Triumph of the Moon

The Triumph of the Moon
By Ronald Hutton
Oxford University Press, 1999
Review by Carl McColman

Ronald Hutton has produced several academic books of interest to the neopagan community, including The Stations of the Sun (a history of the ritual year in Britain) and The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. Like his earlier books, The Triumph of the Moon strikes a careful, and in my opinion important, balance between debunking the cherished myths and sacred cows of a community that is too often recklessly unconcerned with factual history, while defending that community for what it is—a valid expression of a modern spiritual impulse. In Hutton's view, Wicca and other forms of neopaganism do not have to prove their ancient lineage in order to be meaningful and important religious movements. This is just as well, since virtually no evidence of such ancient lineage exists.

Although such an assertion may scandalize members of the neopagan community (read some of the scathing reviews of this book posted at amazon.com to get a sense of the ire it raises among the more fundamentalist of pagans), Hutton carefully and methodically demonstrates, time and again, how little or no real evidence exists to back up the claims of many of Wicca's most celebrated and controversial spokespersons, including Gerald Gardner, Sybil Leek, Alex Sanders, and Bill Liddell. Like the true scholar he is, Hutton never once claims that this disproves the assertions that Wicca's founders made about the lineage of their faith—it merely means the evidence to back up their claims isn't there. Hutton leaves his readers free to draw their own conclusions. Granted, one could decide that modern Wicca is only a giant hoax. But my conclusion is that, following Hutton's own sensible view, this attempt to "revive" ancient paganism in the guide of religious witchcraft is a meaningful and culturally important development that does not need to appeal to a past that probably never existed in order to justify itself.

Anyone who cares enough about the Wiccan and broader neopagan movement to want high standards of scholarship to inform the history and theology of the movement should welcome this book. As the first book-length critical study of the history of Wicca, the text doubtless has a measure of errors, omissions, and blind spots of its own (and I certainly lack the scholarship or the knowledge to point those out). But if Hutton's work inspires further consideration by historians and cultural anthropologists to come, such blemishes will eventually be revealed in the light of subsequent research. In the meantime, the importance of this book cannot be overstated. A thoroughly-read copy belongs in the library of every neopagan (as well as every observer of contemporary religious culture).