Folklore ISSN: 0015-587X (Print) 1469-8315 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfol20 Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition To cite this article: (2008) Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition, Folklore, 119:3, 251-273, DOI: 10.1080/00155870802352178 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802352178 Published online: 03 Nov 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3955 View related articles Citing articles: 7 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rfol20 Download by: [37.44.196.21] Date: 15 December 2017, At: 17:20
Folklore 119 (December 2008): 251 273 RESEARCH ARTICLE Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition Abstract The cluster of recently appeared religions known as Paganism have developed, over the past sixty years, a distinctive cycle of annual festivals, most of which draw on long historic roots but that are grouped together in a modern framework. No study has yet been made of the manner in which this cycle developed, and potentially rich rewards may be gained from doing so. Such a project is a rare opportunity to study a religious festive tradition in the process of evolution, and also to suggest features of the nature of tradition in modern societies, and the manner in which it is perceived by scholars in different disciplines. Introduction During the past thirty years, scholars have gradually become aware of the existence, across the western world, of a rapidly growing complex of modern religions organised under the label of Paganism. [1] Although they differ from each other in the nature of their deities, rites, and organisation, they have certain definitive features in common: most obviously, a veneration of the feminine principle of divinity as well as the masculine, a sense of an inherent sanctity in the natural world, an ethic of responsible individual self-expression that rejects concepts of sin and salvation, and an identification with the pre-christian religions of Europe and the Near East. They are also more or less united by the observation of a common pattern of eight annual seasonal festivals. The study of festivity is currently a focus of considerable interest among scholars of religion, society, and culture, in several different disciplines: it is, indeed, a phenomenon encountered in all, or virtually all, human cultures. The most comprehensive and considered definition of a festival, by a social scientist, seems to have been that of Alessandro Falassi: a periodically recurrent, social occasion in which, through a multiplicity of forms and a series of co-ordinated events, participate directly or indirectly and to various degrees, all members of a whole community, united by ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical bonds and sharing a worldview (1987, 2). This certainly fits the seasonal celebrations of modern Pagans, in all respects. Most scholars of religious festivity have to reckon with the fact that the particular rites they study have developed over relatively long periods of time, so that we can observe their later and current forms, but have irrevocably lost much or all of the process by which they came into existence. In the case of modern Paganism, by contrast, it is possible to document virtually every detail of the way in which an entire ritual calendar has developed. This provides a historian with an ideal ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/08/030251-23; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis q 2008 The Folklore Society DOI: 10.1080/00155870802352178
252 case study through which to understand how the processes by which sacred and seasonal calendars, and festive traditions, can be produced within a modern society. Forms of modern Paganism have now been the subject of a valuable amount of scholarly attention, on both sides of the Atlantic, even though this study still remains at a comparatively early stage and much more work is needed. The existing publications have tended to concentrate on pagan witchcraft, the longest-established and best-known tradition, but even here they represent only a first stage of the investigation that is needed for the international community of scholarship fully to understand its nature and its context within the wider world (Luhrmann 1989; Onion 1995; Harvey 1997; Berger 1999; Greenwood 2000; Salomonsen 2002; Magliocco 2004; Bado-Fralick 2005; Johnston and Aloi 2007). They have usually included a consideration of the place of festivity in the traditions concerned, and of the celebration of the eight points of the Pagan cycle. This consideration has, however, been focused upon the contemporary significance of the cycle and the manner in which celebrants experience it. As the authors have been sociologists, anthropologists, and experts in religious studies, this preoccupation is natural enough, and valuable in itself. Some valuable attention has now been also paid to the history of modern Paganism or the manner in which that Paganism uses history. The quantity of work has, however, been smaller, and much less of it has been produced by professional scholars (Kelly 1991; Purkiss 1996; Hutton 1998; Heselton 2000, 2003; Clifton 2006; Adler 2007; Gibson 2007; Pearson 2007). Of the publications in this category, only my own has as yet taken any notice of the manner in which the festive cycle developed, and then only briefly and in passing (Hutton 1998, 195, 233 4, 245 6 and 248). This neglect is undeserved, because a proper investigation of the development of the cycle has relevance to some of the most prominent current preoccupations of several different disciplines, and especially folklore. It is a classic study of the invention of tradition, an area of critical interest to scholars ever since the publication of Eric Hobsbawm s and Terence Ranger s pioneering work in 1983. In his introductory essay to that collection, Hobsbawm declared that the most interesting feature of this phenomenon was the use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes (1983, 6). Modern Pagan festivals perfectly fit that description. Moreover, a study of them is a consideration of the nature of tradition itself, especially in a modern society. This is a project that goes to the very roots of folklore studies: in 1891 Edwin Sidney Hartland could declare that folklore is the science of tradition (1891, 11). Two years after that, and writing in this journal, Joseph Jacobs suggested that one of the prime objectives of folklorists should be to understand how a particular tradition originated, and how it developed and disseminated (1893, 237). Over a century later, Simon Bronner has restated the same theme, suggesting that a particular contribution of folklore studies to the philosophy of tradition could be to integrate creativity and emergence into the idea of tradition (2000, 93). A study of modern Pagan festivals permits exactly such an understanding, and integration, as Jacobs and Bronner recommended. It also has implications for a broader appreciation of the nature of modernity, and its relationship with older ideas and customs, and of the changing place of religion in western culture.
Modern Pagan Festivals 253 The Intellectual Roots of the Cycle Four of the eight festivals of the modern Pagan ritual calendar consist of the cardinal points of the sun s progress through the year: the solstices at midsummer and midwinter, and the equinoxes of spring and autumn. The four others are represented by the dates that commenced the seasons in traditional British and Irish culture: the first days of November, February, May, and August, or their eves. They are known, across the various traditions of modern Paganism, by various different names, reflecting the particular ancient cultures with which the traditions concerned identify: for example, the winter solstice is known to pagan witches and to Pagans who follow Scandinavian models as Yule, to Druids as Alban Arthan, to some Pagans who follow an Anglo-Saxon model as the Mother Night, to those influenced by classical Greek and Roman religion as Saturnalia, and so on. Nonetheless, they are generally observed as what Pagans collectively usually call the Wheel of the Year, stressing the cyclical nature of the cosmos, which is one of the themes of modern Pagan belief. It will be noticed that the festivals concerned are not equally spaced throughout the year. They represent two equal-armed crosses, imposed on each other in a slightly crooked pattern, some five weeks apart and some seven weeks apart. This is because the two sets of feasts do not just reflect two different natural systems, one solar and one lunar. They actually have two completely different points of origin, each associated with a different modern writer. The solar feasts are there because of Edward Williams, the quarter days because of Margaret Murray; and the relationship of both with an ancient and modern pagan calendar now needs setting in context. The context for Williams s work was the general British rediscovery of the ancient Druids in the mid-eighteenth century (Hutton 2007, 12 17 and 41 58). [2] It was then that a mixture of excavation and fieldwork, mostly by William Stukeley, established once and for all that the great megalithic monuments of Britain had been built by the pre-roman natives of the island. Until then they had been credited, variously, to the Vikings, the Romans, and the post-roman British, the latter sometimes having the assistance of the wizard Merlin. Now all these alternative candidates were swept away. What every educated European knew about the ancient British was that their religious leaders had been called Druids. Most of Britain s prehistoric stone structures circles, avenues and rows of great stones, and chambered tombs had by then been recognised (correctly) as ceremonial monuments. It followed therefore that the Druids must have been their designers and the priests who officiated at them. This shot Druids to centre-stage in the British imagination, having hitherto been marginal and hazy figures. A race began to try to understand their beliefs and customs, and so recover a lost portion of the British national heritage. As the Welsh were the modern people in the island most obviously descended from the aboriginal Britons, there was a real hope that their early literature might prove to contain traces of Druidical teaching that had survived the conversion to Christianity. The person who proceeded to look hardest for these was a stonemason from Glamorgan, the aforementioned Edward Williams, who took the nickname [3] of Iolo Morganwg, by which he is now better known (Morgan 1975; Jenkins 1997, 2005; Hutton 2007, 19 30, 57 61 and 160 2). When he realised that the surviving manuscripts contained nothing demonstrably Druidic, he proceeded to forge the
254 missing evidence and pass it off as a scholarly discovery. As part of this work of deception, he had to devise a system of Druidic festivals, and did so by stages between 1792 and 1826 (Owen 1792, xlvi; Williams 1848, 435). Iolo Morganwg has recently been made the subject of a major and wonderfully productive research project based at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and led by Geraint Jenkins (Jenkins 2005; Charnell-White 2007; Constantine 2007; Jenkins, Jones and Jones 2007). Almost the only aspect of his life and work that has not been covered by this is Iolo s vision of ancient Druidry, and accordingly the development of its festive cycle has not been investigated either. The basis of it was the greatest of all Britain s prehistoric monuments: Stonehenge. As had been appreciated since the writings of William Stukeley in the 1740s, this is clearly aligned on the midsummer sunrise, which, since it was now credited to the Druids, meant that the cardinal points of the sun must have been sacred to them. Iolo accordingly invented a pattern of four great Druidic festivals, the solstices and equinoxes, to which he gave Welsh names relating to light: from midwinter onward, Alban Arthan (21 December), Alban Eilir (21 March), Alban Hefin (21 June), and Alban Elfed (23 September). It was only in the late nineteenth century that British scholars in general concluded that the megalithic monuments belong to the New Stone Age and the Druids to the Iron Age, almost three thousand years later, severing the link. This news took another hundred years to reach the general public. It was likewise only in the early twentieth century that Welsh academics proved conclusively that Iolo had made up his Druidic system. They did so, moreover, in books published in Welsh, so that there are members of the English and American public, to this day, who still believe in it. Among those who long retained such a belief were various orders of modern Druids inspired, at least in part, by Iolo s dream; and some of these celebrated rites inside Stonehenge at midsummer from 1912 onward (Hutton 2007, 64 75 and 174 93). In this manner, one-half of the modern Pagan cycle was put into place. The other half arrived by quite a different route. During the eighteenth century, most of the ruling elites of Europe came to lose a literal belief in magic and witchcraft, as part of the process that came to be called the Enlightenment. As a result, the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in state after state. This gave the liberal intellectuals of that century and the succeeding one a splendid stick with which to beat the established churches and hereditary aristocracies. If witchcraft had been an illusion, then all those who had perished in the witch trials of the preceding epoch had been the victims of bigotry and superstition, embodied in the traditional figures and institutions of authority. One possible answer to this was provided in the period of reaction after the Napoleonic Wars by two German scholars, Karl Jarcke and Franz Mone. They agreed that witchcraft did not exist, but declared that the victims of the witch trials had been pagans, surviving practitioners of the bloodthirsty and orgiastic religions of old Europe. As such, they had been guilty of most of the atrocious behaviour that demonologists and witch-hunters had associated with the festive assemblies of witches, and so richly deserved their punishment and suppression (Jarcke 1828; Mone 1839). [4] This theory posed a real challenge to the new generation of liberal reformers and revolutionaries, and the one who accepted it with the most gusto was the Frenchman Jules Michelet. He had neither the time nor the means to challenge the reactionary theory from original evidence, and so he simply subverted it. He declared that the people persecuted
Modern Pagan Festivals 255 as witches had indeed been pagans. Rather than practitioners of a disgusting religion, however, in his imagination this became one that loved the natural world, and human liberty and self-expression. It was a rallying-point for ordinary people opposed to the main oppressors of medieval society: the feudal aristocracy and the Christian Church (Michelet 1862; see Hutton 1998, 137 40). By the end of the nineteenth century, this belief was well established on both sides of the Atlantic. Scholars who were expert in the records of the witch trials recognised it as untenable, but specialists in other areas of history, and in other disciplines, often took it up (Hutton 1998, 140 50). The one who tried hardest to match it to actual evidence was the British archaeologist Margaret Murray, who, between the 1910s and 1950s, did her best to build up a complete picture of the religion that had been called witchcraft (Hutton 1998, 194 201). Her working methods in doing so have recently been given attention (Simpson 1994; Oates and Wood 1998; Hutton 1998, 194 201); no sustained consideration, however, has been accorded to the way in which she constructed its festivals. She declared the most important to have been the four quarter days that opened the seasons, which she felt to have been very appropriate for a surviving ancient religion rooted in the cycle of the agricultural year. In addition, she concluded that lesser assemblies were held at the solstices, which she asserted to have been feasts brought in later by sun-worshipping invaders. This conformed to the view of prehistory that predominated in Britain at the time, having been propagated by scholars such as Max Müller, Sir William Boyd-Dawkins, and Sir John Rhys, and is now more or less completely abandoned. It depended on the idea of an earthworshipping Neolithic religion that had been overthrown or absorbed by a new cult of the sun brought in by bronze-using Aryan invaders from the East. She explicitly stated that British witches had never celebrated the equinoxes, although she might be read as implying by this that some on the Continent could have done so (Murray 1921, 109). On examining the sources used by Murray herself, let alone a larger body of original evidence, it is clear that most people accused of witchcraft did not specify any calendar dates as being regularly used for their assemblies to worship the Devil. Those that did specify named a wide range of them, including one or two of the quarter days, either of the solstices but not both, and (just as frequently) Christian feasts such as Easter or saints days. Only one, in fact, out of the thousands whose detailed trial records have survived from across Europe stated that she and her comrades had met on the four quarter days. This was Isobel Smyth, tried at Forfar, Scotland, in 1661. Nobody else accused in the whole great Scottish hunt of 1661, let alone at any other time and place, seems to have done so (Murray 1921, 109 11; cf. Maxwell-Stuart 2006). The fact that Margaret Murray used this single case as the peg on which to hang a major aspect of an entire assumed religion fits in with her usual methods when writing on witchcraft. The Appearance of the Cycle Margaret Murray s interpretation of the witch trials is now rejected by all academic historians. Nonetheless, detailed studies of the early modern witch hunt largely fell into abeyance during the time in which she was writing. As a result, by the 1940s and 1950s her account of it was accepted as correct by a great many people, both inside and outside the world of professional scholarship
256 (Hutton 1998, 199 200, 272 8 and 377 80). In other words, her portrait of a native system of ancient festivity, spanning Western Europe, was at its most influential just as Iolo Morganwg s system was losing credibility. One of those who believed it completely was a colleague of hers in The Folklore Society, a retired colonial civil servant called Gerald Gardner. He is central to our story because it was he who revealed to the world the existence of Wicca, or pagan witchcraft, the oldest recorded and most enduring variety of modern Paganism and the template for most of the rest. It has often been suggested that Gardner himself developed Wicca, with an unknown amount of help from friends and collaborators. This is at present impossible to verify and may always remain so. What is certain is that there is no definite evidence for its existence before his involvement in it, and that he was its first and greatest publicist (Hutton 1998, 205 52 and 369 86; Heselton 2000, 2003). Gardner was also a high-ranking member of the most prominent of the modern Druid orders that held public ceremonies at Stonehenge, the Universal Bond, although latterly he was not very impressed by it. Apart from any other consideration, he was sufficiently up to date with current scholarship to be aware of the discrediting of Iolo Morganwg. On 6 November 1951, the year in which he proclaimed the existence of Wicca, he summed up his own Druid order s rites to a business partner as just what sentimental folk would invent in the eighteenth century (Williamson Papers). On the other hand, he not only believed that Margaret Murray s portrait of early modern witchcraft was absolutely accurate, but declared Wicca to have been that very religion, which had survived the witch hunts in secret until the present day. Murray wrote a supportive preface to the book in which he did so (Gardner 1954). Her influence is amply borne out by the earliest surviving Wiccan liturgy, a manuscript compiled by Gardner and labelled Ye Bok of ye Art Magical, which dates from some point in the 1940s, more probably from the second half of the decade. [5] In that period the main Druidic seasonal ceremonies were all at midsummer. By contrast, the seasonal witches sabbats in Ye Bok are based firmly on the descriptions given by Murray ( Ye Bok, 271 88; Murray 1921, 124 31; 1933, 109 19). They are scheduled for her four quarter days, and the activities prescribed are essentially those reconstructed in Murray s books from the descriptions of witches assemblies given by demonologists and the confessions extracted from those accused of witchcraft. The emphasis is, accordingly, on dancing, feasting, games, songs or chants, and spell-casting, rather than on seasonal rites as such, in which the witches of the early modern imagination had shown no interest. The ritual space is approached in a processional dance, riding brooms and carrying a phallic wand, as Murray portrayed her witches as having done. Among the dances prescribed for Gardner s witches is one from Italy to which she drew particular attention la volta which allowed couples to dance together ( Ye Bok, 278; Murray 1921, 135). Murray had provided no lyrics for the songs or chants allegedly used by witches at their gatherings. Those prescribed for the festivals in Ye Bok are all taken from existing published sources easily accessible to Gardner: a verse of Kipling, quotations or paraphrases from published works of Aleister Crowley, and an invocation from a thirteenth-century French miracle play, reproduced in two well-known textbooks on magic published in 1931 and 1948 (Hutton 1998, 231 2 and forthcoming [b]).
Modern Pagan Festivals 257 Margaret Murray had not given much prominence to the seasonal festivals in her reconstruction of her imagined witch religion, and neither did Ye Bok ; they occupy just 15 pages, in large handwriting, out of 288 in the manuscript. The main emphasis in the latter is firmly on operative magic. The fact that the verse of Kipling is used in two successive festivals, and that a piece of Crowley s work that appears in one is also employed in an invocation a few pages earlier in the manuscript, indicates a considerable economy, or haste, of composition. The rites that specifically recognise the season are all very brief and simple. Nonetheless, they already embody characteristics that mark them out as part of a viable, and highly distinctive, religion. The early modern demonologists had stated that the central act of a witches festival was to adore the Devil as their god and master. Murray had turned this into the adoration of a high priest, personifying a pagan horned god who was the main deity of her reconstructed witch cult; she held that the Christian Devil was simply a misrepresentation of this deity, once venerated throughout the ancient pagan world. Gardner s seasonal rites, from the beginning, included such a god, but also gave equal emphasis to a high priestess, personifying a goddess. They formed a divine couple who were intrinsically linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer in temperate latitudes, the god predominating during the cold-season festivals and being associated with death and rebirth, and the goddess during the warm-season pair and being associated with life and fertility. This concept of ancient paganism as being based on a duotheism of a female and a male deity, who between them create and sustain the world, had a long history by the 1940s. It had been found in the writings of scholars of religion of whom the best known was the French revolutionary ideologue Charles Dupuis since the eighteenth century (Dupuis 1795; Hugues 1785; Knight 1786). Gardner s witches also had existing models for a witches goddess, of which the most obvious is the one in the pagan gospel allegedly used by Italian witches and published by the American, Charles Godfrey Leland, in 1899. Most, if not all, scholars at the present time doubt very strongly that Leland s text was the work of a genuine religion; it seems to have been another product of the nineteenth-century desire to imagine a traditional folk religion opposed to Christianity (Leland 1998; Hutton 1998, 141 8). The author or authors of Ye Bok of ye Art Magical had certainly read Leland s book, because a passage from the latter is paraphrased as a key part of the liturgy in Ye Bok (pp. 263 8). A still more obvious source of the goddess who appears in Ye Bok, however, lies in the sensual and ecstatic female divinities who feature prominently in the writings of Aleister Crowley. Gardner had a personal relationship with Crowley, treating him as a mentor, in the period during which Ye Bok was most probably compiled. It can be no coincidence that the goddess in Ye Bok is most often invoked, or speaks, in Crowley s own words. [6] Nonetheless, it was novel to find both god and goddess together, as equals, at the centre of the religion of witchcraft. This automatically gave Wicca a feminist appeal that was to serve it well in later decades: mirrored in the leadership of each group, or coven, by a high priestess supported by a high priest. The other significant addition came in the November Eve, or Hallowe en, rite, and dealt with the essential religious problem of the fate of the human soul. The text that expressed this was, according to somebody who knew Gardner very well and worked with him as his high priestess, written by Gardner himself. [7]
258 It promised that those who found favour with the god of Wicca would undergo reincarnation into better bodies than before and at a time when those who had been dearest to them in a previous life would be reborn again with them ( Ye Bok, 272 5). To those who love the present world, it is a remarkably comforting vision of the future. It is also a somewhat unusual one, and was, beyond any doubt, Gerald Gardner s own, because he had made it the central theme of his first novel, written at the end of the 1930s before he claimed ever to have heard of Wicca (Gardner 1939). Here we are provided with a rare, and important, insight into the personal influence that Gardner exerted over the creation or development of Wicca itself. More important, it may be seen that, although the first modern Pagan seasonal rites were short, scrappy, and largely a plagiaristic pastiche, they already contained a quite distinctive theology of divinity and of an afterlife. They had, arguably, addressed the two most important needs of a religion: to provide superhuman beings with whom humans may form respectful relationships and to provide some reassurance of the survival of the human soul after death. The Evolution and Diffusion of the Cycle By the early 1950s, it is possible to observe the Wiccan festive calendar in the process of further development. In 1953, Gardner initiated a woman with remarkable powers of liturgical and poetic composition, Doreen Valiente. By this date, his group had started to celebrate the solstices as well as the quarter days. It may well be that Valiente s appearance was itself the occasion for this, as she concealed her membership of a witch religion from her family by claiming that she had joined the more familiar and respectable modern Druids. They, of course, observed the solar feasts (Valiente 1989, 40). It is a sign of how new the observation of these seems to have been in Wicca that, at the very first midwinter that Valiente celebrated as a Wiccan, there was no liturgy for the occasion. Gardner therefore asked her to write one, a few hours before the celebration was due. Whereas Gardner, or his initiators, generally took complete sections from existing sources, with some paraphrasing, Valiente used existing texts only as starting points and then wrote what were effectively new compositions, which only faintly echoed the originals. Thus, as a starting point for her first such creation, she took two of the prayers from Alexander Carmichael s famous collection of Hebridean folklore, Carmina Gadelica. What she produced was a powerful invocation to the Wiccan goddess, which immediately became the central component of the enduring seasonal rite (Farrar and Farrar 1981, 148). Gardner was so pleased with it, indeed, that he put it straight into the book he was writing on Wicca at that time, as an example of the seasonal liturgy of his religion. It was the only extract from that liturgy to feature in the book concerned, Witchcraft Today, which was published in 1954, and was the main work that revealed Wicca to the world at large (Gardner 1954, 21 2). This was surely because Valiente s invocation was both a fine piece of writing and almost the only one of the texts prescribed for festivals by that date which an astute reader would not recognise as taken from an existing source. Encouraged by this success, Valiente went on to compose matching invocations for the summer solstice and the equinoxes, sometimes, again, drawing on phrases in Carmina Gadelica for inspiration (Farrar and Farrar 1981, 72 9, 93 101 and 116 20). The equinoxes seem to have been adopted into the Wiccan calendar after
Modern Pagan Festivals 259 Witchcraft Today went to press in 1954, because that book only mentions the quarter days and solstices as witch festivals (Gardner 1954, 130). Gardner himself remained very resistant to the idea of giving the solar feasts the full status of festivals, perhaps because he associated them with Druidry, or perhaps because Margaret Murray had stated so firmly that the quarter days had been the great feasts for witches. As a result, within the small but growing network of Wiccan covens, the solar feasts still tended to be regarded as minor events, celebrated at the nearest full moon to the dates concerned and treated as of less importance than the quarter days. This situation ended in early 1958, when Gardner s main coven, based on the northern edge of London, objected collectively to it. Its members felt that the solstices in particular had great importance as calendar events, and that the equinoxes made a perfect symbolic balance for them. They therefore asked for equal observation of both the cardinal points of the sun and the quarter days, as close to the actual dates as was conveniently possible. Gardner gave way, and in this manner the modern Pagan calendar of eight festivals came into being. [8] Gardner himself still felt that only the quarter days were grand witches feasts, and this tradition lingered long in some branches of Wicca (compare Farrar 1971, 81 2). Nonetheless, the basic pattern of the eight feasts was now the norm. The history of modern Paganism in the decades since 1958 has been one of how the Wiccan template of ritual has been diffused all over the western world, and through many other varieties of Pagan religion that have appeared in the wake of Wicca. It has travelled by word of mouth, by the copying of manuscript books of ritual, and by the publication of an increasingly large body of handbooks about Wicca and other kinds of Paganism. From the 1990s, the Internet has added a major new means of transmission (Cowan 2004). To provide one important example of the diffusion of the cycle: in 1964 a friend of Gardner s, Ross Nichols, seceded from the main modern Druid order to which Gardner belonged. He established his own, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and promptly instituted in it, as one of his innovations in Druid tradition, the new Wiccan pattern of eight festivals. It is now the biggest Druid order in the world (Nichols 1990, esp. 299 306; Carr-Gomm 2002, 159 61). In the late 1980s a large number of new Druid orders appeared in Britain, some of which themselves founded colonies overseas. What distinguished these from the older Druidry, which had developed in the eighteenth century, was that they had a specifically Pagan identity, instead of representing themselves as being, like Freemasonry, a system of philosophy and ritual that could accommodate a variety of faiths. All of them adopted the eight-fold festive pattern from Wicca, as the definitive one for modern Paganism (Hutton 2003, 239 58). By the opening of the 1980s, most Wiccans, let alone Pagans outside the Wiccan tradition, had lost any realisation that the pattern concerned had been established in the 1950s. It was, rather, accepted as an intrinsic feature of what was regarded by many, following Gardner s claims, as a surviving ancient faith. [9] By the end of the 1980s, the broadening number and range of Pagan traditions influenced by Wicca stretched its historic application still further. Rather than being associated with one particular branch of ancient paganism, which had allegedly survived as Margaret Murray s and Gerald Gardner s pagan witchcraft, it was now commonly regarded as having been the general festive cycle of north-western Europe
260 in pre-christian times. To one very influential British writer, Caitlín Matthews, who served especially the emerging constituencies of Pagan Druidry and a non-denominational Paganism inspired mainly by Welsh and Irish literature, it was, by 1989, simply the wheel of the Celtic year (Matthews 1989, passim). An American Version of the Cycle Since the 1970s, the world centre of modern Paganism has not been the United Kingdom but the United States, and the eight-fold pattern has been imported and adapted there in ways that provide further insights into the concerns of this article. America produced its own, home-grown, modern Pagan revivals during the early twentieth century. What distinguishes them from those based on Wicca is that, like earlier British and Continental revivals, they failed to create lasting movements (Clifton 2006, 115 48; Adler 2007, 243 60). Thus, the quarter days, which have always been celebrated as important feasts in Gaelic areas of Britain and Ireland, were brought to California as the key festivals of an Irish mystical society founded in the early twentieth century. This was the Fellowship of Shasta, imported into America by one member whose followers remained active although hardly noticed until the 1960s. [10] It was the arrival of Wicca in America from Britain, apparently in the early 1960s, which catalysed the establishment of enduring and large-scale modern Pagan religions in the New World; and the cycle of eight festivals came with it. A particularly good case study of the adoption and naturalisation of that cycle is provided by a Californian Pagan tradition known as the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. [11] It began in 1968, as a group of friends in the Bay Area of San Francisco, who decided to create a body of ceremony that fused together relics of ancient paganism with the festival atmosphere of the contemporary hippie counterculture. In doing so, its members were self-consciously trying to recreate a pagan witch religion of the sort described by Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, but with a new organisational structure and set of ceremonies. The liturgy that resulted was largely the work of one man, Aidan Kelly, who acknowledges that his sources were all literary. The most influential author among them was Gerald Gardner, followed by the poet Robert Graves and then a list of lesser names including Margaret Murray and Doreen Valiente. Unsurprisingly, the festival pattern that Kelly adopted was the eightfold Wiccan one. The rites that he created, however, were almost completely different: most of the liturgy was in verse, and it was an original composition based on Kelly s own reading of ancient mythologies and medieval literature, often mediated through Victorian and Edwardian commentaries. For example, those for Midsummer were based on the Arthurian legend, in conformity with the nineteenth-century idea apparently first floated by Edward Davies in 1809 but subsequently very widespread that Arthur was a transfigured sun god (NROOGD Book of Shadows, 30 4; Davies 1809). Midsummer became Litha, the Anglo-Saxon word for that season, as found in the writings of the early medieval monk Bede (Bede 1843, book IV, 178 9). It may have helped that it had been appropriated, as Lithe, for the Midsummer festival in the hobbits calendar in J. R. R. Tolkien s fantasy masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien 1966, 384 7).
Modern Pagan Festivals 261 Kelly had more problems with the equinoxes. As noted, Margaret Murray had said that British witches did not observe them, and he was self-consciously trying to recreate a pagan witch religion inspired partly by the one portrayed in her pages. All the six other festivals in the Wiccan system have ancient equivalents, manifested both by specific mention in early texts and by a clustering of subsequent folk customs (Hutton 1996). The equinoxes lack both these attributes. The spring one has no recorded festival associations in northern Europe before the arrival of the Christian Easter, which, of course, can occur almost a month later. The autumn one is even less evident. The Roman calendar certainly had a scatter of festivals around the time of the equinoxes, and annual offices were assumed at the spring one, when the military campaigning season began. There were no greater feasts at the equinoxes, however, than in the remainder of the surrounding months, and the opening of the official year was not in itself a great religious festival (Scullard 1981, 84 95 and 182 8). It is necessary to go as far as ancient Greece to find any at an equinox. [12] Kelly dealt with the spring equinox by applying the name Ostara, which is simply the most euphonious of the early Germanic equivalents for Easter. It was, moreover, one highlighted by the greatest of all pioneers of the study of German folklore, Jacob Grimm, who had suggested that it had originally been the name of a pagan goddess (Grimm 1882, vol. 1, 10 13). Kelly composed rites for it associated with renewal and rebirth. He named his autumn equinox festival Mabon, which to British scholars might seem preposterously inappropriate. It is a proper name derived from the Welsh word mab/map son or boy, which hardly suits an autumnal festival. He got there by a route that is typical, and revealing, of American Pagan syncretism. His starting point was the greatest of all European myths that can be associated with autumn the return of the goddess Kore, or Persephone, to the underworld for the darker half of the year. Her story therefore became the core of the ceremony that he composed for the festival. The name and the Welsh connection, however, seem to derive from the work of a Welsh scholar, W. J. Gruffydd, published as an article (Gruffydd 1912) and as a book (Gruffydd 1953). It emphasised the identity of Mabon, a character known from medieval Welsh literature, as a former pagan deity; an attribution that is possible, although arguably unproven. Gruffydd went further, to make Mabon into a young god born of a great goddess: a male divine parallel for the Greek Persephone. This was one of the last examples of the Victorian tradition, now almost completely abandoned in Britain, of interpreting medieval romances as echoes of lost pagan myth. Kelly s creation of his Mabon festival marks one of the main differences between the British and American constructions of modern Paganism, in seasonal observance as in other respects. From Britain, Greece and Wales seem a very long way apart. From California, however, they can look quite close together, and America is, after all, a melting pot of peoples and traditions from all over Europe and beyond. There is therefore commonly a quality of syncretism, and a range of cultural catchment, in modern American Paganism that is much less commonly found in that of Britain. Kelly s new coinage of names for festivals proved extremely influential in the United States, getting into the mainstream of American Paganism as the latter developed in the 1970s, through his contributions to the most widely-read journal of the movement, Green Egg. [13] They subsequently leaked back into British Pagan
262 parlance during the 1980s, when the books of American Pagan authors found a wide readership in the United Kingdom. [14] Like Gerald Gardner or his informants, therefore, Aidan Kelly relied heavily in his recreation of an imagined witch religion on ideas that were, or had been, products of academic scholarship. This is a phenomenon that has already been noted and treated, in a folkoristic context, by Sabina Magliocco (2004). The relationship between these ideas and the creation of ritual may have been a more complex one than the simple reception of scholarly arguments by members of a reading public. To some extent, both parties in the process were united by similar emotional or ideological needs. From Michelet onward, those who had propounded a belief in the existence of an early modern religion of pagan witchcraft, rooted in antiquity, were setting up a portrait of such a religion in opposition to the established structures of religious and social authority that were more generally associated with the Middle Ages. It acted in great measure as a radical spiritual alternative to Christianity and to conventional mores, to be pitched against the contemporary conservative admiration for more familiar aspects of medievalism. Gardner, and those who joined him in Wicca, were likewise developing a modern Pagan witch religion as a proportionate alternative to social and religious conventions: they were giving physical expression to a libertarian dream. Likewise, the academic fashion for finding pagan antecedents behind figures in medieval romance and epic, and ancient religious traditions behind modern folk customs, was propelled by much the same impulses that were expressed by creators of ritual such as Aidan Kelly. Both were reaching back instinctually beyond the centuries of Christian culture to a reconnection with older ideas and images that seemed to express enduring and fundamental qualities of the natural world. There was, however, an important difference between the two phases of re-creation. Gerald Gardner claimed to be the publicist of a pagan religion that had survived continuously since antiquity, while Aidan Kelly was openly recreating one from modern literary sources, employing a large amount of individual imagination and artistry in the process. Nonetheless, he also made clear that he believed the result to represent a genuine reconnection with ancient practices and spiritual entities. Just as Gardner s seasonal rites were largely a pastiche of existing literary texts, and yet contained a distinctive theology, so Kelly s were based on the crafting together of information taken from books, but this was utilised to produce what participants felt to be a religious experience. He and his companions were acting out the parts of figures that his informing texts had held to be ancient archetypes representing powerful and enduring forces of the natural world. By doing so, they felt themselves to be communing directly with those forces. The repetition of the rites concerned, with growing assurance and fervour, reached a point at which all involved in them felt that something genuinely numinous had resulted: waves of unseen lightness, flooding our circle, washing about our shoulders, breaking over our heads (Kelly n.d., 30 40; see also Adler 2007, 165 7). In their parlance, the ritual had suddenly worked. From that moment, they felt themselves to be members of a viable religious tradition. In a sense there was something characteristically modern in this process: indeed, it embodied a central aspect of what was subsequently to be called postmodernism. This was especially that aspect most clearly emphasised
Modern Pagan Festivals 263 by Jean-Francois Lyotard: of postmodernity as a period in which culture recreates itself by employing many different language games and a heterogeneity of elements, legitimating itself by the quality and utility of what is produced, as evaluated by those who produce and consume it (Lyotard 1984, esp. xxiv). An application of this postmodern model to another form of recently appeared spirituality, the New Age, has already been made by Adrian Ivakhiv (2001, 9 11). It can certainly be made to fit certain aspects of the development of Pagan seasonal festivity. Aidan Kelly self-consciously and openly created a system of ritual by selecting portions of published works, of different ages and contexts, and mixing them together according to his own taste to provide a vehicle for actual experience. In another sense, however, he was working within much older European traditions. If he never concealed the fact that he was composing a system himself, he also felt at times as if he were reconstructing one, from fragments, hints, innuendos, a riddle, a puzzle dispersed through different texts (Adler 2007, 163). This quest, of recovering ancient wisdom, and so a better understanding of the cosmos, from clues and remnants scattered through many sources, has been a theme of European culture from Renaissance humanism onward, through the Enlightenment project, to Victorian Theosophy. Furthermore, the experience of taking ideas from different texts, and mixing them together in a new framework to form a basis for active religious experience, has always been one of the keynotes of radical Protestantism. The only difference is that, in the latter case, the texts concerned were taken from the Bible, sometimes leavened by devotional writings. In that sense, Kelly s approach departed significantly from that of postmodernism, in holding to a source of inner spiritual wisdom and authenticity, validated by reference to the past; something that Susan Greenwood has noted as typical of modern alternative western spirituality as a whole (Greenwood 2005, esp. 206 9). The Significance of the Cycle This, then, is what seems to be the basic outline of the history of modern Pagan festivals. It remains to propose some thoughts concerning their significance as religious festivity. They have already been subjected to good scholarly analysis as events that convey a particular experience: in other words, as phenomena in the realms of sociology and anthropology (see particularly Luhrmann 1989; Greenwood 2000; Magliocco 2004). They have not, however, been treated as performances of theology, or as activities that occupy a particular place in the development of religious seasonal celebration. In both contexts, they do seem to indicate a shift in emphasis between premodern and modern attitudes, which lies in the relationship between the non-human and the human. Some timeless facets of seasonal festivity have remained in place, including what is probably the central one: that of connecting human beings to the rhythm of the seasons, and thus traditionally to the supernatural forces that may lie behind it. Modern Pagan festivals certainly do that, but they have completely lost the sense of relationship with both the natural and the divine that characterises most traditional religion. There is virtually no sense of propitiation, nor of a concept of the natural world as something much more powerful than humanity, and at times deeply threatening to humans. In view of the hugely changed
264 relationship between humanity and the natural environment over the past two hundred years, this is hardly surprising. It is, however, one very striking hallmark of modernity in the nature of pagan festivity. [15] It is accompanied by a proportionate lack of fear of the divine; of a sense of deities either as capricious and moody rulers or as stern creators, lawgivers, and judges. Modern Pagan deities are viewed essentially as beings of a different order to humanity, with whom humans should make relationships to mutual benefit. It is very hard, a lot of the time, to make out whether these beings are supposed to have a literal and objective existence, or whether they function more as motifs and symbols. As a result, modern pagan festivity almost invariably lacks any component of the central act of most ancient festivity: sacrifice. In many groups the remnants of consecrated food and drink, consumed as part of the rite, are scattered and libated as offerings to deities or land spirits. This is, however, more of an act of sharing than one of tribute. [16] Likewise, the festive rites lack most elements of what is traditionally regarded as worship. Transactions with deities consist essentially of attempts to bring them closer to humans in a process of understanding and negotiation. Very often these attempts are difficult to distinguish from a process of making the humans concerned feel more divine. These hallmarks have been present from the beginning, in Gardner s characterisation of a Wiccan as both priestess, or priest, and witch: the former can be simply a passive servant of the divine, but the latter is presumed to be a more active and productive agent. It is notable, in this context, that festivals actually get just two pages out of the one hundred and sixty in his famous seminal book, Witchcraft Today (Gardner 1954, 21 and 130). Most of that book is concerned with the potential of pagan witchcraft to cultivate hidden powers in human beings, for their own good and that of others. This remained the emphasis in all books published on the subject by practitioners during the following twenty years (Gardner 1959; Valiente 1962, 1973, 1978; Glass 1965; Johns 1969; Farrar 1971; Sanders 1976). At the end of the 1970s a movement arose to emphasise the religious aspects of Pagan witchcraft, as a feminist and ecologically friendly alternative to mainstream faiths. It was in origin an American phenomenon, reflecting both the greater general religiosity of the USA and its native inheritance of nature-centred transcendentalism. British witches also found it attractive, both as a logical development of their existing beliefs and as a solution to a serious public image problem. A nature-venerating religion was simply more acceptable to most people in modern western societies than the traditional associations of the witch (Hutton 1998, 340 68). On both sides of the Atlantic, however, humanity remained central to Pagan festive rites even after this shift of emphasis. The most famous of all the feminist American witches, Starhawk, created with her coven network in the late 1970s a series of seasonal rites that addressed human hopes and fears at each point of the Wiccan eight-festival cycle (Starhawk 1979, 181 96). Those published in the early 1980s by a pair of British witches, Janet and Stewart Farrar, were much more closely centred on the deity figures of goddess and god, presenting them as characters in a constantly repeated creation myth. Nonetheless, their avowed aim was to reintroduce urban people to the archetypal rhythms of the natural world (Farrar and Farrar 1981, esp. 1 27). At the end of the decade, another British couple, Vivianne and Chris Crowley, produced their own book on Wicca, in which