Freeman's Reviews

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The Triumph of the Moon : A Belated Review

This book is a great cure for insomnia. Usually when someone says that, they mean it is dull. This once, it means I have the 2001 paperback edition, in which someone had the brilliant idea of making the book a manageable size by setting it in Minion at about 5 or 6 point. I recommend a good strong reading light and erect posture, because you will want to finish this book.

Hutton, a professor at Bristol, is the first professional historian to tackle the history of British Wicca. The book straightens out so many misconceptions and Wicca-myths in its 416 pages (or its 650 pages typeset as 416!) that it has an internal momentum about it. I have already seen the book referred to online as “TotM” as a result.

If you’re curious about the sources of Gardner’s original Book of Shadows, or the likely validity of any of the “founding myths” of Wicca, this is the book. While some of the problems we’d really like answers to are quite insoluble and Hutton never pretends to answers he cannot prove, the book enlightens the reader at every turn. Traditional witchcraft? How about traditional “cunning craft” instead? Witches, seemingly mostly women, were still considered mostly hexers in the English-speaking world, while a completely separate class of cunning-folk, mostly men, did a reasonable trade in spells, healing, curse removals and divination. And of course, evidence that any of them were explicitly pagan is not forthcoming because it has never been found.

The book contains a balanced, respectful portrait of both the history and something of the current state of Wicca in England. It crosses the Atlantic only to look at trends in the United States and their impact on the English Craft.

Speaking of Craft: one of the many factoids I have at my immediate command as a result of reading this book is that Gardner got “So mote it be” from Freemasonry. I always wondered about that one.

Radical Feminists are not going to like TotM or any of Hutton’s other writings. He doesn’t kowtow to the Universal Primitive Goddess myth, or any of the other unprovables (or proven falsehoods) that make up the discredited Founding Mythos of Wicca. He does make a point to demonstrate that it is no great loss, and that Gardner and his successors made a valuable contribution to modern spirituality, whatever the merits of their claimed history.

That is where opinion is going to fracture on this book: along political lines. If you can read TotM without feeling like your sacred cow has been gored, then you will probably recommend it and put it on your most-favored-books shelf. It is quite possible to feel that Hutton was a little too soft on some of the politicizers of Witchcraft, actually; each reader will look in that particular mirror and find their own opinion.

1. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.