Queens of the Wild
By Ronald Hutton
(Yale University Press ISBN- 0300261012 Price £15.43)
For most Pagans, I believe the works of Ronald Hutton need no apologia. We recognize him as our greatest scholar and most bountiful resource of fact and evidence in any historical undertaking.
That there are those, however, who have attacked and vilified him – usually from either being incensed by the truth or failing to read him carefully enough – is undeniable.
Also undeniable is the care, respect and generosity which he accords his critics, especially as the years have passed.
Starting from a place without assumptions and accepting only provable facts, his reductionist approach is sometimes difficult to accept, but provides a platform of confidence from which the rest of us can speak about our pagan and Pagan history.
At the same time, I believe I have seen some of his hard lines (“This happened. This did not.”) soften slightly round the edges over the years. Always I felt that no one wanted more than he to discover ancient pagan treasure, or was sorrier when our dreams of a surviving pagan past were demolished. Also, he has always been willing to speculate – guardedly – on what more interesting things may have happened, but although this too has increased with time, he has clearly stated that he happily, and hopefully, leaves that to other people.
This latest book, Queens of the Wild, is the epitome of all of that. Spoiler alert: none of the female entities dealt with (nor the Green Man, who features as an epilogue) turn out to be traceable descendants of ancient deities – to the point that he believes another category is needed, for entities discovered or created in the last thousand years or so which are neither Christian nor properly pagan.
But the ride is rich and fascinating, full of myriad products of human creativity, which grow and change so quickly and thoroughly that, in the end, they cannot with certainty be traced.
Beginning with a summary of his previous findings about the (lack of) survival of a cohesive pagan cult or even widespread practices within seasonal festivals, Queens then looks in depth at four female figures of culture and modern Pagan practice. He scours them all for ancient spiritual meaning, or even existence. The integrity of his search is foremost, and his net (as always) astonishingly wide, looking for scraps which can be pasted into a whole picture of an ancient Mother Earth/Great Goddess, Fairy Queen, (flying) Lady of the Night, or the Cailleach, as well as the Green Man as mentioned. In no case is there a clear ancient prototype. In every case there are bits and pieces, intriguing hints, and multiple threads woven together during the life of Christianity which have given rise to new figures.
The newness is key, because while there is a sense of failure in not finding a glorious past, Hutton’s conviction shines clear that these figures sometimes arose when and because they were needed. The Lady of the Night brought reassurance and excitement to the downtrodden women of the Middle Ages; the Earth Mother/Great Goddess began as a foil to the triple oppression of the Church, the Patriarchy and the Industrial Revolution, and grew to become a blazing symbol of the rise of feminism and demands for equal rights for women; and the Green Man has become a unifying force and symbol for our desperate personal, spiritual need to reconnect with the natural world, and our even more desperate political need to stop destroying it. The underlying theme of this book is the irrepressible ability of the human spirit to form, from whatever material, the symbols, the images, the deities, that feed its survival and growth.
I feel I have always seen in his work, reading between the lines, a deep desire to discover the things he sought and ended up debunking. I have always believed this is why he looks for them so hard – only to see another cherished historical construct crumble to dust beneath the gaze of critical research.
Yet I also believe that he has come to find a more unexpected inspiration in this intense spiritual creativity, which is the true history of humanity.
The book is a delight, beautifully designed and readable, his prose less dense and more engaging than in some of his previous works.
Do not ignore the footnotes. Some are mere references or helpful guides for further research, but a fair few reveal the man more than the main text, demonstrating his grace, kindness, flexibility of mind, and deep belief in the process of spirituality.
If you are drawn to any one of these figures, or to a greater knowledge of how we, as Pagans, came to be where we are, this book is essential.
One consideration of the book as whole deserves further attention:
What does “god” or “goddess” even mean?
The author’s stated aim in the book is to trace whether these five figures are descended from ancient deities, but he never directly addresses what constitutes a god, or godhood. He is looking at the adjectives: pagan, Christian, allegorical – but never directly addresses the noun.
His exhaustive research, and that of his sources, is immensely valuable. But while his approach is integrative, he never states the viewpoint which would probably most directly aid his assertion that, speaking of devotees versus revisionist sceptics: “Both have their value as reactions to a changing world, and it would be a very productive achievement if they could be diverted from clashing with each other.”
To take an Animist viewpoint would address the facts in a way that would facilitate this. Originally nature spirits and deities were interchangeable, and the goddess of this river was all that mattered. A Goddess of Rivers was for millennia an irrelevant abstraction that existed only in the minds of a few, if at all. Each of these figures is an abstraction of a mythic type which would have existed for a tribe or province, each with its own name, qualities, and stories. (If you have read any of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series, you will probably recognize the concept.) Increasing population and communication, the rise of writing and scholarship to consider abstractions, and finally the victory of (the Abrahamic) GOD, an ineffable abstraction which absorbed to himself all qualities of godhood, created the possibility of Hutton’s quest, which would have been unimaginable before.
Admittedly, there are those on both sides – hard polytheists and hard academics – who would not be satisfied with this answer. The Great Goddess in particular cannot be as conceived unless she is universal. It has been suggested, however, that she was specifically, if unconsciously, a parallel construct to the Abrahamic God, and as such is an anachronistic concept to apply to prehistoric times. She could not be a Great Goddess until modern abstract thinking and comparative studies created her out of many. This says nothing, however, to discount her and her historicity. It does speak to the prevalence of mother goddesses in those times, which may have been very similar to each other and recognizable across cultural divides.
Indeed, we know that Roman soldiers made offerings to the Matres or Matronae – of a province, or military institution, or even a parade ground. Not really the same entities across the Roman world, and yet always so. The Cailleach in particular can be comprehended in this way. Something in the past, in deep tradition, or in the collective unconscious – it doesn’t matter which – predisposed Goidelic peoples to be sensitive to the spirit of an old woman, perhaps connected with deer and winter, in their landscape. So when they met her in the place where they lived, they might name her, they would recount her own particular stories, they would discuss her qualities (which would be specific to her, in that place), they would accord her the respect she demanded. She is not the Goddess of Winter, or Goddess of Mountains. She is a goddess of where we are, at a particular time of year.
When these beings later aggregated into an idea, of course they changed. Of course they picked up new qualities, and sometimes specifically Christian traits. How could this not be true?
This is not a criticism of Queens, and indeed, it is sort of his point, I think. But he never quite acknowledges that looking for big gods in the past is pointless, because outside of Akhnaten’s Egypt and a small tribe of Jews, nobody really had them.
Some Neo-Pagan beliefs have been disproven: Jack in the Green (in specific form) is nineteenth century, there was no large underground surviving witch cult. Others not only have less definitive counter-arguments, but also depend entirely on your point of view and your definitions. And if your point of view is too modern, too flavoured by taxonomy and abstraction, you will miss the point. – TH