Transcription
I am delighted to introduce the gram college professor of divinity Professor Ronald Hutton. Thank you, everybody, and a very warm welcome to you.
I'm going to start a lecture on the origins of modern paganism by asking what "pagan" actually means, because there's been a big debate over this in recent years. The traditional definition, which is from the 19th century, is that it meant a rustic, a country dweller, on the presumption that cities converted first to Christianity, but the old ways lingered longest in the deep countryside.
And then in 1987, the Oxford classicist Robin Lane Fox pointed out that the term "pagan" was already being used when most of the population of ancient cities were not yet Christian, so it couldn't mean a country dweller. And he suggested it was a slang term for a civilian, in other words, somebody not enrolled in the army of Jesus Christ marching to victory.
And then three years later, this was overturned by a French historian, Pierre Shuan, who pointed out that the meaning of the term "pagan" as civilian had mostly died out before it began being used of non-Christians. And he suggested that "pagan" means the people who observe the religion of the *parochia*, which is the unit of local government in the Roman Empire, in other words, those who still observe the rooted religions, the religions of the place, the locality, instead of the pick-up-and-carry new missionary religion of Christianity. And so, quite simply, "pagan" does seem to mean just the old religions of Europe and the Near East, which makes perfect sense: rooted and traditional.
So now that seems to be sorted out. How did the 19th and early 20th century British discuss paganism? Well, there are four descriptive languages used of it, all of them important for our purposes.
And number one is: paganism is, is, and was a religion of savagery and ignorance. And this was a deeply traditional language for Europeans, given a new lease of life by modernity. It's embedded in Christianity with the Old Testament's denunciation of the abomination of the heathen bowing down to idols and alleged human sacrifice among those who don't observe the true religion of Jehovah, Yahweh. And the church fathers thundered in turn against the pagans and the heathens for their filthy habits and their false gods.
But this language was given a modern revival in the 19th century when European colonial empires expanded across the world, engulfing large numbers of tribal peoples. Until now, there had been two languages used by mainstream Europeans with respect to traditional peoples in the world. Some use the language of the Old Testament and church fathers and described them as vile savages. But there was an equally powerful tradition of regarding peoples with a simpler lifestyle as noble savages, closer to nature and more deeply in touch with humanity and the basic truths of the world.
But in the 19th century, the noble savage becomes much scarcer because of three things which work together. The one was, this was the century in which European technology evolved to the point at which European colonial states could decisively defeat African and Asian and the remaining North American and South American independent peoples. Second, having discovered this power, Europeans deployed it to vanquish these peoples and to conquer their territory, and then to justify it by saying that everything they were doing to the rest of the world was necessary to make the world a better place by civilizing its peoples, introducing the benefits of European modernity to them, and converting them to a better religion of Christianity.
And one of the lost genres of popular fiction in European culture is the account of missionaries abroad among tribal peoples as a heroic epic of brave young Europeans going out to fight ignorance, superstition, and beastly practices in the rest of the world. And this propaganda got a much larger audience by being taken into popular fiction, particularly by this gentleman, R.M. Ballantyne, a schoolmaster who invented and popularized the boy adventure story, above all *The Coral Island*, his bestseller published in 1858, but the last edition was in 1994. And it manages in equal measures to mix together sentimentality, religious zeal, and sadism. It portrays native peoples as being quite literally possessed by demons, represented by the false gods they worship, and therefore doing terrible things to each other and to any other human beings, which are eradicated instantly. A strapping British Christian missionary appears and literally exorcises the demons from them, after which, almost overnight, the entire native population puts on clothes, accepts baptism, and becomes as meek as lambs.
And these images are projected back into the primeval European past again. Ancient Europeans were regarded in two different ways in the 18th century. One way was to regard the predecessors of European civilization as bloodthirsty barbarians. Again, the Old Testament took this view of many non-Hebrew ancient peoples, and the Imperial Romans took the same view of many tribal peoples, which again justified their incorporation into the Roman Empire.
But there was an equally ancient view, equally propagated by Greeks and Romans, which is that the further back you go into deep antiquity, the nicer, more free, more happy people are, living closer to nature, not needing governments, armies, or taxation, and having a much healthier and better life, free and natural.
But in the 19th century, increasingly, that second, benevolent picture was scrapped. As modern tribal peoples, as portrayed mostly by missionary publications, as people with evil customs, worshiping evil gods, was made the model for how prehistoric Europeans must have been. In other words, the history of Europe was now regarded as a steady and glorious story of progress from every misdemeanor or crime that humanity can commit upon itself to better and better civilization.
And this ghostly view of prehistoric Europe was embodied in two key works which founded academic disciplines. One was *Prehistoric Times*, the work of Sir John Lubbock in 1865, which became the foundation text of the discipline of archaeology, and *Primitive Culture* by Sir Edward Tylor, 1878, which became the foundation text of the discipline of anthropology. Both of them showed prehistoric Europe to be a chamber of horrors, and they justified this by retailing all the very worst stories that could be told about, and were told about, tribal peoples in the modern world.
The chief casualty, or a chief casualty, of this process was the reputation of the Druids. Druids were portrayed in two different ways by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Druids never portrayed themselves because they never left any writings, and the Greeks and Romans disagreed over them. Some saw them as very wise, and the others saw them as savage. Some saw them as natural philosophers, leaders, pacifists, versed in the wisdom of nature by studying the stars and the natural terrestrial world. Others, particularly the Romans, who are busy conquering their peoples, portrayed them as bloodthirsty leaders of a religion devoted to ignorance and brutality, with an especially obsessive line in human sacrifice.
The two views, the admiring and the hating, alternated through later European history. In the 18th century, Druids were much more admired than reviled, seen as noble ancestors for Northwest Europeans. But in the 19th century, their reputation took a distinct turn for the worse, as part of the general darkening of the reputation of primitive Europeans.
At the opening of the 19th century, William Blake portrayed Druids as the worst exemplar of what priests do in an established religion if they get control of people. And William Wordsworth's attitude can be summed up by his poem about Stonehenge, entitled "Guilt and Terror." At the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after they had been accidentally burned down, which took place in 1843, a set of paintings were commissioned to flank one of the galleries leading to the Houses, entitled "The Progress of Britain." And each was a before-and-after effect: how we started, and how we gloriously are now. And in each, the progress was from barbarism and savagery to leading world civilization. And the very first was on one side, a British Druid committing a human sacrifice, and on the other, a strapping Victorian British officer rescuing a Hindu woman from the rite of Sati, or being burned alive on her husband's pyre. And the story is that the British had learned how to be great and civilized, and could now teach the rest of the world how to be so. But Druids were among the things that we had rejected as part of becoming better.
And that inspired in turn one of the most famous paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and certainly one with the longest and silliest title: "A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids." This was, even the Victorians recognized, utterly unhistorical, but the colors glow. It's by Holman Hunt, who was a great painter, and it speaks its own story. By 1900, it was well established that prehistoric pagan religion had been one of gloom and gore, and that made the whole of history everywhere a narrative of greater and greater progress out of those things.
But there was still a lurking fear that that religion lingered underneath civilization, an uncomfortable stain on the underside of the national story, a nasty chapter in the communal past to which we need to own up, but might not be entirely gone. And at worst, a force which could rise vampire-like from the ancient world to subvert modern humans and turn them to evil again, should the power of reason and education falter.
But there's a second language, which is equally traditional and powerful, which is that paganism was a religion which produced magnificent art, literature, and philosophy, and in many ways utterly admirable, but deficient to Christianity in its ethical system and in a lesser component of divine revelation. The Bible was dictated by the one true God. God. No pagan literature was...
Now, this did not result in an argument with language number one, because it referred to a different kind of paganism, not that of prehistoric tribal Europe, but that of very historic ancient Europe: Classical Greece and Rome. The Olympian deities of Greece and Rome were familiar and beloved characters in literature, painting, and sculpture, as well as in the ancient works of those that were edited, collected, and admired by the Victorians. They were the foundation of Western civilization, and 19th-century England was more soaked in the Greek and Roman classics than any European culture before. The study of them was made the foundation of a gentile education.
And if you look around British cities, because Victorian England was a Protestant Christianity, you'll find many more pagan deities represented in statues and carvings than Christian saints. And this can produce some quite stunning effects. On that monument to Prince Albert, Victoria's husband and consort, and also to Victorian bad taste, the Albert Memorial, you'll find Shakespeare there, but sitting at the feet of the ancient Greek poet Homer. And the man who died one of the first truly modern deaths was a Tory politician, a very good one, called William Huskisson, who was cabinet minister in the 1820s, and he opened one of the very first railways. He didn't understand how a railway worked and got run down by the train. And his constituent in Pimlico gave him a statue in memory of his great life and tragic death, showing him in a Roman toga.
And that's why one of the leading pundits of the Victorian period, John Ruskin, could say that our present education, to all intents and purposes, denies Christ. The struggle to reconcile the two, Christianity and Greek and Roman classical culture, was part of the Victorian enterprise. Such leading Victorians as the great Catholic Cardinal Newman, the muscular Protestant Charles Kingsley, the Oxford Dons Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, all found an answer in the new theory of evolution. That just as species evolve, so does religion. And classical paganism was a way of teaching the childhood of the human race basic religious truths and preparing human minds for the Christian revelation, which then perfected European religion by adding a creed of chastity, personal salvation, and moral responsibility to police and contain the rather more sensual and more environmentally friendly world of the ancient classics.
But there's another solution, found equally potent by the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and another Roman Catholic leader, Cardinal Newman, and in other works of the man and the historian Charles Merivale, and that was that Greek and Roman religion had been fine. It was dignified and benevolent, but it was corrupted by filthy ideas coming in from the East, from Orientals, orgiastic, superstitious, and focused on devils, which won over the masses and rendered ancient classical paganism worthy of demolition. And both of those satisfied the need to reconcile an admiration for the ancient classics with an allegiance to Christianity.
The funniest example that I have encountered of an illustration of the inadequacy of ancient paganism is from an American novel, but one that was a bestseller in Victorian Britain: *Ben-Hur*, 1893. Few of you may have read it, many more may have seen the movies, the first or the second version. And in the novel, though not the movie, the hero of it finds himself in the garden of the god Apollo at Antioch, the Garden of Daphne. And he wanders around enraptured by the physical beauty of the place, the flowers, the statues. He thinks it's the closest thing to paradise that he could imagine. And then he comes across a young couple lying at each other's arms, asleep after making love at the foot of the statue of a pagan god. And he is horrified and realizes the corruption, the falsity of the religion he's just been admiring, not because the couple have just been fornicating, but because it's the middle of a working day, and they should be at work creating greater wealth for their society and their economy and pulling their weight, like a Protestant Christian.
The common theme throughout all these writings is that classical paganism was lovely, but it was limited and corruptible. It could be enjoyed aesthetically and intellectually, but as long as it was tightly and carefully patrolled by Christian faith and morality. And this carried the other message: that should Christian vigilance fail, and even the old Greek and Roman paganism return, then modern society would decay and fall, just as the Roman Empire had done, and the ancient world had gone, engulfed by a new barbarism. And so this argument ran: Christian teaching was the bond of the social order and must be kept for this purpose, whether or not people have any personal belief in it. In other words, Christianity is so good in holding society together and making people behave well that it doesn't matter if there's actually a Christian God or not. Christianity is essential to the survival of civilization. So this was the second of the two traditional and conservative languages concerning paganism.
But the 19th century also produced two others which were much more radical. One of them was that paganism was once part of a single great world religion based on genuine divine revelation, of which all the main historical faith systems through the world contain traces. So the work of the present should be to take the best features of each of the great world faiths, Western and Eastern, and recombine them to revive the original divinely revealed world religion. And this movement became known as Theosophy.
And it sprang from the great project from the Renaissance through to the 18th-century Enlightenment of rediscovering and reuniting the wisdom of all the world and of all peoples. And it was one clear and benevolent consequence of the great discoveries, explorations, and conquests by Europeans in both hemispheres from the 16th century onwards. And these conquests had revealed a huge number of peoples, cultures, and religions of which Europeans had hitherto known nothing. And one intellectual reaction to this shock was to develop the project to reunite all human knowledge and revelation, people by people, to understand the whole world and the divine plan for the world better than ever before, and so make the whole world a better place.
But a distinctive 19th-century twist to this, relevant to this third language, was given in 1836 by a Yorkshire country gentleman called Godfrey Higgins, definitely a mystic, definitely an original thinker. And he suggested that the ancient philosophers all over the world, including the Druids, the Indians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians, had all got their wisdom from the original center of European civilization, the lost continent of Atlantis. The Atlantean wisdom could now be reconstructed from portions of all these teachings to create an ideal religion for the coming age, which he dubbed the Age of Aquarius, thereby starting the high road to Hippie-dom in Yorkshire in 1836.
However, he was regarded as demented by most of his fellow British elite, and his views had little impact until they were given international currency by a Russian immigrant to the West, the formidable and remarkable Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky, in her two great books, *Isis Unveiled* (1877) and *The Secret Doctrine* (1888), she was a truly international figure. Very bravely, and often alone, she traveled most of the world. She really got to understand Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Western faiths, and she really understood the language of science and evolution. She clearly drew on Higgins's work, but rather than acknowledging it, said that she had been told everything that she was publishing by direct divine revelation, channeled to her by enlightened beings, the Mahatmas, the hidden chiefs living in the Himalayas.
And her writings, unlike Higgins's, had a huge impact. She founded the Theosophical Society, which is still very much around today, and she provided two ideas which diffused a lot more widely in Western society in the 20th century: that of reincarnation as a probable, or at least possible, result of the journey of the soul after death, and the idea that there is a hidden message inside Christianity which the enlightened few can read, and by which they can live independent of established churches.
But there was a double-edged message to Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, which Theosophy later shed. Because on the one hand, it was racist. Lubbock and Tylor had portrayed many traditional peoples in the modern world and prehistoric peoples as being bloodthirsty barbarians, but they had emphasized that they're still human beings, that they could be re-educated and civilized and become just like us. Madame Blavatsky was far more inclined to preach that certain races of the world were much more suited to enlightenment and civilization than others. And also, her philosophy respected paganism, but only while diluting it beyond recognition, taking a few ideas from it and then packing them into a lot of Christianity, Judaism, and above all, Hinduism and Buddhism.
But there was a fourth language which appeared in the 19th century, which was that paganism was a religion of joy, liberation, and kinship with nature and human creativity, both life-affirming and life-enhancing. This was also based on Greek and Roman culture, so it drew on the same texts and the same art as the mainstream, qualified admiration of Greek and Roman paganism, but it demolished all the safety warnings and checks on admiring ancient Greek and Roman paganism.
And it began in late 18th-century Germany, like a lot of great modern ideas, when the classicist Johann Winckelmann proposed the return of modern civilization to ancient models of art in order to renew German art in modernity. And his equation was that ancient Greek art represented the natural, the creative, and the free, which was the much-needed alternative to and cure for modern civilization, which had become artificial, high-bound, and restricted. In other words, modernity needed ancient Greece and Rome to refresh itself.
And his language regarding art then combined in Germany with the longing for an organic unity between people, culture, and nature, opening the way for old ways and traditional beliefs to return, which was one hallmark of the Romantic movement that was beginning just at that time. It was taken up by the German Romantics, and especially by Friedrich von Schiller in his poem *The Gods of Greece* (1788), which was an impassioned lament for a lost pagan fairy land, Greek and Roman, presided over by happy and serene deities, in which the whole landscape was invested by divinity. An even better-known German Romantic, Goethe, could speak about how the beautiful gods had started to talk to him again after he had read these works and opened himself to them. It made a huge impact on German writers in general, but then crossed to England.
The whole of the first generation of English Romantic poets took it up, including Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats, and Shelley, especially Keats and Shelley. They were part of a group around the essayist Leigh Hunt in the years 1815 to 16. And this group aimed at rescuing humanity from the gloomier aspects of modern Christianity by bringing back the joys and the naturalism of old paganism. They were joined by another great writer, Thomas Love Peacock, and began to practice paganism as well as preaching it. They hung up garlands in honor of classical deities and they built altars to them.
Now, all this may just have been fun and games. It may have been role-playing, am-ram, not entirely serious. But there was a serious set of attitudes behind it. What they were suggesting was deadly serious. And I need only quote Leigh Hunt himself in 1818, in a letter to a friend: "I hope you paid your devotions as usual to the old religion and hung up an evergreen. If you all go on so, there will be a hope someday that a voice will be heard along the water saying, 'The Great God Pan is alive again,' upon which the villagers will leave off starving and singing profane hymns and fall to dancing again." And as I suggested, that hanging up evergreens and the dancing was something that he and his friends were actually doing.
After this, there is a lull. The outpourings of the early Romantics having in many ways provided all that was needed for an appetite for that revival, and their works continued to be read. But then in the 1860s, another great and later Romantic poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, started a new wave of such literature, writing passionate poems like his poem to the goddess Venus, with lines like, "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean," meaning Christ, "the world has grown gray from thy breath." In another poem, he hailed the German goddess Freya as the great creatrix of the universe, the original source of all things.
Other poets and novelists took their cue from Swinburne's remarkable commercial success, especially poets and novelists. By the time Thomas Hardy could write *The Return of the Native*, published in 1878, the term "pagan," which occurs three times in the novel, is always a buzzword for rather naughty personal liberation.
In the 1890s, this language began to grow more aggressive. The socialist, vegetarian, and gay rights guru Edward Carpenter could write in an essay on "Modern Man" in 1889: "The meaning of the old religions will come back to him on the high tops once more. He will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon." In many ways, paganism was now the antithesis of puritanism, and anybody reacting against Victorian puritanism need only to dip into the classics, or indeed into Romantic poetry, to find the fuel for such a movement.
It was also becoming bankable. Paganism paid. It was a buzzword. Kenneth Grahame, later the author of *The Wind in the Willows*, published his first collection of stories in 1893 and entitled them *Pagan Papers*. There wasn't any paganism in them, but he knew if he put that on the cover, then people would buy them. Another rising author called William Sharp started a magazine called *The Pagan Review* in 1892. It was really very bad, which is why there was no second issue, partly because he wrote all the stories himself in a tearing hurry. And it's a great read, it's absurd, but it's quite lewd. One of the stories is called "The Oread" and it's about a young Victorian gentleman wearing tweed plus-fours and hunting, no, stalking a stag on a Scottish moor and encounters a naked nymph, the Oread, and he pursues her with amorous intent, and she is seemingly willing, but he can't ever catch up with her until he realizes that to do so he has to take off all his clothes as well, and then everything works out.
Alternatively, the racier and the more negative view of literary paganism is "The Black Madonna," which is about priestly despotism and human sacrifice, and it has the immortal pair of lines, immortal among bad British writing, of "Black Madonna, quavering and seeming to fear, 'What wouldst thou, high priest?'"
In 1891, the essayist W.F. Barry coins the term "neopaganism" in the magazine *The Quarterly Review* for a new movement which he termed "the exuberance of eternal nature, all rhythm and harmonious evolution, a great unceasing festival of flowers and lights and easy sensuous love." Well, what's not to like? Well, Barry would point out this is just the kind of thing that led to the fall of the Roman Empire and will lead to the fall of the British Empire if you give into it.
And the same message was preached by a much greater writer, G.K. Chesterton, who distinguished between what he called shallow and deep neopaganism in Britain. Shallow was those who imagined the ancient Greeks and Romans, in his words, continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing around in an irresponsible state, above all things inebriate and lawless. But what really worried him was what he called deep neopaganism, which was the message that people like Leigh Hunt and his friends had started to put out, that paganism was much more suited in many ways to the modern age than Christianity, as it embodied a humanitarian view of the world and an ecologically sound philosophy of respect and love for nature. He fingered writers like Goethe, Dickinson, Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis as his chief targets and the most worrying of the writers in preaching this. But he consoled himself that most of the neopaganism around in the 1900s was shallow.
And this was typified by the poet James Elroy Flecker, who was later to make a huge hit with the operatic melodrama filled with gorgeous poetry, *Hassan*, which is still occasionally revived and played. But some of his forgotten verse, remembering his school days, he was a Cheltenham man, had lines like, "Have I not chased the fluting Pan through Cranham's stately trees? That's Cranham Woods. Have I not sat on Psylli Hill with a nymph upon my knees, and she as rosy as the dawn and naked as the breeze?" You can see a pattern here. The answer, of course, is no. This is what you imagined yourself doing as a schoolboy at Cheltenham College, James Elroy Flecker. But this is typical of a large outpouring of verse from the period.
World War I killed off the appetite for this kind of fun, but trite escapism, and so shallow neopaganism mostly disappeared. But deep neopaganism remained. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the work of such writers as Algernon Blackwood, writing of one hero of one of his stories, he knew that the spell of nature was greater for him than all the other spells in the world combined, greater than love, Ruray, pleasure, greater even than study. He had always been afraid to let himself go. His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery, even while he worshiped her.
Harold Massingham, a great writer on the English countryside, wrote in a different sort of way, but with the same message: "If only the English will kiss the sleeping beauty of their land beneath her roses, then she will awake, and the Lord of Misrule will be proclaimed, and all the blessed sons and daughters will gather to the Feast of Fools." The occult novelist Dion Fortune, in 1936, rather charmingly said that what modern society needed to bring itself into a healthy balance was a dose of paganism, which she summed up as "vitamin P." And D.H. Lawrence, in his most famous book, banned in Britain until the 1960s, had the most famous gamekeeper in English literature express the view of the ordinary people: "They ought to be naked and handsome and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances. Let the mass be forever pagan."
Well, since Leigh Hunt wrote over a hundred years before, some of the British had been dreaming of a reawakening of the old religions. And by the 1940s, at latest, it was really happening. In the pagan religion known as Wicca, of which I shall speak more later in this lecture series and dedicate a lecture to it. This revival grew directly out of this wave after wave of admiration for the pagan ancient world which had begun with the Romantic poets. And it happened in England.
So why England in particular? Well, the answer is that the obvious rivals in the West, in great powers and civilizations, were Germany and France. And German paganism, after all, had been born out of Greece and Rome, and it had launched the very ideas that crossed to England and eventually produced a genuine pagan revival there. But German paganism veered off into an admiration for the native paganism of Germany and Scandinavia, against that of Greece and Rome. And rather than fitting a counterculture, it became involved with nationalist groups, with a warrior ethic, and with a centralization of authority to renew Germany. And as such, it was unable to produce a grassroots countercultural paganism of the sort that appeared in England.
And English paganism, an admiration for Greek and Roman paganism, really embodied a love for and an admiration for the natural world. And the English countryside was vanishing very fast in the 19th century, producing a tremendous emotional reaction of love for it and a wish to preserve it, which in turn nurtured in some areas an allegiance to an ancient pagan revival, or revival of ancient paganism. Whereas French intellectuals had practically no sympathy for the French countryside, because there was still so much of it. France remained in many ways a rural society, and the urban intellectuals and liberals who founded countercultural movements regarded the French peasantry as their natural enemies, the peasantry, the rural population, as the basis of conservatism in politics and Catholicism in religion. So French radicals, poets like Baudelaire, flirted with paganism, with Satanism instead, as a countercultural antidote to Christianity.
But England had everything that was needed for a modern pagan revival: a vanishing countryside which attracted love, sympathy, and a tendency to spiritualize nature; a classical education which provided tremendous models in literature and art; a strong and self-confident nation-state to protect and nurture this society; a strong economy to fund it; and a harmonious and relatively united society which enabled a counterculture to appear without immediately being stamped out by an insecure society and government. And that is why, to raise the curtain on the rest of this lecture series, it was England that ended up by providing the language of paganism that enabled a revival to happen, and then actually to provide the revival. And there we leave the story for tonight.
[Applause]