by Ronald Hutton
(Oxford University Press,
ISBN 0-19-820744-1)
review
by Leon Reed
The time has come, if you have been waiting, to read a book on the pagan revival, which has caught the imagination of so many in recent years. This time the work is an intelligent and intelligible history of the ideas that fed into the revival. The book is called The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, by Ronald Hutton.
Ronald is a history professor at the University of Bristol in England and writes as both an insider and an academic. No one with such skills has ever tried to write anything like this about the history of the "Craft." Within Triumph's 416 pages, we trace the history of the ideas and dialogues of both neo-paganism and witchcraft. He goes for the roots of it all and finds them. They are all there: the Aleister Crowley connection, George Pickingill's family, Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, as well as many, many more strands.
If you think you know it all, you either have already read this book or you are wrong. If you want to check Ronald's work, his 53 pages of footnotes will take you to the correct page in the correct volume. Should you want to look up something in specific, try the excellent 15-page index.
The book's only weakness in my view is that there are no illustrations. I guess it will take an art historian to make the appropriate selections to flesh out this rich text with the right pictures.
Do not fear -- you will not get bored with this one. You might find yourself blowing off appointments to get the next chapter read. I was delighted to find that the roots of the Craft are found deeper in the past than so many recent books claim. The tree may be only 100 years old, but the roots go back to about 1400. The most surprising part of the book for me was its ability to create criteria for the evaluation of the Craft's source materials. You may well not agree with Ronald, but you will be surprised how much you learn from this volume about the Craft and neo-pagan books that you have read for years.
As in his earlier book about the seasonal holidays, The Rise and Fall of Merry Old England, and the excellent compendium Stations of the Sun, you will discover "what is what" in ways you did not before even know to ask about. Ronald also provided us with an excellent study of the ancient roots of the modern developments of "nature religion" in his first major book, The Ancient Religions of the British Isles. This book is probably the best historical analysis ever produced by an insider or outsider of this field about the evidence of religion from ancient times and its interpretation.
Reading these books will really get you thinking about modern developments and what lies behind them. I think they will make the neo-pagan and Craft movements stronger, as they give a much more solid and less romanticized base upon which to build anew.
The conclusion I came to after a reading and a careful rereading of Triumph is that the gods and goddesses have been trying to find a way back from the fringes of obscurity since at least the medieval period. What we see in pagan literary and artistic developments since the 1400s or so is that they're managing to do so, bit by bit.
Many will find reasons to hate Ronald's books. He spares no one in the field when he looks at their writings. He is very clear about what there is evidence for and what is an author's own conclusion or opinion. It may be less obvious what his own opinions are, but his conclusions are clearly stated.
I hope that every practitioner reads Triumph of the Moon and that all will require their students to read it before they train them. Ronald is so good at shattering illusions that he will make it impossible for many of the most popular forms of self-delusion relating to modern Craft developments to take hold of the neophyte. Triumph of the Moon will dispel much of the "mists of obscurity" in readers' minds and in the expressed opinions found in almost every book published on witchcraft.
No matter if you agree with it all or not, this book is the most well-documented tracing of who first published the ideas of the modern neo-pagan, pagan and witchcraft movements ever written. For the insider and well-informed, as well as the beginner, it is an eye-opener.
Leon Reed is a witch and a Druid in several traditions. Initiated as a witch in 1973 in Victoria, BC, into an eclectic bootstrap coven called Heru-Ra-Ha, he moved to Seattle in 1977 to run Beltane Bookstore. He began the Grove of Swans in 1978 and has assisted to found a number of lineages in the Northwest. He more recently has been trained in the English tradition known as Kingstone. He has also of late become a Bard in the British Druid Order (BDO), an Ovate in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and a Bard in the New Reformed Druids of North America. He is a writer and editor of The Sound, the local newsletter of the BDO, Bards of Caer Pugetia. He is also widely known as a medieval-style incense maker, ghost-hunter and a teacher and lecturer on Wicca, Druidry and metaphysics.
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