Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History

In a 2011 article published in the journal Pomegranate, “Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History,” English historian Ronald Hutton discusses the conflicting narratives put forth to account for the development of modern forms of paganism. A “scholarly orthodoxy” had been established over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, he explains, that held that Neo-Paganism could trace a direct lineage from the pre-Christian religions practiced in Europe in ancient times. The vast majority of ordinary Europeans, it was claimed, defied Christianization and continued their pagan traditions while merely paying lip service to the new religion of the elite classes. Support for this idea was drawn from decorations found in early Christian churches said to represent pagan deities such as the Green Man, the respectful preservation of geoglyphs like the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, the continuing tradition of Morris dancing at springtime village festivals, the passing down of ancient folk remedies and superstitions, and other perceived holdovers from prehistory. In light of all this, scholars maintained that a continent-spanning nature religion, generally known as “witchcraft,” survived—and even flourished—until being persecuted nearly out of existence by Christian “witch hunts” between the 15th and 17th centuries. After its emergence into the public consciousness in the 1950s, Gerald Gardner’s Wiccan religion claimed an unbroken line of descent from this suppressed witchcraft tradition.

However, Hutton continues, subsequent scholarship could not uphold this view. No evidence of such a witchcraft religion resisting national Christianization could be found, and meticulous alternative explanations and interpretations of the previous suppositions were put forward. Accounts of witch practices taken from early modern trial transcripts were dismissed as inventions of the prosecutors. By the end of the 20th century, the old orthodoxy had fallen apart, having found no one in the academic community willing to defend it. Hutton refers to this scholarly realignment as “revisionism” and goes on to describe how this proved not to be the death knell of Neo-Paganism, for it was able to thrive despite the loss of this historical validation as a thoroughly modern religious movement:

These developments made the foundation story of modern Paganism untenable and opened the way to the construction of a different sort of history for it, which could be based on demonstrable evidence. In this, it was certainly based on older images and ideas, gathered from the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, but evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to suit modern needs and ideals; which it did very well, thereby explaining most of its appeal and viability. As such, it was no less genuine than any other faith which had undergone a process of renewal and revival, such as Protestant Christianity’s rejection of more than a millennium of developing Catholic theology and ritual to return to what its exponents regarded as ancient truths. (p.227)

Hutton further argues that the collapse of the old narrative was, in fact, beneficial to Neo-Paganism, as it had encouraged a set of antisocial attitudes in its adherents. The legacy of the witch trials inspired “a deep suspicion of mainstream society and a particularly adversarial attitude towards established Christianity” (p.231). Modern-day witches complained that tens of thousands, if not millions, of their forebears had been unjustly executed by Christian authorities with the full complicity of their families, friends, and neighbors. They were thus drawn into unproductive and alienating historical debates that hindered the larger Neo-Pagan community from gaining widespread acceptance. Furthermore, the idea that paganism survived centuries of repression only through the secret rites of “true believers” held back the development of new approaches by placing a premium on initiation and its attendant hierarchical structures, creating just the sort of rules and restrictions that many ex-Christians had turned to Neo-Paganism to escape. Conversely, Hutton asserts:

The revisionist history encourages a greater sense of integration into, and of a common inheritance with, the parent society. Instead of a line of martyrs and embattled tradition-bearers, the immediate ancestors of Paganism become a succession of cultural radicals, appearing from the eighteenth century onward, who carried out the work of distinguishing the Pagan elements preserved in Western culture and recombining them with images and ideas retrieved directly from the remains of the ancient past, to create a set of modern religions…. In this model, Paganism is not something inherently different from mainstream society, and traditionally oppressed and persecuted by it, but represents an extreme, and courageous, distillation of some of its deepest and most important modern impulses. That is precisely why Pagans can regard themselves as peculiarly well positioned to serve some of the most profound instincts and needs of modernity. This model reduces the emphasis on the authority of elders, group leaders, and initiatory lineages and encourages a greater liberalism and eclecticism within the movement, as that movement itself arose from creativity, self-expression, and individual will within the relatively recent past (pp.231–232).

Neo-Paganism, then, is perhaps better suited to modern sensibilities—and modern problems—than any ancient religion. The past, though it haunts us, has fallen away, and I believe we’re better off focusing on the future.