblance. Lithuania we know a lot more about because it goes on later. The Lithuanians are the last officially existing European pagans. They survive until the end of the 14th century, largely because nobody wants to convert them locally, they all want to conquer them. And so the Grand Dukes remain pagan. And the Grand Dukes stopped being pagan when owing to a fortuitous couple of marriage alliances, they inherit the Kingdom of Poland. And in order to get Poland, you've got to turn Catholic. And so they do overnight. And so Lithuania slowly turns into a Christian state united to Poland. But it's quite

an aggressive, quite a viable medieval paganism of the sort you find surviving nowhere else. And it beats off Christian attacks. And do we know what the Lithuanians, what they believed? And do we also know why it's so resilient compared with other European paganisms? It's only resilient because nobody really wants to convert it, as said. They keep attacking it in crusades in order to have an excuse for conquering it, except the pagans are so tough they're able to beat off the crusades quite successfully, and indeed ironically to annex some of the lands the crusaders have come to when they convert. As for the type of paganism, it had a pantheon of deities. I've read all the sources in translation, which is now possible, and they're very confusing.

The earliest sources show no dominant goddesses or gods in general for Lithuanians, just a wide range of local cults with a fascinating but hazy line and sacred snakes. You tend not to find elsewhere in Northern Europe. But about 200 years after the conversion to Christianity, Lithuanian scholars come up with this established pantheon of universal goddesses and gods for Lithuanians, who've helped give birth to a new Lithuanian pagan religion at the present day, or a revived one. Oh, right. There's a neo-paganism in Lithuania.

You find modern pagans now all over Europe, certainly in Lithuania. So the evidence is a bit puzzling. And that's as much as it go. It's all retrospective. Ronald, just before we go to a break, and this is a kind of insane thing because it's a huge, huge topic. But if we're talking about paganism,

we should just mention them. Oh, Dominic needs an apotropaic charm to keep the demons of coughing at bay. In the 15th century, you get a revival, keep the demons of coughing at bay. In the 15th century, you get a revival supposedly of pagan ideas, both in Greece and in Italy. So in Greece at Mistras with this extraordinary figure,

Pletho, who it has been thought revives the worship of the Greek gods. And in Renaissance Italy with Marsilio Ficino and people like him, who likewise are thought to have kind of revived the worship of the ancient gods, Platonism and so on. Can we call them pagans? Or are they operating still within a kind of Christian framework? I think they're operating still within a Christian framework, that they're trying to bring back pagan deities into it. They're trying to reintegrate them. And they're part of the same movement. Plato or Platon helps give birth to the Italian Renaissance because his ideas get in there. He goes on embassy, doesn't he, to Florence, I think. Yeah, he does. He actually goes there. And Greek scholars fleeing from the Turks bring in large

quantities of hugely important ancient Greek literature and Roman literature into Italy at just the right moment. So whether you call it a Byzantine or an Italian Renaissance, and it's both, 15th century scholars are trying very hard to recover the knowledge of the ancient world and then surf on it. But I think the language here is difficult because they're pagans in a sense that they are honoring pagan deities, but they're not in the sense they're trying to overturn or replace Christianity. They're trying to enrich it. Right. And particularly in the case of medieval Christian intellectuals, long before this, since the 12th century, when the Arabs produced the first great wave of recovered ancient Greek and Roman texts,

there's been this desire to put back the Olympian deities as rulers of planets. In other words, it's recognized that heavenly bodies have an influence on the earth, like the moon being linked to the tides. And the basis of astrology is the idea that the other heavenly bodies influence the world and so human life. And so if you reinstate those ancient deities, Greek and Roman, that are linked to planets as servants of the almighty God who control things on earth, you're giving them a huge amount of refreshed agency while keeping them on board as part of the Christian team. Right. Okay. That's absolutely brilliant. I think we should go for a break now. And when we come back, if we could go as far back in time as we can, say, let's look at Britain, let's focus in

on paganism in Britain. What can we know about pre-Christian paganism in Britain? How far back can we push it? So we will see you in a few minutes. all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are approaching the final lap of our canter around the course of paganism with Professor Ronald Hutton from the University of Bristol. Ronald, let's cut right to the chase, something you've written about. We had a question from a listener called Robbie Rippamonte, and he says, can we know anything for certain about the Druids? Only that they existed.

They were the experts in religion, spirituality, religious ritual in northwestern Europe at the dawn of history. And that's it. which marks them off. But we have not a single word, as far as we know, of writing left by the Druids themselves describing what they did. And there's not a single artifact among the hundreds of thousands that have been recovered from the pre-Roman European Iron Age, which can definitely be linked to them. What we have instead are a small number of rather brief descriptions of them by Greek and Roman writers, and all of them are suspect for different reasons. Some are deeply admiring, but they may have been the work of dewy-eyed intellectuals living thousands of miles away who'd never met a druid. And rather more of them are deeply hostile, representing Druids as bloodthirsty barbarian priests dyed to the elbows in human gore.

So this is where Wiccan men come from, isn't it? Yeah, they could have been the work of authors justifying the Roman conquest and expropriation of the lands held by Druids, especially as Druids featured in some narratives as resistance leaders to the Romans. So they're all suspect. There's a bit more body of evidence for those who notice it in the medieval Irish texts. Ireland matters because it's a society where actually had Druids. So you have descriptions of Druids by the natives themselves. Unfortunately, they're all from centuries after the conversion to Christianity. And we've no idea how good the information of the authors were. They could be making it up again. So in no case can we condemn a single ancient or medieval image of an ancient Druid as inauthentic. But in no case can we accept one as fully reliable that's why they're great to think with and so the idea that merlin was a druid i think merlin's a very bad fit for

a druid uh for a start he isn't really human he is the offspring of a nun and a demon and it's having 50% demon blood that gives him his magical powers. And he's also the advisor to a king who, in all his representations from the earliest until the late 20th century, is a devout Christian. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we'll finish with the Druids then. But in the context of Roman Britainain you might have this idea that um you know we have the druids we don't really think about them then the romans come they write so therefore we must know loads about uh what is going on in roman britain but in your your wonderful book pagan britain um you you describe um a group of elderly women who were found at Kimmeridge in Dorset, who'd had their heads chopped off, their lower jaws removed, put by their feet, and each one had been provided with a spindle. So what's going on there?

Anybody's guess. Clearly, there's a specific range of options. They're wise women who are being honoured after death with a particular right. And indeed, removing their lower jaw could be to allow them to speak even more freely to their descendants or to those yet living. Or they could be people suspected of witchcraft who've had their jaws removed so they can no longer utter curses and imprecations they've actually been put to death uh and the spindle is a symbol of those who weave spells to label them as bad now these are extreme opposite cases and you can find anything on the spectrum between uh what i said before was we know an awful lot, an agreeable lot about Greek and Roman religion.

We don't know a lot about Romano-British religion in particular. The Romano-British did not produce books that have survived to the present day. And they produced a large number of inscriptions, but they tend to be brief and enigmatic. So in Warwickshire at Waspeton, if you find a slab of stone, which had a fire Stag's antlers put on it, and then the word Feliciter for luck engraved on it, what's going on there? It's anybody's guess. I mean, I've always found the weirdness of, say, images of gods that people have no idea what they are, actually much more kind of haunting than the attempts to reproduce, I don't know, kind of Mediterranean

style classical statuary. So I always remember the coccolati, the hooded ones, and they're shown on a frieze at Halstead's Fort on Hadrian's Wall. And I think I'm right right we have no idea really who they are what they represent or anything and I've always found them kind of more tantalizing for that reason. I agree and they're great to work imaginatively with at the present day for that reason it's not just the hooded spirits the Ghani Kukul, it's whole categories of deity, like the Matres or Matroni, the mother goddesses, who are three portly ladies sitting in a row with goodies, usually fruit, bread, on their laps. And they're clearly givers of bounty, but we have no backstory for them. We have no mythology. They're incredibly popular with soldiers, maybe because soldiers need luck,

or soldiers get hungry, or soldiers just miss their mums. They come from probably the modern Rhineland or the Rhineland and spread out from there. But why or how, we've no idea. So once you're north of the Alps, you're in pretty mystifying territory, even under Rome. So if we know so little about Romano-British religion, and indeed the folk religion, if you like, of Roman soldiers on the frontiers and so on, what can we say about the world before the Romans came? So, you know, when Julius Caesar and then later Claudius, when they pitch up in Britain, what are the people worshipping? Or do we just not know at all? We have a very dimly lit view of religion in Britain at that moment, because the Romans consecrate and adopt many of the deities and the shrines of the natives. So we have the names and the imagined appearances of a lot of pre-Roman goddesses and gods that survive into Roman Britain. And we can reconstruct something

of the layout and the purpose of particular Iron Age shrines, because they're turned into Roman temples. But once you go back more than, say, 100 years before the Romans arrived, the lights just go out. And it's not just religion. It's anything that requires knowing what people are thinking. So we have, after about half a millennium, no real idea of society. We have no idea of gender relations. We have no idea of gender relations. We have no idea of political structures. And by the time you go back 2,000 years, you could be looking at matriarchy, patriarchy,

aristocracy, monarchy, petty chieftains, democracy, oligarchy, all the archies and ologies of actual service. Now, it doesn't mean we know nothing about them. Because of what technology can give us, we know more and more about their ethnicity, their diet, their technology, their living spaces, their handicrafts. It's anything that involves getting into the human mind that's still a closed world. And presumably, I mean, so Britain is famous for its prehistoric monuments and that they're stamped across the country, standing stones, barrows, great hills, in the case of Silbury Hill. I guess the temptation is to see them all as a kind of indistinguishable flux. But presumably, the different style of these monuments presumably must reflect different attitudes

to the supernatural, to humanity's relationship to the cosmos. And they must be expression of kind of evolutions in that understanding that we simply can't get a handle on? We can't, but we can say that quite big things are going on in terms of religious change. It's intermittent. It happens about once every one and a half thousand years, but it's quite dramatic. So there's really not much tradition of monument building apart from posts in Britain until the Neolithic arrives. That's the package of farming and making polished axes and pottery. But once that arrives, the British suddenly go monument mad for two millennia and for about a thousand years their main monuments are closed chambers of big stones or big timbers sealed in by mounds and often containing the human dead the bones of which

are taken out and worked with so this is a religion which looks as if it's mediated at least partly through the dead. And then around 3000 BCE, BC, 5000 years ago, these monuments are abandoned. In fact, they're often blocked up to stop access. And instead, the British Isles go mad about round shapes. The dead are increasingly interred in round mounds and they're given goods as personal possessions and they're sealed in, they're not contacted physically anymore. And people gather to worship not at these great tomb shrines but in spaces defined by circular barriers, banks of earth, circles of standing stones, or circles of big wooden posts. Now, this is a massive conceptual change. It requires a religious reformation.

But what the story is, is really for novelists or the poet. A pre-historian can't go there. And you mentioned that human remains. So there are kind of, I mean, kind of all kinds of strange, like, like they, I think in Kent, they would smoke their grandfathers and grandmothers and hang them from the roof, which presumably must be expressive of some, I mean, obviously dead. It must be expressive of, of kind of something that we just can't. It's like we've got the hardware, but not the software. Yes, that's a very good parallel. And it's the case throughout prehistory.

Again, people react to prehistory with their guts, with their instincts. And really the classic division for hundreds of years is between those who really see humanity as essentially decent and those who really see it as essentially depraved. And so people who see humanity as essentially decent will find a set of human skulls and long bones interred around an Iron Age enclosure and say this is revering the ancestors these are great warriors or wise people whose mortal remains were revered like saints relics after their death often for a long time and then interred as saints remains are interred in churches in the enclosures to sanctify them and those who have the opposite reaction will say these are clearly trophies taken in war or the remains of human sacrifices who are put on display to terrify everybody else or to make people feel good that they can trash marginal people in their

society or tribal enemies and then when everybody's got bored with them and have decapitated a few new people, they chuck them into pits to get rid of them. Now, these are not compatible visions. They depend utterly upon instinctually opposed views of humans, and we'll always have them. Yeah, yeah. So pushing right the way back, that brilliantly brings us to one of the most famous sites in prehistoric Britain, which is Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge. So we're talking, what, 1300, 1200 BC. And there, human remains have been found, which exactly exemplify what you're talking about. So there are skulls that have been turned into kind of drinking cups. And people say, is this respect for an elder or something? Or is it evidence for cannibalism?

And is there any sense of a consensus on that? No. It depends by now, because we're a multicultural society based on individuals, not even on the prevailing mood of the time or social norms, but on whims of individual archaeologists. And they tend to disagree. What we do about this, I don't know. I have a strong view on one side of the debate uh because really we do have options and the big options are to celebrate our ignorance and to say that anybody's view is as good as anybody else's so let's have as many views as possible because the law of average dictates the more you have the more chance there is that somebody will be right but you'll never know which one you'll never know

though who who but at least we're producing the range of possibilities uh but there's still a strong tradition which is uh ingrained in western scholarship of the gladiatorial approach that academics heatedly espouse. Duke it out. And then do battle with each other. The public looks on and decides the victor or the victor will emerge. And that becomes the orthodoxy until another strong contender emerges and kills off the reigning theory. I actually loathe that, A, because I'm a nice guy, but also because it seems to me rather intellectually dishonest.

I mean, we are a very competitive society. One of our major popular forms of entertainment is the competition, whether it's Big Brother, Strictly, the show for which there can only be one or one pair of winners. And to me, it's a lousy attitude to scholarship. Now, I was going to say, can we push it back even further? I mean, lots of people will want to ask this question.

It's a subject very dear to Tom's heart. Stonehenge. I mean, that's the site that has generated more theories than any other and and i guess it you'd say the same about stonehenge right that there was literally nothing at all or very little that we can say with any certainty at all about what people were doing there why they built it and what it meant yeah correct. We're now brilliant at knowing exactly when it was put up, how it was put up, and by whom it was put up, but not why it was put up. And we've made some advances over the last half millennium. We know that it belongs to the British New Stone Age, that it wasn't built by the Wizard Merlin, King Arthur,

the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings or the Romans which were all theories up for grabs until the 18th century. So we've made progress but as for what went on there really it's again up to people's instincts where whether you're visualising a group of wise women clad in white robes deeply in touch with the secrets of nature and the movements of heavens or a male equivalent or mixed sex or you're visualising a bunch of savages

covered in paint whooping round the place with stone tomahawks and butchering human victims, because they're both equally credible. I guess what I would say is that one thing we can know is that it clearly had some sacral, some spiritual, some kind of holy significance. And it wasn't just Stonehenge, it was the landscape around it as well. And that the fact that this has survived is itself, it gives us a sense of communion with the people who made it, even if we have no idea why they were doing it. And that that in thousands of years on is something I would say precious, and I would go so far as to say sacred.

Yes, and it fits in exactly with my celebration of our prehistory and that should be honoured so we have a growing body of resources for an increasingly unfettered imagination i think that's a really healthy place to be in a multicultural multi-faith society and it should definitely be honoured by not building a large tunnel through the landscape. I knew you were going to bring that up. Yeah, I was just going to bring it up. Ronald, we've been whistling back through time. Could we end by looking at what I think, certainly in your book, you describe as the earliest

evidence for paganism, I suppose for any kind of spiritual dimension within Britain, which is the Red Lady of Paveland, as it was called. But she wasn't a lady, was she? So Paveland is on the Gower Peninsula. What is the Red Lady? And how old is he or she? It's a he. He's a young man, five foot seven, five foot eight, who was buried around 34,000 years ago, which is certainly the oldest ceremonial human burial in this part of the world, northwest Europe, and possibly the oldest in Europe. And by ceremonial, he was interred on the floor of a cave, which was then in a very striking golden cliff, it's still golden, overlooking a broad plain stretching out to France, as France now is. And he was dressed in a two-piece garment, which was dyed bright red.

So this is not a hunting outfit. It's a ceremonial garment and seems to be associated with a mammoth skull, certainly associated with broken ivory objects, conical and carefully made in segments that look like wands. They have no practical use. They are ceremonial wands or septons that have been ritually broken and placed over his body. Now, by anybody's rendering, this is heavy duty ritual. It's a very careful burial. His head was missing, which may have been due to later disturbance or may have been related to the nature of his death. But he's somebody given great honour. And the attire is that of somebody with a high ceremonial function. So this looks like we can quibble over the term endlessly.

As we see it, the birth of British religion. And on that bombshell, I can't thank you enough. It's been an absolute tour de force. Well, I was asked really, really well-informed, intelligent questions, both by the two, especially by the two of you, but also by your followers. I think that one of the reasons why the two of you like me is that I'm a heavyweight academic who actually writes like a pop historian, not just in going for purple passages, but for covering an embarrassingly wide range of interests.

Everything you write on this subject is so fascinating. I particularly recommend The Statues of the Sun as we go into winter, if you want to keep your spirits up, all kinds of festive paganism there. And your most recent book, The Making of Cromwell, absolutely superb book. And you've talked, I think, at the beginning

of yesterday's episode about your love of the english countryside and one of the really striking things about the making cromwell is it's brilliant not only on cromwell but on the seasons and the flowers and the plants and the landscape of england it's kind of very unexpected in a book about um about the civil war so thank you so much for coming on thank you dominic we are back aren are back, aren't we, on the 4th of November with a 5th of November special. Oh, with a preview of the Gunpowder Plot.

Yes. So, which is, of course, one of the few, I guess, kind of modern British festivities, English festivities. Yes.

Something about which Ronald has also written. Fascinatingly. And we may be name-checking in that episode. I think we will. I think we will. Okay.

Thanks ever so much. All right. Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.