Hutton accepts that there are pagan survivals (for example, statues of pagan goddesses that have been rechristened as saints and "the use of candles, incense, wreaths and garlands, altars, images, formal liturgies, hymns, vestments, choral music and sermons” that the early Christians borrowed from the pagan world) and that there are “small gods” around the world worshipped by peoples who have had their “indigenous religions officially replaced by major religious systems” which “embody mental consequences of the human experience of living in environments which seem to have their own independent, animating powers.” However he repeatedly demolishes the claims of those who seek unbroken traditions. For example:
- Green Man heads in churches seem to have first appeared as illustrations in mediaeval manuscripts and are thus unlikely to be pagan in origin; no written evidence before the nineteen hundreds suggests they are any more than decorative (Ch 1)
- Morris dancing "appeared in the fifteenth century as a fashionable new entertainment in the royal and ducal courts of France and Burgundy, and spread from them to the English ones. In the early sixteenth century it had begun to move out among the English populace, and it became a widespread craze in the second half of that century.” (Ch 1)
- “Early English medicine contained notable Greek, Roman and Arab elements, as well as the native tradition, so drew eclectically on all knowledge that seemed to be available.” (Ch 1)
- The Mother Earth of the Greeks and Romans was a very minor deity who was virtually shrineless. (Ch 2)
- A 'mother goddess' figurine found at the bottom of Grimes Graves in Norfolk “turned out to have been announced by the director of the excavation, without his having recorded it in the site notebook and after he had asked all other experienced archaeologists to leave the area.” (Ch 2)
- The interpretation of all images as representing a single goddess was at odds with the known pagan practice of having multiple goddesses and the reduction of the mother earth goddess to the single function of fertility seems restrictive given the known pagan goddesses who had functions in eg wisdom (Athena) etc. (Ch 2)
- While most European cultures have “woodland beings which could take the form of beautiful people, of either gender, and have sexual intercourse with the humans whom they encountered and seduced. These seem to have been equivalent to the Greek and Roman nymphs and satyrs” (Ch 3), fairies seem to have derived from the twelfth century romance literature and the King and Queen of the fairies are late additions which reached their apogee with Oberon and Titania in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights' Dream. (Ch 3)
- Jack-in-the-Green “which had been taken as the supreme British example of a folk representation of an ancient vegetation deity, was essentially a nineteenth-century custom carried on by chimney sweeps in southern English towns to collect money against a summer season in which they would be largely unemployed.” (Epilogue)
Selected quotes:
- “An idea mooted by British scholars in the late nineteenth century and based on the then still new theory of evolution ... held that, as human bodies bore the same similarity across the planet, so human minds must do too, and that therefore basic notions had developed in the same way throughout the scattered branches of the human race. ... In reality, beliefs seem to develop in much more independent, capricious, contingent and opportunistic ways.” (Epilogue)
- "Illiterate people are often more willing and able to change ideas and habits than those who have preserved them in writing.” (Epilogue)
- “a sphinx without a riddle” (Epilogue)
Well-written, readable, and authoritative
October 2022; 197 pages
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