Hutton addresses the issue directly in this passage from his third chapter:
What is very much a live issue is the potential set of relationships between professional archaeology and those members of the public who are drawn to the ancient past by feelings of religious and moral kinship: the very people among whom a literal belief in earth energies remains one possible subset of ideology. For much of the twentieth century relations between the two were adversarial, and especially between experts in British prehistory and modern people who had taken the name and identity of Druid. Since the 1990s it has been feasible to propose a mutual understanding between them, based on the more or less undoubted fact, strongly argued in the present book, that it is impossible to determine with any precision the nature of the religious beliefs and rites of the prehistoric British. It may fairly be argued, therefore, that present-day groups have a perfect right to recreate their own representations of those, and enact them as a personal religious practice—of the sort now generally given the name Pagan—providing that they remain within the rather broad limits of the material evidence (or, if they choose not to remain there, honestly to acknowledge the fact). If there are many plausible ways in which prehistoric attitudes to the divine and supernatural may be imagined, then the reconstructions made by modern Pagans can represent viable, and even valuable, conjectures. If treated as such, by both parties, then there is no necessary reason for conflict between Pagans and archaeologists. Indeed there is much potential for a creative and benevolent partnership, if the former—while not able to claim any inherent wisdom or knowledge that automatically renders them superior to other members of their society—prove their worth by making exciting, creative and inspiring use of the data steadily generated by the latter (pp. 142–143).
A cooperative approach would certainly seem to be beneficial, rather than either side claiming a special authority that precludes the work of the other. This attitude can only lead to an unhealthy entrenchment. Mainstream Christianity has become moribund fighting against centuries of scientific discovery, and modern Paganism need not fall into the same trap. Ultimately, the scientist and the Pagan practitioner have different objectives and should look to each other for inspiration rather than validation. And, of course, honesty and open-mindedness is key, on both sides.
In another lengthy passage, this one from the seventh chapter, Hutton takes pains to make clear that modern Paganism need not be dependent on the work of archaeologists or historians for validation as a legitimate religious expression:
Only one British formation that has been interpreted as a labyrinth has been systematically investigated by archaeology, and it was never recognized as one until the mid twentieth century and never firmly accepted as such by either historians or archaeologists. It is also now the most famous among British and American pagans and New Agers: the spiral labyrinth on the dramatic conical hill in Somerset known as Glastonbury Tor. It was the great novelist and ritual magician Violet Firth, who wrote under the name Dion Fortune, who first drew attention to the terraces on the Tor, which had hitherto been presumed to have been medieval field systems. In the 1930s, she had a vision in which they became a sacred processional way made by refugees from Atlantis. This was brought down to earth by a former colonial from Ceylon called Geoffrey Russell. In 1969 he suggested that the terraces were a giant labyrinth, which he first thought was medieval, but later believed were more likely to have been prehistoric. Geoffrey Ashe, the eminent writer on Glastonbury, accepted the terraces as a huge, and hitherto unsuspected, ancient monument, and Philip Rahtz, a distinguished archaeologist, put on record that he thought this possible. The Tor was promptly adopted as one of the main sacred monuments of the rapidly growing community of people who had moved into the town dedicated to the practice of ‘alternative’ forms of spirituality. Archaeologists in general ignored it, as there was no known prehistoric structure which resembled it in the whole of Europe, though the excavations at Silbury Hill, undertaken in the 2000s, threw up the idea that Silbury might have been built with a spiral walkway ascending it. No examination was therefore made to test the reality of the Tor labyrinth until 2004, when the National Trust, which has custody of the hill, needed to renew the paths and gateways upon it, and invited Glastonbury’s resident archaeologists, Nancy and Charles Hollinrake, to make a proper survey of the terraces. They found that these were indeed human-made but had until recent times been discontinuous, not one circuit of them having linked up to make a pathway. They seem instead to have been medieval field systems, as had traditionally been supposed, similar to others surviving in that part of Somerset and probably made during the thirteenth century, when a rapidly expanding population was creating acute land hunger, and Glastonbury Abbey was engaged in ambitious building and drainage projects. No proper excavation was undertaken to confirm this date, but fragments of medieval pottery were found in one terrace. The labyrinth on the Tor does not, therefore, seem to be an ancient sacred structure, but it is certainly now a modern one, converted into a huge open-air temple in the late twentieth century and consecrated by the feet of thousands of devotees. As such it performs a religious function extremely well, and deserves the respect that is accorded to any site of which that is true, old or not (pp. 353–354).
Hutton’s work, in Pagan Britain and elsewhere, gives ample evidence of similar evolutions of religious practice. Regardless of the history of a rite or ritual, each generation either makes it their own or leaves it behind. What ancient peoples may or may not have done is immaterial if a devotional act has meaning in a modern context. Thus, an over-reliance on tradition to justify religious practices is as objectionable as using scholarly work to denigrate the innovative practices of Neo-Pagans. Scientific Paganism is focused on the future, not bound to the past.
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