Tea at Trianon: The Real History of Paganism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 19, 2022

The Real History of Paganism

From First Things:

For over thirty years, Prof. Ronald Hutton has been the leading scholar of the history of paganism, both ancient and modern. While Hutton’s iconoclastic masterpiece The Triumph of the Moon (1999) essentially denied contemporary neopaganism any convincing claims to historical continuity, Hutton has always balanced his scrupulously polite eviscerations of neopagan wishful thinking with an insistence that the history of paganism nevertheless matters, even if the real history is not the one many of us expected. In his latest book, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation, Hutton returns to a key question posed in his work in the 1990s: Was there really any continuity or survival of paganism in the Christian Middle Ages? Inspired by the centrality of the figure of “The Goddess” to neopaganism, Hutton attempts to answer that question by examining four culturally significant “goddesses” who have been considered “pagan” at different times: Mother Earth, a personification of the entirety of nature; the Fairy Queen, ruler of a parallel supernatural world and, Hutton argues, a distinctly British phenomenon; the Mistress of the Night, a mighty supernatural woman who roved the night with an entourage that mortals could join; and the Old Woman, or Cailleach, of Gaelic tradition, a legendary woman of immense age who came to be associated with mountains and wild places.

Hutton shows that popular perceptions of paganism are sometimes still informed by an old historiography that advanced the idea of “surviving paganism,” most notably in Margaret Murray’s “witch-cult” theory. Murray’s outlandish belief that groups of “witches” secretly worshipping a Neolithic goddess and a horned god in a fertility cult survived into the seventeenth century prevailed as a respectable scholarly position into the 1970s. Yet in the ’80s and ’90s a new generation of scholars—including Hutton himself—rapidly rejected the notion that paganism could have lingered for more than a short time after Christianization.

Instead, Hutton made a distinction between “surviving paganism”—the persistence of an organized pagan religion as a competitor of Christianity—and “pagan survivals,” the lingering existence of pagan elements as part of folk Christianity. Once elites abandoned their pre-Christian beliefs, Hutton argues, there was no chance of a coherent paganism surviving, but this did not mean scattered elements of pagan rite and belief could not endure. Some scholars have taken the revisionism even further, arguing that “pagan” is a meaningless term, and all we can say is that certain practices belonging to medieval popular Christianity had little to do with Christian orthodoxy.

Hutton is at pains to hold back from this kind of extreme skepticism, maintaining the meaningfulness of “pagan” as a category. He offers an intriguing analysis of why such skepticism took root so quickly, however. While the “Murray thesis” of pagan survival appealed to a post-Christian academic world when the rejection of Christianity was still new and self-conscious, as scholars became accustomed to a secular, pluralistic society, the project of exposing the flaws of Christianity lost its urgency, thus permitting historians to adopt a more objective approach to the analysis of medieval popular Christianity. For the second and third generations of scholars for whom religion is often no longer a lived reality, nor even a component of their experience at all, there is no longer any incentive to favor or discredit one religion over another.

Hutton’s “goddesses” originate from very different sources; Mother Earth was originally a learned personification, while the Fairy Queen came from literature. The Mistress of the Night and the Gaelic Cailleach both grew from folklore. However, all four figures are of particular interest to Hutton because they took on a life of their own, becoming figures of power with their own kind of agency in the collective cultural imagination. For example, the Fairy Queen was a literary figure at the end of the Middle Ages who appeared under a number of different guises in romances, from Morgan le Fay to a reimagining of the Roman sibyl, but by the sixteenth century she had seemingly made the transition to the “real” world, and judicial records show that she was often invoked by fraudsters and confidence tricksters as a source of magical power and authority. In the same way, the allegorical Mother Earth of the medieval alchemists and natural philosophers became, in the twentieth century, a much more literal personification of the suffering planet Earth. (Read more.)