Did you write The Triumph of the Moon to demolish the traditional history of Pagan witchcraft?

Absolutely not: I wrote Triumph to fill a vacuum created by the collapse, within Britain, of that traditional history: which is why I do not devote any space in the book to a sustained attack on that history itself. The concept of early modern witchcraft as a surviving pagan religion, which had been scholarly orthodoxy in the mid-twentieth century, began to disappear among professional historians around 1970, along with many other nineteenth-century beliefs. At the same time, many Pagan witches who had worked with founding figures of traditions, such as Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders and Robert Cochrane, had always expressed doubts regarding the truth of what those founders had claimed about the history of those traditions. <...>

Then The Triumph of the Moon was not some sort of attack from the outside but a contribution to a debate which had already begun inside Pagan witchcraft itself?

That is broadly true, but in Britain the debate was really over by the time that I wrote the book, at least among the Pagan leadership. I wrote the book to suggest a real history for Pagan witchcraft which could be substantiated from the sources, and to rescue it from the accusation that it was an invented modern religion produced by a few cranks on the fringe of society. I showed that it represented instead a distillation of cultural developments which were actually central and very important to modern Britain. Its goddess and god, for example, were the two ancient pagan deity forms most honoured and needed by British writers for about one and a half centuries before the appearance of Wicca. This process, by which certain divine forms suddenly become vivid and important to the human mind at particular points in history, is what is usually termed revelation. Rather than remain regarded as a rather suspect cult on the cultural margins, Wicca could, I argued, be recognised as a worthy religion, of some importance, not least because it was the only one which England has ever given to the world; and one of which it could be proud.

+ 2 цитатыIf modern Pagan witches do not represent a continuation of a religion that survived the Witch Hunts and can be traced back to the pre-Christian era, then what is our lineage?

Most notably in a chapter in a collection entitled Paganism Today, published in 1996, I have taken direct issue with the view generally held by academics that there were no links between ancient and modern paganism at all. In reply I identified no less than four cultural streams which connected the two: ritual magic, cunning craft, folk rites, and (above all) the persistent love affair of Christian culture with the art and literature of the ancient world. All these streams of images and ideas were, certainly, maintained between the early medieval and modern periods by people who were at least nominally Christian, but none the less they were preserved. The great development of the modern age was for them to be filtered back out of general Christian culture and recombined with an active allegiance to pagan deities to produce a revived and viable set of Pagan religions. This essay in Paganism Today was my manifesto for Triumph of the Moon and intended to be read in conjunction with it, which in Britain it certainly often was. Abroad, however, the essay tended to be unknown and the book read outside of its vital context.

So, how do you reply to those who believe that you argue that there is no direct and consistent connection between ancient and modern Paganism?

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My second reply is that it is ridiculous to declare that no religion has validity unless it can claim unbroken descent from the remote past. Most of the major faiths of the world have undergone periods of reform in which members have jettisoned the norms of those faiths during the recent past to renew them by reference to much older practices. To take the example which has produced the most influential effects in the Western world, Protestant Christianity was founded on the claim that the faith of Christ had been corrupted by medieval Catholicism and that it was necessary to return to its earlier texts for the inspiration to purify and renew it, vaulting over the many centuries between. Pagans today are likewise perfectly entitled both to filter out the elements of paganism preserved in medieval and early modern Christian culture and to return directly to those preserved in the texts and art of the ancient world, to rebuild a paganism suited to the needs of the present. Indeed, the appearance of postmodernism as a major school of philosophy powerfully reinforces this justification, highlighting the way in which the present always appropriates and transplants aspects of the past in order to serve its requirements, and celebrating that process.