Witchcraft and Modernity Ronald Hutton the Purpose of This Chapter Is

WITCHCRAFT AND MODERNITY Ronald Hutton The purpose of this chapter is to consider the place that witchcraft occu- pies in the modern world, and how it is affected by older concepts. When westerners think of modern witches, the kind that seems most commonly to occur to them consists of practitioners of a pagan religion venerat- ing deities of the natural world, a stereotype especially strong in Britain and the United States but found across most of Europe and the English- speaking world. Its oldest and most prevalent variety bears the name of Wicca, the standard Anglo-Saxon word for “witch”. The foundation myth of this religion refers directly to older forms of belief: that modern pagan witchcraft represents a public reappearance of a surviving ancient faith which was persecuted in the witch trials of the early modern period. According to the myth, that religion was driven underground by the trials, to emerge intact in the mid-twentieth century.1 This version of history has now largely been abandoned by modern witches themselves, especially by the most highly visible and published of them. It lingers as a position of faith among some prominent witches in America and in what might be termed the backwoods of contemporary witchcraft elsewhere.2 The fact that it was so powerful in the mid-twentieth century was largely a reflection of the wide acceptance by academics of the belief that the peo- ple accused in the witch trials had been practitioners of a surviving pagan religion. Propounded most famously by the English Egyptologist Margaret Murray, it was accepted in Britain by anthropologists such as Mary Doug- las and historians of the status of Sir George Clark, Christopher Hill and 1 The classic statements can be found in Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (London: Rider, 1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (London: Aquarian, 1959); Doreen Valiente, Where Witchcraft Lives (London: Aquarian, 1962); Patricia Crowther and Arnold Crowther, The Witches Speak (Isle of Man: Athol, 1965); June Johns, King of the Witches (London: Davies, 1969); Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979) and Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1982). 2 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 369–88. 192 ronald hutton Sir Stephen Runciman.3 Its evaporation among most modern witches, and their acceptance of their religion as essentially a twentieth-century cre- ation, has likewise been the result of its abandonment within the world of professional scholarship. It is in many ways impressive for practitioners of a religion to recognize the falsity of its traditional historical claims with such speed. It is both a sign that pagan witchcraft has its own viability as a spiritual system, and that it is less given than some other faiths to fundamentalist responses. Two other aspects of the Wiccan foundation myth are of more impor- tance here: from whence it came, and why it was functionally so effective in creating a new religion. As with so much else about modern pagan witchcraft, the myth was both an international product and one that was rooted in major cultural developments. The first of these developments was the loss of literal belief in witchcraft by European elites in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This immediately raised a historical problem in how to characterize the early modern witch trials. The shift of opinion invited the verdict that they had been a huge and tragic error, for which somebody had to be blamed. This was exactly the oppor- tunity taken by the Enlightenment philosophers, especially Voltaire and the authors of the Encyclopédie. They used the trials as a stick with which to beat traditional religious beliefs and established churches, an attack broadened and made populist in the era of the French Revolution.4 In the period of reaction which followed the fall of Napoleon, a potentially effective answer was found. Over thirty years ago, Norman Cohn identified the pioneering authors of this approach as the German scholars Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Joseph Mone.5 What has generally been missed is the polemical context of their work, which represented a powerful reaction- ary response to the Enlightenment challenge. It conceded that witchcraft was an illusion, but argued that the witches tried in the early modern period had been members of a persisting pagan religion. Furthermore, 3 Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); G. N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945); Stephen Runciman, preface to paperback edition of Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Mar- garet Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Christopher Hill, From Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 115–18; Mary Douglas, “Sor- cery Accusations Unleashed: The Lele Revisited,” Africa 69 (1999): 177–93. 4 Roy Porter, “Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian B. Levack and Roy Porter (London: Athlone, 1999). 5 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (London: Chatto and Heinemann, 1975), 103–5. .

Load more