Ronald Hutton - Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

QUEENS OF THE WILD

Copyright 2022 Ronald Hutton

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CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

L ike a great many publications sent to press at the end of 2020, this was one, to use the old expression, written in time of pestilence. I was therefore fortunate to be working on this book during the period of Covid-related restrictions; it required relatively little additional research as I had amassed most of the material for it over the previous thirty years although I now wished to ask new questions of it and put it to fresh uses. There was still some work to be done, however, and for this I had to await the reopening of libraries and negotiate the precautions taken by each to limit the spread of infection. In this context I would especially like to express my gratitude to Alan Brown of the Bodleian Library, for reserving a seat there for me when the online booking system broke down for the day. In the end, all the additional reading that I needed for the book was completed, save for one or two German works which could not be obtained in the circumstances of the epidemic other than by a very long wait and which were marginal to the work as a whole.

In more general terms, I remain grateful to all the staff of libraries and archives who assisted me beyond the normal call of duty in the long period of preceding decades in which I was accumulating the material. In the short term, I thank the two sets of readers employed by Yale University Press to scrutinize first the proposal and then the manuscript, and as always now at this point Heather McCallum, its managing director, who is responsible for my lengthy loyalty to her press. Mark Williams read my fifth chapter in draft and made invaluable suggestions. Synopses of the arguments in the book were presented and tested as an address to a conference at Leuven in 2018 and in my Stenton Lecture at Reading in 2019, and the former paper published in the proceedings of the event, edited by Joseph Verheyden and Daniela Mller and entitled Imaging Paganism in the Middle Ages, from Peeters in 2020.

The greatest point of difficulty in getting the book into publication was the question of the title, over which weeks were spent in a tug of war between the presss natural desire for one as colourful and alluring as possible and my pedantic anxiety to settle on one that most accurately reflected the contents of the book. The result was the presss suggestion that I liked best: it does not quite deal with the problem of whether the subjects of the book were either pagan or goddesses, strictly speaking, but it is certainly charismatic, and the clause an investigation may suggest that the problem spoken of may exist.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS A PAGAN SURVIVAL?

The Twentieth-Century Model

F or most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expression pagan survival would have had an obvious and uncontentious meaning for both most professional scholars and the general public interested in history. It was linked to a widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe, generally known by the umbrella term of paganism, had in some form and by some definition survived beyond the introduction of Christianity as the official faith. Moreover, it was as commonly believed that they did so for some considerable time, extending through the Middle Ages and far into the early modern period. This was thought to be true to some extent of the entire continent, but considerations of space and expertise mean that it will be examined in depth now with respect to Britain and publications in the English language.

The belief concerned was often asserted in general terms. In 1892 a leader of the newly formed British Folk-Lore Society informed his colleagues that English commoners had barely been Christianized even as late as the seventeenth century, and as such had preserved a pagan culture

All of these were highly respected authorities, although none of them knew much about medieval popular religion. They could make these statements with such confidence because they were based on a mass of apparent evidence of different kinds which had been interpreted in ways which tended towards the general conclusions just cited. One striking example of this in the British context was the Cerne Abbas Giant, the outline of a man 180 feet tall carved from the chalk rock on a hillside in Dorset, brandishing a 120-foot club. Two aspects of the figure are especially meaningful in this context. One is his virility, for he has pronounced genitals, including a 30-foot erect phallus. The other is that the valley below him had been occupied by one of Englands most important and long-lived medieval abbeys, which seemed to present the inescapable conclusion that if the giant were ancient as his primeval appearance would seem to suggest then the Christian monks had at least connived in his preservation for six centuries. A very popular and erudite guide to the ancient monuments of England and Wales published in the 1950s summed up the prevalent opinion concerning the figure. It stated that the giant was probably Romano-British, and that it must have been kept in being by the common people,

Famous legends as well as famous monuments could inspire similar suggestions. Another of the early luminaries of the Folk-Lore Society opined that the story of Lady Godivas nude ride through the city of Coventry to save her people from heavy taxation actually testified to the late survival of pagan belief and worship in the city. He believed that the latter had been centred on the cult of a horse-riding goddess.

Unique and extraordinary customs, carried on in particular places, were subjected to the same treatment. The Haxey Hood Game is an annual

During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s these interpretations were continued, elaborated and reinforced, and whereas until now they had been published mainly in specialist journals and monographs embodied in popular survey books which carried them to a large general public.

If accessibly written books on folk customs reached a large audience, exciting works of pure fiction reached an even larger one, and it is not surprising, in view of these scholarly developments, that a particular genre of British fantasy novels and essays appeared in parallel during the same period. It featured an outsider through whose eyes the storyline develops and whose Christian or rationalist viewpoint is presumed to reflect that of the reader coming to live in a rural British community. This protagonist then slowly discovers that it is inhabited by natives secretly practising a surviving pagan religion; and this is always an unpleasant one, thoroughly transgressive of current social norms, with which the heroine or hero comes into conflict. The message is that paganism is essentially a malign force which makes the people who continue it do bad things. Clearly, this trope was one which spun off from an anxiety about the progressive loss of power by Christianity in the modern world, as more and more people embraced atheism, agnosticism or alternative forms of religion and spirituality. Its first notable appearance seems to have been in 1895, with a short story by the Anglican Christian Arthur Machen, entitled The Novel of the Black Seal. This featured the Little People, the degenerate descendants of pre-Celtic races, who dwell underground in remote countryside and creep forth in search of virgins to sacrifice in their pagan rituals.