Imagining the Pagan Past: Gods and Goddesses in Literature and History Since the Dark Ages 0203068300, 9780203068304

Table of contents :
Cover
IMAGINING THE PAGAN PAST
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Breaking the pagan silence: from Geoffrey of Monmouth to William Camden
2 ‘Gods of every shape and size’: pagan deities from the antiquaries to the Romantics
3 Something old, something new: pagan deities from the first Celtic Revival to the mid-twentieth century
4 ‘I wonder what Wotan will say to me’: ‘heathen men’ and northern deities from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century
5 New ages: melting the ice-gods
6 ‘Find me in your own time’: three schools of contemporary god and goddess fiction
Notes
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

IMAGINING THE PAGAN PAST

Imagining the Pagan Past explores stories of Britain’s pagan history. These tales have been characterised by gods and fairies, folklore and magic. They have had an uncomfortable relationship with the scholarly world; often being seen as historically dubious, self-indulgent romance and, worse, encouraging tribal and nationalistic feelings or challenging church and state. This book shows how important these stories are to the history of British culture, taking the reader on a lively tour from prehistory to the present. From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, Marion Gibson explores the ways in which British pagan gods and goddesses have been represented in poetry, novels, plays, chronicles, and scientific and scholarly writing. From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney and H.G. Wells to Naomi Mitchison it explores Romano-British, Celtic and AngloSaxon deities and fictions. The result is a comprehensive picture of the ways in which writers have peopled the British pagan pantheons throughout history. Imagining the Pagan Past will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of paganism. Marion Gibson is Associate Professor (Reader) in Renaissance and Magical Literatures at Exeter University and works on paganism, witches, magic and the supernatural in literature c.1500–present. Her previous publications include Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity, co-edited with Shelley Trower and Gary Tregidga (2012), Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (2007), Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (2006) and Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (2000).

IMAGINING THE PAGAN PAST Gods and goddesses in literature and history since the Dark Ages

Marion Gibson

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Marion Gibson The right of Marion Gibson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gibson, Marion, 1970Imagining the pagan past / Marion Gibson. p. cm. 1. Folklore – Great Britain. 2. Mythology, British. 3. Great Britain – Social life and customs. I. Title. GR141.G48 2013 398.20941 – dc23 2012032429 ISBN: 978-0-415-67418-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-67419-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-06830-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

The book is dedicated gratefully to the memory of Mary Jacobs, who gave me my first teaching job and, generously and inspiringly, so much else besides; thank you Mary.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

Breaking the pagan silence: from Geoffrey of Monmouth to William Camden

viii 1

7

‘Gods of every shape and size’: pagan deities from the antiquaries to the Romantics

38

Something old, something new: pagan deities from the first Celtic Revival to the mid-twentieth century

71

‘I wonder what Wotan will say to me’: ‘heathen men’ and northern deities from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century

100

5

New ages: melting the ice-gods

128

6

‘Find me in your own time’: three schools of contemporary god and goddess fiction

149

4

Notes Select bibliography Index

176 208 243

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped me think through the ideas in this book, shared their enthusiasm for prehistory, paganism, archaeology or historical literature with me or facilitated my sharing my enthusiasms with others. The book would not have been possible without them. Many thanks, then, to: Harry Bennett, Ronald Hutton, the University of Leicester archaeology department for their excellent courses on prehistory, the Arts and Humanities Research Council for its generous funding of the ‘Mysticism, Myth and “Celtic” Nationalism’ project, Shelley Trower, Garry Tregidga and Samantha Rayne for their collaboration on the project and the speakers at the Mysticism, Myth, Nationalism conference (July 2010), especially those contributing to the edited collection Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Nationalism (Routledge, 2012), Adam Stout, the University of Plymouth’s Peninsula Arts team for the ‘Sacred Footprints’ lecture series, Tate St. Ives for the ‘Dark Monarch’ exhibition, Chris Faunch, Jessica Gardner and Sarah Jane at Exeter University Library’s Special Collections Department, audiences at the Cornwall Centre, Redruth, the du Maurier Festival, Fowey, the Tremough Campus Culture Festival, the University of Sussex and University Campus Suffolk, especially Louise Carter and her husband Paul and David Gill, Regenia Gagnier, Philip Schwyzer, Nick Groom, Ayesha Mukherjee, Tim Kendall, Sarah Moss, Joanne Parker and Alex Murray from Exeter University’s English Department for discussions of the book and suggestions of further reading, Jo Esra, Alyson Hallett, Nicola Whyte, Catherine Brace Leyshon, Dave Hosken, Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Evans and Steve Rippon for talking over ideas and sending me more material, my excellent research assistant Charlotte Campton, Michael Wykes, Ashley Tauchert for approving the budget for my archaeology courses, James Mulholland for letting me read two pieces of unpublished work, my students each year on the module ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Literature’ and ‘Renaissance, Reformation and Rebellion’ who worked through texts from

Acknowledgements ix

‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ to The Wicker Man with me, the National Trust at Sutton Hoo, Steve Trussel, Ben Beck, Daniel Jackson, Jessica V. Tomaselli for allowing me to read her unpublished thesis, Ros Cleal at the Alexander Keiller Museum, Avebury, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society and Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes, Guildford Museum, Cornwall Archaeological Society, the Witchcraft Museum at Boscastle, Judith Higginbottom, Jacqui Wood at Saveock Water Archaeology for sending me her novel, Ipswich Museum, Colchester Castle Museum, the National Museum of Wales, the National Museum of Scotland, the National Museum of Ireland, the National Roman Legion Museum at Caerleon, Buxton Museum, Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre, the National Museum of Archaeology (France) at St-Germain-en-Laye, Brading Roman Villa, Fishbourne Roman Palace, the Royal Cornwall Museum and Courtney Library, Truro, the Great North Museum, Hancock, Janice Rayment of Roundhouse Indexing for her help with the bibliography, Doranna Durgin, James Lovegrove, Mum and Dad and Hoppy. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Among inspirations for the book I must thank Richard North and Joe Allard for editing Beowulf and Other Stories (more academic books should be as passionate, challenging and funny as this one), Tony Robinson and Time Team, especially for the Athelney episode that showed my 24-year-old self how legible the past really might be with a little geo-phys and imagination, and Dad for buying books about gods, graves and scholars in the 1970s. At Routledge, many thanks to my editors Vicky Peters and Michael Strang and their wonderful senior editorial assistant Laura Mothersole. I would also like to thank Robert J. Wallis, Ronald Hutton and Chas S. Clifton as well as an anonymous reader, who reviewed the book proposal and final manuscript and made helpful suggestions.

INTRODUCTION

In the 1964 British comedy Carry On Cleo we meet the ancient Britons and their gods. But the Britons are called Hengist and Horsa, officiously incorrect Saxon names for characters dressed as cavemen, and their gods are identified by the puzzled Romans as the great deities ‘Tea Up’ and ‘Crumpet’. When these are named, they notice, everyone leaps to attention. Clearly the Carry On writer Talbot Rothwell is teasing, but his screenplay provokes questions.1 When did British people first start to tell stories of their long and confusing pagan past? What kinds of deities did they imagine their ancestors worshipped – in caves, roundhouses, longhouses and temples? How clearly differentiated were various periods of pagan activity, from the stone ages through to pre-Roman and then Anglo-Saxon times? How did people learn about these in factual and fictional works – especially ones that, like the Carry On film, are designed to entertain but bring with them all sorts of cultural baggage? Jim Dale and Kenneth Connor (playing, respectively, Horsa and Hengist) displayed no interest at all in these matters as they went off to Rome to save the life of Julius Caesar, but in this book I hope to fill up the competing British pantheons with rather betterresearched deities than Tea Up and Crumpet. The first stories of British deities came as traveller’s tales, geographical and military reports. Roman writers working in the period that they knew as ‘700 to 850 years after the founding of Rome’ created descriptions of British pagan practices from the viewpoint of outsiders. The Romans were, of course, pagan themselves and although their accounts refer to specifically northern European practices, they also point to the fusing of Roman and British paganisms that was to come when their empire extended to Britain. But no ‘Briton’ left any trace of his or her beliefs from the same time and after the Romans withdrew, the first records of renewed storytelling about paganism in Britain come from the sixth century AD. The letters AD (Anno Domini, ‘the year

2 Introduction

of Our Lord’) tell their own story, about the situating of Britain as a Christian rather than a pagan place, part of what seemed to be the Christian god’s universe. Whatever was to be said in the first indigenous writings about Britain’s tribal history would be framed by Christian notions about a chosen people to whom this god had eventually revealed himself. That revelation, however, was the endpoint of an indefinite period of unknowingness and unchosenness, which was difficult and potentially embarrassing for writers to imagine. Indeed, depending on which area of the then-non-existent entity ‘Britain’ one was discussing, the notional end of paganism could be as early as the second century AD or as late as the tenth. Large areas of what was then becoming ‘AngloSaxon England’, such as Mercia and the Isle of Wight, remained pagan well into the seventh century. Other pagan beliefs later to be named ‘Celtic’ probably survived unchallenged beyond the areas of former Roman influence in the north and west of the archipelago. Because they were unchallenged, they were also unrecorded. Then in the ninth century, some of the peoples later known as ‘Vikings’ brought their own paganism into Scotland, Dál Riata, Man, Gwynedd and the north-west and also into long-Christianized areas in the east of England from Northumbria to East Anglia. Since the writing of indigenous history began with Christian monks and scholars as paganism waned in each area – or long after it had gone – in many places paganism and the silence of prehistory lingered together or after a brief interval of Christianity the pagan silence reasserted itself with new colonists. Each kind of paganism thus left complex and highly localized remains of information and artefacts for writers to draw upon, from temples and their brief but decisive altar inscriptions ‘to the goddess X’ through to highly cryptic texts in manuscript books. Later the complexity was greatly increased by the rediscovery and popularization of the Roman texts, a process that went on from the early medieval period into the Renaissance and beyond, and by further rediscoveries of Anglo-Saxon texts up to the nineteenth century. Finally, in Britain’s imperial period, from the sixteenth century onward, the remains of British paganism were illuminated by greater engagement with non-Christian cultures all around the world, each of which offered comparisons to bemuse the most acute observer. It is those remains and the vast accretions of re-imaginings that have been shovelled together with them that this book will explore. Imagining the Pagan Past concentrates on literary accounts of paganism from the sixteenth century onward, with an introductory chapter on those from the sixth century to the sixteenth. By ‘paganism’ I mean ancient non-Christian faiths, not living religions such as Islam or Judaism – this is the definition that the book will use throughout. Most of the religions discussed are imagined as native British ones, but often these are mixed with or compared with other faiths by their chroniclers: Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Scandinavian, Indian and so on. Because religion is often syncretic, this blurring of boundaries is inevitable, and it runs alongside a persistent interest in the national origins of the British peoples that imagines them coming from places as far apart as the Himalayas, Troy and Africa.

Introduction 3

Indeed, the sense of a journey completed on arrival in Britain and the fusion of deities and rites in this new setting creates much of the imaginative power of British paganism in literary texts, as we shall see. In this body of material, poetic texts inevitably draw upon deliberately historical accounts, from the earliest chronicles and antiquarian chorographies to the latest scholarship in monograph or journal articles, and these are discussed alongside the overt fictions, or as a prelude to later fictions. The intention is not to separate the two rigidly, since my belief is that, because of the dearth of contemporary accounts, all writings about the lost worlds of British paganism contain elements of imagination and often a surprising emotional investment too. Indeed, I think it is usually emotion rather than scientific enquiry that drives the imagination of lost paganisms. Too often, we think we are dealing with a dry scholarly endeavour to reconstruct a dead culture when actually the writer’s text is heaving with passion and wholly modern angst: unresolved conflict with Christianity, an unmet need for magic, irrationality and wonder, political discontent, revolt against social limits of class, gender, profession or sexuality. The project of which this book is a part set out to explore the literary history of this passion, to see if there was a larger narrative about poetic fiction and historical writing in its many varied conceptions of pagan deities in particular. There was; and the result is a book that hopes to illuminate the ways in which ancient British paganisms have affected the British imagination, and how scholarly and overtly creative literatures have interacted with each other to produce a number of successive and potent grand narratives from the Middle Ages to the present. In this book I have focused on the elements of the narrative that seemed most important to me: some of the major engagements with pagan deities by canonical authors and as wide a range of less well-known writers in each era as can be managed. Inevitably, lots of interesting texts (and films) have had to be omitted in order to tell the broad, general story of each kind of paganism with reasonable clarity and economy. The book could easily be five times its length and I have no doubt that parts of the story can be expanded, and even contradicted by different examples.2 I hope that the book will stimulate discussion and further work and that it will be accessible to a wide audience, outside academia and across disciplines into the sciences as well as the arts – although this is dangerous territory because it rightly provokes debate about method, value and truth itself. I also quite simply wanted to bring together knowledges in history and literary studies that sometimes bypass each other. I did not think that I could teach another class on Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, for example, without answering the nagging question in my head about what was going on between the literary notion of paganism so commonly discussed in classes on Renaissance texts, and the theological and historical notions of it in Britain. What was Milton’s literary heritage in writing about pagan deities and how far was his love/ hate relationship with them echoed in earlier and later poetry and novels? How could the theological Milton bear to read, to be, the literary Milton who patently loved his departing pagan deities even as he celebrated their fall? How far was he

4 Introduction

like and unlike Edmund Spenser, William Blake, H.G. Wells, William Golding and other writers on pagan deities? What has emerged in my understanding is a story in six chapters, from the earliest imaginations of paganism to the present. It is my broadest contention throughout that it is the fiction of prehistoric paganism, and any element of subjective, poetic feeling in even the driest account that most propels and informs both scholarly and popular perceptions of what we ‘know’ about Britain’s pagan past. In detail, I trace the fashions in writings about paganism, from classical through Gothic to Celtic, looking at competition between different pantheons and deities but always focusing primarily on the British deities portrayed and discussing why each writer chose them. My work intersects repeatedly with the pioneering and magisterial histories of Ronald Hutton, without which very little of this project would have seemed possible, and I have throughout added, in the notes as well as the text, references to related passages in his books. Often we consider the same deity or poem from different viewpoints. The book also is in dialogue with Adam Stout’s work on pagan archaeologies, and is – in Philip Schwyzer’s phrase – part of a hopefully ‘archaeological turn’ in literary studies. I’m equally fond of his other wistfully-desired version of the same thing: ‘new antiquarianism’.3 At one time the book had a good deal more archaeology in it, and there is still discussion of the influence of particular ‘sites’ (Stonehenge, Coventina’s Well), ‘finds’ from Neanderthal Man to the Sutton Hoo ship. But I have whittled this book down to a core investigation of fictions about pagan deities and their contexts in chronicle, chorographical and antiquarian writing – the precursors to and the contested margins of modern professional archaeology.4 Since it defines some of its categories so widely, the book limits itself perforce in other ways too. The period 540 AD to the present is quite long enough to warrant a corresponding shrinkage of geographical scope, and so I confine myself on the whole to discussions of texts written in English and setting their stories on what is now the biggest island of the Atlantic archipelago and its nearest small satellites – i.e. modern England, Scotland and Wales. Ireland, north and south, has its own literature of paganism and while this needs to be considered when discussing stories that feature Dál Riata and the Scots or the tuatha dé danann and other material of Irish origin, it will not be the main focus. Occasionally a work or group of works written or set beyond these geographical boundaries will be important in explaining the history or context of prehistoric fictions, and these will be included where relevant. Literatures in Latin, Welsh, Old and Middle English and so on are likewise considered where they are relevant, but the book concentrates on texts in modern English on the whole. These texts have their own pool of references and intertextual relationships and examining these will be my aim. I concentrate on works in printed form after 1400, since my interest is not in the genesis of ideas about prehistoric pagans per se but in the wide popularization of these ideas and their influence on other writers. In summary, I am interested in writers in English who chose to imagine a pagan past for the

Introduction 5

Britain that they knew, as a case study of how a land is populated in fiction by pagan deities and practices from its past. I am especially interested in what kinds of imaginative satisfaction and, in some cases, practical consequence come of that process. These limitations are also needed to compensate for the vastness of prehistory that is to be explored – from the dawn of time to the centuries just before the Norman Conquest, i.e. the ‘ends’ of pagan cultures across Britain as defined in the paragraphs above. I think that the same kinds of imagination are at work in fictions about, say, Iron Age Picts who worship the god Lugh and Palaeolithic glacier-worshippers so that a study enabling comparison between fictions about these periods is a valuable one. It is good to know that ‘Celtic’ or ‘Viking’ paganism is portrayed in a particular way, but it is, I think, even more interesting to know how all paganisms imagined for a particular place are portrayed and how they compete. This tells us about those imagining paganism as a ‘broad church’, their shared or disparate cultures and motives. It allows us to examine pagan deities as, in their widest significance, simply imagined alternatives to Christianity. And it gives us the opportunity to see individual writers choosing which kind(s) of paganism to portray. Some chose a specific context, specific deities, while others ranged freely between cultures and beliefs. Some were looking for new spiritual homes, others for a sharper, juicier experience of historical reconstruction than they found in scholarly textbooks. I have chosen to focus most tightly on pagan deities as opposed to sacred sites, priesthoods or rites, because it is the nature of its imagined deities that tends to define a religion’s culture and all the rest flows from that. There is something especially daring in imagining a deity, of any kind, and that is my theme. With this comparative aim in mind, Chapter 1 looks at the very earliest writings on British pagan deity to around 1600 and Chapter 2 at further defining scholarship and fictions from 1600 to 1850. Because of the limitations placed on early writing by biblically-based chronology – which compressed the history of the world into a few thousand years and had no concept of biological or cultural evolution – the first two chapters deal with the Celts and the RomanoBritish period, since that was thought to constitute all of British prehistory. Everything from Stonehenge (now firmly categorized as Neolithic) to the Roman temple complex at Bath was swept into this imagined period until notions of it began to change in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 3 continues the story of the now ‘Iron Age’ Celts and Romans where we left it in 1850 just as it was about to meet the paradigm shift of Lyell and Darwin, and looks at what happens when it did, finishing in the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 4 completes the survey of the period before 1970 by examining fictions of the post-Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic period, looking at notions of migration and invasion and the deities that they brought. Chapter 5 takes a step back in prehistoric time to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic as they were invented as classificatory eras and imagined in the new ‘science fiction’ after 1850, adding into the mix deities imagined for the very earliest societies by British authors.

6 Introduction

Finally, Chapter 6 brings together discussion of all these fictive traditions to examine ‘where we are now’ in fictions from 1970 onward. In this way a literary history of pagan prehistory from the beginning of human culture through to the ‘Vikings’ can be offered, which draws attention to the intellectually contingent and fictive nature of all accounts of the unwritten past.

1 BREAKING THE PAGAN SILENCE From Geoffrey of Monmouth to William Camden

O powerful goddess, terror of the forest glades, yet hope of the wild woodlands … pronounce a judgement … Tell me which lands you wish us to inhabit. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (trans. Lewis Thorpe)

Writing against pagans In about 540 AD, a monk working somewhere in the west of Britain, Gildas, wrote a patchy, angry history of Britain that set the pattern for the many us-andthem accounts of paganism to follow thereafter. The adversarial nature of his book was transmitted in part from one of his key sources, Paulus Orosius’ Septem Libri Historiarum Adversum Paganos (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans) finished in about 417. Building on the new Christian histories of Eusebius and Augustine, Orosius was answering pagan writers’ assertions that Christianity was an impious and damaging innovation that had brought punishment on humanity. Against them, Orosius argued that Christianity was the fulfilment of God’s plan for the world, brought about through the rise, fall and conversion of the Roman empire – all history’s trials and sufferings were thus explicable by the excellence of the outcome.1 Gildas agreed with Orosius’ providential vision, and for him the local adversaries were the pagan Saxons (‘hated by man and God’), allowing him to position the people he called ‘the British’, or at least some of them, as ‘us’ – the troubled but ultimately chosen people of God. However, Gildas despised the British almost as much as the Saxons, since even before the invaders had arrived to despoil their land (his book was entitled The Ruin of Britain) the Britons had been ‘stiff-necked and haughty’, in revolt against God, the Romans and fighting each other.2 Their ruin was their own fault, Gildas stated in an admonitiuncula, a ‘little admonition’: the warlord kings were

8 Imagining the pagan past

tyrants, their subjects sinners, their clergy fools or worse. Some were Christian, yet behaved unChristianly, while others were pagan like the Saxons – all of them had to do better to justify God’s choice of their land as his own. Gildas did not dignify the Britons with a myth of origin or describe their (possibly disparate) paganism(s) – instead he stated: I shall not speak of the ancient errors common to all races, that bound the whole of humanity fast before the coming of Christ in the flesh. I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities [‘portenta … diabolica’, which Giles’ translation renders as ‘diabolical idols’] of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside and outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours [‘divinus honor … cumulabatur’]. This is not just silence, it is militant and signposted silence so that the history of British paganism begins with a refusal to write it. Gildas sums up by noting simply that ‘ever since it was first inhabited, Britain has been ungratefully rebelling’: a resonant, enticing silence.3 What was the nature of that pagan ‘rebellion’, already defined as Christianity’s turbulent Other? Many readers have disliked Gildas’ denunciatory tone and because of his silences they have questioned his knowledge – to the extent that a 1941 article had to remind scholars that ‘he deserves very serious attention’ – but in 1979, E.A. Thompson claimed him as ‘the first man in the entire West to write a provincial history’, the history of a former province of the Roman empire and its tribes. In doing this Gildas offered, very obliquely and disapprovingly, a comment on some of the persistent pagan elements in British and English life.4 After Gildas, silence on the matter of paganism prevailed until the Northumbrian monk Bede’s works on the English church were completed in the 730s. Once again, paganism was the Other, so that its representation was a by-product of the history of conversion. There was one major difference, however: Bede was a monk at Jarrow in the north-east, so that he had no attachment to a British identity that did not include England, and his experience of paganism was primarily of the Anglo-Saxon kind.5 In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed around 731), Bede told his readers that Christianity had first reached Britain in the reign of King Lucius before 156 AD, and he charted the fates of Britain’s Christian martyrs under pagan administrations led by Romans. These he described as ‘offering sacrifice to devils’ and ‘idols’, and he quoted Pope Gregory the Great’s letter to Abbot Mellitus (601 AD) on how to change pagan sacrifices and temples to Christian use. Bede did not specify if the worshipped devils were British or Roman deities or both – all were equally demonic and uninteresting.6 However, Bede had found the Anglo-Saxon religious calendar useful in trying to establish a proper dating for Christian festivals, a matter of controversy in the

Breaking the pagan silence 9

eighth century: and thus he gave an account of it, again almost as an aside. In On the Reckoning of Time (completed around 721), he listed the months under their English names and explained the names of many of them and of some individual days and nights with reference to the goddesses, pagan festivals and sacrifices that he said had once characterized them.7 Bede’s list of months is one of the most controversial texts of its era. Nineteenth-century German folklorists were especially exercised by it, since because it dealt with emigrant Angles and other Germanic peoples it either shed a unique light on German national religious history or invented a series of pernicious lies about it. Jacob Grimm accepted Bede’s word in 1835 in the foundational work Deutsche Mythologie, even though Bede’s assertions were not echoed anywhere in early German literature. But in the other camp, Alexander Tille in particular was sceptical about Bede’s knowledge of heathenism. In 1899, he accused Bede of inventing explanations for awkward month-names, in the process fabricating a Germanic ritual year and part of a pantheon. Tille pointed out that, although Bede speaks of the pagan festivals in the past tense, he is likely to have been drawing on slim knowledge of contemporary pagan practices. This may be true; but it is not certain what Bede’s sources were and so his level of knowledge of contemporary paganism cannot easily be judged. Yet Tille describes Bede’s goddess names as ‘imaginary’ and ‘bad guesses’. He dismisses the notion of a festival of motherhood as ‘an imaginary cult’, a debased Christian nativity custom mistaken by Bede for heathenism. Tille’s sharp questioning of names and etymologies mentioned only by Bede and nowhere else is praiseworthy, as Ronald Hutton shows in his history of Britain’s ritual year The Stations of the Sun, but for me Tille’s conclusions are too negative. It is hard, too, not to wonder if his dislike of Britain inflected his judgement of Bede. Tille was a lecturer at Glasgow University and by the late 1890s, when he wrote on Bede, he regarded the British as arrogant rivals preventing German expansion. In 1898, he had joined an extreme German nationalist group dedicated to social-Darwinist racial ends including economic dominance and empire. A year later, he resigned his post after criticism of Britain’s ambitions and military competence in South Africa led to a physical attack on him by university students. He returned home to write scathing attacks on British society, prophesying a ‘bloody struggle for first place’ in the world between Germany and Britain.8 In these circumstances, he was unlikely to laud as authentic Bede’s uniquely English additions to the history of Germanic paganism. Jacob Grimm, of course, also wrote in a nationalist context as did the other German scholars who either criticized or supported Bede. Grimm set the tone in the latter grouping by choosing to analyse Bede’s wider work as well as the contested section on goddesses, and to trust his scholarship and experience on that basis. As Grimm first argued, ‘it would be uncritical to saddle this father of the church, who everywhere keeps heathenism at a distance, and tells us less of it than he knows, with the invention of these goddesses’.9 It seems to me too that Bede’s dismissal of Roman paganism demonstrates his unwillingness to fabricate

10 Imagining the pagan past

details of pagan deities where he neither knows nor cares about them. When he refers to Anglo-Saxon deities and rites, it must surely be knowledge that drives him to specifics. So I would argue that we can see Bede in the long tradition of writing against the pagans, describing their authentic but despised rites in passing as he tries to give us a Christian history instead.10 Bede tells us that the eighth kalends of January (December 25) marked the start of the pagan year and the night of December 24 was known by ‘the heathen word Modranicht’ (‘tunc gentili vocabulo Modranicht’). Mothers’ Night was so-called ‘because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night’ (‘ob causam, ut suspicamur, ceremoniarum quas in ea pervigiles agebant’). But Bede does not describe these. He may either refuse us the details because they are in some way offensive to him or because he feels they are unimportant. At the start of this chapter, he tells us carefully that what he is giving us is a history of the months as calculated in different cultures including Roman and Greek as well as English (‘it did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations’ observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nation’s’). This could be read as a disclaimer (‘please don’t imagine that I’m interested in this heathenism simply because it is local!’) or a statement of a qualified sense of ownership (‘the Greeks and Romans have had their chapters and the English deserve one too, even though what is described is not creditable’). Either way, Bede moves on smartly to state that cakes were offered to the gods in February. Two goddesses are named: Rheda and Eostre, whose festivals were in March and April respectively. Bede explains that the Christian festival of Easter is so-named because of the continuation of the goddess’ name – a claim that Tille rejected on the grounds that ‘it has not been proved that the principal feast of the Church could be called after a heathen goddess’ (but if Bede wasn’t shocked by that thought, why should Tille be?). September was Halegmonath, a month of ‘sacred rites’ (‘mensis sacrorum’), and, finally, Blodmonath was named after its annual slaughter of cattle, which were ‘consecrated to their gods’ (‘diis’).11 If we accept that Bede may well have made untraceable mistakes in his account, but did not invent it ex nihilo, it is noteworthy the goddesses in the Anglo-Saxon pantheon are what seems to catch his eye the most. He named them because he thought that they had months named after them, but one suspects that he found goddesses particularly notable because they were unlike the Christian god. He did not name rival gods: he mentioned the name Woden, but only as a human ancestor of the Anglo-Saxons. Bede regarded the details of heathenism as ‘vanities’ and ended his chapter professing delight that the true god had turned many of his countrymen away from their pagan past.12 Similar relief was expressed in Anglo-Saxon chronicles thereafter and it would be 800 years before an English writer paid more than passing attention to the Anglo-Saxon pantheon again.13 Moving in the same Christian intellectual world, although on the British rather than English side, the next contribution to British history was a ‘highly composite’ work, possibly by a Welsh monk usually referred to as Nennius.

Breaking the pagan silence 11

He offered more scope to future writers who wished to speculate about the pagan past.14 He began his History of the Britons by situating British history in biblical time (the 2,042 years in which he believed the world to have been in existence by the time that he wrote in about 820). But as well as placing Britain securely in the Christian narrative, Nennius made a surprising statement about its original population, drawing on classical and early Christian historians working in Rome, the Levant and north Africa. Britons, he said, were descended from Brutus who was descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas.15 Ultimately they trace their origins from the Romans and the Greeks, that is, on the mother’s side, from Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of Italy, of the race of Silvanus, son of Inachus, son of Dardanus. This Dardanus was son of Saturn, king of the Greeks, who took a part of Asia and there built the city of Troy.16 Saturn was, of course, a god of the classical world but here he is identified as a human king in the way that deities often were by Christian writers trying to rationalize their existence: euhemerism, the theory that non-Christian deities were deified rulers or heroes. So Nennius sidestepped the assertion that Britons are the children of a pagan god. Yet he was not wholly comfortable with even this watered-down pagan descent. He then reported that he had ‘learned another account of this Brutus from the ancient books of our ancestors’, and proceeded to name him as a descendant of the biblical patriarch Noah’s son Japheth. Japheth’s descendant Alan had a son Hessitio, who had four sons – Francus, Romanus, Brutus and Alamannus – whose names correspond neatly to European tribal identities. So Britons are descended from pagan matriarchs and their heroic husbands but also, conflictingly, from Judaeo-Christian patriarchs and their nameless wives. These fictions point to completely different religious identities for Britons: Roman, Greek, Trojan and Jewish.17 Nennius has an almost scholarly detachment from his material and allows these identities to co-exist.18 And although he was the first British writer to create a surviving account of a war leader named Arthur, his dog Cabal, and a visionary boy named Ambrosius who would later metamorphose into Merlin, he also told their stories without fanfare among a mass of others: Vortigern and the invading Saxons, St. Patrick, St. Germanus, and a list of wonders including a spring with a magic log in it, a walking stone and something that sounds very much like the Severn Bore.19 He did not, then, speculate about a national religion for his ancient Britons but he open-mindedly gave later writers four from which to choose. After Nennius came another long period of near-silence on pagan matters. Chroniclers and compilers of genealogies wrote in the kingdoms across England, Wales and Scotland, but they barely touched on paganism. Where they did they repeated older material or referred only briefly to the names of ancestors subsequently deified. For instance, king-lists such as that in the Parker Chronicle (891)

12 Imagining the pagan past

continued to refer to ‘Woden’ as the ancestor of the present West Saxon dynasty, so that by 1125, William of Malmesbury could mention the deification of Woden and his wife Frea, whom he took to be euhemerized rulers.20 In around 1129, Simeon of Durham called Woden ‘Voden’, which suggests a Germanic pronunciation.21 Similarly, Welsh king-lists from the ill-defined ‘north’ (‘y gogledd’) and Gwynedd mentioned an ancestor named ‘Beli’ or ‘Beli magni’, who was subsequently identified with a god. Welsh poems that would later be claimed as the myths of a lost Irish-British pantheon were also written, and will be discussed in Chapter 3, but there is no evidence that in the Middle Ages these were regarded as any more than stories of ancestors.22 On the English side, an exceptional reference to Woden, apparently in situ in a pagan incantation, is found in the Lacnunga, a tenth- or eleventh-century text containing ‘leech’ remedies. These are charms to be recited for curative and mnemonic purposes. In them, Woden – who appears simply as a name copied by a scribe – was described as taking up nine herbs and/or runes to defeat a venomous snake. The nine cures were referred to in a kenning as ‘glory-twigs’ (‘ða genam Woden VIIII wuldortanas’) and a few lines later we are told that the ‘wise lord’ (‘witig drihten’), holy in the heavens (‘halig on heofonum, þa he hongode’), obtained these as he hung. The mythology seems to be that of Woden/Odin hanging himself sacrificially in order to be granted wisdom through the discovery of runes, as in the Elder Edda Norse poem Hávamál.23 But Woden was not described as a pagan god, so that nothing was said of his incongruity in the otherwise Christian world of the poem. An even more fugitive memory of Anglo-Saxon paganism may be found in a charm recorded in an eleventh-century manuscript, Aecerbot. This is a description of a day-long field-blessing ritual, and has been Christianized to incorporate a church visit and the use of hallowed substances. Yet it also contains unChristiansounding references to the earth as both a mother herself and as possessing a mother: ‘hail to you, earth, mother of mortals, may you grow big in god’s embrace, filled with food for the use of mankind’ (‘hal wes þu, folde, fira modor, beo þu growende on Godes foeðme, fodre gefylled firum to nytte’) and ‘erce, erce, erce, mother of earth’ (‘erce, erce, erce, eorþan modor’). The text offers no comment on any of this and the references seem to be unique. As such, they too went unremarked by contemporaries as far as we know and Aecerbot’s modern rediscovery and reinterpretation will be discussed in Chapter 6. Scattered references of this kind are evidence that British writers continued the transmission of pagan fragments into modernity, but they are limited in their scope. It is not hard to imagine the loss of texts concerning pagan deities. Scribes might well have ignored pagan elements in narratives and anthologies, omitting them from new copies. Many writers spoke simply of the ‘hatreds of pagans’ (William of St. Albans’ phrase) without explaining anything about their beliefs. They were pushed to the margins of hagiographical texts as enemies to be overcome.24 It was in this context that Henry of Huntingdon openly rejoiced in the 1120s at the extinction of the ‘heathen’ Picts and blamed the subjugation of the Britons to the Saxons on the fact that they ‘sought for aid from pagans’.25

Breaking the pagan silence 13

Most chroniclers quoted the papal letters of instruction sent to early missionaries, such as that from Gregory to Mellitus. Perhaps most revealingly, in his Deeds of the Abbots of St. Albans, Matthew Paris gave an account of the burning of Roman-period books in a British language that contained ‘invocations and rites of idolaters’. These were found in ruins at Verulamium in about 1000 AD, he said. He did, however, tell us something of what he had heard about their contents: They [the people of Verulamium] invoked and worshipped especially Phoebus, god of the sun [Phebum deum solis], which can be assessed from the history of St. Alban, if the diligent reader may understand it. But in second place Mercury, named Woden in English [Mercurium, Woden Anglice appellatum], from whom the fourth day of the week is entitled, the god, that is, of merchants, because the citizens … were nearly all businessmen and shopkeepers. These books were ‘rejected and burned’ as ‘fabrications of the devil’ some 200 years before Paris wrote.26 Yet he was sufficiently interested to speculate about why Mercury/Woden would have been a favoured local god. Since he wrote in around 1255, we may see here a flicker of the reawakening in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of an ability to write about pagan worship. For the terse, wary descriptions that survive from before 1130 were not effective in consigning the heathen deities to historical oblivion. Instead, the histories’ silences left an alluring gap.

Writing with pagans Into the gap in the 1130s bounced Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh churchman possibly with Breton roots who lived much of his life in Oxford. He called himself Gaufridus or Galfridus, to which was sometimes added the Latinate cognomen Artur or Arturus. And he wrote in Latin a history of the kings of Britain, which he identified as a translation of an older work in the ‘British language’ (such as Welsh, Cornish or Breton). Geoffrey said that the book had been brought to him from ‘Britannia’ (thus Wales or Brittany?) by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford27 – although scholars have been sceptical about the existence of Walter’s book.28 It used to be argued that Geoffrey’s purpose in writing might have been to urge the British (the Celtic speakers including Armoricans in Brittany) to unite against the new Anglo-Norman hegemony by remembering their glorious heritage. But as Michelle R. Warren has pointed out, such a multiple identity as Geoffrey’s complicates matters and the vision of Geoffrey as a proto-Celtic-Revivalist has now been challenged.29 Instead, Michael A. Faletra argued convincingly in 2000 that Geoffrey accepted Anglo-Norman dominance as a fait accompli, a successor imperium to Trojan, Greek, Roman and Saxon dominance. In such a view, a successful Norman government would bring stability, but only if it was provided by historians with an understanding of its descent

14 Imagining the pagan past

and the diversity of its subject peoples.30 In this reading, Geoffrey sought to preserve and celebrate Britain’s heritage in his Historia Regum Britanniae by translating it into the context of a new imperial culture. Migration, colonization and cultural fusion are thus key themes. With Nennius’ Trojan myth as his inspiration, Geoffrey imagined his early Britons as transplanted worshippers of classical deities, the culmination of a process of Romanization during the journey from Troy. It is of course true that Iron Age Romano-Britons worshipped Roman deities, as altar inscriptions show – Geoffrey might have known some of these.31 But he was being accused of fabrication as early as the 1190s (and 800 years later an article once again described his book’s claims to authenticity as ‘fraud’);32 yet he recounted his material as if he were a documentary reporter, combining it with the narrative flair of the ‘romance writer’ as Antonia Gransden calls him.33 He included references to pagan temples, feastdays and ceremonies. Here was something revolutionary in its potential. For instance, the first story to be set in Britain itself, after Brutus’ flight from his homeland and travel to the island, is that of his friend Corineus and the giant Gogmagog: Corineus experienced great pleasure from wrestling with the giants, of whom there were far more there [in Cornwall] than in any of the districts which had been distributed among his comrades. Among the others there was a particularly repulsive one, called Gogmagog, who was twelve feet tall … Once, when Brutus was celebrating a day dedicated to the gods [festivum diem diis] in the port where he had landed this creature, along with twenty other giants, attacked him and killed a great number of the Britons … [Corineus] challenged Gogmagog to a wrestlingmatch … and hurled this deadly monster … far out into the sea.34 Setting the attack on a religious holiday, even though it is a pagan one, makes the giants’ behaviour seem more shocking and uncivilized. Geoffrey’s dislike of the giants establishes the Trojans’ paganism as, by contrast, worthy of respect and protection. But it should be noted that, despite his apparent endorsement, Geoffrey was also undermining any real faith that the reader might have in pagan prophecy: during his travels Brutus had consulted the goddess Diana and been told by her that Britain used to be peopled by giants but was now empty. Clearly, it was not. And so Geoffrey presented his readers with sympathetic pagan colonists and a vividly-imagined contest between the new settlers and the original inhabitants: pre-Britons and non-humans.35 In this way, he showed readers that they could respect older religious cultures, although they must recognize the process by which each was superseded by a stronger and better one.36 He reclaimed Orosian ideas of the inevitability of a succession of dominant cultures – with Christians rightly in the ascendant – to give the pagans of history legitimacy in their own time. He pushed the story of British ‘manifest destiny’ back further into the past than previous historians

Breaking the pagan silence 15

had done. Apparently, Diana’s prophecy was part of a providential plan.37 And, although questionable in its morality and accuracy, that prophecy and the religion validating it continued to be important in the story. Geoffrey imagined a paganism that was Roman but now British too. He tells us that King Bladud dedicated a temple to Minerva at Bath and died at Apollo’s temple in Trinovantum, how King Dunvallo built a temple of Concordia and was buried there and that King Cassivelaunus sacrificed hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep to his gods at a victory celebration in the time of Julius Caesar. J.S.P. Tatlock, writing in 1950, argued that while Geoffrey showed little to no interest in his Historia in Christian monastic life, sacraments or councils, he had a ‘sympathetic view of ancient religion’. He Romanized it – probably from his reading of Ovid, Livy, Pliny and so on – and ‘medievalized’ it by back-dating contemporary religious practices such as the existence of an episcopal-style priestly hierarchy of ‘flamens’ in his pagan church.38 For these reasons, Geoffrey did not need an adversarial approach to pagans because in his view ‘they’ would become ‘us’ once Christianity had been revealed to them – their church was the ancestor of the Christian one. Clearly, as Tatlock had recognized as early as 1938, Geoffrey was ‘not aiming at … pleasing pious zealots’. In fact he might be seen as an anti-Bede or an anti-Malmesbury/Huntingdon, writing back against more assertively Christian Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman historians whose narratives he considered unhelpfully limited.39 Kellie Robertson noted in 1998 that even at the linguistic level he disrupts the Latin orthodoxies of ecclesiastical historians by claiming that his work is a translation of a Celtic text. He also wrote as a secular canon rather than a monk, as H.E. Salter pointed out, and may have seen himself as an outsider, asserting independence against attempts to ‘contain’ history.40 Partly because of his tolerant stance on religion, Tatlock saw Geoffrey as a prototypical modern man, ‘secular-minded and rationalistic’,41 but I think this rather underemphasizes his enthusiasm for pagan culture. Even Faletra can’t quite see how the ‘presumably shameful paganism’ of Brutus fits into Geoffrey’s rehabilitation of Britishness in Anglo-Norman history. In fact it fits perfectly because Geoffrey was not ashamed of British paganism, for the first time in history. His version of Britain’s heritage as including pagan ritual practices and monuments portrayed as belonging to Roman gods and goddesses was another way of providing evidence of the manageability of a succession of peoples and cultures. Geoffrey offered material with which to build a new consensually-governed, multi-cultural Britain. But beyond that, his artistic investment in the pagan past allowed the imagination of pagan culture to become, for the first time, a positive pleasure. Geoffrey was a subversive of all kinds in these readings and his bold reconstruction of a British paganism from Trojan, Greek and Roman materials is a further, hitherto little discussed, aspect of his new kind of British history. Yet, of course, Geoffrey wrote in a pious context. As Fiona Tolhurst shows, his Britons are very much like the Jews of Exodus, a chosen people.42 Geoffrey also made his interest in paganism palatable by linking pagan Britain firmly to developments in the Christianizing world. If he tells us that ‘at that time Isaiah

16 Imagining the pagan past

was making his prophecies’ he can safely tell us that, a few years before, King Leir was buried in a tomb under the river Soar dedicated to the Roman god twofaced Janus (‘in honorem bifrontis Jani’).43 Readers can be assured that in times to come Britain will be incorporated into God’s plan, which has been unfolding since the Creation, and sure enough (as Bede had said) Geoffrey’s Britons are converted in the time of King Lucius with St. Augustine prompting the Saxons to catch up later.44 The description of a Christian Britain, then, was still a prerequisite for early British chroniclers, but in Geoffrey’s twelfth-century book we can see how at least one writer could begin to reach back with imaginative satisfaction to the curious and romanticized pagans who ‘lived here before the Incarnation of Christ’, as he puts it.45 Indeed, as part of its status as a new kind of imaginative writing, this freedom helps to explain his book’s success (with 215 manuscripts of it surviving) as compared with other histories.46 Matthew Paris’ wistful recollection of the burnt books might be another example of this nostalgia but it does not take him nearly as far as the bold innovator Geoffrey.47

Doubt, hatred, confusion Writers continued to ogle this lost world with more or, frequently, less boldness until the Reformation. Jessica V. Tomaselli notes perceptively that medieval writers stubbornly failed to reduce the number of pagan references in their text.48 Geoffrey was always their main source. In the Middle Ages this literary-historical writing followed two main traditions: ‘Bruts’, or Anglo-French-derived poetic romances retelling the story of Britain from the time of Brutus; and Anglo-Latin prose chronicles, although the two genres overlapped and there were also English poetic chronicles, such as that of Robert of Gloucester. While romances such as Wace’s Roman de Brut and Laȝamon’s Brut each tried to tell the stories anew, with refreshing stylistic innovations, most chronicles were fairly formulaic. Many chroniclers concentrated on the reigns of recent kings, where they would analyse political developments and moralize them. In part, though, this evasion reflected the fact that there was cultural confusion about both the veracity of early stories and what to do with the pagan deities who had begun to haunt the imaginations of writers of both chronicle and Brut. This confusing haunting can be seen most clearly in the Bruts.49 Wace, a Channel Islander, writing in the 1150s, was the first to struggle with Geoffrey’s story of Brutus consulting the goddess Diana and being directed by her to sail to Britain. In what Tatlock calls a ‘great pagan scene’, Geoffrey had imagined Brutus finding a temple to Diana, Jupiter and Mercury and, with his augur Gero, worshipping all of them. Brutus then chooses Diana’s altar specifically for further sacrifice with wine and the blood of a white hind (‘ante aram deae vas sacrificii plenum vino et sanguine cervae candidae’) and prays (in Thorpe’s translation): O powerful goddess (diva potens), terror of the forest glades, yet hope of the wild woodlands, you who have the power to go in orbit through the airy

Breaking the pagan silence 17

heavens and the halls of hell, pronounce a judgement … Tell me which lands you wish us to inhabit. Brutus repeats the invocation nine times, circles the altar four times and lays down on a deerskin to receive a dream vision directing him to Britain. Afterwards he wonders if he dreamt or really saw the goddess, but is otherwise sure of the correctness of his old rite (‘veterimo ritu’) and the trustworthiness of the goddess.50 Such a profoundly unChristian encounter troubled Wace when he came to translate Geoffrey’s book. He reduced Diana from goddess to idol (‘image’), prophetess (‘divineresse’), devil (‘diables’) and witch (one who deceives through ‘enchantement’): L’image ert d’une deuesse, Diane, une divineresse: Diables esteit, ki la gent Deceveit par enchantement. This Diana only calls herself a goddess rather than being one, and Wace could not bear Brutus to address her directly, instead editing his prayer and putting it into the third person.51 His caution is thrown into sharp relief by Laȝamon (Layamon, Lawman), a Worcestershire priest who wrote his Brut around the turn of the twelfth century. While Laȝamon repeatedly described pagan gods as devils and their prophecies as witchcraft, in describing Brutus’ visit to Diana’s temple (‘dedicated to the Devil’) he reverted more closely to Geoffrey’s version of events. He explains that the temple and its statue are beautiful, that Diana was a queen among goddesses, an inspirer of the cleverest men and mentor to Brutus. As Laȝamon’s Brutus invokes her, he utters a beautiful prayer: Leafdi Diana; leoue Diana; heȝe Diana, help me to neode. Wise me & wite me … (Lady Diana, beloved Diana, lofty Diana, help me in my need. Guide me and govern me …). In response: His lauedi Diana; hine leofliche biheolde. Mid wn-sume leahtren; wel heo him bi-hihte, & hendiliche hire hond; on his heued leide … (Diana his lady gazed lovingly towards him;/With an attractive smile, she amicably promised [to help him],/Graciously laying her hand on his head).52 What are readers expected to make of this loving, attractive, amicable, gracious pagan goddess/devil, who sounds very much like contemporary depictions of the

18 Imagining the pagan past

Virgin Mary?53 Laȝamon added a similar description of the Anglo-Saxon deities later on in his poem, given by the Saxon warlord Hengist: ȝet we habbeþ an leafdi; þat heh his and mihti. ȝeo his i-hote Frea; heredmen hire louieþ (We have a lady who is most high and mighty, High she is and holy – courtiers love her for this: She is called Frea … ) He also named ‘Phebus’, Woden, ‘Jubiter’, ‘Merchurius’, Thunder (‘þonre’), the Moon (‘mone’), Tydea and Saturnus, explaining that these were ‘dear’ to the Saxons ‘just as much as their life’. Two new names added are Appolin and Tervagant, invented ‘deities’ borrowed from Crusader accounts of Islam and grafted onto the Saxon pantheon, and later on we also find with the recognizable Venus another two newcomers, Didon and Mamilon.54 How should we feel about these apparently demonic deities whom Hengist nevertheless portrays as much-loved? For some chroniclers, preoccupied with the Crusades of the period, the correct feeling was clear: pagans were evil since their deities were devils. Here Geoffrey’s legacy of imaginative multi-cultural sympathy was reversed, in texts narrowed by anxiety and hatred. Robert of Gloucester’s verse chronicle, written in the thirteenth century, continued and extended the association of paganism with Islam by describing the statue that Brutus found on the island as a ‘mawmed’ and ‘mamet’ and as male.55 The word means an image and derives from Mahomet, the Islamic prophet as demonized by Christian writers. Brutus ‘offrede to þis mamet’ and received a reply, but the ceremony is not described. Robert thought that Brutus had been deluded by Mahomet masquerading as Diana – so much so that he cut out all reference to her in order to expose the deception. Unsurprisingly, his Brutus did not continue these offerings in Britain, where any reference to pagan deities that might have been borrowed from Geoffrey was suppressed. The Saxons, however, were allowed their catalogue of deities because they would be converted later on: for Robert, ‘they’ would become ‘us’ rather than Geoffrey’s Britons becoming ‘us’. That the early generations of Saxon pagans were Others was made clear: worryingly, Christians could not be distinguished from them, ‘wuch was on, ne wuch was oþer (other), ne to wam me myȝte truste’ (to whom I might trust myself). Worse, ‘some faderes were Cristene, & þo moderes heþene were’ (the mothers heathen were). The heathens were allowed to remain by the ‘feble’ king, despite Robert’s outraged statement that ‘yt was Cristendam’, which, for him, means that pagans should be excluded.56 The Saxon pagan, then, is potentially like the mamet: wearing a deceiving mask that might as well be Islamic or heathen. Indeed, Robert identified Muslims with the worship of Woden: ‘Woden … þat þe Saracens weneþ [weeneth, believe], þat he a gret God be’.57 His prejudice against the heathen was religious

Breaking the pagan silence 19

rather than anachronistically racial or cultural, for he wrote self-consciously in the language of the Saxon invaders and wondered why his compatriots favoured Norman French.58 He was, however, a Christian, having benefited from St. Augustine’s mission: ‘þus come, lo! Cristendom aȝen [again] in to þys londe’ – so all was well.59 Most disturbingly, Robert went on to link Jews with Muslims and Saxon pagans, following Richard of Devizes’ account of the coronation of King Richard I. Richard’s chronicle explained that the Jews carried out a ‘holocaust’ (a sacrifice) to their god, the devil, at the same time as the coronation – the first use of the word in a Semitic context. On ‘discovering’ this, the Londoners massacred them.60 In Robert’s account of the same events, the ‘wrecche luther Giwes’ were rejected as ‘unclene’ and after the sacrifice was discovered the king’s loyal subjects ‘wende in to the Gywerie [Jewry], & wounded & to drowe [tore apart], & robbede & barnde hous, & manie of hom slowe’. A few lines later Richard goes off to the ‘holi lond’ to fight ‘the luther Saladin’ (the word ‘luther’ or ‘luþer’ is one of Robert’s favourites, used more than 30 times, but it has no surviving definition). Robert was also one of the chroniclers of his time who circulated stories of the Jews crucifying Christian children, such as the boyvictim Hugh of Lincoln: … Giwes a child in drowe, At Lincolne, that het [was called] Hue, & in the rode [on the rood, cross] him slowe.61 The ‘Saxon’ heathens who could not be distinguished from Christians and ought to have been banished from England suddenly assume a new Semitic aspect. Robert wrote in the context of increasing persecution of Jews in England, who among many other assaults had been massacred at York in 1190, ordered to wear distinctive badged clothes in the 1220s, excluded from Christian churches and – paradoxically – excommunicated throughout the latter half of the thirteenth century. They were expelled from individual jurisdictions and subsequently the entire country.62 Thus a hatred and fear of contemporary ‘pagans’ is reflected in a hatred and fear of ancient British ones. A clearer example of why writings about ancient British paganism matter in their contemporary context and in ours too could not be imagined. Encounters with other faiths, then, caused some writers to close their minds to the imagination of the British pagan past. Others, more open to notions of difference and often themselves experiencing attacks on their culture, produced further elaborations of Geoffrey’s text that suggest a continuation of his nostalgic, inclusive impulse as well as some of Wace and Laȝamon’s caution. For instance, the Welsh Brut Tysilio (a version from the end of the fourteenth century) added a vine-leaf chaplet (‘ddail y gwin’) to Brutus’ (‘Bryttys’) head when he consulted ‘Arglwyddes’ (Lady) Diana (a detail from Geoffrey lost in subsequent versions), and had him pour wine into the goddess’ mouth (‘yn genau y ddywes’) as an offering.

20 Imagining the pagan past

Then it added consistency and detail to his religiosity by describing Gogmagog’s attack on Totnes as occurring whilst Brutus was sacrificing at a Dianic altar there.63 Brutus’ pagan practice while in Britain itself was explicitly identified as exotic goddess-worship, rather than Geoffrey’s more generalized and masculine description of the Totnes feast day as ‘dedicated to their gods’. These proGeoffrey, tolerant versions of the story are, however, rare: more usual is a suspicion of pagan deities and a desire to equate them safely with various sins after the fashion of a morality play. Even this allegorical treatment gave a great deal of trouble to Christian writers. A particularly good example of their problems occurs in the fourteenthcentury monk Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon or ‘universal history’. The Latin Polychronicon was translated into English by the Cornish scholar John Trevisa.64 Most of Higden’s work is in prose, but when he came to describe his home town, Chester, he included a poem.65 It described Chester’s situation and cavernous salt-mines, a great market and some famous people buried there. Then came a puzzling end. Here is Trevisa’s translation: Bacchus and Mercurius, Mars and Venus, also Laverna, Proteus and Pluto regneth there the towne.66 How did these pagan deities ‘reign’ in fourteenth-century Chester? Trevisa was really confused: ‘God woot what this is to mene’ (God knows what this is supposed to mean!), he shrugged in an aside. Assuming the reader would be equally lost, he explained that poets sometimes invented deities to symbolize different crafts, attributes and so on, and finally he offered a tentative interpretation: hit semeth that this vers wolde mene that these feyned goddes regneth and beeth i-served in Chestre; Mars with fighting and cokkynge; Mercurius with covetise of richesse and of marchandyse; Bacchus with grete drinkynge; Venus with love nought ful wys; Laverna with thefte and robberye; Proteus with falshede and gyle. Than is Pluto not unserved, god of helle.67 Higden’s intent in including the ‘feyned’ (imagined) deities, then, was probably satirical – they are ‘served’ or worshipped with sins like fighting and covetousness. But the very notion of pagan worship puzzled and unsettled Trevisa.68 His reaction illustrates the problems that chroniclers and romancers faced in, firstly, imagining a world before Christianity and then in deciding how to deal with that world in their texts. When paganism could be equated simply with sin, and individual pagan deities with specific sins such as lust and drunkenness, how could the heroic tale of British origins be told when all its characters were, therefore, merely sinners? The late fourteenth-century or early fifteenth-century poem St. Erkenwald engages with this question by imagining the exhumation of a virtuous pagan Briton, a judge from the reign of King Belinus, and the salvation of his soul by the holy tears of the bishop St. Erkenwald. Animated by miracle

Breaking the pagan silence 21

through the bishop’s intercession, the judge’s corpse speaks to the Christian god of his sorrow that he lived in a pagan realm and knew nothing better: Nas I a paynym unpreste [unready] þat never þi plite [pledge] knewe, Ne þe mesure of þi mercy ne þi mecul virtue. He is saved when the bishop baptises him with his tears of pity and kindliness and so the pagan is recuperated into the British story, but the reader must wonder how many other virtuous pagans remain in limbo because their corpses are not miraculously preserved and endowed with speech. The poem remains troubling.69 How, too, were writers to deal with the notion of gods and goddesses as metaphors without being drawn into the idea that all deities might be symbolic? Echoes of Trevisa’s confusion are found in works as late as Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France, published in 1516, where Fabyan paraphrased this passage to explain that in olden times, though not now, ‘Poetis … fayned in theyr sawes … Goddes of Batayll and rychesse’.70

New possibilities Fabyan is a good example of another transitional moment in British writing, that between the reverential repetition of previous scholarship and the asking of new questions, a movement that facilitated the Reformation and Renaissance. He felt that modern histories should ‘agre with other olde storyes’, but noted that these often disagreed with each other. He followed Geoffrey and Higden most closely, but worried that even in their texts there were only ‘ryght mysty storyes, doughtfull and unclere’.71 This comment shows how historians were beginning to question the accuracy of earlier writers, offering a comparative reading – literary criticism, in fact – of accounts. It is a classic humanist stance. The humanist movement took as one of its starting points the need to explore all the literature of history in search of a greater understanding of human experience. Texts written by ancient pagans were sometimes – potentially paradoxically – seen to shed more light on contemporary problems than those by medieval Christians. Even if humanists were deeply pious, they found themselves investing imaginatively in pagan worlds. Clearly, as Geoffrey’s example shows, this investment in paganism was already possible in the twelfth century. This early beginning is a vital part of the history of rediscovering British paganism, hitherto very little discussed (although it is essential for understanding antiquarianism generally, as Stan Mendyk argues).72 But the intensity of Geoffrey’s interest and the confusion of more recent texts begged many questions and the later Middle Ages and Renaissance brought these to a crisis. A good example of half-asked questions and confusing answers as knowledges were welded together in the Renaissance is in the work of Alexander Barclay, writing in 1509. Barclay was a Scottish chaplain at the college of canons in Ottery St. Mary in Devon. In 1508–9 he was translating a German religious

22 Imagining the pagan past

satire, The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brandt. Brandt had filled his ship, which represented the world, with sinners and frivolous people. Barclay followed Brandt’s lead closely, although he made changes such as cheekily adding Ottery’s canons to his list of fools. Another important addition to Brandt’s text was druid priests – the earliest that has so far been found in England, as A. L. Owen noticed in 1962. The druids were mentioned among the fools, having brought together both pagan worship and other ‘lewdness’ in dancing in their temples: The Druydans renneth in vayne about In theyr mad festes upon the hylle of yde [Mount Ida] Makynge theyr sacrafyce with furour noyse and shout Whan theyr madness settyth theyr wyt asyde … 73 Thus, medieval British Christians who behaved in similar ways in any context could be seen as ‘paynyms’ (pagans), and the section was illustrated with an image of dancers worshipping a golden calf (an image from Exodus, Chapter 32). Even the most innocent-seeming sin was, Barclay explained, ‘idolatry’. Christians could become pagans without even knowing it, and the druids were one of a number of historical examples of pagan irrationality. Barclay does not place his druids firmly in Britain, that would come later. But, drawing on the work of the German scholar Jakob Locher, who had already translated Brandt’s work, and on two French translations, he located them apparently in Turkey or Greece (there are two Mount Idas, both discussed in classical literature as places of pagan worship). Hutton suggests that Barclay simply got the druids ‘mixed up with’ Asiatic priests, but the slippage may be a conscious It is tantalizing to speculate too that by ‘the hylle of yde’, Barclay might just have been referring to Ide in Devon (about 12 miles from Ottery), rather than Ida. There’s a moment of textual uncertainty that could anticipate Edmund Spenser’s transplantation 80 years later of the Muses, Graces and Isis to Ireland The Faerie Queene.75 In any case, from their frenzied activity it is that Barclay saw his druids as celebrants of Cybele, to whom the Phrygian (Turkish) Mount Ida mentioned by Homer and Virgil was sacred. Cybele was the earth-mother goddess, notoriously worshipped by wild dancing, drinking and general ecstasy exactly like that described by Barclay. Also venerated at Ida was Attis, Cybele’s consort. Driven mad by the goddess’ power, Attis castrated himself, and some of his and Cybele’s followers also became eunuchs to honour the pair. certainly associated his druids with Cybele (whom he mentioned in his text) Barclay seems to have taken his word for it. These druids, then, imagined in Devon in the early sixteenth century, are worshipping a Turkish goddess celebrated across the classical world in Greek and Roman literature. This knowledge of foreign deities extended to the Egyptians too, as the Greeks and Romans had described them and adopted some of their deities.

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Translating Hector Boece’s 1526 Historia Gentis Scotorum ten years after its first appearance, John Bellenden recounted Boece’s notions about the worship of Diana and Isis in Scotland at stone circles. These were based on speculation by Geoffrey and in other early texts about Egyptian origins for northern Britons: The sacrifice usit in thay dayis, was ane portioun of cornis, catellis [cattle], or ony other fruits that grew apon the ground … quhen the samin [same] was superflew, or mair then was sufficient sustentatioun to the preistis. King Maynus foundat als ane sacrifice, to be maid monethly, in the honoure of Diane, Goddis of woddis [woods] and huntaris; and thairfore, the pepill maid their adoratioun to the new mone. Quhilk [which] superstitioun was lang usit amang oure ancient faderis, with mony other vane ceremonyis, efter the rite of Egyptianis. Boece and Bellenden added that Thair religion was nocht to be commendit; for thay adorit imagis of brutall beistis, in forme of levand [living] Goddis, as the Egyptianis usit … Boece said that when two Spanish philosophers visited Scotland they were able to convert the people to Christianity, with the result that ‘the sacrifice that was wont to be gevin to Isis and Apis [Osiris], the Goddis of Egypt, was abrogat’. Some, though, clung obstinately to the worship of moon and sun (which Bellenden, adding to Boece, names Diana and Phoebus) and the next king, Fynnane, was one of these obstinate pagans. He ordered that the pre-Christian temples be rebuilt and he sent prelates and clerics to the Isle of Man as ‘Druides’ to uphold the religion of ‘thair Goddis’. Yet for all his exotic polytheism, Fynnane is represented as a good man and king, and Maynus and the worshippers of Diana are too.76 There is some tut-tutting about superstition but no sense of shock or anxiety, even when it is made quite clear that exotic female deities are being worshipped. Perhaps Catholicism facilitated this relaxed attitude, and Hutton notes Boece’s Parisian connections as allowing him to follow the French tradition of claiming druids as noble ancestors: but the emphasis on goddess worship is still a surprise.77 Moving back to England, we can see Robert Fabyan struggling with his own literary variant of the problem as he offers a prayer to whichever deities can help him in his work: In this prayer, I thynke nat to be used, As dyddyn these Poetis in theyr olde days, Whiche made theyr prayers to goddes abused, As Jupiter and Mars, that in theyr olde laws Were named Goddes. …

24 Imagining the pagan past

For what may helpe these fayned goddess all … ? Wherto shuld I calle unto Caliope … ? Syne all these were Mynystris of god in mortall, And had in theym no power dyvynall.78 For Fabyan, there were self-evidently no other deities than the Christian god, so that when Fabyan’s Brutus meets Diana the author dismisses her with the lofty addition ‘a Goddesse of mysbyleved people’.79 His Diana was mentioned only in passing, just as Venus was mentioned in – for instance – medieval retellings of the story of Troilus, Cressida and the siege of Troy. But still, his list of pagan deities and description of some of their attributes suggests pleasure in rehearsing their names and, crucially, he was willing to see the pagan deities as ‘ministers’ of the Christian god. Even though they were not themselves divine, they may have been agents of divinity – and, surely, they sound rather like angels. In this way, humanists like Fabyan and Barclay overcame some of the stumbling blocks to the open discussion of paganism: God had always existed and had worked in the world in mysterious ways in the past, they reasoned. Pagan peoples had been able to access some divine wisdom despite the folly mixed with it, and some attributes of their deities had been versions of the Christian god’s wisdom. This notion offered a permissive reading of pagan religions. It allowed the recuperation of pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, since all spirits once thought to be deities were simply awaiting the true God’s revelation – a neoPlatonic stance to be taken most notably in the 1580s by Giordano Bruno, following the earlier Italian humanists Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.80 If these creatures were part of God’s plan then their worshippers must have been too and in Scotland in 1526 Boece, like Fabyan, felt able to accept a pagan past for his people as a kind of proto-Christianity, well-meaning although wrong: Regarding religion, prior to their adoption of the Christian faith, they comprehended it wonderfully and with learning, according to the standard of the time … having adopted the True Religion at the outset without any reluctance, they clung to it with great sincerity.81 Here is the first hint of the druids as would-be Christians, to be explored further below and in Chapter 2.82 And although not all humanists were willing, as the sixteenth century went on a positive delight in being able to think like a pagan, however controversially, briefly or furtively, became a widespread habit of mind. It was deeply troubling in its wider implications. The ability to think in two different imaginative worlds – that of, say, Cicero and Augustine – offered a model of empathy for other situations. If one could think like a celebrant of Cybele and a subject of Jesus Christ, what if one could think as both a Catholic and a Protestant, or an Italian and an Englishman, or a man and a woman … ? It was a simple insight but the possibilities were seductive and frightening.

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Arthur B. Ferguson speaks of ‘the ability of Renaissance minds to half-believe or believe contradictory things’, which he finds childlike.83 But it seems to me that all human minds have this sophisticated, liberating capacity: what was revolutionary about Renaissance minds was the transformative literary and cultural uses to which they put it. Thinking like a pagan was one of the most challenging things that an early modern person could do, and the Renaissance began when that way of thinking became normal, indeed expected, among the creative writers and scholars following in Geoffrey’s wide wake. This introductory chapter will end with a consideration of the historians, chorographers and poets who best exemplify that Christian/pagan double consciousness.84 Among the historians, the rediscovery of classical authors was aided by Henry VIII, who employed the antiquary John Leland to search his nation’s libraries. Leland notes more than 100 topographical and historical writers among his reading, many of them pagan. In his ‘new year’s gift’ to the King, a progress report from c.1546, he imagined these books as a ‘wyndow’ on the British past.85 Leland was unable to complete his project, however, succumbing to mental illness in 1547. It is hard not to connect his breakdown to the awareness that all history, particularly religious history, was violently controversial in the sixteenth century. As they moved towards and beyond the Reformation of the 1530s–1550s, writers were treading on eggshells when they approached it. Henry VIII’s Italian historian Polydore Vergil offers a classic example.86 Out go all Geoffrey’s speculations on Romano-British paganism. When Vergil tells us that as part of his researches into King Bladud he has visited Bath, the site of a Roman temple complex of great magnificence, he proffers no comment on its pagan deities. Instead he tells us that he has seen boys diving in the water of the old pools, reaching with their toes for coins thrown in by visitors for sport. This is delightful, but deliberately strips the site of sacred associations, reducing the shrine to a mere swimming pool. Even Leland was hardly verbose in his description, noting the carvings that he saw there in 1542 and guessing that some might represent Hercules (described by Tacitus as a god of northern Europe) or Laocoon, but refusing to elaborate.87 Luckily most historians’ attitudes relaxed during the long, reasonably stable Protestant reign of Elizabeth I. That relaxation allowed both the further development of histories of prehistoric paganism and the fictions indebted to them. There was another problem, however. If Geoffrey had been wrong about Brutus, a new chronology of ancient religion would have to be developed. Surely – and this must have come as a flash of inspiration – biblical religion must have come to Britain with the first survivors of Noah’s flood, those grandsons and great-grandsons of Noah described by Nennius. It was the first British religion, long before the Trojan/Greek/Roman one! But if so, how had it turned pagan later on? An answer came when the work of an Italian forger, Annius of Viterbo, hypothesized in the late 1400s that patriarchal Jewish religion had been transmitted to Europe after the flood by the line of Samothes, a descendant of Noah, through a priesthood of wise men. Later, these proto-Christians had

26 Imagining the pagan past

succumbed to error, human corruptibility being what it was. This fallen patriarchal religion had become the paganism that the Romans found when they arrived in northern Europe.88 It took time for Annius’ theory to be applied to the British context, so that it was first promoted by the Protestant bishop John Bale in his Illustrium Majoris Britannia Scriptorum … Summarium (A Summary of Famous Writers of Great Britain) and its sequel in the 1540s and 1550s. Bale, following Annius, argued that druids, bards and other ‘gentile’ (pagan) priests had preserved from Noah’s time the memory of a true religion that believed ‘that there is one God, immortal and incomprehensible’ (‘unum esse Deum immortalem, et incomprehensibilem … ’). Britain had indeed originally been given the Judaeo-Christian god’s revealed wisdom and had for some centuries preserved it intact. But this religion had been decisively lost during the time of the giants Albion and Gogmagog, Brutus’ enemies, when it had been replaced by all-out idolatry.89 Bale’s Latin text was very long, angrily sectarian and accessible only to scholars: nevertheless it was influential. Alan MacColl says that ‘it would be wrong to underestimate the power of this idea on the grounds that it is based on forgery and fiction’. Indeed, as this book shows, these are often the most persuasive narratives. A more important milestone, however, was reached with Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1577, with an expanded edition in 1587. The Chronicles were in English and circulated widely. They included a section on ‘the auncient Religion used in this Island’, contributed by the rector William Harrison. Harrison was known for his scholarship on biblical chronology and was thus ideal for the task of reimagining Britain’s pagan past in detail in a definitive version, which he did.90 He decided that Bale had been right. In Harrison’s view, then, Britons had originally followed the Christian god’s own religion, as spread by Samothes after Noah’s division of the earth into provinces 133 years after the flood. But they had begun to corrupt it over time because of their innate fallibility, ‘either thorowe curiositie, or negligence’. Yet even ‘when it was at the woorst, it farre exceeded the best of that which afterwarde came in with Albion’, Gogmagog and the giants. Here they were re-imagined as human, yet surely not the descendants of the good Japheth/Japhet and Samothes. They must have migrated from elsewhere – Egypt, Bale and Harrison thought, as descendants of Noah’s wicked son Cham who had deified himself – and established their own ‘superstitious rites’ when they came. In Bale, the analogy with ‘superstitious’ Catholicism was made explicit, but in Harrison’s account it was left to the reader to make the link.91 To add to the mix of deities, Brutus had arrived in precisely the year 1127 BC and imported Greek religion, with a Trojan as his chief priest. These later developments had almost wholly spoiled the patriarchal proto-Christianity that had been the British church after the flood: After Brute, Idolatry and supersticion still increased more and more among us … our countrymen eyther brought hither from abroad, or daily

Breaking the pagan silence 27

invented at home, new religion, and rites, whereby it came to passe that in the stead of the only and immortal God (of whome Samothes and his posteritie dyd preache in times past) now they honoured the sayde Samothes himselfe vnder the name of Dis: likewise Saturne, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva, Mercurie, Apollo, Diana, and divers other. The Britons offered human sacrifices to ‘their Idols’ and built ‘huge temples … unto them’. At last, mercifully, Christianity arrived once again in its fullyrevealed form, brought by missionaries to Lucius. The repulsively hybrid ‘Idole churches’ of British, Egyptian, Greek and Trojan perversions of true religion were suppressed.92 Harrison’s account of the fallen, superstitious period of British worship is far more sympathetic and readable than Bale’s: note that the Britons are ‘us’, ‘our countrymen’ in the passage above. And this sorrowing empathy with pagans relates directly to Harrison’s own experiences: he was a convert from Catholicism in the late 1550s. He had been brought up Protestant but ‘flung himself into the filth of papistry and bec[o]me a shaven [tonsured] worshipper of Baal’ at university, as he related in 1565. Harrison thus saw himself metaphorically but sincerely as a fallen but reformed pagan, having ‘completely deserted the Christ he had earlier known’ (like the Britons) but been reclaimed (also like them) by preaching.93 And so, drawing on the Protestant thinking of his time, on Bale, Leland, Annius94 and on his own profound conversion experience in particular, Harrison gave Holinshed a detailed, emotive account of British paganisms that antedated and post-dated Brutus, solving all the problems of that hard-to-imagine era and putting the whole thing into accessible English for the general reader. Paradoxically, Harrison’s version of a proto-Christian Britain facilitated the guilt-free imagining of paganism for several centuries to come by labelling it as an understandable human corruption of true religion. Harrison’s story worked because the paganism it described was the meat in the Christian sandwich: before and after it came good religion (‘the Christ … known earlier’ and later). Samothes had been a good man, transformed against his will after his death into a god and set alongside other euhemerized deities: later, his original will prevailed and the real god was reinstated. That made it safe – indeed, imperative – for even very godly Protestants such as Harrison to discuss pagan deities, their origin and worshippers, and find room for these deluded souls in their hearts.95 Harrison’s became the standard account, usually referred to as ‘Holinshed’ after the editor of the Chronicles in which it appeared. Thus paganism’s history was retold in terms that suited Elizabethan politics, which had begun to show a way forward. The experience of rejecting Catholicism had paradoxically provided a model for discussing ancient paganism: it was unfortunate that so many generations of Britons had been led into idolatry, but there was still a place for them in the British imagination.96 If Britain and Harrison could be forgiven for the Catholicism of their youth, pagan Britons

28 Imagining the pagan past

and their deities could be rehabilitated too. Indeed, some chorographers sought even more boldly to engage with paganism.97 Holinshed’s fellow antiquary William Camden was working through the same problems at the same time, with an increased emphasis on classical texts and material remains. As Graham Parry points out, Camden is a historian of Roman Britain in that he covers the province ‘Britannia’ – although William Rockett is right to remind us that he is also an historian of Britons.98 Camden published the first edition of his chorographical survey Britannia in 1586 with later revisions, and an English translation in 1610. He paid less sustained attention to religion than Harrison/ Holinshed in any one passage, but referred excitedly to pagan matters where they occurred county by county: an altar-stone here, an old custom there. The format of Britannia allowed Camden to argue case by case, instead of rushing to synthesis, leaving a banquet of small morsels for later writers to pick over. Following Harrison, Camden accepted in general that ancient British paganism had predisposed Britons to accept modern Christianity when it came. This gave a newly comfortable frame to his discussion. Yet in Camden there is also a warmth of feeling for the pagan Britons that is not quite there in Harrison. Harrison understood them as one understands and may forgive a sinner. Camden cherished every little trace of them. He loved the pagan altars he found and his passionate concern to decode their meanings is as clear in this passage, as is his belief that they represent the fallen remains of a proto-Christian religion: [in 1603 in Lancashire] I hapned upon the greatest and fairest Altar that ever I saw, dedicated to the Mother Goddesses … Another little altar I saw there, cast out among rubbish stone, with this inscription: PACIFICE RO MARTI ELEGAVR BA POS VIT EX VO TO. So small a one this was that it may seeme to have beene some poore mans little alter to cary with him to and fro, serving onely to burne and offer incense or salt and meale upon it, whereas that other was farre bigger and made for to sacrifice and offer greater beasts upon it. In these altares the posterity no doubt imitated Noah, even after they had fallen away and revolted from the true worship of God. Neither erected they altars to their Gods onely, but also unto their Emperors by way of servile flattery … Unto these they kneeled in humble manner, these they clasped about and embraced as they praied: before these they tooke their othes, and in one word, in these and in their sacrifices consisted the maine substance of all their religion …

Breaking the pagan silence 29

Another typical remark on remains from a Cumbrian temple combines keen interest with a calming historical perspective: … such altars as these (neither neede we thinke much to observe those ancient rites, which now long since the most sacred Christian religion hath chased away and banished quite) they were wont to crowne with greene branches, as they did the beasts for sacrifices and themselves, and then they used frankincense and wine to make supplication … yea, and their maner was to enhuile [oil] or anoint the very altars all over. This new confidence in handling controversial material was in evidence, too, when Camden discussed the rumour that there had been a temple to Diana on the site of St. Paul’s in London. He began by explaining that a bishop had replaced a pagan priest (flamen) there, the latter having been ‘taken away’ by the ‘good’ Christian Emperor Constantine. With this welcome development noted, Camden added that he remembered as a boy seeing a stag’s head paraded round the church on a spear by priests crowned with flowers that he thought ‘may seeme to smell of Dianas worship’. It could be explained because ‘certaine strang and foraine and heathenish rites crept into Christian religion. Which ceremonies the first Christians (as mankind is naturally a pliant sectary to superstition) either admitted, or else at the first tolerated … ’99 Camden’s own tolerance, balancing secure respect for Christianity with a careful weighing of evidence about its alternatives, shapes his discussion throughout. Camden also suggested that paganism might have been a positive force in certain circumstances, urging ancient peoples towards virtue and greatness when, for example, they invented stories of the foundation of their nations and cities by pagan gods: Let Antiquitie herein be pardoned, if by entermingling falsities and truths, humane matters and divine together, it make the first beginnings of nations and cities more noble, sacred, and of greater majestie … such originals as these, fetched from the gods [are] … profitable; that valorous men may believe, although untruely, that they are descended from the gods, and thereby the minde of man assuredly perswaded of some divine race, may presume to enterprise great matters more boldly, act the same more resolutely, and upon the very securitie thereof, performe all more happily.100 Finally, Camden’s attraction to paganism as a respectable part of British history is suggested by his flirtation with some of the more dangerous language of Renaissance humanism. While to the modern reader, the word ‘security’ is a safe and comforting one, to many Renaissance Protestants, ‘securitie’ meant complacency: a too-sure reliance on one’s status as one of the Christian god’s own. The pejorative use of the term is exemplified by Thomas Rogers’

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The Enimie of Securitie, the extremely popular 1579 English translation of a German devotional aid: security was there to be beaten back by its enemies, prayer and self-examination. Words such as ‘bold’ and ‘resolute’, too, find echoes in early modern stories of hubristic heroes – Macbeth, Faustus – who are persuaded only too easily that they are demi-gods. Quietly and without fuss, Camden strayed much further than the puritanical Harrison and his mentor Holinshed into the possibilities of relativist thinking – if imagining pagan deities gave his bold and resolute ancestors security then so much the better.101

The poet as idolator Meanwhile something more flashily revolutionary was happening at a castle in Ireland. A poet known primarily for his pastorals, Edmund Spenser, had begun an epic dedicated to his queen, Elizabeth I, The Faerie Queene. He thanked/ blamed his fellow poets Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney for inspiring his work, anxiously anticipating its reception. He drew also on the accession and progress pageants that had been staged since the beginning of the Tudor monarchy, and he called upon his reading in British literature and history, neoPlatonic philosophy and Italian sonnet. In all of these he found pagan elements: classical deities, Britons worshipping them, syncretic amalgams of classical and Christian imagery and deities, women being praised as if they were deities, and so on. But what he read he took in a new direction so that in the course of developing his mythology – a churning mix of classical, biblical, Celtic and frankly idiosyncratic elements – he would not only deify the queen in a casual euhemeristic act but also permanently transform the ability of other British writers to deal with the deities of their pagan past. As we have begun to see, medieval and early modern poets and chorographers such as Higden and Fabyan referred to pagan deities with increasing frequency. Sometimes what could not be easily said in prose was perfectly acceptable in a poem, whether interjected into a chronicle or published as a freestanding work. Often stories of Troy were retold, and the names of deities occurring in these spilled over into love lyrics and satires of a more local kind. The high Middle Ages saw poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the Scot Robert Henryson writing with confidence of Venus and other deities. Chaucer made his Wife of Bath a metaphorical devotee of ‘seinte Venus’ while Gower was a suppliant to Venus in Confessio Amantis. Henryson described the deities – Cynthia, Saturn, Mars – as both personified emotions and planets, but he also himself contemplated praying to Venus as ‘luifeis quene’ (love’s queen) in the night sky before being driven inside by the cold. In an ironic early sixteenthcentury elegy for a sparrow, John Skelton wrote in the persona of a teenaged girl and coupled pleas to Jupiter and Jesus for the sparrow’s soul, while in a satire of the 1530s, Thomas Wyatt personified love and drinking as Venus and ‘Baccus’ in a manner similar to Higden’s two centuries before. The Muses appeared as the inspirers of poetry, as for instance in George Gascoigne’s ‘Woodmanship

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in the 1560s’.102 All this had become conventional enough, part of the Medieval and Renaissance rebirth of classical literatures in the English and Scottish languages. Spenser built on existing work, then, but it is also true that he began his poetical life in a new spirit of ambition. In 1579 he was self-consciously the ‘New Poet’, anonymous and hyped in the introduction to his first book The Shepheardes Calender by ‘E.K.’, perhaps his friend Gabriel Harvey and/or Spenser himself. Like other poets, Spenser was drawing on Italian models such as Petrarch but also on Boccaccio and Dante, who had shown that writing about classical deities could generate new poetic energy.103 In the calendar, for instance, he referred to Pan as both the god of shepherds and as the father of ‘Elisa’, and E.K. explained in a note that Pan is, alarmingly, both Henry VIII and ‘Christ himself’. Elizabeth is Cynthia, the moon-goddess, and a Muse.104 E.K.’s note suggests that Spenser felt himself to be pushing the limits of tasteful flattery but that with E.K.’s support his work would be acceptable. It was, but it had begun to break new ground in representing deities in a British context. By 1590, in the Argument of the First Book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser waited only until the fourth stanza to call on the deified Queen Elizabeth alongside the Muses in his invocation: And with them eke, O Goddesse heavenly bright, Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine, Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine … The goddess-queen is complimented with a plethora of adjectives and metaphors that in other contexts might have been mutually exclusive. She is heavenly, a Queen of Heaven, burning with a bright light that is likened to Phoebus’ masculine lamp, so that she is also a Sun Queen. She is a mirror of divine majesty – a reflection but also the embodiment of deity. And she is the mirror of grace, which means both bodily elegance and God-given selection. She is ideally Protestant but part of a polytheistic pantheon. Nameless and original in every sense, she is positioned for metamorphosis into aspects of any and all of the deities that Spenser might want. That Spenser’s deification of his monarch was welcomed is confirmed by his subsequent career, by almost-casual imitations such as Thomas Dekker’s ‘temple of Eliza’ in 1599 and also by the ‘Commendatory Verse’ by H.B. printed in The Faerie Queene itself, commenting that ‘our Goddesse here’ had given the Muses leave to land in Britain. Spenser’s great cleverness was that while he endorsed the notion of Elizabeth’s deity he also withheld it: yes but no, maybe but maybe not.105 His epic project was still on trial, after all. Elizabeth was flattered into goddesshood without being committed to any blasphemous claim or restrictive type.106 She did not need to buy into what followed. But she did, apparently, and so in a transformative epic woven between Spenser and his royal reader, the ability of fiction to engage with the

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British pagan pantheons boldly, in detail but at length, and in a highly sensitive nationalistic and mythopoeic context reached viability. Spenser’s first choice for Elizabeth was Dianic; but she was not to be the goddess herself, rather the foster-daughter and votary of Diana. Even this was part of two double incarnations: Gloriana/Belphoebe, Belphoebe/Amoret. Elizabeth was ‘Gloriana’, but also ‘Belphoebe’, as Spenser explained: ‘she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most virtuous and beautifull Lady’, the latter of whom is Belphoebe. In his choice of name, Spenser acknowledged the influence of Raleigh’s now mostly-lost poem ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ and, silently, returned to his own Shepheardes Calender. As he pointed out in the letter to Raleigh printed with the first edition of The Faerie Queene, ‘Phoebe and Cynthia … [are] both names of Diana’.107 Belphoebe was his new formulation: a virgin huntress who is, but isn’t, a goddess. Spenser suggested both: A goodly Ladie … That seemd to be a woman of great worth, And by her stately portance, borne of heavenly birth … So glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace, And soveraine monument of mortall vowes, How shall fraile pen descrive her heavenly face … ? Her legs are like marble pillars that ‘doe the temple of the Gods support’, while the overall impression is ‘such as Diana … ’, a deliciously vague phrase. The ignorant Trompart and Braggadochio, who meet Belphoebe in the forest, provide an explicit, canny framing of Spenser’s refusal to commit: O Goddesse, (for such I thee take to bee) For neither doth thy face terrestriall shew, Nor voice sound mortall … Which of the Gods I shall thee name, That unto thee due worship I may rightly frame … But what art thou, o Ladie … ?108 The reader has to wait 15 cantos before it is explained that Belphoebe and her twin sister Amoret are both fairies – thus literally neither human nor divine but allegorically possibly both – one of whom was brought up by Venus, the other by Diana.109 By this time the theological problems have receded among the three-ring-circus crowding of witches, Genii, ‘naked Damzelles’, actual as opposed to symbolic ‘paynims’ (here, Muslims), Mammon, knights, lady-knights and Merlin. Spenser published Part One of his poem in 1590, Part Two in 1596, and the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ were published posthumously in 1609. And in the second part of the poem (Books Four to Six) he became more daring in its flirtation

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with paganism. He built on his virtuoso shilly-shallying in Part One and took the reader to the temples of not one but two pagan goddesses, Venus and Isis. In both, in an extraordinary synthesis of pagan and Christian allegory and meaning, he showed his contemporaries what to do with the legacy of the British pagan past. Using Robert Graves’ term, Jennifer Rust rightly describes Spenser’s method as iconotropy, the ‘conversion of religious iconography from one mode of spiritual organisation to another’ in a ‘mix and match’ eclecticism. And, as she notes, the enabling assumption of iconotropy is that ‘persons and objects … are always in flux in The Faerie Queene, one perpetually on the way to becoming the other’.110 That goes for deities too, and the most prominent are goddesses who represent a wide range of emotions, duties, persons and states. First, Venus’ temple is visited by the knight Scudamour in his quest for his love, Amoret. The temple takes the place of a typical castle in Romance: insular, fortified, heavily defended. Scudamour at last enters it and approaches the image of Venus. Although what he views is a statue, we are told at first that ‘right in the midst the Goddesse selfe did stand’. Even when it is admitted that what we see is a representation, always problematic for Spenser in its potential deceitfulness, Scudamour’s description is reverent, mystical: It in shape and beautie did excel, All other Idoles, which the heathen adore … But covered with a slender veile afore … The cause why she was covered with a vele, Was hard to know, for that her Priests the same From peoples knowledge labour’d to concele. But sooth it was not sure for womanish shame, Nor any blemish, which the worke mote blame; But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one, Both male and female, both under one name: She syre and mother is her selfe alone, Begets and eke conceives, ne needeth other none. Here is an hermaphrodite goddess-idol, part-hidden, wholly artificial, luring the reader to worship it. Yet there are none of the warnings that scream around Spenser’s previous representations of false religion and its ills – Errour, Duessa, the Bower of Bliss – here.111 Further, the image makes explicit the notions referred to parenthetically in a previous near-encounter with Venus in the Garden of Adonis in Book Three.112 There we are told about the Garden as the place to which Venus took Amoret after adopting her. It is ‘the first seminarie/Of all things’ from which are born babies, attired in flesh by Genius (also known as Agdistes) and to which they return after death to be re-planted and ‘grow afresh’.113 This reincarnative space is governed by ‘the mightie word/Which first was spoken by th’almightie lord,/bad

34 Imagining the pagan past

them to increase and multiply’. Yet at its centre is an arbour in which Venus has embowered and embalmed her lover Adonis, killed but yet mysteriously still alive and hidden from the Stygian gods. We do not meet either Venus or Adonis; instead Spenser draws us back to the story of Amoret.114 But in Book Four he marches boldly up to Venus’ altar and invokes her, via Scudamour: Great Venus, Queene of beautie and of grace, The joy of Gods and men … Thee goddesses, thee the winds, the clouds doe feare, And when thou spredst thy mantle forth on hie, The waters play and pleasant lands appeare, And heavens laugh, & al the world shews joyous cheare … So all the world by thee at first was made, And dayly yet thou doest the same repayre … Thou art the root of all that joyous is, Great God of men and women, queen of th’ayre, Mother of laughter, and wellspring of blisse, O graunt that of my love at last I may not misse. The invocation in full occupies four stanzas, and its glorious cheek is rewarded: Amoret emerges from the shadows of Venus’ statue and with ‘amiable grace’ and laughter, Venus allows Scudamour to lead her out of the temple and away.115 What is most remarkable is the lightness of the whole episode, permeated with ‘confidence’ and ‘laughter’, without the expected shadow of suspicion or fear of the pagan other.116 Gone are the complications, the traps set to surprise the reader into sin or error. Spenser was trusting his readers – and his knights – to be able to negotiate the complexities of even the most challenging allegory with sophistication. Gareth Roberts saw Book One as Spenser’s primer for reading allegory and by Books Four and Five the reader has progressed to postgraduate level. Venus’ temple sets a most exquisite test of their ability to appreciate pagan deities as neoPlatonic allegory.117 With the second episode of goddess worship in Part Two of The Faerie Queene, Spenser established once and for all that his tour de force in Venus’ Temple was not a fluke or misreading. This time his poetics were if possible even more risky, for he took the female knight Britomart – established in Book Three as the heromother of Britain’s royal Tudor line – to ‘Isis Church’ and had her worship there. Spenser explains to us that Isis was a goddess invented by ancient peoples to represent Equity, the goddess of mitigating circumstance. Like her husband Osiris (Justice), Isis was originally a human being – indeed, a queen – deified by her grateful people. Deified queens sound familiar. Britomart is led into Isis’ Temple and meets her priests: they wear ‘rich Mitres shaped like the Moone,/To shew that Isis doth the Moone portend’. The moon goddess sounds familiar too. Britomart, Elizabeth’s ancestress, is visiting several aspects of her future descendant.

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The allegory is already dizzying enough when we are shown Isis’ ‘Idoll’. It is made of silver and dressed in linen. It wears a golden crown – ‘to shew that she had power in things divine’ – and is treading upon a crocodile. This represents ‘forged guile’, Spenser suggests. But the idol is more than the illustration of a simple concept, for without warning: Such was the Goddesse: whom when Britomart Had long beheld, her selfe upon the land She did prostrate, and with right humble hart, Unto her selfe her silent prayers did impart. To which the Idoll as it were inclining, Her wand did move with amiable looke, By outward shew her inward sence desining, Who well perceiving, how her wand she shooke, It as a token of good fortune tooke … Britomart, having prayed to Isis’ idol, lies down to sleep ‘by the altars side’ and is there visited by a curious dream-vision, ‘which did close implie/The course of all her fortune and posteritie’. She sees herself sacrificing to Isis, dressed as a priest, when her mitre becomes a crown and her stole a scarlet robe. She is adorned with gems. Suddenly a storm strikes the temple, and the crocodile attacks her. But Britomart beats him back, mates with him, and gives birth to a lion. She wakes in (unsurprising) panic. Isis’ priests interpret the vision for her: the crocodile is her lover Artegall in the guise of Osiris, and together (Justice and Equity) they will rule Britain and beget a royal line. ‘So blesse thee God,’ they advise, ‘and give thee joyance of thy dreame.’ Britomart is comforted, but instead of thanking God directly she gives rich gifts to ‘their Goddesse’. There is so much going on in this passage that the reader may well boggle. To begin with, mitres and scarlet robes recall Duessa/Deceit from Book One, who seduced Holiness and was later revealed to be the half-animal Whore of Babylon. Yet here, mitres are good, as are idols, and even masses as in stanza 17. Sex with crocodiles is also perfectly acceptable and – once again – the pagan goddess is unquestioned in her goodness and rectitude. Indeed, she not only advises the British princess but they are aspects of each other.118 Readers might notice the ambiguity of the line ‘unto her selfe her silent prayers did impart’. Is Britomart praying to herself, or just silently?119 J. David Macey and Elizabeth Bieman both see a genuine ‘spiritual transformation’ wrought by Isis on Britomart, enabling her to see ‘herself as a goddess’ and take on her dynastic role.120 We are back with the English queen as goddess, and forced to accept all manner of baggage with that identification. Perhaps Isis Church is just a vision of the Anglican via media, with its vestments, female governor and so on as D. Douglas Waters, Clifford Davidson and Elizabeth Bieman debate.121 It likely also reflects Spenser’s interest in syncretic notions that Egyptian and Hermetic religion prefigured Christianity; indeed Davidson describes neoPlatonic syncretism as ‘a way to make

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the old wineskins more pliable’ for new poetic wine.122 But in Isis Church, Spenser rubs the nose of his reader in pagan allegory in a way that goes far beyond a desire to represent the Elizabethan Settlement. Instead he asserts absolute poetic freedom: he will represent what he wishes and how he wishes it. We trust him, surely, and we have sufficient moral fibre and taste not to mistake his meaning? If he says Isis is the queen and paganism is, in this instance and under these circumstances, Christianity, then it is so. With Book Five, The Faerie Queene asserts the total right of the writer to imagine, and in this case to imagine a pagan world without the slightest personal danger.123 It is a very British pagan world, too, for all its exotic goddesses. Looping back to where we began, Isis Church’s dream returns to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Brutus, dreaming Britain’s future in the temple of Diana. The similarity between the episodes was noticed in 1758 by John Upton, and unearthed again by René Graziani in 1964. Graziani could not see especially convincing parallels: ‘except that both Isis and Diana are moon-goddesses … Diana’s virginity corresponds to Britomart’s … the tie with the original of the British line of the Tudors strengthens the general probability of historical allusion’. He was most interested in the dreams, which ‘have little in common’.124 But, as this chapter has shown, the parallels are both precise and broad, though they depend on a very long literary history for recognition. They include the ones that Graziani lists as well as that Britomart is named for Britain as Britain is named after Brutus; that Brutus too prays and sleeps and his vision ‘did close implie/The course of all [his] fortune and posteritie’; that both scenes are saturated with notions of national legitimacy, royalty and destiny and both goddesses answer their royal suppliants’ prayer for the good of Britain’s future. Most broadly, the episode of Brutus and Diana had over the course of the Middle Ages become a test for writers negotiating the border between Christian and pagan British pasts. Spenser was the first writer since Geoffrey to choose complete identification with the pagan worshipper. We are back where we started, but we are also in the new world of the Renaissance with the ‘New Poet’.125 Spenser could be as daring as he liked because of his impeccable credentials as a Christian, Protestant poet working in a now-safe neoPlatonic paradigm. He could fill Book Two with Venus, Diana, ‘mother of the Gods … Old Cybele’ (looking back to Alexander Barclay), Astraea and whatsoever deities he chose precisely because he was so secure.126 His first book was an allegory of holiness that, for all its many ambiguities, could not be misconstrued in its overall focus and intention. Even the surprisingly neoPlatonic Book Three, with the Garden of Adonis, had passed muster and secured approval. In the second instalment, Book Five could thus embrace the ‘franticke rites’ of Cybele hurried past in Book One and take Scudamour and Britomart/Elizabeth – even Britain itself – to worship at a pagan temple in an allegory whose remarkable boldness still perplexes readers and frightens away critics. By the end of Spenser’s poem, the Mutabilitie Cantos, unpublished in his lifetime, could devote themselves entirely to a goddess, Nature, and the acceptance of the reality of change – religious,

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literary and historical, among other kinds of mutability.127 In The Faerie Queene, Spenser could not have devised a more persuasive demonstration of the ability of creative fiction to revivify myths of Britain’s pagan past. He could not have tipped a more telling wink to the beginner of pagan fictions, Geoffrey of Monmouth, nor given a stronger steer to poets to come.

2 ‘GODS OF EVERY SHAPE AND SIZE’ Pagan deities from the antiquaries to the Romantics

Gods they had tried of every shape and size That god-smiths could produce, or priests devise. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel The edifice called ARTHUR’S Oven in Sterlingshire … is by no means of Roman original, whatever our antiquaries have thoughtlessly fancy’d to the contrary. Some make it the Temple of TERMINUS, and others a triumphal arch, when they might as well have fancy’d it to be a hogtrough … John Toland, A Critical History of the Celtic Religion

After Spenser Spenser’s staking of a new poetic claim to Britain’s pagan past had a number of important effects. While a direct link is usually untraceable, influence can be inferred: this chapter traces the development of the representation of British deities in writing after Spenser, with case studies of works from Shakespeare to Blake. Most obviously, Spenser’s work strongly reaffirmed Renaissance poets’ and dramatists’ desire to people their writing with classical deities, especially in compliment to royal and noble patrons. William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis of 1592–93 is a major example, written for the Earl of Southampton two years after the appearance of Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. Likewise, Samuel Daniel’s 1604 masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses put Pallas, Juno, Diana and their divine associates on the stage at Hampton Court in the persons of the new queen, Anne, and her ladies (ironically, as its editor Ernest Law noted, the goddesses were dressed in the jewels and gowns of the late ‘goddess’ Queen Elizabeth, recycling Spenser’s myth in a very tangible form).1 More specifically, a new impetus was given to the traditional performance of royal pageantry, so that the new British monarch, James I, often found himself face to face with pagan deities

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prophesying good fortune and praising his rule in a transparent reworking of the trope of Brutus and Diana, Britomart and Isis. In Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’ The Masque of Blackness (1605) the usual moon goddess was the unusual Aethiopia, who told King James: For were the world, with all his wealth, a ring, Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing, Might be a diamant worthy to inchase it, Ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it: Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corse.2 Moon goddess met sun king in a new Britain, united by James’ accession; in the Lord Mayor of London’s pageant for that year James was further described as a ‘second Brute and king’ by Brutus himself, speaking the words of the playwright and draper Anthony Munday. Brutus appeared in procession with the nymph Britannia, and the deities Neptune and Amphitrite.3 A poetic celebration of classical paganism in a British context derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth was thus commonplace in literature of praise and tribute at the turn of the sixteenth century. Its significance was expected to be understood by a wide audience such as the crowd at the Lord Mayor’s show. By 1611, when Shakespeare’s Cymbeline was performed, the trope had become established enough to be subjected to self-reflexive questioning, perhaps even mockery. There is a striking intertextuality in the play, of a kind often suggesting parody: Spenser’s Temple of Isis episode is an evident influence on the similar dream-vision experienced by Shakespeare’s Posthumus. In Cymbeline, Jupiter appears to Posthumus along with the ghosts of his family, who upbraid the god for his cruelty to their son and brother. He has been deceived into ordering the murder of his wife and believes it has been carried out; now he is to be executed. ‘No more, thou thunder-master, show/Thy spite on mortal flies …’ urges his father, Sicilius Leonatus, facing down the god and adding: Hath my poor boy done aught but well … ? Whose father then, as men report Thou orphans’ father art, Thou shouldst have been, and shielded him From this earth-vexing smart. Jupiter is moved and descends with thunderbolts to defend himself: No more, you petty spirits of region low, Offend our hearing; hush! How dare you ghosts Accuse the thunderer … ? Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift,

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The more delay’d, delighted. Be content; Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift: His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent. Our Jovial star reign’d at his birth, and in Our temple was he married. Rise, and fade. Waking from the dream, Posthumus finds a tablet containing a cryptic note: when as a lion’s whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embrac’d by a spirit of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopp’d branches which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty. Called to interpret once the play’s trials have worked themselves out (Posthumus is indeed reunited with his wife, Cymbeline with his princely sons and daughter) the Roman soothsayer Philharmonus immediately announces that: Thou, Leonatus, art the lion’s whelp; the fit and apt construction of thy name, being leo-natus, doth import so much. [To Cymbeline] The piece of tender air, thy virtuous daughter, which we call ‘mollis aer’, and ‘mollis aer’ we term it ‘mulier’; which ‘mulier’ I divine is this most constant wife, who even now answering the letter of the oracle unknown to you, unsought, were clipp’d about with this most tender air … The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline, personates thee; and thy lopped branches point thy two sons forth, who, by Belarius stol’n for many years thought dead, are now revived, to the majestic cedar join’d, whose issue promises Britain peace and plenty. In the forced glibness of this reading of the pagan prophecy, Shakespeare harks back to Spenser. The similarities are manifold. Both Posthumus and Britomart are prehistoric British royalty: Britomart is the daughter of King Ryence, while Posthumus is Cymbeline’s son-in-law.4 Both visions reveal to the characters their destinies as rulers and spouses through exotic and royal animal imagery. In particular, at the end of her vision, Britomart gives birth to a lion and Posthumus is the ‘lion’s whelp’. Both receive the strained interpretation from vatic figures, and in both cases the destiny of empire is the theme – the English in Ireland, the

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Romans in Britain. The Greek and Egyptian deities are passing on the baton of power to their successor civilizations, glossing the transition with a generous sousing of mysticism from which these royal characters benefit, as does the contemporary monarch in each case. For all this weight of symbolism, however, audiences traditionally find Philharmonus’ speech funny or foolish, deflating what could be a moment of high patriotic and human emotion. In this they echo Samuel Johnson, who famously found Cymbeline full of ‘incongruity … folly … absurdity’ and ‘unresisting imbecility’. Since its first ‘revival’ in 1683, the scene has often been cut.5 On the one hand, the absurdity of the soothsayer seems a likely intention in its original cultural context. The speech could be a parodic lightening of the mood, one that recalls Spenser only to disrupt smug pretensions to divinely-sanctioned imperial power. We know, as Judiana Lawrence notes, that Philharmonus has already misinterpreted another dream in the play and this one is too neat to be accepted without a knowing meta-dramatic wink.6 But it’s also significant that Cymbeline’s reign (from the late first century BC to around 40 AD) was usually regarded as the backdrop to the birth of Christ: Holinshed, Munday, John Stow and other chroniclers’ accounts link the king with the messiah in this way. Perhaps Cymbeline’s pagan prophecy might be assumed to be nonsense alongside this great Christian truth, and is thus deliberately represented as frivolous? Or might it, as Robin Moffet suggests, be taken as evidence that Britain needs ‘divine aid’ in one form or another and that Christianity will be welcomed there? Moffet reads the play’s setting as a period marking ‘the end of the possibility of pagan greatness’, with Posthumus as the last-born of the era. He is, after all, compared to ‘a descended god’ (like Jupiter) and his wife Imogen likens him to Mercury, Mars, Hercules and Jove.7 Are we witnessing the death of paganism in Posthumus’ apparent beheading in the middle of the play? And if so, how do we feel about it, with all its confusions (such as the fact that it is actually Cloten’s body not Posthumus’ at all)? How do we feel about the beautiful pagan funeral rites accorded to the body and the supposedly dead Imogen (who is not in fact dead either)? One reading of the play might dismiss paganism as inherently false – doomed to death amid all manner of mistaken beliefs – while another sees it as well-meant striving in the right direction: a typological foreshadowing of what real religion and providential foreknowing might look like.8 Lila Geller argues that the princes who mourn Cloten/Posthumus ‘are like the sylvan precursors of the true religion in Britain, the Druids’ – pagan but proto-Christian. Moffet even wonders if the book Posthumus is given after the dreamvision suggests the Bible that is to come, while the soothsayer’s ‘ingenuity’ may encourage us to exercise our own wit to find a Christian reading. This seems overly optimistic, however, since no clear Christian reading suggests itself.9 And although Posthumus is a deeply flawed character he does not die, as if representative of paganism’s end. He is instead assimilated back into a pagan community that forgives and repents its folly, heads to Jupiter’s temple to

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celebrate at the end of Act 5 (having mentioned him 30 times in the play already) and does not mention the nativity once. The play’s last speech begins ‘Laud we the gods;/And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils/From our blest altars’.10 To dismiss paganism’s appearance in Cymbeline as simply amusing or (Harrison-like) as a paganism that is simply prefiguring Christianity, is to reduce its genuine complexity and refusal to meet any one set of expectations. The Spenserian echo confirms for me what has been suggested by other readers for other reasons: that the play wants well-read audience members to notice its place in a literary and dramatic tradition. Responding to the prevailing fashion and theatrical expectations at the Blackfriars theatre where the play was performed, Shakespeare has put a deity onstage, with his creaky but probably impressive masque machinery.11 Posthumus also rather stagily has a prop tablet or book to give the soothsayer for interpretation. As J. Clinton Crumley argues, the interpretation of show and book draws such attention to itself that the message of both seems likely to be a hermeneutic one, about interpretation itself.12 Perhaps Shakespeare intended audiences to reflect that his dream-vision-masque can mean anything the soothsayer wants it to mean. No matter who sniggers in the auditorium, ‘peace and plenty’ will rule because the author and his deus ex machina say so: and the audience is invited to accept or critique Philharmonus’ interpretation for themselves. Do they want to believe? The descent of Jupiter raises all manner of questions that are not answered: are deities cruel puppetmasters (‘Hardyish’, as F.D. Hoeniger puts it) or fatherly protectors?13 Why is the trial of the god’s favourites justified? Donna Landry points out that the providential explanation given by Jupiter ‘is delivered … to the rumble of thundering machinery and the chime of strained and stagey rhymes’.14 Do these hand-cranked deities really sanction royal and priestly power and supervise national destiny? Can we trust them and their deputies on earth? In drawing attention to these questions, Cymbeline demonstrates that the reinvention of pagan deities has great subversive potential. Certainly it can be used to flatter, to suggest a continuity of power and sacredness from the dawn of time to the current monarch. But it can also authorize all kinds of meanings and explode apparent certainties while appearing to be an innocent antiquarian classicism. Poised as they are between the blank of prehistory and scanty and contradictory Roman and Greek texts, the British deities of Cunobelinus’ time are inherently unstable material for later writers to build upon, and they were being seen to be so by the early seventeenth century.15 Their subversive potential was being uncovered as antiquarians asked increasingly pointed questions about them and put forward ever more divergent theories. Shakespeare was one of many dramatists to put classical deities onstage – other occasions include Diana in Pericles (1607–8), Hymen in As You Like It (1599) and a group of goddesses led by Juno in The Tempest (1610) as well as prayers to the classical deities in The Two Noble Kinsmen written with John Fletcher (1612–13) – but in his work their appearances often have doubt cast on them by the illusory, theatrical setting. Diana is the most magical and earnest, showing King

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Pericles in a dream how to find his lost wife in a play riddled with coincidence and wish-fulfilment.16 Hymen may be a real god or more likely an illusion staged by Rosalind, the girl dressed as a boy who attributes her reappearance as a girl to a fictitious magician. Juno and her colleagues are actually the spirits of the magician Prospero. The same irony and evasion is obvious in the god and goddess chosen for Fletcher’s Romano-British play Bonduca (about 1613): they do not appear onstage and their communication with worshippers is with smoke (it might as well be with mirrors too). Unusually for the period, however, they are not classical. At the heart of the play, Act 3 Scene 1, is a sacrifice to ‘Tiranes’ and ‘Andate’, with singing druids (the first on the British stage, as Hutton shows), and a procession of flower-strewing British royals led by Bonduca (Boudicca) herself.17 She invokes the ‘powerful gods of Britain’ as ‘great Revengers’, and her daughters and tribespeople call especially on ‘Tiranes’, a thunder god who is the leader of the pantheon. Tiranes is clearly a version of Taranis, who is a version of Jupiter, so that there is a strong echo of Cymbeline here. As ‘Taranis’ he is mentioned by the first-century Spanish poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (Lucan) as being venerated by the tribes somewhere in northern Europe.18 The change to his name does not seem accidental: ‘Tiranes’ suggests tyranny, and indeed he is a ‘feared god’ who is asked to ‘send thy consuming fires and deadly bolts … take to thy killing anger’. Initially the gods are unresponsive to Bonduca’s pleas for help against the Romans, and the British soldier Caratach argues that the gods ‘sit and smile’ at ‘weak tears’. What they want to see is ‘courage arm’d with confidence’, a little self-help. He prefers to invoke the goddess Andate: thou who hold’st the reins of furious Battels, and disordred War, and proudly roll’st thy swarty chariot wheels over heaps of wounds, and carcasses, sailing through seas of bloud; thou sure-steel’d sternnesse … More straightforward than the revengeful, malicious women of the play, he asks only for ‘good hearts, good enemies,/good blowes o’both sides’, so that ‘thy Britain/thy little Britain, but as great in fortune/meet [Rome] as strong as shee, as proud, as daring’. The flame rises from the onstage altar only at this point: Andate appears to be listening to Caratach while Tiranes was not hearing Bonduca. His meaning is ‘hidden’: and indeed his lack of answer will lead to the queen’s death, while Caratach lives to be captured and taken to Rome as a ‘friend’.19 His Andate, though, is a pale echo of Brutus’ Diana, invisible and half-hearted in her support of the British hero, while Tiranes appears wholly disengaged from his savage worshippers. Neither suggests good things about James I, successor of both Caratach and Bonduca in different ways: deities, monarchs and war-leaders are all equally ignoble in Bonduca, as Andrew Hickman puts it.

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After Harrison (and Camden) At the same time that Jonson and Jones, Fletcher, Shakespeare and Daniel were putting pagan deities onstage in flattering or satirical ways that drew attention to their fictive nature, antiquarian writers including Jones himself were arguing quite earnestly for the real presence of the old gods and goddesses in the British landscape. Jones thought that Stonehenge was a temple dedicated to the god Caelus or Terminus. Camden argued that elements of Dianic temple worship remained in the rituals of St. Paul’s Cathedral, while others thought that, far in advance of the neoPlatonic speculations of the Renaissance, the Phoenicians and/ or Hercules could have brought Platonic religion to Britain and practised it. This shared preoccupation in two quite different literary spheres is not, of course, a coincidence: it demonstrates how pervasive the desire to imagine a British pagan past had become by about 1610. That desire and its new antiquarian impetus reshaped all kinds of narrative: a chorographer might look back on his childhood and reinterpret the festivities he had witnessed in the mid-sixteenth century as pagan rather than Christian or a playwright might rework a popular romance or chronicle history with the insertion of a deus ex machina, both with entirely new results. The impulses come from the same root and are explored in this chapter as they develop across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning with the rewriting of antiquarian discourse by and after Camden. As we have seen in Chapter 1, by 1600 some chorographical writers had been enabled to move on from the Trojan myth by signing up to a specific successor story. This was the one invented by the forger Annius of Viterbo, augmented by John Bale and then by William Harrison for Raphael Holinshed and accepted by Camden. In its most polished form, the myth asserted that the ancient British ancestors of Protestantism were followers of a druidic monotheism inherited from the Jewish patriarchs. This hypothesis popularized a narrative of a British Judaeo-Christianity fallen into pagan corruption, which offered rich possibilities for synthesis and compromise. Writers concerned about exploring non-Christian religions could join in with the search for pagan gods, while those already deeply engaged by them could point to their connection with more orthodox theological studies if required. The proto-Christianity hypothesis shaped Britannia and Britannia was a reference point for all succeeding writers.20 Not only did it drive forward debate throughout the period, but Camden’s huge collection of discoveries from across the country inspired further conjecture everywhere. Whether writers agreed or disagreed with him, they adopted a filial tone in discussing Camden’s work, perhaps because he was so disarming in his admission that what he suggested was not delivered ex cathedra. Bale, Harrison and Holinshed, paradoxically, were accorded little credit by later writers for their insight into pagan ecclesiastical history. Instead it was usually enough to note that Camden had believed that ancient British religion prepared the Britons well for Christianity before going on to echo or modify his theory, or respectfully invent another one. With Britannia as their main authority, then, many scholars

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and poets coasted on Camden’s erudition for the next century and a half, if not longer. Each, however, did it in his own way. There were some striking innovations that transformed Bale and Harrison’s basic theory, and several bitter controversies where beliefs differed from his that mark later literature even today. In particular, writers grappled with the loose ends of Bale and Harrison’s ideas. If the ancient Britons really had worshipped a single male deity, how exactly had they conceived of him and how was their worship expressed? How did it get to Britain? And if their worship had later degenerated so badly as to be unrecognizable – Harrison’s ‘Idole churches’ phase – then what kind of multiple gods and goddesses had the Britons worshipped? Candidates put forward for various models in competition with or as part of the proto-Christianity theory included: a euhemerized Phoenician hero Hercules (mentioned by Harrison drawing on Tacitus), Ogmius, Apollo Belenus (the sun), Apollo Belatucadros and/or Apollo Grannus, Caelus or Terminus, the sky-god, Taranis, the sun-god Sol, Bacchus, Teutates, Mars, Mercury, Moloch, Hues, Loda, Woden, Pan, as well as the goddesses Andate and Adraste in various forms, Ceres, Belisama, Onca, Astarte, Minerva and Diana (again). And so, despite the predisposition to Christian–pagan synthesis among many high-profile scholars, the period 1600–1830 was a period of spectacular confusion and inventiveness, taking an increasingly controversial tone as antiquaries fought for control of their national culture. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the jurist John Selden wrote that he lived in a ‘critic age’, and the coming battles supported that view.21 It had always been the case that writers worked out their own religious politics through the imagination of pagan forms of worship but the violent sectarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries intensified this trend and made it more visible and self-conscious. In 1681, John Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel cynically coined the term ‘god-smiths’ for the proponents of various Christian sectarianisms, but his words apply equally well if not better to the partisans of the pagan deities too.22

‘What they should have done … ’: Selden versus Drayton The early seventeenth-century god-smithing appetite in both poetic and scholarly writing, the shared concerns of different genres and their shared reliance on Camden are all satisfyingly summed up in the literary marriage between a poetic and a critical work of 1612. The poem is Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion and the critical commentary is contained in the notes prepared for it by the jurist John Selden.23 The marriage, however, is not always a happy one, as Anne Lake Prescott notes – indeed, Angus Vine goes so far as to suggest that Selden’s notes are a kind of literary game. Perhaps they are even a joke on Drayton. Drayton’s poem is a massive chorographical tour of Britain, inspired by Britannia in its scale and many local details.24 But as well as following Camden, Drayton also responded to the Spenserian impulse by peopling the landscape of his epic with

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mythological beings: gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs. Classical deities come into the tales, or are dragged in as explanations for landscape features, but specifically British deities do not appear.25 In this evidently conscious choice, Drayton preferred the established classics to the local pantheon: Belatucadros and his like. Like Camden, he imagined Britain as filled with local genii, but unlike him he invented these, personifying the Itchen river and Watling Street. For instance, Drayton imagined the bay of Poole Harbour in Dorset as being built by Albion to protect his lover, the nymph Poole, from the wrath of Thetis. The sea-goddess was supposedly angry that Poole, a member of her ‘train’, had borne three islands as children to Albion: so he enclosed them in a bay formed by his sheltering arms.26 Like Spenser, then, while Drayton drew on stories of foreign ‘paynims’ and ‘heathen hounds’ as the enemies of Britain, he indulged himself freely in literary paganisms of classical kinds at home.27 At Bath he speculated, like Camden, whether Minerva or Hercules were the tutelary deity, choosing the goddess.28 The druids recur as ‘native Priests’, and ‘flamens’, described as teaching ‘our Rites’ (presumably British rites, but also ‘most religious’ and ‘wise’ and thus ‘ours’ in a more confusingly pious sense). Old British kings build ‘Fanes [temples] unto her [Britain’s] Gods’ in the poem and priests conduct animal sacrifice. The favourite epithet is ‘fearless’: the druids scare others but are themselves undaunted by blood, be it sacrificial or martial in its context. They believe in the immortality, but transmigration, of souls and in ‘Wood-gods’.29 The religion of the Britons is thus clearly identified as pagan, but it is not condemned and a pleasing continuity is maintained when Christianity comes: flamens’ seats become bishops’ sees as in Camden and all is well.30 Drayton creates a classically-based pagan landscape adapted to incorporate modern features in a confusing but unthreatening blend. In writing the poem’s notes, however, Selden added to Drayton’s whimsies in ways that challenged the poem’s silences and comfortable blurrings, pointedly attempting to firm up understanding of old religions and introducing the names of British deities. Prescott likens these notes to ‘acid eating a book from the edges’ in its effect on the poem itself, while Parry contrasts Drayton’s ‘amiable, undemanding’ pastoral with Selden’s ‘dense, ingrown prose’ and ‘harsh pedantry’: the notes do indeed make Drayton look lazy and crankish.31 Selden also drew on Camden, but on that side of Britannia that was boldly local and precise in its religious speculations. For example, where Drayton pleased his own fancy in staging a contest between Wansdike and Stonehenge over which was the more important ‘Wonder of the Land’, Selden’s notes promoted Camden’s notion that the boundary dike was named after Woden as Mercury, ‘President of ways’ and ‘Peacemaker’ (see Chapter 4 for Woden).32 When Drayton wheeled out Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of the two kings Brennus and Belinus, Selden speculated whether kings such as Belinus and Cunobelinus (Cymbeline again) could be identified with gods, pointing out that Belenus or Belin was an Apollonian god mentioned by the fourth-century poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Ausonius mentions Belenus’ temple in an elegy for a Burgundian rhetorician,

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Attius Patera, whom he says was descended from the druids of Bayeux and from (presumably those officiating at) Belenus’ temple. He bore the name Patera because this designated ‘servants of Apollo’. Selden then links this god to Belatucadros, the dedicatee of several altars on Hadrian’s Wall as noted by Camden. Finally, Selden associates Belenus with the ancestral king Beli or Heli Magni from the Welsh genealogies, and thus with the Punic name for Phoebus, Hel, which brings him back triumphantly to King Belinus deified as a sun-god. ‘Diana and her brother Apollo (under name of Belin) were two great Deities among the Britons’, he sums up: the first authority cited is Caesar and the second is Camden, the ‘Light of antiquity’.33 By the ninth song of Poly-Olbion, Selden was ready to commit to explaining his theory of British paganism: I think you may truly say with Origen, that, before our Saviour’s time, Britain acknowledged not one true God, yet it came as near to what they should have done, or rather nearer, than most of other either Greek or Roman, as by their positions in Caesar, Strabo, Lucan, and the like discoursing of them, you may be satisfied. For although Apollo, Mars and Mercury were worshipped among the vulgar Gauls, yet it appears that the Druids’ invocation was to one All-healing or All-saving power … If I should imagine by this All-healing Deity to be meant Apollo, whom they worshipped under name of Belin … my conjecture were every way receivable … Tentative and filled with potential contradiction as this statement is, it is a quiet revolution – one occurring literally in the margins and footnotes of Drayton’s poem. Selden suggests that ancient British gods may be boiled down to one central, classical-local male deity, of whom physical evidence remains in the form of altars and British texts: Apollo Belinus/Beli/Belatucadros, rather than Samothes. He adds another extremely influential idea too, from the SicilianGreek historian Diodorus: that Abaris, a ‘Hyperborean’, from a northern island that might be Britain, was one of this Apollo’s priests.34 Selden’s note had become a dissertation, and one read by later poets and scholars with fascination: Jonson called Selden ‘monarch in letters’, while for Milton he was ‘the chief of learned men reputed in this land’.35 Thus both creative and critical writers drew on Camden, and under his protective wing each developed his own highly personal imagination of ancient deities. Some preferred an evasive blur between heathenism and Christianity, while others were more interested in the ‘polluting sacrifices and idolatry’ (to quote Selden) that had spoiled patriarchal teaching.36 Either way, a great deal could be imagined so long as Christianity was the end-point. There were dissenting voices, of course: not everyone approved of such imaginations and others rejected still more firmly the idea that pagans could be proto-Christians. For example, ancient British religion was mentioned by several combatants in debate during the Commonwealth and Protectorate periods, as pious people of all

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persuasions attempted to define an ideal English church. Thomas Fuller and Peter Heylyn, although nominally on the same (royalist) side, argued out some of their differences by claiming (Heylyn) that the druid priesthood had venerated a single god and led the way for Christianity and (conversely, Fuller) that, while monotheistic, it had done no such thing, being addicted to devil worship.37 For Heylyn a well-meaning paganism actually seems to have been more attractive than puritanism: not a surprise for regular readers of his anti-puritan rantings. For Fuller that was a dangerous fudge. Yet the common debt to Camden can be seen although – like Drayton and Selden – Fuller and Heylyn differ greatly in their style and conclusions.

The end-point? One would have thought that the potential pressure of such contradiction, together with the importance of the matters being discussed, would have limited poetic response to the transition between pagan and Christian – especially in a godly writer such as John Milton, puritan polemicist. The Civil War and the Parliamentarian victory might, therefore, have put a decisive end to speculations on pagan deity. But this was not the case at all, and we have already seen Heylyn and Fuller engaged in the debate about the rights and wrongs of imagining paganism towards the end of the ‘interregnum’. Milton was no less exercised by the pre-Roman history of British religion. Hutton explores his contradictory attitude to druids in Blood and Mistletoe, for instance, and concludes that his early writings (such as ‘Lycidas’) drew on Selden’s image of them though by 1647, in his History of Britain, he was condemning them as prelate-like savages.38 Yet even as he distanced himself from druids in the History, Milton also took the trouble to retranslate Brutus’ prayer to Diana – strictly on the understanding that he was retelling a myth: Goddess of shades, and huntress, who at will Walk’st on the rowling sphere, and through the deep, On thy third reign, the earth, look now, and tell What land, what seat of rest thou bid’st me seek, What certain seat, where I may worship thee For aye, with temples vow’d, and virgin choirs. Diana’s answer is also given, though anti-monarchical Milton acidly remarks ‘Diana overshot her oracle’ in claiming that the whole earth would be subject to Britain’s race of kings. However, his venom is directed more at kingship than it is at the goddess and her worshipper, whom he describes simply as mistaken: ‘guided now, as he thought, by divine conduct’.39 So, while throughout his writing life Milton explored different versions of what pagan Britons symbolized, pagan deities continued to inspire him. This should not surprise us when we look at how his poetry began, with ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. The ode

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embodies the contradictions of Milton and many others of his time. It is a very early piece, from 1629, and of all Milton’s works it is most securely linked to the same cultural concerns that animated Selden and Drayton. It offers what appears at first to be a clear-cut response: the total rejection of paganism. The young man who, in a verse letter to his father, had begun to explain his poetic desires with the statement that ‘Apollo … gave to me certain gifts’ was moving away from that metaphor and away from a British epic in which he had, explicitly, planned to include ‘old Belinus’ (whether as king or god is unclear). In the Nativity Ode he seems to be purifying his poetry of such pagan trappings.40 But how much is that really the case? Like Spenser, Milton rose magnificently above the problems of imagining pagan and Christian simultaneously: instead he rubbed the two systems together until they sparked, in concepts such as the ‘heavenly muse’ to whom he attributes ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ and later Paradise Lost (1667). An early surprise in the former poem comes with the notion that the muse needs to produce a tribute for the newly-born Christ before dawn, ‘while the heaven, by the sun’s team untrod,/Hath took no print of the approaching light’. Phoebus’ horses’ hoof-prints threaten to mark the poem but don’t: yet what beautiful and illuminating marks they will or would make, bringing not only daylight but the first day of the Christian era. How confusing. Further, Christ himself is described typologically as ‘the mighty Pan’ for the benefit of the shepherds who witness his birth – Milton seems to be remembering Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender here, where the Christ–Pan link is explored in the notes by E.K. (see Chapter 1).41 With this dizzying oscillation between pagan and Christian in play, Milton sets out to write a hymn to the new man-god. He will have to banish pagan deities in doing so, but their departure is ridiculously beautiful, and they will haunt his scholarship and poetry to come, as well as that of those who read his work.42 The banishment itself is long because it is hard and sad as well as delightful and necessary, and Milton gives the pagan gods and goddesses a grand exit from literature to be savoured in every way: The Oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathèd spell, Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell. The lonely mountains o’er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; Edgèd with poplar pale,

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From haunted spring, and dale The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. In consecrated earth, And on the holy hearth, The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns, and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat. Peor and Baälim Forsake their temples dim, With that twice-battered god of Palestine; And moonèd Ashtaroth, Heaven’s Queen and Mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine: The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals’ ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste. Nor is Osiris seen In Memphian grove or green, Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud; Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest; Nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud; In vain, with timbreled anthems dark, The sable-stolèd Sorcerers bear his worshipped ark. He feels from Juda’s land The dreaded Infant’s hand; The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

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Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide, Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine: Our Babe, to show his Godhead true, Can in his swaddling bands control the damnèd crew. This is far from a simple goodbye. The poem’s regret is almost as strong as its joy: ‘nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud’ for this is the only option, but Osiris’ chest is still described as ‘sacred’ and who could condemn to hell a simple lowing bull? Lawrence Hyman rightly sees ‘darkness … helplessness’ and ‘pain’ in the poem, ‘genuine regret’. It would have been easy for Milton to dirty all his departing deities like Moloch (‘sullen … burning … grisly … dismal’); but Milton always preferred truth to ease. So his pagan gods and goddesses are ‘lovely as well as hideous’ in Barbara K. Lewalski’s phrase. They are sincerely mourned by a writer who, as Christina Fawcett puts it, ‘served his apprenticeship under Virgil and Ovid’ and is bidding farewell to some of his dearest friends, with nymphs tearing their flower-garlanded hair, and ‘sighing’ and ‘plaint’ echoing through the poem.43 In a later stanza even the ‘yellow-skirted fays’, avatars of Spenser’s fairies and the most obviously British characters of the poem, must go: can Milton really get rid of The Faerie Queene’s legacy so easily? Of course he cannot and in 1644 he was still working out the relationship with ‘our sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’.44 Whatever he had tried to do to the fays, he was still ‘daring’ to learn from their creator. In the Nativity Ode, then, the ‘flamens’ must hand over to priests and this is good: but the Babe has enormous shoes to fill. With Milton as his poet, he will try to do so in Paradise Lost. But even then in the early nineteenth century, William Blake will sum up dissatisfaction with the poetry of Milton’s God and his Messiah with the resonant allegation that ‘the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.’[sic]45 Pagan Milton, like pagan Spenser, was a tenacious presence as the alter ego of his godly counterpart and his deities were impossible to bid farewell.

‘A confused heap’: Edmund Gibson surveys the field In seventeenth-century writing, then, pagan deities were frequently present. They might be the subject of the work itself, or their departure or loss might be represented with more or less regret. Modern readers have detected them hiding in the woods in the Parliamentarian Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (Diana), while Venus is only too obvious in the royalist vicar Robert Herrick’s apostrophe: Sea-born goddess, let me be By thy son thus graced, and thee.

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That whene’er I woo, I find Virgins coy, but not unkind.46 In the 1680s, John Aubrey wrote up extensive notes, later published as Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, which documented what appeared to be relics of ancient religions in contemporary superstitions and folk customs. He found some of his material in Selden’s Table-Talk, a notebook published in 1689 after long circulation in manuscript. Bushes hung outside taverns were garlanded with ivy, Aubrey thought, because Bacchus had once been worshipped in Britain, while harvest home customs also descended from the Romans, this time the festival of Cerealia. Remaines began a long tradition of folklore scholarship overtly seeking living pagan rites in popular sayings and good luck charms.47 Meanwhile, as we have seen, Selden’s notes to Drayton’s Poly-Olbion perfectly demonstrate the pagan hauntings to be expected in texts of the period – pagan deities are marginal but insistently present, pressing on the text for attention and interpretation. Overtly, the comfortable notion that ancient Britons were monotheistic by inclination was widely accepted, along with the idea that pagan gods had, typologically, prefigured the Christian one. It remained for later-seventeenthand early-eighteenth-century writers to refine their understanding of how this proto-Christianity had come to Britain and what had happened to it there, an ‘Enlightenment’ journey explored by Thomas Kendrick, Stuart Piggott and Ronald Hutton in particular. In the years leading up to and after the Restoration (1660), a group of philologists based at Oxford University began to argue that the druids had been taught the true faith by Abraham himself. Their religion had then travelled west to Britain and east to India by the means of a shared group of languages (now known as Indo-European, after the work of William Jones, whom we’ll meet again in Chapter 3).48 One possible conduit was Phoenician traders coming to Cornwall for tin, argued Aylett Sammes in his Britannia Antiqua Illustrata: or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain derived from the Phoenicians of 1676. Far more controversially, however, Sammes suggested that the Cabiri (Mediterranean deities such as Ceres and Proserpina) had been imported by the Phoenicians, perhaps by a hero of theirs like Hercules. The ancient Britons had then worshipped this Hercules, under the name Ogmius (a Gaulish god mentioned by the Syrian satirist Lucian as being analogous to the Greek Heracles). They also worshipped Jupiter under the name of Taranis or Thor as well as Hesus, Hues or Mercury, Bacchus, Belinus, Baal, Belatucadros and Teutates, as well as the Romanized Gaulish gods Minerva, Venus-Adraste and Diana-Belisama.49 This was a rich mix that had Britons straying so far from the proto-Christian path as to worship Moloch, the Phoenician Jupiter (as Sammes asserted) – and Milton’s least favourite pagan god. Sammes’ super-syncretic method did not find favour, therefore, although the Phoenician element was useful in transporting patriarchal religion from the Levant to Britain. In this element of his speculation, Sammes was building on a theory suggested by John Twyne in the mid-sixteenth century.50

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Meanwhile the proto-archaeologist John Aubrey was becoming acquainted with the prehistoric stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge and deciding that they were ancient British temples, probably druidic, rather than battle monuments or grave markers as had previously been thought. Although he did not publish his theory of stone circles, it became well known among scholars since he spent some 30 years discussing it with them. Eventually it reached a wide readership through its representation in Edmund Gibson’s editions of Camden’s Britannia from 1695 onwards, especially the third, expanded, edition of 1722, and became tied up with the proto-Christianity theory.51 In the 1695 edition of Britannia, Gibson had paraphrased Camden’s words on ancient British religion: it was ‘a confused heap’ of superstition and little more was to be said. But in 1722, aided by the young Oxford chaplain Thomas Tanner, he brought together the collective wisdom of the antiquaries of his age and all those writing since around 1600, to dig through the ‘heap’ further in a way that was invaluable to all writers on prehistory for at least a century to come. This Britannia offers a snapshot of the scholarly consensus built upon Camden’s ideas about ancient British religion, primarily through the adoption of Aubrey’s theories about stone circles. But it also contains a survey of the competing claims that had fallen by the wayside or were to be discarded by opinion-formers by the mid-century – which did not, of course, mean that everyone forgot them. Indeed, rejection caused some of them to thrive even more strongly. For example, to Camden’s discussion of the county of Wiltshire Tanner and Gibson added a description of Stonehenge ‘much more distinct than what Mr. Camden has left us’ and summarized current and recent thinking on the monument’s origin: 1. That it is a work of the Phoenicians, as Mr. Sammes in his Britannia conceits; a conjecture that has met with so little approbation, that I shall not stay to confute it. 2. That it was a Temple of the Druids long before the coming of the Romans; which Mr. John Aubrey, Fellow of the Royal Society, endeavours to prove in his Manuscript Treatise, entitl’d Monumenta Britannica. 3. That it was an old Triumphal British Monument, erected to Anaraith the Goddess of Victory, after a bloody battle won by the illustrious Stanings and his Cangick Giants, from Divitiacus and his Belgae; and that the Captives and Spoils were sacrific’d to the said Idol in this Temple. An opinion advanc’d (on what grounds I know not) in an anonymous MS. Writ about the year 1666, and now in the hands of Mr. Andrew Paschal, Rector of Chedzoy near Bridgewater. 4. That it was a monument rais’d by the Britains in memory of Queen Boadicia; advanc’d by the Author of Nero-Caesar. 5. That it was a Temple built by the Romans to the God Caelum or Terminus … is Mr. Jones’s, in his ingenious Conjecture … 6. That it was the burial-place of Uther Pendragon, Constantine, Ambrosius, and other British Kings … 52 7. That it was a Danish monument … 53

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They sum up: I should think one need make no scruple to affirm that it is a British monument … There is no authority to convince a man of the truth of what Nero Caesar, or Mr. Paschal‘s MS have laid down; and ’tis hard, to assent to the later British Writers, who tell us ’twas the sepulchre of the British Kings … 54 This leaves only Aubrey’s argument standing: it would shape the literary future decisively across many different fields.55 But the other opinions are equally interesting – Sammes’ was especially unkillable – and several name deities that persist in fictions and antiquarian speculations in later times. Two are goddesses, although they were to be swept aside for many decades in favour of the successive versions of the Bale–Harrison hypothesis and its derivatives, which came to focus on male deities. The third opinion on the list, which identifies the goddess Anaraith, is preserved in print – probably taken directly from the manuscript mentioned by Gibson. This printed version was copied from a manuscript borrowed in 1722 from James West of Balliol College by the antiquary Thomas Hearne and published by him in 1725 under the manuscript’s title: A Fool’s Bolt Soon Shott at Stonage [Stonehenge].56 In volume 3 of Hearne’s works, his publisher’s preface identifies Paschal’s manuscript as the one lent to Hearne by West. Andrew Paschal died in 1696 and his papers passed to Roger Maunder, Master of Balliol, neatly providing a link to West.57 The manuscript’s origin was mysterious, however. Hearne mentioned the Herald and fellow-antiquary John Gibbon as a possible candidate for its authorship but he was sceptical of his having enough learning to have written it.58 However, in the mid-1980s, Robert Gay was suggested as the author by the antiquarian and activist Rodney Legg on the basis of a note in Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica.59 This mentioned a 1690 letter from Paschal to Aubrey.60 The letter stated that the Fool’s Bolt was by ‘Mr. … Jay’ of Nettlecombe, the dots seeming to indicate that Paschal had forgotten the author’s Christian name. Robert Gay was rector of Nettlecombe in the mid-seventeenth century, and had family with an estate in Bath as mentioned in the Bolt.61 So the Bolt is almost certainly by Gay and has an appropriate west country emphasis, stemming from a local antiquarian milieu: the Cangic giants are the people of Somerset (Glad-er-haf, as the author Celtically calls it), the Stanings are a local family.62 But Anaraith is a newly-named version of Andraste or Andate, Boudicca’s Icenian Victory goddess (described under both names by the Roman historian Cassius Dio), ‘a manlie virago’ as the text explains.63 Gay evidently imagines her cult to have been a widespread one.64 He quotes Gildas’ description of idols to show what Anaraith’s might have been like, and proudly claims that Gildas came from Bath. But for all the text’s assertiveness, the continuing difficulties that Christian writers experienced in speculating about, and thus potentially coming to

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feel affection for, pagan deities is evident. The tract is prefaced by the dismissive rectorly remark that Stonehenge was ‘some heathenish Temple demolished by the immediate hand of God’ as a reminder of his power, ‘dissuading us from looking back in our hearts upon any thing of idolatry’. Gay then indulges freely in this, apparently without irony, also suggesting that Salisbury was Sol’s bury and featured a temple to the god Sol, the sun.65 Anaraith must have a male counterpart, it appears. Under one of her more conventional names, she is also the chosen goddess of the fourth opinion on Gibson’s list, that of Edmund Bolton, whose Nero-Caesar: or Monarchie Depraved was published in London as far back as 1624. It is a history of Boudicca’s (‘Bunduca’) rebellion, suggesting that even the most tyrannical monarchy is better than revolt and portraying British religion as ‘hellish’ conspiratorial savagery, a druidic ‘conjuratorie secret’ dedicated to Andate.66 Bolton was a Catholic, which makes his portrayal of ancient British religion as possessing the traits typically associated with Catholics – conspiracy, bloodthirstiness and superstition – an interesting reversal, since druids represent contemporary antimonarchist, puritanical forces in his text. Bolton’s Nero-Caesar was one of several works in which he staked an ultimately unsuccessful claim to antiquarian learning, and he died without a patron and in poverty.67 But Gay’s later Fool’s Bolt – perhaps from the mid-1660s as Gibson suggests – shows clearly the democratization of antiquarian scholarship after the Civil War and the confidence and inventiveness of the god-smithing that went with it. Bolton would have flourished far more readily a mere 40 years later. Gay, after all, was a provincial rector whose name had been lost from his work: yet his manuscript was carefully preserved, edited and published by those who could not get enough of the kind of speculation it contained. The final suggestion of a Romano-British deity for Stonehenge (Gibson’s fifth opinion) is that of the architect and masque-designer Inigo Jones. His belief is recorded in The Most Notable Antiquity of Great-Britain … Stone-Heng … Restored (1655), a work edited and published, more than 30 years after its inception, by his pupil John Webb and defended further in Webb’s A Vindication of Stone-Heng Restored (1665).68 Jones had been asked to survey Stonehenge by James I and to offer an opinion on its origin. And his choice of dedicatory deity was unique: the ‘sky’ or ‘heavens’, in the person of Caelus, who was (like the Greek Uranus) a sky-god and perhaps of Greek origin. In Webb’s book, he records accounts of circular Thracian temples dedicated to Sol, which Jones may have considered in his attribution, and debates other possible dedicatees: Diana and Pan in particular. But Caelus is preferred because of the temple’s open site, open roof, circular form (like temples to Vesta, who was often paired with Caelus), its apparent age (Caelus was an early god), the fact that cattle bones had been found there (and these were favourite sacrifices to Caelus), the pyramidal shape of some of the stones (like ethereal fires, apparently) and because the temple’s geometry and numerical symbolism seemed to refer to the celestial zodiac. The Most Notable Antiquity likened Stonehenge to Solomon’s Temple since both were dedicated to

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heavenly gods and concluded that the temple was, like other works of the mature Roman empire, ‘manly and perfect’ in its scientific and aesthetic achievement.69 In rejecting the idea that Britons had built the henge, Jones also considered the Andate theory, adding a revenge goddess to the Druidic pantheon by splitting Andate[s] from A[n]draste as he did so. He thought that the ‘British Nomades’, as Walter Raleigh had called them, venerated as their ‘dea optima maxima’ the goddess of victory, Andates, and the subsidiary goddess of revenge, Adraste (whom he likens to the classical Victoria and Nemesis). But he rejected the idea that they had built Stonehenge for these goddesses since he had found no evidence in classical works that the British or their druids were skilful architects, mathematicians or sculptors.70 It also seems likely that a god rather than a goddess was the desired outcome for a task so inseparable from ‘manly’ celebration of divine kingship and imperial ambition. Although Jones and Webb’s Caelus did not catch on, he fitted well into the notion that British pagan deity was a monotheistic, masculine affair. With these opinions failing to find widespread favour, Aubrey’s opinion was to dominate writing about the period for the next two centuries and still remains the basis for many popular literary representations of ‘Celtic’ or ‘Romano-British’ paganism – even though Stonehenge’s builders have been decisively relocated to the Neolithic period. On the whole, modern writers have separated druidry from Christianity. But in the eighteenth century, the pagan and the Christian were pulled closer together than at any time before or since, as antiquaries thought through the supposed beliefs of the Britons and their eastern sources. This could only occur after puritanism had been ousted from its primacy in English politics and ecclesiastical life in the years from 1660 onward, as Hutton shows.71 This ousting meant a new freedom to speculate about the priestly classes of ancient Britain: prelates, presbyters, classes, synods and the doctrines that they had and had not debated. And it also meant a greater tolerance for antiquarian speculation about non-Christian deities. Many antiquaries, however, also moved in the direction of compromise with the newly high-church Protestant establishment, in that they often preferred the imagination of male rather than female deities. This made a syncretic vision of proto-Christian Britons being easily converted (back) to the new faith easier to manage. It was a long way from Dianaworshippers to Jesus Christ; it was less far from Hercules, Teutates or Belenus. In this way, paradoxically, late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars laid the foundation for Sir James Frazer’s speculations on Attis, Adonis and Osiris as the mythic ancestors of Jesus Christ, which was to come and will be discussed in Chapter 5.

Hercules: Celtic linguist and megalithic builder Some of the most enduring groundwork for future speculation was done by John Toland in his Critical History of the Celtic Religion, based on three lengthy letters to Robert, Viscount Molesworth written in 1718.Toland did not contribute to the

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proto-Christianity hypothesis – indeed he was opposed to it, as a deist. Deists were a diverse group, with their emphasis – as the name suggests – on God rather than his human ministers or established churches. In scholarship on paganism, they focused on an exploration of the simultaneous growth of various religions from God himself, as against their origin in one common human being such as Abraham or Noah. The earliest major deist writer was Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who in his humane and kindly The Antient Religion of the Gentiles argued that there was truth among even the ‘superstitions’ of pagans.72 Toland came from a similar background of questioning received wisdom and as part of that he suggested a new place to look for evidence of ancient religion: Ireland. He was himself an Irish convert from Catholicism trying to make his way as a scholar in England. By divesting himself of all associations with Catholicism, he hoped to convince English readers of his acceptability, and attacking the druids’ religion, with its supposed ceremonies, vestments and sacred priesthood, was thus a way of repudiating his upbringing. Toland described druidic religion as one of ‘fraudulent superstitions … barbarous tyranny … ’ and ‘authority incompatible with the power of the magistrate’ – all things that had been alleged about Irish Catholicism.73 But, more importantly for the long-term history of writing on pagan deities, Toland’s work made an influential claim that the language and antiquities of Ireland might help to unlock the mysteries of ancient religion.74 This needed spelling out to English readers, accustomed since at least Spenser’s time to think of Ireland as savage and full of ignorant rebels – hardly a fount of ancient wisdom: no revolution that has befallen any or all of the Celtic colonies, can be a just prejudice against the truly antient and undoubted monuments they may be able to furnish, towards improving or restoring any point of Learning.75 This rehabilitation of Irish prehistory was new, and especially powerful when joined with the contemporary work of Edward Lhuyd on the Welsh language, one of the connections that Toland made as he explored the meanings of various Celtic words and place-names and what they could tell the reader about ancient beliefs and rites.76 Celtic languages and cultures were being linked and reclaimed as a vital connection to the British past. It was an influential theory that transformed writing on ancient religion and culture. For example, an 1814 edition of Toland’s book was prefaced by its publisher Robert Huddleston, who stated honestly that his own classical education (at Edinburgh University) had given him every possible prejudice against the Celts. I was, from my infancy, taught to consider them a parcel of demi-savages, their language an unintelligible jargon, and their boasted antiquity the raving of a disordered imagination.

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On reading Toland, however, he began to believe that lost learning could be recovered from Irish culture. As a schoolmaster (at Lunan, Angus), Huddleston was ideally positioned to disseminate his new-found enthusiasm for Celts, and it was in small conversions of this kind that the Celtic Revival grew. Huddleston published not just Toland’s work, but also Holinshed’s, and contributed his own antiquarian speculations to various publications such as the Edinburgh Magazine. He defended the poet James Macpherson from accusations that he had himself written the poems of the Scottish Homer ‘Ossian’ (which he had, but Huddleston was not to know that) and assisted in various learned and literary enterprises in Montrose and London.77 And he was joined in his publication of Toland’s History at Montrose by subscribers such as excise-men, postmasters and stationers: almost a century after Toland wrote, his middleclass Scottish readers were making their own claim to ownership of Celtic pagan religion.78 Among many gifts to later writing on the subject Toland explained the Gallic name Ogmius, one of Sammes’ favourite deities, as relating to the ancient Irish alphabet Ogham and its inventor, Hercules, whom he thought to be an allegory of speech – a deified attribute rather than a deified hero.79 ‘Even metaphors and epithets have been transform’d into Gods’, Toland said, blaming superstitious priests for such mistakes. He connected Hercules-Ogmius to ‘the Danannan race’, the tuatha dé danann early settlers of Irish mythological stories, which he had researched in ‘many antient Manuscripts’. This would have important effects later on when this ‘race’ was re-imagined as a pantheon, which Ogmius or Ogma joined. Toland helped to begin this process by identifying heroic figures from the stories like Manannan as the children of deities such as ‘Lear, or the God of the Sea’, later ‘Lir’.80 In some cases he modified existing speculation: he thought the Irish stone idols and cairns described by Christian missionaries might have been widespread across Britain, where they were mistaken by Romans for ‘herms’, representations of Mercury. In Greece, square stones and stone heaps represented Mercury or Hermes as a boundary-god, and seeing the standing stones and cairns of Britain the Romans, thought Toland, had naturally concluded that Mercury was the Britons’ favourite deity. Instead he associated such stones with sites where contemporary Irish people celebrated the festival of Beltane, and thought them linked to Belenus or Belin – back to Selden again. In Manx and Breton, he additionally noted, the syllable ‘bel’ was still part of words for priests.81 Finally, he imagined Scottish stone circles as the round Hyperborean temple of Apollo mentioned by Diodorus (and Selden), where a writer thought then to be the Greek geographer Eratosthenes had said Apollo’s sacred arrow might be hidden.82 He backed up this appealing claim by reference to the altarstone of Apollo Grannus found near Edinburgh and described by Camden. Apollo and Belenus were both sun-gods, and thus interchangeable, so it could be inferred that Belenus’ worship was conducted in circular stone temples like Stonehenge.83 All these mixed Celtic and classical deities would recur in later fiction, given new bearings and life by Toland.

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Toland’s work also inspired a final influential re-imagining of ancient British religion, this time with a Phoenician Hercules featuring prominently as the carrier of proto-Christianity from the east. Yet for all his fame as a writer on paganism, most of William Stukeley’s work on the nature of religion was intended to offer a comprehensive account of the truth of the Christian revelation, as befitted a clergyman and successor of Harrison. Initially, following Aubrey and Toland, in the early 1720s Stukeley attributed Stonehenge to the evidently pagan druids.84 By 1740, he had, however, developed an understanding of druidry and Christianity as parallel, to the point of explaining away even druidic human sacrifice as a misinterpretation of Old and New Testament stories: It is remarkable that the Romans, who were so catholic (different from those we now absurdly call Roman catholics) as to permit all religions, persecuted only that of the Druids, and the Christian: whence we are naturally led to think, there was a good deal of resemblance. Indeed, the Druids are accused of human sacrifices. They crucified a man and burnt him on the altar; which seems to be a most extravagant act of superstition, deriv’d from some extraordinary notices they had of mankind’s redemption: and perhaps from Abraham’s example misunderstood.85 As part of this scholarly and spiritual journey, Stukeley had presented himself to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a candidate for ordination in 1729 with the claim that his antiquarian knowledge would allow him to confute the church’s critics. He was quickly ordained and given a fine living and from then on he argued in print and manuscript that ancient Britons had had access to a protoChristian religion by the good graces of the Egyptians or – later – Phoenicians who had brought such knowledge to the druids. Stukeley’s new ideas drew on Bale and Harrison as transmitted by Camden, whom he called ‘the sun of antiquity’.86 So conventional, in some ways, was Stukeley’s claim that he could precis his variant of the proto-Christianity hypothesis in a few prefatory lines in his 1740 work Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids. ‘My studies … have produc’d a vast quantity of drawings and writing’, he explained, some of which could be summed up as a delineation of the first and patriarchal religion, from the best light we can gather in the sacred history; and from the most ancient heathen customs, which were remains of that religion. In this Treatise is it shewn, that the first religion was no other than Christianity, the Mosaic dispensation, as a veil, intervening; that all mankind from the creation had a knowledge of the plurality of persons in the Deity … The patriarchal history, particularly of Abraham, is largely pursu’d; and the deduction of the Phoenician colony into the Island of Britain, about or soon after his time; whence the origin of the Druids, of their Religion and writing; they brought the patriarchal

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Religion along with them … they had the notion and expectation of the Messiah. … 87 So far, so neat. Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock and Ronald Hutton, however, have all rightly pointed to the many internal contradictions, over the course of a long writing life, in Stukeley’s thought.88 Indeed, the passage above gives a falsely brusque account of the range and peculiarity of his theories. Stukeley asserted that Stonehenge and Avebury were not only druidic temples, but that each took the form of a circle with a serpent crossing it, together with subsidiary circles dedicated to the planets, Mercury (pace Toland) and so on. He had, in the late 1720s, laid out a druidic temple in his garden and buried his stillborn baby there. So, as Hutton suggests, his investment in paganism was deeply felt and highly idiosyncratic even as he accepted a Christian vocation.89 But he had in other ways been as consistent and transparent in his version of Christianity as many of the other writers examined so far: not very, in other words, but not so much so as to attract formal censure either. This perhaps explains his immediate success in entering the ministry and his long tenure in post. It also contextualizes the fact that although his contemporaries often mocked him or worried about his oddity, some of his views on protoChristianity (if not their serpentine details) prevailed so widely among receptive groups during his lifetime and after his death.

A pagan enlightenment? Like Spenser, Milton, and the supporting cast of this and the previous chapter for that matter, Stukeley put forward notions about paganism that should have been shocking and repellent, but actually did not offend. A compulsive interest in paganism was thus far more mainstream in early modern and early-eighteenthcentury British culture than we might imagine from the vast and weighty literature of Christianity, heresy and sectarian controversy from those times and from the widely-held perception that such matters only became prominent in Romantic discourse after about 1750. In fact, paganism continued to occupy a largely unchallenged position as a field of poetic inspiration and scholarly endeavour, sitting challengingly but quietly alongside its Christian neighbour, as it had done from the earliest medieval writings on the subject onwards. Such an apparent contradiction is very hard to map meaningfully, especially given the huge time-span involved and the very broad range of ideas, both welland (very) ill-defined. For example, from one angle much of the work discussed so far looks like outrageous blasphemy (‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ states Exodus 20, the first commandment), while from another it is a perfectly acceptable relativist understanding of Christianity. Critical thinkers have been sharply divided about whether the eighteenth century, in particular, saw the quiet conversion of a mass of intellectuals, from David Hume to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to atheism, deism or outright paganism. Peter Gay’s

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The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism offers a straightforward reading: enlightenment thinkers adopted the manners and philosophies of classical pagans wholesale.90 But his view, a sweeping polemic on behalf of secularism in many ways, is equally straightforwardly rejected by Willis B. Glover as ‘misleading’. Glover suggests that: … the men [sic] of the Enlightenment quoted classical authors when it served their purpose and found, or thought they found, in classical history and literature illustrations of their own ideas; they even continued to learn from the ancient pagans as Christians had done since ancient times; but their own outlook and interests were essentially different … The Enlightened were pagan in the sense that they were not Christian, but very close identification of the Enlightenment with ancient, classical paganism obscures the originality of modern humanism and its historical relationship to the Biblical-Christian tradition.91 Yet even the notion of ‘not being Christian’ opens a can of worms – how is one to define ‘non-Christian’, given what we have seen so far? Where is the line between a burning antiquarian interest or the heartfelt invocation of a pagan muse and the loss or questioning of Christian faith? Clearly many of the writers discussed knew exactly where the line was, and remained on the Christian side of it in their daily lives and private prayers. Many must have questioned, but not recorded their internal debate. I suspect that for each writer the line might have been in a different place. In summary, however, viewed in the context of the longer story of medieval and renaissance writings on paganism, the eighteenth century is less of a special case. It does not represent an unprecedented break with the past or throw up a wholly new set of challenges. Its views on paganism and their literary representations of it were new in some respects, but in other respects were extremely traditional: the difference was in the number of contributors to debate, their diversity and the detail into which they went in their various interpretations of pagan deity. By the mid-eighteenth century, the wholly pious proto-Christianity hypothesis had a clear lead in scholarly circles, championed – though idiosyncratically – by the prolific and noisy Stukeley. It was most profitable (in every sense of the word) for writers to take this line or a close parallel to it, although no one was willing to take Stukeley’s uniquely assertive tone. Instead a comfortable indefiniteness was the ideal.92

Pure divinities and superior beings Two examples of this implicit but completely non-committal endorsement of proto-Christianity come from two of the most successful and influential literary works of the mid-eighteenth century: surely no coincidence. The first is the Yorkshire chaplain William Mason’s Caractacus of 1759. Although Mason was bold in his treatment of druidic priests, they and his deities are very

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self-contradictory. The dramatic poem features a druid religious service, at which the Chorus associates the king and the rites with ‘gaunt Revenge, ensanguin’d Slaughter,/And mad Ambition …’ very much like Bonduca’s religion in Fletcher’s play. Here once again is the valkyrie-like Andraste who immortalizes the fame of those who die in battle. The Brigantes swear ‘by Andraste’s throne’ and the central oak of the grove contains ‘the spirit of high Taranis’. But there is clearly a wider pantheon as well as these named deities and here there is room to associate druidic religion with light, peace and wisdom: the ‘gods’ benevolently warn Caractacus’ daughter Evilina of the Brigantes’ treachery (‘Oft to the purity of virgin souls/Doth heav’n its voluntary light dispense,/When victims bleed in vain’) and we hear also of ‘Heaven’s pure Divinities’. These gods are anti-slavery: the Chorus rebukes Aulus Didius with the words ‘would … to heav’n,/Ye reverenc’d the gods but ev’n enough/Not to debase with slavery’s cruel chain,/ What they created free’. There is a worrying reference to human sacrifice, but any such unChristian act is averted by a Roman victory. The Romans, although miffed at the near-immolation, are magnanimous to the druids – as Hutton remarks, Mason ‘mangled even the apparently known historical facts beyond recognition’: Ye bloody priests … Did not our laws give licence to all faiths, We would o’erturn your altars, headlong heave These shapeless symbols of your barbarous gods … Instead, however, they spare the groves and they and the druids live happily ever after. Mason finished the poem with notes on his druidic religion, drawn from, among others, Camden, Selden and Toland. Even here, nothing is quite definite: the notion that humans might have been sacrificed in Britain is rebutted firmly, while in a note hidden away on page 94, Mason also says ‘the Druids did not really worship the divinity under any symbol’. Apparently the play’s Romans have got their anthropological observations wrong and no idolatry is going on.93 Contradictions abound. But it was exactly this fuzzy fantasy of alternative deities hinted at but kept mistily pleasant and horrid rites never quite enacted that the public wanted. The poem was a bestseller, running to six editions and a play within the next 20 years.94 The second work depicting nearly-Christian Britons was inspired by the first, and was by the Inverness-shire schoolmaster James Macpherson. In 1760, Macpherson published what was essentially a literary forgery, inventing a deity all of his own in doing so. His Fragments of Ancient Poetry was a collection largely composed by him and enlarged in 1765 into The Works of Ossian, but it was presented as a translation of the orally-transmitted remains of a group of poets working in Scotland in the third century AD.95 As we have seen, wish-fulfilment played a large part in eighteenth-century speculations on antiquity, as it had done in the past, and (partly because of the growing fashion for Gothic and

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Anglo-Saxon medievalism discussed in Chapter 4) Macpherson’s work was received by many with delight. Others, however, made accusations of transparent fraud, summed up after Macpherson’s death by the historian Malcolm Laing. It may be that Macpherson did incorporate elements from Scottish folk-tales into his work (a softer version of his own claim re-adopted by recent scholarship), but if so he shaped them into a surprisingly harmonious epic. Further, its names, plots and religion bear little resemblance to anything known (at the time or since) from related literature or archaeological finds.96 One of the poems’ peculiarities is its sole spirit-figure or god, Loda. Yet Loda is not reverenced by the group of heroes that is supposed to have produced the poems, Fingal king of Morven, his warrior-poets Ossian and Ullin, his sons and grandsons. Instead, Loda appears to be the deity of their antagonists, invading northerners such as Starno and Swaran. He is associated with stone monuments and circles, weaponry and armour, trees, the souls of warriors, protection in battle, meteors, clouds and the night sky. He sends signs and winds to help those who submit to him and request help. He is a curiously human creature who seems to owe a good deal to Milton’s Satan, and Fingal confronts him in the ‘fragment’ ‘Carric-Thura’: a blast came from the mountain, on its wings was the spirit of Loda. He came to his place in his terrors, and shook his dusky spear. His eyes appear like flames in his dark face; his voice is like distant thunder … [Fingal addresses him]: ‘Son of night, retire: call thy winds and fly! Why dost thou come to my presence with thy shadowy arms? Do I fear thy gloomy form, spirit of dismal Loda? Weak is thy shield of clouds: feeble is that meteor, thy sword! The blast rolls them together; and thou thyself art lost. Fly from my presence, son of night! Call thy winds and fly!’ ‘Dost thou force me from my place?’ replied the hollow voice. ‘The people bend before me. I turn the battle in the field of the brave. I look on the nations, and they vanish: my nostrils pour the blast of death. I come abroad on the winds; the tempests are before my face. But my dwelling is calm, above the clouds … the fields of my rest are pleasant.’97 Fingal draws his sword and ‘the gleaming path of the steel winds through the gloomy ghost. The form fell shapeless into air … the spirit of Loda shrieked, as, rolled into himself, he rose on the wind.’ The spirit continues to help Fingal’s opponents but his power is badly dented. This is the clearest description we get of Loda, on the basis of which he is ‘supposed to be the ancient Odin’ in one of Macpherson’s editorial headnotes to the poems. This was a nicely tentative identification and widely accepted as authoritative, especially because Hugh Blair’s ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’ in which it is echoed was printed with the poems from 1765.98 But it was not received well by all. William Stukeley wrote to Macpherson to congratulate him on his editorial work but added:

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I must beg leave to differ from your exposition of the spirit of Loda; as if it meant Woden, or some idol of the Scandinavians. The poet means nothing more, than the aerial spirit of a deceased hero. After all, Britain was proto-Christian, so that it was wrong to suggest any of the poem’s characters might have been practising ‘idolatry’.99 By the 1820s, still believing the poems to be third-century originals, the French revolutionary scholar Eusebe Salverte was arguing that Loda was a ‘Celtic’ deity, not a Scandinavian one, whose oracles were manipulated by the druids.100 Funnily enough, both he and Stukeley acquitted Macpherson of literary forgery but did not accept the author’s theory about the deity that he had himself invented. Similarly, although in a different spirit, in 1800 Laing poured scorn on the idea that Norwegians and Danes had occupied the Scottish isles before the eighth century and argued that Loda was a name ‘which has no affinity to the twelve names of Odin’. He explained with painful plausibility how Macpherson lifted the name from a Danish history where it was associated with stone temples, because he was ‘afraid to introduce the Scandinavian deity into his poems by name’ and thus invented another.101 Whatever the ‘truth’ Macpherson intended his readers to believe, he made Loda marginal: a sinister and fallible deity, highly localized and capable of wounding by unbelievers, although sublime and misty.102 We may infer, therefore, that he did not much want to commit himself to an exploration of pagan detail and in opposing Loda, the hero Fingal and his friends must simply be imagined to be exercising a Christian-like virtue. Macpherson certainly commented in his notes that ‘it lets us into Ossian’s notions of a superior Being; and shews that he was not addicted to the superstition which prevailed all the world over, before the introduction of Christianity’.103 But if they do not succumb to superstitious addiction, in what do Fingal’s party believe? If they seem to be proto-Christians, then it is also true that they are given no statement of belief and no deity of their own is represented. Paganism of some sort (an Irish-Scottish-Danish blend?) is rejected in the Ossianic poems, but nothing explicit is put in its place. It seems likely, surveying the ‘confused heap’ of beliefs attributed to ancient Britons in this chapter, that Macpherson was unsure about what they ought to believe and in which deities to place his trust. He played safe by alluding to a non-superstitious ‘superior Being’ of possibly non-British origin and left readers to do the rest.

New deities, new Britain By 1760, the more blurred the line between good proto-Christian gods and dreadful heathen idols the better: Mason and Macpherson were both very successful writers because they knew exactly what they were doing in leaving religious details vague. Rather ironically, they had carried on a much longer tradition of syncretic blurring based on equating classical deities with the Christian

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god and then changed the pagan element to suit their own needs. Classical deities were no longer so fashionable among more radical writers of the second half of the eighteenth century. This was partly a patriotic impulse: Andate/Andraste at least could be seen to be a British goddess, however problematic, while Taranis was European-Celtic and we have seen how Toland’s notion of the Celtic past was making that term more acceptable (whatever precisely it meant). Hercules and Mercury could not be seen in the same proprietorial way. The legacy of fictions such as Cymbeline and Bonduca and scholarly studies such as Camden’s Britannia in eighteenth-century literature was in part one of nationalistic pride – in prehistory, Britain had come to terms with the Roman empire, but now she had replaced it. The history of the goddess Britannia perfectly encapsulates this newly-imagined imperial might. She had been recognized in Britain in Roman times, embodying the spirit of the Roman province of Britain in inscriptions like the ones to her at York and Auchendavy, the latter as ‘genio terrae Britannicae’.104 But by the mid-eighteenth century her image had been revived and revamped to suggest the military and naval power of the unified kingdoms with her shield (often bearing the union flag) and trident and she was being portrayed in political cartoons, heroic murals and on coins. James Thomson wrote a poem to her in 1740 (‘Rule Britannia! Rule the waves … ’) which was adopted as a patriotic song second only to the national anthem.105 Such localized deities replaced the older classical models in some sections of the literary world as Romanticism triumphed over classicism. The whiff of the exotic was still there, through ever-wilder syncretism, but the deities were on balance more British. Imperatives conflicted. Mason and Macpherson inspired many imitators in trying to imagine prehistoric British religion as: 1) virtuously proto-Christian; 2) titillatingly pagan; 3) excitingly exotic; and 4) excitingly local.106 Just how local individual visions could be is suggested by the Devonshire antiquary Richard Polwhele, who in 1797 wrote a study of his own region under both its modern name and its ancient one, Damnonium (Dumnonia, incorporating Cornwall). Here he is having his cake and eating it on the subject of ‘the religion of Damnonium’, which is piously proto-Christian, bloodily pagan, exotic and highly localized: so striking was its character of sanctity and wisdom, that it attracted the attention of the more learned and inquisitive among the Gauls … This religion was Druidism. Among the rites of Druidism, it was human sacrifice, which chiefly astonished the nations of Europe … At first, there is no doubt but the Druids offered up their human victims with views the most sublime … It points out, I think, THE ONE GREAT SACRIFICE FOR THE SINS OF THE WHOLE WORLD! But after the Phenician colonies had mixed with the primeval Britons, this degenerated priesthood delighted in human blood … We have, also, places in Damnonium, which retain the names of Mars and of Mercury … temples were erected to Belisama, or the Queen of Heaven … Onca, at Bath … sacred buildings

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were probably frequented at the Start-point, by the votaries of Astarte, and at the promontory of Hertland, by the worshippers of Hercules … 107 Landscape features are believed to be ancient sacred sites simply because ‘Start Point’ sounds like ‘Astarte’ and Hartland can be forced to resemble ‘Hercules’. Polwhele found numerous hamlets and tors that seemed to him obviously to be named after pagan deities, and made great play of the belief that the south-west had been one of the last refuges of Celtic culture upon the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. This granted him a share of the respect accorded to Toland as an interpreter of western antiquities not well-known in wider debate and set him up as an authority of the subject of ancient religion.

Radical and conservative Romanticisms Similarly on a very personal journey in the footsteps of Harrison, Stukeley and co. was the engraver William Blake, who took vagueness to new levels in his ecstatic but cryptic visions of alternative religion. Blake was not interested in commercial success but rather in following the windings of his own imagination, which he regarded as divinely inspired. Tapping into the Romantic desire for feeling freed from scholarly and theological convention – of which Mason and Macpherson had been pioneers – he tied together the antiquarian and poetic strands explored in this chapter with images of megaliths alongside reflections on druidry, the failings of modern Christianity and prehistoric animism. As we have seen, by the mid-century Stonehenge was well established as the primary location for disputes about the nature of the ancient British god(s).108 Blake created iconic images of the monument that would haunt later imaginings as he and his wife Catherine made illustrated, reverse-etched books of great beauty. The Blakes represent a further democratization of the ability to speculate about Britain’s pagan past, for William was a working man, the son of a hosier, and Catherine was illiterate until her husband taught her to read and write. Yet William felt able to comment on the Bale–Harrison hypothesis and took its implications profoundly seriously: Was Britain the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion? … It is True, and cannot be controverted. Ye are united O ye Inhabitants of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel … ‘All things Begin & End in Albions Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.’[sic]109 Like Harrison, Blake believed true religion had been practised in ancient Britain, but he went further in appearing to believe that it had originated there – ‘all things begin …’, as Hutton notes. Blake’s prophetic voice is hard to interpret, and it is not clear how far he meant this to be taken literally. But whatever the case, he had to show how this patriarchal proto-Christianity had been lost and

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what kind of paganism had replaced it. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he explained: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood … Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast [sic].110 The druids and ‘their’ monuments represented fallen religion: originally good but now exploitative of the labour of monument-builders and destructive of the human spirit. As part of this mythology of wicked priests, Blake drew on Milton’s imagery of Apollo as the god who had inspired his original poetic vocation but then had to be banished. Blake shows him as a toppled statue posed in front of Stonehenge, alluding to the notion first popularized by Selden that Apollo was the Hyperborean god of stone circles.111 In a sense, Blake was saying that just as early Britons mistakenly worshipped Apollo, so modern Christians worshipped false gods. He despised what religion had become in the hands of the clergymen of the established churches. Brothels, he wrote, were built with ‘bricks of Religion’ and much of what conventional Christians had consigned to Hell was in fact good: ‘every thing that lives is Holy’, including rebellion, anger and sexual desire.112 Established churches, thought Blake, favoured not the real Jesus Christ (an outspoken, passionate radical) but ‘Antichrist Creeping Jesus’ (a milksop yes-man). ‘God wants not Man to Humble himself’, he concluded, and never had done: ‘All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus … Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.’113 Blake anticipates some of the righteous atheist and socialist wrath that was to be articulated through prehistoric fictions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first: a belief that established religion was from very early times an oppressive force for evil, with a good god (if there was one) turned evil in the limited minds of his supposed worshippers. Other Romantic poets also explored the notion that established religion stood in opposition to a more natural spirituality and some, like Robert Southey, wrote explicitly about pagan deities (see Chapter 4). William Wordsworth was vaguer. He had a sense that the British landscape embodied a natural piety and force of some kind: he wrote of a ‘Soul that art the eternity of thought’, the ‘Souls of lonely places’ and their ‘ministry’ among the Lakeland mountains and a ‘Spirit in the woods’. But like so many other writers, he did not commit himself further.114 As Margot Louis shows, he hedged his bets spectacularly in ‘The Excursion’ of 1814 when he discussed the notion of ‘a spiritual presence’,

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associating himself surprisingly with such fundamentalist Christians as covenanters whom he compared to ‘bewildered Pagans’ in their perception that outdoor worship was best. He then left the idea of paganism floating within a broadly Christian framework of tolerance and benignity, having also described a ‘dismal service’ of human sacrifice to Taranis. Louis suggests that such ‘Wordsworthian strategies of reconciliation’ played a major part in allowing Victorian Hellenism to grow, while Hutton is blunter: Wordsworth was ‘having it both ways’.115 It may be that this facilitated Victorian scholarship and creative writing on pagan subjects, or this may be part of the longer tradition explored so far. Certainly Romanticism and Victorian culture had a strong pagan–classical streak, with John Keats and Percy Shelley tending towards the mystery and power embodied in Greek religion rather than in ancient Britain and John Ruskin continuing a tradition of classical reference that led on to Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold’s work on Hellenism (see Chapter 3).116 And, as we shall see in Chapter 5, in the later nineteenth century, scholars of mythography and Greek drama would bring their insights back to Britain with revolutionary effect on notions of local prehistory. But there was far less enthusiasm for speculations on British paganism in the first half of the nineteenth-century culture than there had been in the eighteenth. Druids and their supposed religion recurred frequently in literature but they followed models established in the previous century.117 Blake’s avowedly radical beliefs thus stand in direct opposition to those of most of the combatants in the ongoing debate. He had some evident successors, notably the deliciously subversive Godfrey Higgins (see Chapter 3). But on the whole antiquarians in the first half of the nineteenth century were conservative men. Many were southern English clergymen who had easy access to Stonehenge and Avebury and the wealth and leisure to examine and research them. Their texts were marked by a most unBlakeian caution. Almost all took the trouble to specify their Christianity, no matter how polytheistic their theories were. For example, the poet and canon of Salisbury cathedral William Lisle Bowles argued in 1828 that the druids – to whom he attributed Stonehenge and Avebury’s stone circles – had worshipped Lucan’s Taranis and Teutates. On the grounds that ‘taran’ was ‘Celtic’ for thunder, while ‘tan’ meant fire, he preferred the name ‘Tanarus’ and suggested that Tan Hill near Avebury was so-called after the thunder-god. The naming of the hill above pointed to the idea that the stone circle below was dedicated to Teutates, imagined as the lowly messenger of gods such as Mercury. Mercury had been named by Caesar as the most popular god in Britain and was associated with stones as Toland had said, and this must be Teutates, while Taranis/Tanarus resembled Jupiter. Everything added up to a theory that he thought ‘coherent and natural’. Pushing his luck further, however, Lisle Bowles followed Sammes in suggesting that Teutates/Mercury was a version of the Egyptian god Thoth (the link being made by Greek scholars who equated Thoth with Hermes) and that the ever-popular Phoenicians had brought him with them on their travels north. This was all very exciting. But on

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page 22 Lisle Bowles was clear about the ease with which these theories could be reconciled with his own Christian profession: One thing must be kept in mind, – though the popular deities of the Celts were thus distinctly recognized, the secret worship of the Druids was of ONE infinite GOD of all, as he was worshipped in Egypt, notwithstanding the multiplicity of Egyptian deities. The priestly caste had access to arcane wisdom, then. For them, all these gods were one and they were not tainted by polytheistic confusions; in much the same way that cathedral clergy like Lisle Bowles would not be expected to indulge in the superstitions of contemporary labourers (or engravers like Blake either). But for all his italics and capitals, commas and dashes, this was actually far from easy for the reader to remember as deities multiplied throughout his book. Bowles was an important influence on the three-volume novel Stonehenge by Malachi Mouldy (a pseudonym of Henry Godwin), which was written in 1842. Here the druids are practically saints. Their main god is Taranis, but so changed from the tyrant of Fletcher’s Bunduca that he is barely recognizable. He manifests himself only naturally and explicably, in thunderstorms: he is not really a god in anything but name. Other equally shy gods lurk in the background: Apollo, Hesus ‘the British Mars’, ‘Teut’ and Thoth are known, and we are told that a range of deities were worshipped in other places that the Arch-Druid has visited. Adraste is sweetened up like Taranis: she is described implausibly as ‘the British Venus’, rather than a blood-hungry harpy. The only potentially troublesome moment for the proto-Christianity hypothesis comes when the Stonehenge druids sing a hymn to the moon under the title ‘Hymn to the Queen of Heaven’ in which they celebrate the transmigration of souls: Hail, thou beauteous Queen of Night! Who dost teach mankind their fate; When extinguished seems thy light, Brighter glories thee await; Waxing, waning, to our eye Thou mayst change, but canst not die. So the soul released from life, Animates some other form … Yet even this foreshadows Christianity’s notions of an afterlife, and it is clear that just as Taranis is now only a natural force the moon is just the moon, not a goddess that pious Victorian readers need to worry about. Mouldy quotes Lucan, Ausonius, Geoffrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, Drayton, Borlase, Gibson’s Camden, Mason, Macpherson, Wordsworth, Lisle Bowles and other luminaries to bolster his claims to knowledge of the goodness of British ancient religion, and elements

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repugnant to Christianity are almost wholly removed or attributed to less holy groups – foreigners, usually. The British Arch-Druid and his daughter convert easily to Christianity, and Joseph of Arimathea is warmly received in Britain at the end of volume three.118 One thing helped to make this link between pagan and Christian gods, however: as we have seen, Lisle Bowles and many of his predecessors and contemporaries preferred male deities to female ones. Returning for a moment to the Brutus myth, Lisle Bowles considered briefly that Tan Hill might have been sacred to Diana, but he rejected the idea out of hand. The hill was sacred to Taranis, not Saint Anne or Diana or other sound-alike female names. The same gender reassignment happened to the deity of Bath, Sulis Minerva. Sulis is described as a goddess in inscriptions and a bronze head, most likely of a statue of a goddess, was found in 1727, but Lisle Bowles thought the name more likely to refer to Sol, the sun-god.119 The ‘gorgon’ face excavated at Bath represented, for him, this Sol, who was linked with Belenus or Apollo (Selden again) and the Phoenician god Bel/Baal (Sammes).120 All was well, then: these gods could all be likened to the Christian god, ‘the ONE infinite GOD of all’. But things were already changing. These male deities lost ground to goddesses as the Woman Question came to interest writers on paganism after 1850.

3 SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW Pagan deities from the first Celtic Revival to the mid-twentieth century

That Taliesin was thoroughly initiated in these mysteries is evident from several of his poems, which have neither head or tail, and which, having no sense in any other point of view, must necessarily, as a learned mythologist has demonstrated, be assigned to the class of theology … Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin Onward, heathen so-oldiers – George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter

By the Romantic era, the hypothesis that pre-Roman pagans had worshipped a single male god had established itself in scholarship and fiction. Many accounts portrayed the god as very much like the Christian god (give or take the odd human sacrifice or other misinterpretation of patriarchal truth). Yet this comfortable narrative was to be challenged with increasing success by writing about new gods and goddesses as the nineteenth century went on. The textual and ethnic background of the deities was re-imagined, moving away from classical and other Mediterranean sources toward Indian, Irish and Welsh ones. And there would also be a change in the way that paganism was explored in culture. While it continued to be written about by scholars and some creative writers, it also began to be a lived experience rather than a textual one for some people, especially from the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter will examine these three inter-related cultural shifts: from gods to goddesses; from classical and Romano-British deities to Indian and Celtic; and from art to life (and back again). In the first half of the twentieth century, emotional investment in the pagan deities was challenged, as was Christianity, by a series of brutal, mechanized wars and social changes. Yet at the end of the chapter, the greatly

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enlarged pick-and-mix pantheon emerged re-invigorated in a new age of pagan literature and practice.

Thee, goddess, I salute! As we saw in Chapter 2, some goddesses were regularly mentioned in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts – Andate and Andraste being the most popular names (Fletcher, Gay, Mason and so on) – while others recurred less frequently – Diana, Belisama, Astarte (Milton, Webb, Polwhele). Malachi Mouldy included a hymn to the moon as ‘queen of heaven’ in his Stonehenge. Hardly anyone, however, continued the tradition of focusing wholly or largely on Diana as moon-goddess that had dominated the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Indeed, as we saw with William Lisle Bowles, some tried to write Diana out of the landscape altogether and argue that well-documented goddesses like Sulis had really been gods. Perhaps the most desperate attempt to insert goddesses into the proto-Christianity theory (but at the same time to destroy them) came in 1772 when the puritan Theophilus Gale argued that ancient pagans were simply worshipping the true god under female names. His discussion of Juno and Diana is typical of his method. These names, he announces blithely, are nothing more than a corruption of the Hebrew ‘Jah’, the name of God: ‘Juno’ and ‘Diana’ are both ‘Dea Jana’. All moon-goddesses, then, are really the true god, lightly disguised by a few misplaced letters. Finally, Gale is able to argue away even the British goddess ‘Adraste’, worshipped by the ‘British Amazon, called Bundovica’ and the Anglo-Saxon one ‘Aestar or Easter’ (Bede’s Eostre) as well.1 For him, paganism was simply a version of Judaeo-Christianity transmitted as in the game of Chinese Whispers and misheard as feminine. This was a reading that would not stand the test of time. Far more influential were the god and goddess speculations of William Jones, whom we met briefly in Chapter 2 as a scholar working on Indo-European languages. Jones wrote on subjects from lemurs to Islamic law, and composed his own verse as well as translating from an extraordinary range of Eastern and European languages. He lived in Calcutta from 1783 where he was a judge in Bengal’s Supreme Court and, as James Mulholland has explored in his work on Jones, he thought Indian culture could offer a way to reinvigorate literature as a ‘fountain head’ of new inspiration.2 In both scholarly and creative work, Jones displayed deep sympathy for the religious beliefs of many different cultures. Interestingly, this pre-dated his move to India, although it undoubtedly grew in range and sophistication during his residence there. In 1780, according to its preserver Mary Granville Delany, Jones wrote a poem to entertain the fellowdruids of his gentlemen’s club, the Druids of Cardigan or ‘Tivy’ (i.e. the river Teifi), a name borrowed from Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. The verse was written out of distaste for the sectarianism of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, so that it had a serious intent, but it was declaimed at a picnic for ‘boozy barristers’ as Michael Franklin puts it, so that it was also intended to be witty and a little bit saucy.

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It focused on the common origin of all religions in the worship of woman as love goddess: By various high titles this Goddess is nam’d At Ephesus Dian, in Syria Astarte, In New Rome ’tis Mary, Heaven’s Regent proclaim’d, In Old Rome ’twas Venus, the buxom and hearty, But crown’d and enthron’d Her Godhead is own’d In desert, in valley, on mountain, on shore, Then join our gay crew, Turk, Roman and Jew, And kneel to the Goddess whom all men adore. When sallow Parsees, in vain Antequil’s rant, Repeat the strange lessons of false Zoroaster, Or hymn ruddy Mithras in rapturous cant, As their surest preserver from every disaster, They worship but one, Warm and round as the sun, Which Persia’s rich kings on their diadems wore. The circle they prize Had long left the skies And they kneel to the Goddess whom all men adore.3 Later on is a verse about phallic worship as well. But behind the rib-poking is, as Franklin describes it, also an ‘Enlightened deism’ that does not scruple to include the Virgin Mary in the fun.4 Franklin adds that the poem’s ‘playful emphasis upon the universality of the divine female … and the ubiquity of inspired revelation … anticipate[s] the comparative mythology and imaginative syncretism of Jones’ path-breaking essay “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India”’.5 Indeed it does. The essay, written in 1784 but revised in later drafts, echoed Dryden in accepting that ‘Gods of all shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination’ and argued that the deities of many ‘idolatrous people’ across the world were connected by language and migration. The deities of ‘the Gothick system’ of Europe were like those of Egypt, China, Persia and so on: Janus was like Ganesha, Jupiter like Vishnu, Siva and Brahma and Diana like Parvati, Durga and Bhavani.6 Sensitively, Jones did not try to suggest that he fully understood all of these figures, or that they were identical. For instance, he could find no parallel for the aspect of Diana as huntress that was so important in European culture, and thought this facet was ‘the daughter of a European fancy’. But Jones concluded that ‘I am persuaded, that a connexion subsisted between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy,

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long before they migrated to their several settlements’. Indeed, there were similarities between the story of Christ and that of Crishna, although also profound differences. Jones even argued that ‘the Muselmans are … a sort of heterodox Christians’, sharing beliefs with Christianity although denying the godhead of Christ. Mohammed and Ali ‘were both very extraordinary men’, he had learned. As for Hindus, ‘we adore, they say, the same God, to whom our several worships, though different in form, are equally acceptable, if they be sincere in substance’. So far, this book has not considered the literature of prehistoric British paganism in conjunction with living non-Christian religions unless an explicit link was made by a poet or antiquarian. Its definition of ‘paganism’ is a British one, not encompassing the major world religions beyond. But with William Jones we move into a different world, where speculations began to be more commonly informed by actual experience of Islam, Hinduism and other Asian and African religions than before. In human, social and political terms this was very different from merely textual acquaintance with, say, classical or ancient Phoenician religion. Mulholland terms the new sense of identity ‘translocal’ – neither geographically-defined nor restricted to a small community, but a new conception of the inter-relation of spaces, times and cultures.7 In Jones’ attitude to his non-Christian neighbours is one of the first stirrings of empathy with the notion that ‘paganism’, however defined, might be lived as well as imagined – and, ultimately, lived once again in Britain. Jones felt the connection with non-Christian religion deeply; he wrote to the Sanskrit scholar Charles Wilkins: ‘I am in love with the Gopia, charmed with Crishnen, an enthusiastic admirer of Ram, and a devout adorer of Brihma.’8 And he went further than study of the religions among which he now lived: he planned an epic poem, Britannia Discover’d, in which Brutus’ journey to found Britain would be influenced by a range of the world’s deities. He wrote ‘hymns’ to nine Hindu deities, too, having collected and studied stories about them.9 The deities chosen included Narayena, the ‘Spirit of Spirits’ whom Jones thought lay behind conceptions of many different gods in the form of power, wisdom and goodness and Lacshmi, ‘the Ceres of India’. One rationale for the hymns, which he published and circulated to friends, was provided by political practicality: We may be inclined perhaps to think, that the wild fables of idolaters are not worth knowing, and that we may be satisfied with misspending our time in learning the Pagan Theology of old Greece and Rome; but we must consider, that the allegories contained in the Hymn to Lacshmi constitute at this moment the prevailing religion of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believed by many millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whose manners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearly affect all Europeans, who reside among them.

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But this doesn’t really account for the beauty of Lacshmi’s hymn: Daughter of Ocean and primeval Night, Who, fed with moonbeams dropping silver dew, And cradled in a wild wave dancing light, Saw’st with a smile new shores and creatures new, Thee, Goddess, I salute; thy gifts I sing … The hymn ends with a statement of religious tolerance which despite its patronising imperial assumptions is also a Romantic plea for the brotherhood of ‘men’: Oh! Bid the patient Hindu rise and live. His erring mind, that wizard lore beguiles, Clouded by priestly wiles, To senseless nature bows for nature’s GOD … Though mists profane obscure their narrow ken, They err, yet feel; though pagans, they are men.10 Jones was the first writer to offer British readers a detailed and enamoured account of Indian religion in both poetic and scholarly form – indeed the two were complementary for him – and it is clear that he found its goddesses particularly alluring as well as the notion of reincarnation.11 Through intermediaries and directly, his orientalist scholarship was a major influence on scholarly accounts of ancient British paganism. It also contributed to the rise of mystical groups who were trying to reconstruct or recreate aspects of prehistoric British beliefs.12 We have seen some of the explosive potential of this mysticism in the work of William Blake. Throughout the nineteenth century, such personal visions of religion became more common, with personal pantheons to go with them. Alongside a great upsurge in evangelical Christianity was a corresponding growth of interest in pagan alternatives, classical (as we have seen in Chapter 2), Nordic or Germanic (as we’ll see in Chapter 4), oriental and British. Ronald Hutton has explored how groups calling themselves druids, like Jones’ barristers, became part of a culture of religious experimentation (serious or frivolous in varying amounts). Diverse groups, freemasons and, later, theosophists drew on a mix of elements from Roman to Hindu.13 Traditions interconnected: Caesar’s statement that the druids believed in the transmigration of souls morphed quite easily into a belief that early British religion was based on Indian reincarnation. For example, as early as the 1790s the Welsh scholar and forger Edward Williams (known by his nickname Iolo Morganwg) was asserting that alongside a universal god, reincarnation was an old British belief; and he was also writing poetry and critical essays to ‘prove’ it.14 The ‘Celt’ and the ‘Goth’ (types conflated in the period, as we started to see with Macpherson in the last chapter, and only later dissevered)

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became exciting new models for British pagan identity as genuine texts were translated and new material added – in one way or another. Among the additions was a new Welsh pantheon.

‘Let in the Celtic Twilight’15 With Celtic scholars such as Morganwg and William Owen publishing work of national importance, the legacy of John Toland was coming into its own. A growing knowledge of old Irish and Welsh stories meant that a more detailed imagination of British religion was available to readers. Some episodes in these texts pointed to priestly rites or objects of worship, while other readers believed that the protagonists were themselves deities. The stories that were most influential in creating a new pantheon were the Irish ones of the tuatha dé danann, translated as the people of the goddess Danu, and the Welsh stories grouped under the title The Mabinogion by their first translator Charlotte Guest in the 1840s.16 Welsh speakers had been writing about these stories for some time when Guest translated them. In 1809 the Gower rector Edward Davies hypothesized that from Middle Welsh poems such as those by ‘Taliesin’, Iolo Goch, Madawg Dwygraig and Aneirin, from triads and from a sixteenth-century tale about Taliesin’s birth, the Hanes Taliesin, it could be gathered that a god and goddess, Hu and Ceridwen, had been the deities of the ancient British.17 These were characters in the old poetry. Hu, Davies argued, must have been a version of Noah and thus an ‘arkite’ god (because he was associated with the ark). Here Davies was conventionally but differently meeting the needs of Harrison’s hypothesis, with reference to the work of Jacob Bryant in the 1770s. Reworking earlier notions of the patriarchal origin of pagan religions, Bryant (a scholar working for the Duke of Marlborough) had argued that the Noachian flood was the key moment in world history and that all mythology and language must point back to it. His ‘New System’ for decoding ancient mythology was a linguistic one. At its simplest, if a syllable meaning ‘sun’ appeared in a placename, Bryant might argue that a sun temple had stood there. All deities, he concluded, were once sun-deities – a pleasing unity amenable to assimilation into Judaeo-Christianity.18 This was an idea continued by the poet and chaplain Thomas Maurice in his work on Indian antiquities and by the Northumberland rector George Faber. Both traced the notion of pagan trinities back to the three sons of Noah, and Faber also emphasized ‘the great father and the great mother’. Originally, the earth had been the great mother but once it was flooded another mother must be found: the ark itself. The ark as a microcosm of the earth thus linked goddesses with ships, wombs, eggs and other vessels. Davies bought this in full, tying his new god securely to a Biblical figure and monotheism, and his goddess to a magical vessel. He suggested that Hu was a Noachian, arkite sun-god. But he was also a bull-god and analogous with, among others, Bacchus (Sammes’ Hues) and the Lord of Annwn from the first branch of the Mabinogion. The goddess Ceridwen or Ked, meanwhile, was motherly and fruitful

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like Ceres or Isis and she was also a water deity, goddess of the ark and the island goddess described by Tacitus as Nerthus (see also Chapter 4). In the Hanes Taliesin she was the keeper of a magical cauldron that contained wisdom and prophetic power. Davies’ theory was quickly labelled ‘helio-arkite’ and widely discussed as the newest answer to the question of whom the British had worshipped before the Romans arrived. It was not the only answer, however. The old classicism of Mercury and Apollo fought back savagely against the new Celtic theory. One arena was The Gentleman’s Magazine, which in 1828 featured in successive issues a letter explaining and lauding Davies’ theories, a vicious attack upon them and a letter from William Lisle Bowles advancing his own Mercury–Teutates theory. Davies’ supporter was the Herefordshire historian Samuel Rush Meyrick, who explained his preference for Celtic-named deities. He argued that ‘the god Teutates is only a corrupted Roman mode of writing the British Duw Tâd … God the Father’ and that Belatucadros was ‘Bela Duw Cadwyr, Beli, the god of warriors, or Bel y Duw Cad, Beli, the puissant god’. These were all versions of Davies’ helio-arkite deity Hu (‘pronounced Hee’, Meyrick asserted, and thus Latinised into Hesus, a fellow-god of Taranis and Teutates in Lucan’s account). Hu was a protective deity and thus probably also Nodens since ‘noddi’ meant ‘to preserve’.19 Apollo Grannus was also Beli, while Sul (a male god, again) was another aspect of him. The goddess, meanwhile, was a moon goddess, Malen, Romanized into Minerva – thus lunar-arkite rather than helio-arkite – and she was also Ked, as Davies had suggested.20 This was all very new and complex but it was correct, Meyrick asserted. But Meyrick was himself then confuted in an anonymous favourable review of Lisle Bowles’ Parochial History of Bremhill, printed in the magazine’s next issue. The reviewer dismissed the helio-arkite theory as ‘a castle, or rather a tower of Babel in the air’. Further, the review was violently anti-Celtic. ‘The Welch,’ it fumed, ‘have always vitiated the history of this nation’ from Geoffrey of Monmouth onward: to their Triads do we owe the foolish notion that Stonehenge was erected by Merlin; and now, when British Archaeology has assumed a rational form of investigation … this fantastic mysticism is hatched to throw every thing back again into fiction. Meanwhile the ‘rational histories of Greece and Rome’, as preferred by his favoured author Lisle Bowles, showed ‘that Jupiters and Junos were worshipped’: theories based on this truth were to be preferred to ‘nursery tales’.21 The reviewer won the battle in the short term but in the longer term he was swimming against the scholarly tide. His bile is part-prejudice, part-correct. Davies’ claims are unexceptional in some ways, both for the period and the longer history that we have examined and there is no reason why they should be rejected out-of-hand. He simply

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attaches new, Welsh, names to older concepts such as the euhemerized hero. If one is used to reading this kind of speculation, the problems of his specific hypothesis are apparent only when his sources are examined more closely: as they were in the 1840s and 1850s by two scholars of medieval Welsh texts, Thomas Stephens and David Nash.22 This disclosed difficulties of interpretation. Here, for instance, is the poet known as ‘Taliesin’ on Hu: ‘Disturbed is the isle of the praise of Hu, the isle of the severe recompenser … ’ (‘Echrys ynys gwawt hu ynys gwrys gobetror’).23 This is a very riddling reference indeed, and not untypical; further, the translation is disputed – what is ‘the praise of Hu’ or ‘hu’? Davies did not need translations, but he did need clarity in the original text and it was not there. In another important reference in the Black Book of Carmarthen the poet Cuhelyn describes a successful song of fruitful praise, relating to the bustling course of the host, According to the sacred ode of Cyridwen, the goddess of various seeds, The various seeds of poetic harmony, the exalted speech of the graduated minstrel … Fynedic. waud. fruythlawn. traethaud trybestraud heid Hervit urten autyl kyrridven ogyrven amhad Amhadanav areith awyrllav. y cavkeineid. But again the translation rests on a disputed word: does ‘ogyrven’ mean ‘goddess’? In fact, it is not known what it means.24 Ceridwen is certainly a character associated with magic, prophecy and wisdom in the Hanes Taliesin, but does that mean she is a deity? And when Davies looked for more clarification he was tricked: he believed some of the forgeries of Iolo Morganwg, which added to the authentic sources for Hu and Ceridwen. This was the more poignant because, as Hutton shows, Davies had tried to separate fact from fiction. But when presented with Morganwg’s fabricated triads in the new historical study of Welsh poetry the Myvyrian Archaiology, he saw a good deal of what he wanted: There are three pillars of the nation of the Isle of Britain. The first was Hu the Mighty, who brought the nation of the Cambrians first to the Isle of Britain; and they came from the Summer Country … where Constantinople now stands … Hu the Mighty … taught the Cambrians the way to plough … formed the first mote and retinue over the nation of Cambria … The large horned oxen of Hu the Mighty … drew the crocodile from the lake to the land, so that the lake did not burst any more.25 This Hu (Hu the Mighty – ‘Hu Gadarn’) was a migrant, leader of peoples, bringer of skills and antagonist of monsters – ideal material for deification. Davies built his

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notions of Hu as a bull-god, a kingly god of nature, growth, sun and safety, conqueror of the monstrous afanc (a water-creature) and preventer of floods, on these passages. But although he wrote these triads, Morganwg did not feed Davies the idea that Hu was a god: his work could easily have been read as the portrait of an ancient king. The deification in all its complexity was Davies’ own. He was looking for a pantheon and he found one.26 Texts about ancient deities were now breeding among themselves. It is no accident that in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, set in the 1830s, one character is engaged in writing The Key to All Mythologies: comparative religious scholarship and synthesis was the order of the day.27 So Davies was by no means exceptional, for all the violent controversy bred by his new Welsh god and goddess. He was part of a new series of interpretations of British pagan prehistory, with radical ideas springing from the most conservative-looking contexts. In The Celtic Druids of 1827, the Yorkshire magistrate Godfrey Higgins argued that ‘the druids were the priests of oriental colonies who emigrated from India’, that they had brought with them the use of letters and built Stonehenge, among other ‘cyclopean works’. They, and all humans, had originally worshipped black deities and black people were the natural inheritors of true religion – indeed the Celts were descended from Ethiopian Cushites. In the same year Higgins published An Apology for Mohamed. Equally surprisingly for a magistrate and former major, Higgins denounced Christianity, at least in its established forms, to which he attributed great evil from the burning of heretics to the building of episcopal palaces while the poor starved: Priests have been the curse of the world … they have converted, and are converting, populous and happy nations into deserts, and have made our beautiful world into a slaughter-house drenched with blood and tears. One can hear Toland and Blake behind Higgins’ anti-clericalism. Heathen priesthoods had been no better than Christian ones, he thought, but since he had rejected orthodox Christian belief, Higgins had a fervent desire to explore other systems. He began to elaborate on fire-worship and goddess-worship among other alternatives. Higgins thought that British religion was linked to that of Samothrace and Phoenicia, where the Cabiri were worshipped: Ceres, Proserpine and so on (an idea drawn from Sammes, Faber and others).28 And these deities had been worshipped in Ireland under other names, which might be discovered in surviving texts. Higgins based many of his conclusions on aural or written similarities – a habit encouraged by the work of linguists such as Bryant, whose work begins with lists of sound-alike words. So, for instance, the Latin ‘amo’, ‘to love’, sounded a bit like Danu of the tuatha dé danann. Thus the mother goddess must be Danu or Anu. The ‘first great Cause’ was Aesar, since in Gaelic ‘easam’ meant ‘to create’. Higgins thought that Selden had been right to say that ancient Britons worshipped an all-healing power but, in the form of Aesar that power

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was fire, creator and destroyer. He identified as versions of fire-destroyer gods Hesus, Mars, the Hindu god Iswara, and Osiris. Anu, meanwhile, was like Ceres, Isis, Ashteroth, Ops and the Indian Maya.29 Once again, we can see Jones’ legacy. Higgins’ book constructed an entire Celtic–Mediterranean–Indian pantheon based on such comparisons. This methodology and many of its conclusions – although, as Hutton points out, it is ‘crazy stuff’ – would be highly influential in later times. Later in the century those not educated in professional scholarly methods, or simply not interested in them, took his work for a modern gospel. Thus Celtic deities met and fused with Asiatic ones, at least in the work of a vocal group of writers.

Celtic and classical in an age of Christian doubt By about 1830, then, new work on the Celtic god and goddess was flourishing; but it was also suspect in various ways from forgery through poor scholarship to radicalism. Yet the deities had clear names, different in the Irish and Welsh contexts but perfectly understandably, it seemed. They had flexible sub-names and likenesses to other deities, which helped to gloss over differences and allowed them to embody all kinds of activity, as well as drawing in exotic deities to their mythology. And they were benign and parental – the attribute that set them apart most clearly from their earlier avatars Taranis and Andraste, who before 1830 might have been thought to be a consensual choice for the top spots in a British pantheon. As a kindly mother and father the re-imagined deities allowed new possibilities into their myths: family, sexuality and a more acceptably soft femininity associated with magic and wisdom rather than bloodthirsty revenge. That this was appealing is shown by the sequel: the gods faded into obscurity while the goddesses grew in reputation. Who now remembers Hu or Aesar? Even fewer look back with nostalgia to Taranis, Nodens or Mars. Andraste continued to occur wherever Boudicca did, as an historically-documented goddess associated with the warrior queen (as for instance in Anya Seton’s 1956 The Mistletoe and the Sword) but she lost further ground to Ceridwen and Danu.30 As the many druidic theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to be questioned and eventually discarded, the passionate interest in Celts and their new goddesses remained and flourished. To pick a random example, it is there at the other end of the century and on the other side of the planet in the work of the Australian historian James Bonwick. He stated simply in 1894 that ‘Ireland … is one of the most interesting countries in the world … in its early history there are traces of nearly every kind of pagan belief’. Bonwick thought that ‘the heathen Irish had a worshipful spirit [and] … certainly honoured woman’.31 Davies and Higgins and their imitators had both protofeminism and the newly-resurgent Celt on their side and these were the elements of their theories that lasted and grew. As Hutton says, ‘ideas of an ancient paganism based on a complementary duality of goddess and god centred upon sexual union, have fed through European thought ever since’.32

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They did not, however, take root in literature immediately. There were rivals: the northern gods had been held off from literature for decades by druidic speculations but by 1800 they were nicely established, so that the Celtic challengers had little cultural space (see Chapter 4 for the northern deities). The Victorian period was an age of realist fiction, and frequently evangelical Christian tone: neither would serve ideally to promote the new deities (and in fact Odin and his ilk had to take a back-seat too). Importantly, as we have seen, a prejudice against Celts may have retarded their deities’ acceptance, along with rightful fears about forgery: we saw in the last chapter how writers such as Mouldy preferred more established gods like Taranis to the riskier new material that had been so savagely attacked by scholars such as Nash. But the quirky Romantic satirist Thomas Love Peacock wrote a poem on Ceridwen in 1829, treating her almost as a goddess, if not quite. The poem is titled ‘The Cauldron of Ceridwen’ and drawn from the Hanes Taliesin. The story is of the rebirth of the boy Gwion as the poet-to-be Taliesin. Ceridwen has made a magic potion, granting wisdom and prophecy. The boy Gwion accidentally drinks it and Ceridwen chases him; both characters shape-shift until Ceridwen catches and swallows Gwion. But nine months later she gives birth to him again as ‘Taliesin’. Peacock chooses to omit the aspects of the story that suggest Ceridwen is a hostile witch: instead, she is ambiguously a protectress of the poet in some way, a willing giver of wisdom and a muse, much as she appears in the work of the early poets. The speaker Taliesin tells us: … well I know Ceridwen’s power protects me still; And hence o’er hill and vale I go, And sing, unharmed, whate’er I will. She has for me Time’s veil withdrawn: The images of things long gone, The shadows of the coming days, Are present to my visioned gaze. The poem is part of Peacock’s interest in Welsh legend and appears earnest alongside his reflex tendency to send up anything portentous: it fits the category of what Peter Sloat Hoff called his ‘impish pedantry’. For instance, we first meet the hero Elphin, who will find Taliesin after his rebirth, in a very commonplace predicament: stuck for something to say to a pretty girl, he turns to ‘what has been, since Britain was Britain, the alpha and omega of British conversation. He said, “it seems a stormy night”’. Moreover, Peacock refuses to take prophecy seriously – in later years Taliesin ‘being on the safe side of prophecy, and writing after the event” mythologizes himself, making his tale’s status dubious. Peacock probably refers to Davies when he describes Taliesin’s poems as ‘having no sense’ and appealing only to ‘a learned mythologist’ who has demonstrated that ‘an occult sense can be found or made for them, according to the views of the

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expounder’. All this makes it hard to know how seriously to take Peacock’s Ceridwen, and we hear too that the Welsh hill-folk are druids who worship Andraste – so perhaps Ceridwen is not quite a goddess after all.33 In a similar but far more serious-minded evasion, in 1851 Esther Le Hardy mentioned Hu Gadarn and Ceridwen as euhemerized rulers, alongside the more conventionally godlike deities, Belus and Dis.34 Le Hardy, a Channel Island antiquary, based her poem Agabus on the excavation of antiquities at Mont Ubé in Jersey. She imagines the ruins as part of a druid temple and the poem tells of the last of the druids. Christians have often attacked the group (and most unChristianly ‘strew’d the temple’s path/With mangled limbs and choking sighs/ Of Druids in death’s agonies’) but an innocent ‘maiden’ wrecked on the island is protected by the druid Rigel. It is not quite clear what she is being protected from: the Arch-Druid Agabus is a kindly old man and the druidess Vega is wise and brave. Their creed is proto-Christian – ‘to daily do some good, to daily bless’ – and focused on the stars and natural forces. But under pressure from Christian invaders, Rigel murders one of the soldiers and then lies about it – thus he loses his love and his life to a druid curse. Vega then kills the Christians’ leader and is killed herself in revenge, though Agabus survives. Le Hardy thus has her cake and eats it, as so many writers before her. Good and bad druids populate her melodrama, but all the religion that she describes is perfectly acceptable. The druids worship primarily Belus, the sun, and secondly Dis, the underworld god, as well as – rather unclearly – Hu and Ceridwen, in a helio-pious proto-Christian sort of way.35 Le Hardy’s work, however, is full of anxiety. Unlike Peacock she wishes to be taken seriously, but she is unsure of her ground in including pagan deities and rites in her poetry. Her preface shows the difficulty that writers on the subject of British prehistory were already feeling in the mid-century, even before Darwin’s revelations blew apart what appeared to be known about it: to acknowledge myself capable of reconciling the diversity of opinions amongst classical and other writers on the subject of the Druids, would be to assume a talent I in no way possess … I have done my humble best to understand as much as necessary for the purpose of my work, I am writing not as an historian, but simply as a poet; I advance no new ideas as incontrovertible facts, and having chosen the best authorities my limited knowledge has made me acquainted with, leave to the classic and antiquary to settle the discrepancies of those writers which, as a mere poet, I trust I may be permitted equally to cite to garnish the fancies of my little work. There is a good deal more of this. The author’s concern was channelled, distressingly, through notions of femininity: ‘for a woman to pretend to treat learnedly on a subject so abstruse as that of the Druids, would be to prove a conceit whose sole parent must be ignorance’. Worse, it would ‘be to ask the well-known generosity of the British press for that leniency of criticism which it ever so willingly accords to the feebler mental powers of my sex’.36 This was

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old-fashioned even by the standards of its time. But Le Hardy’s cringing delicacy points to what the reader should by now have noticed: hardly any women wrote on the topic of prehistoric religion before the late nineteenth century. It was a playground for male writers that Le Hardy accurately imagined as seething with critical bile, and it was becoming dangerous even for them: not all of this anxiety is created by gender. In her focus on ‘diversity of opinion’ among scholars, and in describing the topic as ‘one of the most hidden pages of the past’, a ‘wilderness’, Le Hardy was quite correct. It was not a new situation but it was shortly to be worsened and then overshadowed completely by a diversity so great as to frighten away ‘fancies’ for decades to come: Hu and Ceridwen, Belus and Taranis and other British deities were all equally difficult for writers to portray credibly by 1860, as Darwinian ideas sunk in. It was much safer for creative writers to turn to the deities of classical Greece and Rome. Although they had lost ground in antiquarian circles to British gods and goddesses, they still had a strong hold on the literary imagination. Several of the major Romantics, such as Percy and Mary Shelley, wrote works on figures such as Prometheus and Proserpine. Walter Savage Landor wrote Hellenic and Roman dialogues and turned automatically to Greece and Rome to find names for his muses, mistresses and goddesses.37 In mid-century Alfred Tennyson worked extensively with classical myth: for instance in ‘Tithonus’ (1860), whose speaker laments the immortality granted to him by the Greek dawn-goddess Eos. Tennyson had little interest in British paganism, despite his love of medieval tales of Celtic origin, and he was criticized later by Charles Squire (see below) for gutting Arthurian myth of its supposed deities. Squire’s choice of words is important: Tennyson ‘merely used the legend [of Arthur] to give a substantial form to his ideal figure of the perfect English gentleman’ (my italics): he was not Celtic enough. And when Tennyson did mention British gods, they were of the old model. ‘Bel’ and ‘Taranis’ are curtly invoked by an unattractive, yelling Boudicca in ‘Boadicea’ (1877), as she imagines the atrocities she will commit against the hapless Romans. But these hastily name-checked gods do not gain our sympathy and sound as if they might be on the side of Fenian terrorists rather than a wronged British matriarch.38 Meanwhile, the decadent aesthete Algernon Swinburne embraced classical paganism with revolutionary fervour, giving the deities a new subversive twist. In verses of hallucinogenic beauty, his Proserpine and Aphrodite reeked of opiates and disaffection. Contemplating the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity, Swinburne wrote in horror in the early 1860s: ‘thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath’. In particular he regretted the loss of the goddesses replaced by Christ and his virgin mother. In ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ we find line after line of rebellious adoration of a goddess with elements of Diana, Cybele and Venus: though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.

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Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned. Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, Clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. In fact, all the classical deities were regretted: ‘ye were all so fair that are broken’, lamented Swinburne hauntingly.39 The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison found in the poem ‘passion and rebellion and liberty’, all the things she felt most strongly in her own work on pagan goddesses.40 Where Christianity was challenged by pagan deities in Victoria’s reign, then, those deities were not British. They were Greek. In 1869 – and in a very different spirit – the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold urged even greater Hellenization of Victorian culture. For him the two main strands of that culture were Hellenic (beautiful, intellectual, unreliable) and Hebraic (puritanical, active, mechanical). Victorian Britain needed more Hellenism to sweeten its life and rescue its soul from materialism. Arnold was a Christian, yet he feared Christian zeal. Hellenism tended towards corruption and decadence, but it was humane and thoughtful. And although Arnold was passionately interested in Celtic literature and saw in it many of the Hellenic features that he liked, he also saw there irrationality and disorder: he certainly felt no need for its pagan element. Indeed, he described Davies’ arkite religion as a ‘fantastical … extravagance’, helping to bring ‘suspicion’ on Celtic scholarship.41 So classicism steamed on through the fin de siècle and First World War and into modernism: when the poet Rupert Brooke and his friends were dubbed the ‘neopagans’ it was Greek models that were being imagined while, for all its Irishness and its brief mention of ‘mother Dana’ and ‘Mananaan’, it would be difficult to find a more obviously classically-inspired text than James Joyce’s Ulysses.42 The period had its favourite classical deities. Patricia Merivale, Ronald Hutton and John Boardman have discussed the persistence of Pan in fictions such as those of Arthur Machen and Kenneth Grahame. Edward Dunsany’s 1928 The Blessing of Pan, for instance, imagines the seduction of an entire village away from Christianity by Pan and his pipes, into happy paganism. Pan’s religion is associated with a ‘yearning’ to be away from the constrictions of conventional society – stiff collars, polite conversation, antimacassars, parental authority. Lost for more than 1,000 years, it is re-celebrated at a stone circle and focuses on the beauty and peace of nature, a ‘language’ written by autumn in gold and red leaves, ‘the mystery of owl’s voices … the long grey script of the mist’.43 Both Margot

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Louis and Andrew Radford have documented the parallel intensity of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century engagement with Demeter and Persephone, who inspired writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and the Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Louis pointed to the publication of the Swiss anthropologist J.J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterecht (‘Mother-right’) in 1861, a work on matrilineal societies, as the key moment in bringing together the literary Persephone with the anthropological and archaeological understanding of real-life goddess-worship. Jane Ellen Harrison’s Themis, a study of the mother goddess in Greek ritual and drama, was another important text (see also Chapter 5).44 Partly because of her association with Swinburne and religious doubt, Persephone/Proserpine flourished as a metaphor and a real presence in novels and poems. Here she is in Lawrence’s 1923 ‘Bavarian Gentians’: Reach me a gentian, give me a torch let me guide myself … down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness, even where Persephone goes, just now … 45 The strength of Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian classicism, then, added to a wariness of Celticity even among some of the major Irish writers, was enough in combination to limit creative interest in Welsh and Irish deities.46 Writers who were suspicious of, or did not wish to write about, Christianity often preferred the classically pagan to the Celtic by default.

A second Celtic Revival But although the literary world remained focused on the classics and their pantheon, towards the end of the nineteenth century a second wave Celtic Revival began in the scholarly world. A minority of important creative writers did take up the speculations about Celtic deities in their own idiosyncratic ways. To begin with, Davies’ work was revisited by a new generation of scholars. Gone was the association with Noah – by the 1880s few would accept that – and its more problematic specifics. Now a good deal of mythological work drew on James Frazer’s theory that religion began in rites intended to secure the fertility of the natural world, crops and people; these involved the symbolic marriage of a god and goddess and often the sacrificial death of the ‘god’ in human form. Frazer’s work will be examined in detail in Chapter 5, and its influence was vast. But in its method of drawing on early Celtic literature for its deities’ names and attributes, some mythological study was still recognizably Davies’ baby. This path was followed by mainland British and Irish retellers of mythological stories and theorists of comparative religion such as Alexander Macbain, Alfred Nutt, Augusta Gregory, George Laurence Gomme and Charles Elton. The most influential figure was a Welshman, John Rhys. Rhys was an Anglesey headmaster and the son of a lead miner who in his mid-twenties won a scholarship to

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Oxford University. He also attended several German universities, where he encountered philology in the tradition of the comparative philologist and Sanskrit scholar Max Müller.47 Publishing prolifically, Rhys established himself as the leading British scholar on the topic of comparative religion and was invited to give the 1886 Hibbert Lectures, published as Lectures in the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom in 1892. In them he set out to re-delineate and popularize knowledge of a British pantheon taken from the Irish story cycles and the Mabinogion. Rhys wanted to solve the Victorian problem of competing paganisms, assigning the first place to the local deities but aligning them with other claimants across the globe and especially with the Indian ‘Aryans’ and their Indo-European language group. He felt that ‘the history of religion had never before been comprehensively studied from the Celtic point of view’, although actually he was writing in a rather well-established tradition, as we have seen. But he meant to add modern knowledge of world religions and philological scholarship.48 His main interest was ‘the Zeus of the Insular Celts’, whom he found in Nuada rather than Hu, following Irish scholarship. Nuada is a hero in the Irish mythological cycle, but since he is one of the tuatha dé danann and moves in an atmosphere of myth and superhuman feats, he was identified as a god just as Danu was a goddess. Nuada’s epithet is Silver Hand, since he lost a hand, which was replaced artificially. Rhys linked this to the Norse story of Tiu or Tyr, who lost a hand to a wolf, and Zeus, who was disabled during battle with Typhon. He thought Nodens was also Nuada, as was Nud or Lud. While he was not keen on Hu, Rhys accepted Ceridwen as a dawn goddess.49 And so on: he moved quickly through the pantheon, ticking off attributes and like-sounding names to produce a grand narrative of a sun-god, his wide pantheon of characters from Irish and Welsh tales and his tribulations. It is difficult to see what is very new about this beyond some contemporary terminology from Müller: the discussion of ‘the Aryan family’ of languages, the Mabinogion’s magician Gwydion identified as a ‘culture-hero’ like Prometheus, stealing knowledge from the gods to give to humankind. But there was one major difference of circumstance: Rhys was appointed to a Chair of Celtic studies at Oxford in 1877.50 His pagan speculations were given Oxford’s stamp of approval and spread widely as orthodoxy, among middle-class folklorists and mythographers in particular, in a way that Davies’ could not a century before. Professor Rhys was still enough of an outsider to challenge some Victorian norms and to help overturn them in the coming century. He was a self-made scholar, rather than a donnish divine – the traditional antiquarian type – and he loved to spread knowledge. He also felt deep contempt for the narrow religiosity of his upbringing, which was ‘of a nature to discourage all interest in anything that savoured of heathen lore’. He quipped sourly, ‘I grew up without having acquired the habit of observing anything, except the Sabbath’. Rhys found recuperation in folklore collection. For him, the key realization was that ‘what may seem to one generation of men a mere matter of mythology, is frequently

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found to have belonged to the serious theology of a previous one’.51 This simple statement summed up the fin de siècle growth of folklore study in a nutshell. Folklore collection and the comparative study of memory and custom would dominate speculation about pagan deities for the next half century. And it provided a source of wonderfully rich pagan imaginings which later made their way into creative fiction and new pagan religion. Margaret Murray, T.C. Lethbridge, Gerald Gardner (see below) all benefited from licence to research stories of old deities in libraries, archaeological sites, children’s games and the memories of older people in their communities. The only problem in Rhys’ sentence above is the word ‘found’: how far is this finding a construct of the imagination, and how is it to be tested?52 But this turned out to be of little interest to most of his admirers. Rhys’ conclusions were repeated as absolute truths in popular books on ‘Celtic religion’, as it was now called. One of the most oft-cited popularizers of Rhys’ views was Charles Squire, who in his Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance of 1905 provided what he thought of as a handbook to the ‘Celtic Renaissance’ of the early Middle Ages.53 Giving Britain ‘back’ her own pantheon was Squire’s aim: partly as a nationalist enterprise, partly a literary-critical one. He equated mythology with national strength: Greece was now only ‘a petty kingdom’ but ‘of greater account’ because of her myths. There is anxiety here about Britain’s Edwardian place in the world. Squire particularly wanted to inspire the nation’s creative writers in answer to this anxiety, to ‘refresh the vitality of English poetry at its most ancient native fount’ – language echoing William Jones, who looking further afield thought that the new poetic fount had lain in India. Squire found his fount more locally, and had a specific target in mind in recommending the new Helicon to English writers. In the past, Greek myth had formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of English poets … At last, however, its potency became somewhat exhausted. Alien and exotic to English soil, it degenerated slowly into a convention. ‘Alien’ and ‘exotic’ – this is obviously nonsense, looking at what was going on in English literature, but it is a firmly-stated view. Squire had had enough of Hellenism. He disagreed with Arnold about its further utility, but he agreed with Arnold’s argument in ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, where the critic made the case that poetic vision came from the Celtic part of British heritage rather than the Anglo-Saxon. Squire concluded his introduction with a stirring declaration that reveals the grandeur of his ambition: ‘we have the right, therefore, to enter upon a new spiritual possession’.54 There is more than literary culture in his mind: he is interested in British pagan ‘spirit’. The recovery of this, he thought, would be achieved through exploring Rhys’ work and especially the reiterated claim that the writers of the Mabinogion and Arthurian legends had recorded ‘an older, pagan, mythological world’. Its Rhysian deities were the legends’ characters:

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Danu/Anu the mother, Badb, Macha and Morrigu the frightening battle goddesses, Branwen the love goddess, Rhiannon the dawn or moon goddess, the fatherly Dagda or Beli, the war god Nuada/Nudd/Nodens/Lludd, Ogma the sun-faced inventor of Ogham, Lugh/Lleu/Llew Llaw Gyffes the sun god, Bran the god of the underworld and so on. Following Rhys, Squire explained that the old deities divided into two camps: good ones led by the goddess Danu (Irish) or Don (Welsh), and bad ones led by the goddess Domna (Irish) or the god Llyr (Welsh). The former were the tuatha dé danann or sky-gods, the latter an earlier race or pantheon described in Irish myth, the Fomorians. All this was now standard ‘knowledge’, thanks to Rhys. Rhys and Squire also thought the Welsh princeling Gwydion an important god, linked with King Arthur. Arthur and his court were also deities, in this view, which originated with the Oxford scholar Algernon Herbert.55 Their praise for Gwydion as a virtuous magus of the gods is surprising in view of his story. In the Mabinogion’s fourth branch, the prince engineers a war with his neighbours so that his brother can rape their uncle’s attendant. In punishment, his uncle turns the two brothers into male and female animals and forces them to mate and breed together. It was true that Charlotte Guest’s translation, which was all that Squire had, left out the gender-transforming element of the original story but she had retained clear suggestions of the rape and homosexual incest.56 These were silently overlooked – the desire of Rhys, Squire and latest generation of Celtic god-smiths to find a god and culture-hero in Gwydion was too strong.57 And Rhys’ pantheon flourished in Squire’s popular summary, especially the goddesses. Indeed, Squire was so keen that this should be the outcome that he dismissed rival goddesses known to have been worshipped in Britain, such as Sulis, as ‘strange gods … ’ worshipped by ‘men of different countries’. They were identified as not being British because they had been linked with Roman deities (Mars Nodens got past Squire’s prejudice because Rhys had foregrounded him as Nuada). Foreign deities were no longer welcome: out with the Dianas and Apollos.58 And some of the newly-popular deities stuck in literature, as Squire had hoped. His work was repeated with variation in Scotland in J. A. MacCulloch’s The Religion of the Ancient Celts (1911), based on a series of magazine articles intended ‘to popularise the subject of Mythology’.59 The publisher Archibald Constable devoted two of his series ‘Religions: Ancient and Modern’ to Celtic deities, in one of which the Welsh philologist Edward Anwyl linked British mythology to the deities of northern Europe, like Epona the horse goddess.60 The literary scholar Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance explored the notion that the Arthurian legends preserved memories of ancient rites.61 These were short, popular books designed to inform the general reader, which they evidently did.

’Fragments shored against my ruins‘ The Celtic deities’ time was coming. But it would not come with the speed or completeness desired by Squire, or take quite the direction he had imagined.

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The names of Celtic deities do appear in literature: Kerriduen, for instance, as well as a new-old god Cocidius in Charles Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain (1906).62 But in Doughty’s epic the pair were imagined as a queen and her king rather than deities as such.63 More fruitfully in the long term, the Celtic deities were sometimes hybridized with Eastern ones after the fashion of Godfrey Higgins, who was claimed as a radical prophet of right religion by some latenineteenth-century experimenters. The mystic Helena Blavatsky incorporated a number of his ideas into her Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) and her British followers took their own directions with this material, some of them back towards Higgins’ ‘Celtic Druids’. Ronald Hutton and Adam Stout have explored how, for instance, the former docker George W. MacGregor Reid put together American Universalism, theosophy and druidry to create druidic rites at Stonehenge in 1912. By 1913 he was referring to himself as ‘Dastur Tuatha de Dinaan’ (the high priest of the tuatha dé danann) in a neat blend of Zoroastrian and Celtic terminology.64 For all Squire’s pomposity, he had been right to say that a new ‘spiritual possession’ was available to claimants in the early twentieth century: some people wanted not only to write about paganism, they wanted to live it. But they wanted to experience paganism in their own idiosyncratic ways, not as a project of Edwardian-style national literary renewal. If national renewal was part of their vision, it was not Squire’s renewal of England (or even a united Britain) that writers had in mind. Elizabeth Sharp’s collection of Celtic poetry in Lyra Celtica (1896) was in many ways a reader in Celtic nationalism: it included some English work but concentrated on Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall as Celtic nations whose cultural work was set against older forms of English literature. The collection certainly promoted the association of Celts with mysticism. It included poems by W.B. Yeats and followed work by folklorists such as Robert Hunt and William Bottrell and creative writers such as the science fiction pioneer Grant Allen in celebrating ‘shee’ (sidhe – spirits, fairies), druids and other Celtic spiritual haunting. Yeats was interested in the figure of Aengus, the love god of the tuatha dé danann and wrote several poems on him.65 But Lyra Celtica pulled readers towards separate Celtic traditions in different languages.66 ‘Celtic religion’ was not a simple, unifying mythology but divided between Welsh, Scots, Irish, Cornish, Manx and other differing literary cultures. The American folklorist W.Y. Evans-Wentz tried to unify it as a ‘fairy faith in Celtic countries’ with some success but not until 1911.67 English poetry, meanwhile, was soon tearing itself apart too. The most celebrated new, modernist work written in Britain was usually not by Englishmen, and it too was multi-lingual. It was also multi-faith in a number of ways: a blend of classical and other traditions that had little room for certainties either Christian or Celtic. The American Anglophile T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) spoke of its bits of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, myth and folklore – everything from the Holy Grail to the Phoenicians – as ‘fragments shored against my ruins’. It began

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by referring to Weston’s speculations on Arthurian myth as a repository of Celtic religion and to her Frazerian reading of this: Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance … To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Attis Adonis Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.68 Yet the poem is not, as might be expected, a satisfying pagan experience based on Weston and Frazer’s insights: it is too broken by war, depression and the perceived ills of modernity. ‘April is the cruellest month’, it begins in antithesis to a rite of spring, continuing ‘that corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout?’ Only the most mythologically-attuned reader would ‘immediately recognise’ a reference to the death and rebirth of a god, or, in the indifferent sexual encounter between a typist and a clerk, the marriage of god and goddess. Is the typist’s ‘half-formed thought … “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over”’ really the goddess bidding farewell to her expendable lover? ‘You cannot say, or guess’, the poem remarks, ‘for you know only/A heap of broken images’. Indeed; and the poem ends uneasily seeking closure with some words from the Hindu Upanishads. Similar in its fragmentary unsacral, unheroic nature is In Parenthesis (1937), by the Welsh poet David Jones. He based it on the same Welsh poets that inspired Davies, Rhys and Squire but he took from them primarily the elegiac tone that was required by the massive casualties of the First World War.69 Looking at the carnage of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, W.H. Auden likewise classed everything religious as ‘yesterday’: ‘the cromlech … the carving of angels … the trial of heretics … the Sabbath of Witches … enormous Jupiter’. And his feeling was common among political writers of the period. Although the Anglican Arnold Toynbee tried to label fascism and communism as a ‘New Paganism’, their atheism or secularism was not perceived as such by most of their adherents. George Orwell found no spiritual consolation in either and explored the poverty of contemporary Christianity and, as he called it, ‘Nature worship’ as well. Paganism and Christianity both fail in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). The ‘daughter’, Dorothy, experiences something like Dunsany’s ‘yearning’ as she contemplates the ‘mystical joy in the beauty of the earth’ around her, but is piously shocked to find herself kissing a plant in a ‘half-pagan ecstasy’. ‘The joy ebbed out of her heart … she admonished herself. None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please!’ Deprived of any faith at all, she falls apart, sharing her descent into breakdown and homelessness with the defrocked vicar Mr Tallboys, who is contemplating Satanism:

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Dearly beloved brethren, we are gathered here in the sight of God for the solemnisation of unholy blasphemy. He has afflicted us with dirt and cold, with hunger and solitude … Our food is damp crusts and slimy meatscraps handed out … from hotel doorways … Our destiny is the pauper’s grave … It is very meet, right and our bounden duty at all times and in all places to curse Him and revile Him.70 The two World Wars and the suffering of the Depression produced poetry and novels of religious and spiritual disillusion with few interspersed works of pagan inspiration and hope (some will be discussed below, but they were rarer than expressions of despair).71 Even in the later 1940s, works about the god and goddess still bore the marks of late-Victorian cultural crisis and World War and appeared in confused and shattered form. Robert Graves was one of many poets who played with the notion of ‘broken images’, as in a poem of that title in the late 1920s, and ‘it’s a crazy book and I didn’t mean to write it’ he said of his 1948 survey of British myth, The White Goddess.72 But although Graves appeared to be stepping back from his magnum opus in this 1959 letter, he was already beginning a revision for the final version that appeared in his lifetime (1961).73 Graves could not let the book go – or, as he might have said, the goddess could not let him go. Partly because of this obsessive quality, The White Goddess was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century in determining the popular perception of British prehistoric religion and its new favourite deity, the ‘Goddess’. From the fragments, Graves created a new unity. Graves’ argument – or one of his many arguments – was that in the earliest British poetry, traces of an ancient religion could be found that was still relevant to modern British poets. It was thus a cover version of Edward Davies’ argument, with a dash of Squire: Graves had been lent Davies’ Celtic Researches in 1943. He thought it ‘crazy in parts’ but containing the ‘key … to Celtic religion’. His own chosen texts in finding this key were primarily the Hanes Taliesin, the Mabinogion and the Câd Goddeu (Battle of the Trees), as well as the Irish Song of Amergin. If one accepted that the characters were gods and goddesses, he argued, then their inspiration of the Celtic poets could be traced and modern poetry reconceived as a sacred art of praise. Poetry was a sort of national unconscious for Graves, linking even advertising executives and radio journalists to their nobler forebears. And faith and passion, even in the austere post-war world, was still available to them through a figure whom Graves named ‘the white goddess’ – a cruel, pagan muse who would help poets to produce work of truth and beauty if they were prepared to sacrifice themselves utterly to her service. Here she is in Chapter 1: The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and

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titles are innumerable … I cannot think of any poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. Of course, most of the poets did so in riddling form or through embodying the goddess in a character – a belle dame sans merci – rather than in detailed exposition, but Graves still saw her everywhere. Harking back to Victorian tradition, he describes the goddess as resembling Demeter or Persephone (he is quoting Frazer here) and in her Welsh form as ‘Cerridwen’ (here he cites MacCulloch).74 Graves also accepts Gwydion as a deity, as well as Bran, Beli/Belen, Danu, and all the others. Hu Gadarn appears as ‘the ancestor of the Cymry’, and there are many avatars of the white goddess: especially from the Mabinogion (Blodeuwedd, Arianrhod, Rhiannon and so on). The goddess’ poets, meanwhile, often had a tragic relationship with her: Graves begins the book by quoting the Welsh poet Alun Lewis on ‘the single poetic theme of Life and Death’. Lewis was killed in the war in 1944, as was Graves’ own son, also a poet. His experience of that and his own near-fatal war service in 1914–18 appear to relate to his emphasis on the harsh but necessary expendability of the male poet. The poet lives, strives and dies, while the goddess lives on from book to book. What women writers are supposed to do with her is not apparent.75 While some readers struggle with Graves’ obtuse argumentative structure and highly personal conclusions, some experience the book as a revelation. They, argues Graves’ editor Grevel Lindop, are the intended audience of poets.76 And this new poetic, not scholarly, revelation is vital in understanding the modern resurgence of creative writing on British pagan themes to be explored below and in Chapter 6. Graves was one of a group of poets, novelists, archaeologists, folklorists and critical writers who in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s determinedly re-enchanted the world of British paganism. They did, in some ways, what Squire wanted: they rebuilt a mythic framework on which English literature could hang new stories of gods and goddesses, rites, customs and theology.77 They also killed off most of the remarkably resilient remains of the Harrison hypothesis, which never managed to liberate its creative writers in quite the same way that purely pagan speculation did: like Blake’s Milton, Harrison’s adherents usually wrote in fetters. But the proto-Christianity thesis was still going strong in odd corners of the literary world. In Beric the Briton (1893) the popular children’s author G.A. Henty reiterated it almost word-for-word as if it were still 1750: The religion of the Britons was a pure one, though disfigured by the offering of human sacrifices. They believed in one great Supreme Spirit, whose power pervaded everything. They thought of him less as an absolute being than as a pervading influence. They worshipped him everywhere, in the forests and in the streams, in the sky and heavenly bodies … 78 Henty’s hero, Beric, is a Icenian boy called by the druids to lead his people in defence of their religion against the Roman attack on Anglesey. To make the

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story perfectly instructive for schoolboys, after he defends a Christian thrown to the lions, Beric realizes the similarity between his god and hers and is converted.79 This kind of thing was anathema to the heroic band of mythmakers of the mid-century. Some random names that stand out are T.C. Lethbridge, Katharine Briggs, Lewis Spence, Margaret Murray, Christina Hole, Doreen Valiente, Ralph Whitlock and Dion Fortune, but there are many, many others. These were all people troubled by the sense that writers such as Rhys and Graves were right, however idiosyncratic their views: something important and poetic was being lost with the eclipse of paganism from British life, firstly by Christianity and then by atheism. Some, like Spence and Fortune, wrote well before Graves had written his ‘crazy book’. All felt, in scholarly or spiritual ways, that there was a lost knowledge, a truth waiting to be remembered. Each responded differently. Hole worked for the Conservative Party before the Second World War and after it edited the journal Folklore. She wrote on customs and festivals herself. Briggs wrote children’s books and plays, scholarly books on folklore and fairies, and a doctoral thesis on seventeenth-century literature. Dion Fortune (a pseudonym of Violet Firth) was a convert from Christianity, a theosophist, occultist and novelist – her novel The Sea Priestess is dedicated to the notion that ‘All women are Isis and Isis is all women’. Spence was a Scottish nationalist journalist, who defended the work of Iolo Morganwg as genuinely ancient and argued that the cauldron of ‘Keridwen’ was one of symbolic rebirth during occult rites of a ‘secret tradition’. The religion dated back to prehistory, coming from Africa via Iberia: its adherents had built Stonehenge and Hu Gadarn was its god. Ralph Whitlock was a journalist with the Guardian newspaper who wrote a column on rural life and nature, and in 1979, In Search of Lost Gods.80 With such a flurry of cultural activity across so many fields and by such different hands, by 1960 pagan deities were not in danger of being ‘lost’ at all. In fact they were being rewritten and rediscovered everywhere. They were also being assimilated into two simple figures: many-named god and many-named goddess.

From Gog to Coventina: god and goddess in folklore, religion and fiction The god and goddess appear in many different genres and under many different names. In the mid-1950s, T.C. (Tom) Lethbridge, director of archaeological excavations for the Cambridge University Museum and Cambridge Antiquarian Society, became convinced that by prodding the ground on Wandlebury Hill he had found the buried outlines of two hill figures. He thought they ‘must’ have been deities of the area. Since the hills were known collectively as the ‘Gogmagog hills’, Lethbridge linked the god-figure with the giant thrown into the sea by Brutus’ friend Corineus and he thought he might be accompanied by a goddess. For the first time, a hill figure would be identified as female because of Lethbridge’s egalitarian notion that the god should have a female equivalent.81

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This great leap forward might have come about because Lethbridge had been reading Harold Bayley’s book Archaic England, in which Bayley suggested that if Gog was a god then perhaps Ma Gog was his wife. Lethbridge thought this ‘very sound reasoning’, and he found that Lewis Spence had agreed, back in 1928, when he associated Gog with Ogmius and Magog with Keridwen. Lethbridge thought Gog might also be Cernunnos, a god associated with fertility, since he had been reading along with Bayley’s book the work of Margaret Murray.82 However, the archaeological establishment refused to accept the hill figures as real and Lethbridge called in Murray, as an expert on prehistoric religion, to examine them. Murray was in her nineties, but she climbed the hill to see Lethbridge’s god and goddess. Murray was another mythmaker. She began as an Egyptologist but had more famously argued in 1921 that the remains of British paganism could be seen in a ‘Dianic cult’ practised by witches in the medieval and early modern periods. While writers from Geoffrey to Camden were earnestly documenting Diana as a long-dead goddess, Murray thought covens were secretly worshipping her and her consort, a deity wearing stag’s or goat’s horns. When witches were accused of worshipping Satan, it was because they were worshipping a horned god. Why, she wondered, should such practices have disappeared altogether? – ‘it is contrary to all experience that a cult should die out and leave no trace’. In fact it had left strong traces in customs and festivities, she posited, and the horned god in his ritual costume could be seen everywhere from ancient Egyptian art to French cave paintings to May Day celebrations.83 Murray later (1931) attached the name Cernunnos to her god, a name appearing in a single inscription on a first-century pillar excavated under Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in the eighteenth century. It accompanies a relief of a horned male head, alongside reliefs of Gallo-Roman deities, and has been likened to the antler-horned man depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a third-century vessel found in Denmark in the 1890s.84 Murray was thus very interested in ancient gods. She offered Lethbridge her support, but it did not help and Lethbridge left Cambridge shortly afterwards to take up a career in dowsing and ESP. Meanwhile the god and goddess were making their way in fiction and through poetry into practice. The rubber-planter and anthropologist Gerald Gardner’s novel High Magic’s Aid (1949) is partly the story of a medieval witch-cult that worships a god called Janicot – a French name also drawn from Murray’s work. The witch Morven describes the horned god and his masked rites as her people’s religion. The witches also worship Ardrea the daughter of Artemis (which recalls the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland’s book Aradia, about Italian witches). Throughout the novel, references to all manner of related and competing magical traditions from Greek to Jewish to Saxon pile together to create a tolerant and undogmatic mix. Gardner was one of the last colonial administrators of the British Empire’s heyday, since he managed and later inspected on behalf of the government rubber plantations in Sri Lanka, Borneo and Malaysia; and the long tradition of creative interest in other faiths that began

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in this chapter with William Jones matures in him. He had experience of Islam, Hinduism and animism as well as freemasonry and once back in England, he began to practise his own magical rites. Gardner is now seen as the creator of the modern British religion of Wicca.85 His co-worker, Doreen Valiente, explains that Gardner would give High Magic’s Aid to applicants wanting to join his coven.86 Their critical response to the novel was a test: thus literature shaped life and was the gatekeeper to modern pagan practice. Valiente also saw her religion as a literary one. She wrote poems to a variety of deities. Most importantly, she wrote a widely-used ‘Charge of the Goddess’ that invokes the deity as ‘Artemis; Astarte; Dione; Melusine; Aphrodite; Cerridwen; Dana; Arianrhod; Bride … ’ and ‘many other names’. Valiente also wrote poems to Pan, Hermes, the ‘Goddess Earth’, Khem and Isis.87 In Valiente’s work, we can see that all the gods and goddesses that we have met since 1130 were once again acceptable to Britons who wanted to write hymns to them as Jones had done, and instead of a wistful fascination actually made the decision to worship them too.88 The notion of the ‘horned god’ Cernunnos spread in wider literature. Most often he appears when the subject is masculinity and its rites of passage. Drawing on Kipling’s fiction (see Chapters 4 and 5) Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) uses the Romano-British period and its gods to negotiate contemporary issues of generational change, masculine friendship and difference. The book focuses on the relationship between the centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila and his British slave Esca Mac Cunoval, a Brigantian. Although it goes far beyond its genre, it is a boys’ adventure story. Sutcliff once said that she had only one plot, that of a boy growing up, and because of that intense, mannish focus Frank Mort calls her books ‘avowedly masculinist and frequently homosocial’ in their emphasis. Sutcliff’s identification with Kipling is evident in her joyous rejection of feminine authorial conventions. Among influences that can be traced are the Roman stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), which provided the model for Marcus in their centurion Parnesius.89 Marcus, like Parnesius, is a worshipper of Mithras, whose Christmas Day festival and identification as a god of light link him implicitly with Christianity. In Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave (1970) this identification is made even clearer: ‘the soldier’s god, the Word, the Light, the Good Shepherd, the mediator between the one God and man … Mithras’.90 Meanwhile, Esca’s god is Lugh, also ‘the Light of the Sun’, part of the tuatha dé danann pantheon. Neither man pays any attention to goddesses, though ‘Roma Dea!’ is a favourite oath in the world of the legionary town. Marcus and Esca’s journey is into manhood under the protection of male deities: it is symbolized when both participate in the book’s central ritual, the Feast of the New Spears. This is the rite of passage at which the boys of the Caledonian Epidaii tribe become men. They die symbolically as boys before rising again out of the tribe’s ancestral tomb as warriors. The tribe dance in the skins of their ‘totem’ animals before their boys are ushered out of the tomb by ‘the Horned One’: ‘an unforgettable figure of nightmare beauty, naked and superb, crested with a spreading pride of antlers’. Both Marcus and Esca feel

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compelled to kneel to the ‘priest-god’. They do not join the warriors but they enact their own version of the rite, raiding the tomb to recover the lost Eagle of the ninth legion. The Eagle is, symbolically, Marcus’ totem (aquila means eagle) and Mithras helps him to acquire it as he imagines light flooding the tomb.91 Sutcliff has found a cunning way to suggest Harrison’s hypothesis even as she emphasizes the beauty and mystery of the horned god’s pagan cult. In another text about growing and changing, the poet Geoffrey Hill imagined himself in 1971 as Cernunnos in a poem that mixed early medieval with contemporary settings. The god comes suddenly into the everyday: the boy/poet who is and isn’t Hill pulls up a root of crab-apple, but it hits him: ‘in brief cavort he was Cernunnos, the branched god, lightly concussed’.92 The man writing looks back at the boy as if he is looking back on the dark-age world of strange rites and unfamiliar being. The poem’s title is ‘Mercian Hymns’ and we might just see the suggestion of a hymn to Cernunnos here: Vincent Sherry calls the moment ‘a waggish burlesque of ritual drama’ and Calvin Bedient even sees ‘Mercian Hymns’ as ‘doing without God’ – but which god, and how earnestly is his presence or absence to be felt?93 There were, however, also sinister versions of Celtic deities in the horror genre so popular in post-war Britain. In 1967 a novel by David Pinner began a train of thought in British culture that was to result in the cult classic film The Wicker Man and its many literary, cinematic and cultural derivatives.94 Moving quickly to its central theme, Ritual begins with what appears to be the aftermath of an offering made to an unspecific god: The oak tree was very old. One of its lower branches had been recently snapped off. And some five feet below, a monkey’s head and three garlic flowers had been fastened to the trunk by a hat pin. Yet the little girl, who was asleep in its shadow, seemed unaware … She noticed nothing as the blood whispered between her front teeth and slid down her throat … And she wasn’t asleep. Dian Spark was eight years old and very dead.95 The cinematic quality of this passage is explained by the fact that the book began life as a movie ‘treatment’ (summary) written by Pinner for the director Michael Winner. Pinner later sold an option on the book to Anthony Shaffer and Christopher Lee, who wrote and starred in The Wicker Man.96 Hence Ritual’s long, unexpected legacy. The oak tree suggests immediately that we may be dealing with some kind of druidic survival and the Cornish setting further suggests Celts. Ritual’s – somewhat confused – ‘Celtic’ religion is then explained as far as it is going to be by Dian’s sister Anna: Fire is the symbol of power … God is in the fire. Not the Christ God! But the Dark God! … Tomorrow night we celebrate God! We will dance to give us power over corn and over ourselves! This tree is magical … Our

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God believes in blood … Your God, my God, our God, is freedom! Complete freedom! To do anything! … 97 Here is a dark god indeed. In The Wicker Man (1973) he becomes Nuada, and receives his human sacrifice at the end of the film. Goddesses, meanwhile, were preoccupying two of the most celebrated poets of the post-war period. Oddest of their outputs is Ted Hughes’ poetic novel Gaudete. It initially seems clear enough in its assertion that the feminine principle is missing in contemporary religiosity: an old man, Smayle, speaks up for it. He voices a defence of the central character, the vicar Lumb, who has (brace yourselves) been replaced by a changeling which has decided to found a cult based on impregnating the women of the parish in the hope that a messiah may be born. Smayle does not know about the changeling, but feels that Lumb has now attained a true understanding of religion: The vicar, he declares, Has realised that his religious career Depends on women, For all he knows, all those other religions too, depend on women … The church began with women … And now the whole thing’s worn back down to its women … Christianity is Christ in his mammy’s arms – Either a babe at the tit … Or else a young fellow collapsed across her knees … Something about mothers – maternal instincts. Something about the womb – foredoomed, protective instinct. Instinct for loss and woe and lamentation. But there is a problem. For all the truthfulness of Lumb’s re-placement of women at the centre of religion, the next line is ‘So men have lost interest’. A feminized religion is not what these men want, and indeed the village’s husbands and fathers eventually kill the changeling Lumb for his presumption in initiating their wives and daughters. Here Dunsany’s story of peaceful pagan conversion goes horribly wrong. Because its title comes from a hymn of rejoicing to the Virgin Mary, Gaudete has been imagined as culminating in ‘hymns to a female deity’ as Raphael Ingelbien puts it. This reading sees it as an attempt to achieve a proper female– male balance in religion by reviving the Goddess, who may appear in the Prologue as a ‘beautiful woman who seems to be alive and dead’ – this sounds like Graves’ white goddess.98 Hughes had won Graves’ The White Goddess as a prize at school and came to regard it as a ‘holy book’.99 But this purpose is not clearly or consistently articulated. Robert Holkeboer finds Lumb’s ministry ‘Dionysian’, and indeed with Hades he is one of two gods rather than goddesses alluded to in Hughes’ epigraphs. Anne Stevenson sees the book as Christian/Orphic with

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Lumb a saviour figure betrayed by his maenads.100 Gaudete could even be an elaborate literary joke: indeed, in an irritated review Paul Muldoon wrote that while he hesitated to use the word ‘gobbledegook’, he felt that Hughes had ‘got a bloody nerve’ in publishing it, while Julian Moynahan commented that he would like to take it seriously but could not.101 Perhaps we are in the territory of Gravesian riddles, or with Peacock in his ‘Cauldron of Ceridwen’, in which he too couldn’t decide whether he was in earnest or not. The poem leads up to and continues obscurely after a bathetic religious ceremony, which is sabotaged by Lumb’s housekeeper – no deities are named during it. One woman, Felicity, feels that ‘somehow she has become a goddess’ and the book teeters on the edge of beauty: ‘all these women are moving inside the body of an incandescent creature of love’. But she is killed by the jealous housekeeper moments later. The only statement offering precise definition to Lumb’s religion is delivered flatly by Mrs Evans, whose husband has beaten it out of her: Mr Lumb has a new religion. He is starting Christianity all over again, right from the start. He has persuaded all the women in the parish. Only women can belong to it. They are all in it and he makes love to them all, all the time. Thus the book begins and ends with Christianity started ‘all over again’, and despite the fact that Lumb carries a sheela-na-gig around, there is no sense that what Hughes is offering is a straightforward engagement with goddessworship.102 Instead, mixing myth and folk-tale with surrealism, realism and comedy, he has produced a poem that takes us back to fragments of the first half of the century, fragments that could be genius or parody or ‘crazy’: a Carry On Mabinogion. The ‘verses’ that end the book do appear to focus on images of birth and female guidance and perhaps thus on celebration of a nature goddess – ‘an unearthly woman wading shorewards/With me in your arms’, ‘She rides the earth … She rides the heavens …’ – but it is over-optimistic to identify her straightforwardly, as Herbert Lomas does, as ‘Graves’ White Goddess’.103 The notion that Hughes evolved a coherent goddess mythology that passed through Gaudete – beginning somewhere in his 1960 collection Lupercal and culminating in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being in 1992 is a myth.104 What he did was to attempt to invoke various versions of the goddess and her worship but the outcome was highly personal, cryptic and fragmentary, just like Graves’. In Hughes’ poetry the result can be seen at its most beautiful, vague and tentative in Remains of Elmet (1979) where we have hints of ‘the Mothers’ as goddesses, as well as ‘the wild gentle god of everywhereness’.105 The Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney deeply revered Hughes and some of his work feels like a direct writing-back to the other poet.106 And in ‘Grotus and Coventina’ (1987) Heaney finds and names the goddess, with a

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directness that the conflicted Hughes could not manage.107 ‘Far from home,’ he begins, ‘Grotus dedicated an altar to Coventina.’ Coventina was worshipped at a spring near Hadrian’s Wall, where Grotus’ altar was excavated in 1878.108 Thinking of Grotus’ altar ‘works on’ the poet as it must have ‘worked on’ Grotus – when he remembers it, something like a spring starts flowing near his heart. Coventina’s image, pouring water from a pitcher, leads him to remember a time when the electric water pump at his house broke down, ‘and when it began to hammer on again,/Jubilation’ was the reaction, a rejoicing in ‘the sheer/ Given fact of water’. The poem recreates the experience of remembering the value of something, or someone, and resolving never to underestimate it again.109 John Dillon points to the poem’s concluding lines, when the poet asks someone to ‘run through’ that experience again with him: There is perhaps also, acting as a link between these two memories [Grotus’ and Heaney’s], and giving them, together, a deeper significance, an appeal to someone, perhaps his wife Marie, often the recipient of poems like this, to renew his poetic inspiration, which has temporarily dried up: ‘I’ll be Grotus, you be Coventina.’110 In this poem, we can all be gods and goddesses, who are rescued from oblivion and remembered at last. While Helen Vendler calls ‘Grotus and Coventina’ ‘a love poem to Heaney’s wife’, it is also a love poem to Coventina herself.111 This chimes with Ingelbien’s reading of Heaney’s poetry as driven by the idea of a goddess as a bringer of reunion and resurgence, especially in the Irish context but also – rather ironically – in England too, where Coventina’s shrine is located. Ingelbien quotes Heaney’s 1974 essay collection Preoccupations in which he argues that Ireland is labouring under ‘a new male cult’ invented by Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, all Protestant figures of conquest. If Ireland were able instead to return to pre-Reformation cultural imperatives and worship something closer to ‘an indigenous territorial numen, a tutelary of the whole island’, a goddess, the nations might be more easily reconciled and spiritually renewed.112 My summary is a simplification of Heaney’s wish, but it is interesting that Ingelbien too ends up speaking of a ‘pagan/Catholic’ culture that might emerge. The slash appears to reconcile everything, although in fact (of course) it does not. Yet this ‘pagan/Catholic’ wholeness was truly hankered after by a group of poets and other writers of the second half of the twentieth century, whose vision is shared to the extent that Ingelbien can speak of Heaney’s goddess-cult as ‘imported from England’ – imported, presumably, from its manufacturer Robert Graves via the middleman Ted Hughes. We’ve surveyed other manufacturers and distributors of the god and goddess in this chapter too. It suggests that we need to look further back than Graves for the literary history of imported goddesses and gods in Britain: as far back as William Jones, at least, and before him in the first chapter to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

4 ‘I WONDER WHAT WOTAN WILL SAY TO ME’ ‘Heathen men’ and northern deities from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century

No more shall nations bow the knee, Vanquish’d Taranis, to thee; No more upon the sacred stone, Teutates, shall thy victims groan; The vanquish’d Odin, Rome, shall cause thy fall, And his destruction shake thy proud imperial wall … Robert Southey, ‘The Death of Odin’ England is a bad country for Gods. Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill

Them and us This chapter takes a step back in British literary history to look at the engagement of writers with the Anglo-Saxon-Northern pagan strand of their heritage and bring it into a legible relationship with their Romano-British-Celtic interests, in a way not attempted before. Often these two creative and scholarly traditions are seen quite separately, and they do have very different aspects – but in fact they and their gods and goddesses merge and diverge in a way vitally important to understanding writings on British pagan deities. To document this relationship we need to look back first to the earliest poems on Anglo-Saxon and ‘Viking’ invasions of the early Middle Ages. The meeting of peoples went badly, since it was an engagement in the military sense as well as the cultural: it was often Christian versus pagan and sometimes different groups of pagans were fighting each other. A good place to start is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 793 AD, which described the first attack on Northumberland by ‘heðenra manna’ (heathen men), those

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we might now label ‘Vikings’. In the Peterborough version of the Chronicle a later reader annotated the account of the destruction of the Lindisfarne monastery with an asterisk and the ominous word ‘Dani’ (Danes). ‘Danes’ was used as a catch-all term, as Donald Scragg explains, the precursor to ‘Vikings’.1 Northern ‘heathens’, then, arrived in the British written record with a reputation for high profile, religiously-motivated savagery. They came to prey on Christians but ironically found themselves converted. That fact and subsequent history – a Germanic royal family and two World Wars where Germany was Britain’s primary opponent – have meant that Germanic and Nordic paganisms have often taken a back-seat in the British imagination for reasons of delicacy or dislike. Here were militant, only recently-reformed pagans with far too much attitude. The two kinds of paganism – Nordic and Germanic – are not the same, however. What we now think of as Nordic or sometimes ‘Viking’ paganism was Scandinavian and focused on the pantheon led by the god Odin. It was quite well documented because it survived into the 1000s AD in places such as Iceland, in a highly-literate scholarly culture. It travelled to Britain, especially Scotland and Ireland, with northern invaders. Germanic paganism, meanwhile, is far less clearly defined. It might include deities such as Taranis, Teutates, Nerthus and others described in antiquity by classical writers (primarily Lucan and Tacitus, as we have seen), or it might focus on Woden and other deities related to the Scandinavian pantheon. These are documented in medieval texts in England, as we saw in Chapter 1. This confusion created two troubling discontinuities for later writers: are the Nordic deities also the Germanic deities or not, and are the English German or not? Neither question has been resolved. Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, then, might be like or unlike ‘Danes’ or ‘Celts’: if they shared Taranis they could all be ‘Celts’, while if they shared Woden they could all be ‘Danes’. All, however, arrived in Britain as pagans: in Chapter 1 we saw Gildas excoriating the god-hated Saxons because they were pagan and Bede, for all his own Englishness, was no better. Although he calendared some of the AngloSaxons’ goddess festivals, when it came to Christian attempts to resist the pagan Saxons and the Picts, he describes a holy war where ‘Christ himself commanded in the camp’ and a baptized army led by three bishops routed their enemies. He summed up: the Britons have ‘a national hatred for the English’ based in part on early religious conflict.2 In the Welsh Annals, the Saxons and the Danes are all referred to as simply ‘the gentiles’ (‘cenhedloedd’), ‘black gentiles’ or ‘pagans’ (‘paganiaid’).3 While the religious division between Christian and pagan is foregrounded in each text, this lumping together of northern and north-eastern pagans from places as far apart as England, Saxony and Norway makes writings about the different groups hard to untangle. The untangling also runs counter to the meanings intended by writers from the Middle Ages right through to the present – once groups such as ‘pagans’, ‘heathen men’ or ‘Vikings’ had been labelled, the term could cover everyone who was not self-evidently a British Christian. Ethel Seaton shows that Camden

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was the first British writer to discuss the term ‘Viking’, in its original form ‘wiccinge’. It was the 1840s before the modern form was in popular use but it endures today. Camden also spoke of ‘English-Saxons’, so that that label has a long history too.4 With this in mind, I shall discuss the Anglo-Saxon and Northern groups as part of this conflated pagan identity, but draw attention to differences when required as the chapter goes on. The tendency to conflate is as important as the reality of Frisians, Angles and Norwegians in discussing writings about Nordic and Germanic paganism in British literature, though it is also vital to remember that we are dealing with a literary construct and to remember that the Germans were routinely described as ‘Celts’ too. A further ‘Celtic’ problem is illuminated in the tenth-century The Battle of Brunanburh. Here ‘Scotta’ and ‘North-menn’ invaders of the tenth century are compared to the earliest Saxon invaders of the fifth, helpfully differentiating the two groups. ‘Never was there greater slaughter’ than now, says the poem: … since hither from the east There came Angles and Saxons (‘Engle’, ‘Seaxe’), Over the broad ocean they sought Britain … So far so good, but: Proud battle-smiths, [they] overcame the Britons (‘Weallas’), Glorious warriors, and conquered the homeland.5 The word Weallas is often translated as ‘Welsh’ but although this is literally correct, it is wrong in its implications: all the Britons were ‘Weallas’, strangers, foreigners, to the invaders. So here is a further conflation: all Britons were Welsh; Welsh texts were once the only ‘British literature’. This is a designation widely forgotten. And ironically the defenders of the ‘homeland’ in the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, repelling the forces of Olaf and Guthfrith of York and Dublin, were the West Saxon (‘West-Seaxe’) and Mercian (‘Mierce’) descendants of earlier Saxon invaders. Now converted, they drove out the heathen under the ‘bright candle of God’ (‘godes candel beorht’) – the Christian sun that lights their victory.6 The identity and religious politics of the period before about 950 AD are impenetrably complex. Soon, however, Danish and Norwegian armies were attacking southern Britain, a conflict culminating in the Battle of Maldon in August 991, which gave rise to the fragmentary poem of that name. This poem is more binary, more insistent on the hero’s Christianity, and the invaders are more simply demonized as ‘helsceaðan’ and ‘hæðene scealcas’ – hell-fiends and heathens. Dying defenders entrust their souls to Christ and thank God for his mercy.7 Here the Danes clearly figure as anti-Christian enemies, despite the fact that, as Jayne Carroll notes, the Danish kings had been Christians since the 960s and that Cnut, who would succeed the last Anglo-Saxon king Edmund, was routinely portrayed by writers as

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a pilgrim and saviour.8 Nevertheless, British writers had begun to settle on a representation of the northern and Germanic peoples who were invading and settling their northern and eastern lands, and their precursors: these were pagans, heathens, and creatures allied with hell. They were not ‘us’. So it was not until the early modern period that British antiquarians began to investigate their northern religious inheritance as well as their ancient British one. Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf were gathered into humanist libraries: Beowulf’s first named British reader was the Elizabethan linguist and antiquarian Laurence Nowell, who wrote his name on the manuscript that he owned.9 The poem makes it clear that Beowulf lived before the Christian conversion, but does not explore his paganism. Meanwhile, we have seen how an equally desacralized Woden appears in medieval chronicles as a mere king. William Harrison mentioned him too, along with Frea and Thor as deified rulers after whom weekdays were named.10 Camden was, however, the first British writer to offer coherent and influential suggestions about the Anglo-Saxon pantheon. His list of deities was based on his reading of Tacitus, Gildas, Bede and, among others, the eleventh-century chronicler Adam of Bremen, though he did not know the Swedish work of Olaus Magnus (see below). In particular, Camden repeated Adam’s account of a temple at Uppsala, Sweden, in which Thor, ‘Woodan’ and ‘Fricco’ were worshipped. Thor, Adam had related, was a god similar to Jupiter, governing the air, thunder, rain and crops; Woodan was a god of war and valour like Mars; Fricco was a god of peace and pleasure, whose statue in the Uppsala temple bore a huge phallus. Camden offered no comment on this. But he did go on to refer to the Saxon practice of augury by neighing horses, animal and human sacrifice to Woden or Mercury (note that he does not choose between Mercury and Mars as equivalents of Woden). He mentioned other deities: Venus in the person of Frea or ‘Frico’, Bede’s ‘Eoster’ and Tacitus’ Nerthus, whom he called ‘Herthus’ and thought to be an earth goddess.11 The name ‘Frico’ introduces a profound confusion of sex, for it looks to the casual reader to be the same as ‘Fricco’, the god, and has a masculine ending. This inherited ambiguity would haunt the figure of the goddess. Meanwhile, Camden had also given impetus to another myth running in English literature, for he had gathered from his sources the conventional wisdom (based on Annius of Viterbo, again) that the great-grandson of Noah’s son Japheth was a man named Tuisco. The Germans having lost their original patriarchal faith somewhere between the Ark and the Rhine, Tuisco was deified by his people. Tacitus listed among German deities ‘Tuisto’ and Camden took his name from there. Such was the bustle to discover the religion and origin of the Britons, however, that it was 1605 before a full-length account of the English was published: Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities Concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation. Verstegan, a Catholic goldsmith and engraver who was born in London of Dutch descent, devoted a whole chapter to Saxon paganism. Firstly, he named ‘Tuisco’ and to Camden’s recital added that

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this god was worshipped as a father-god in the figure of a man dressed in animal skins. The Saxons’ other ‘Idolls’ were varied and, strikingly, the book provided pictures of seven of them, engraved by Verstegan himself. As Rolf Bremmer points out, each one flies in the face of Tacitus’ comment in his Germania that the Saxons did not represent their deities as human beings.12 Instead, Verstegan is drawing his visual imagination from the richly illustrated Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus of Olaus Magnus (1555): Magnus’ woodcuts show the gods as human figures, so that Verstegan’s statues are an evolution into stone form.13 As well as Tuisco, Verstegan gives us the sun, worshipped in the form of a pillar topped by a man’s torso bearing the image of a wheel and with a face surrounded by rays. There is also the moon, which Verstegan feared would seem ‘very strange and ridiculous’ since the depiction was of a woman wearing ‘a short coat like a man’, a hood with ‘two long ears’ and ‘pyked shooes’ (pointed). She held a disc bearing a face, which Verstegan explained as the moon’s shape, but he could not account for her other attributes. Then came Woden, an armed hero, deified like Tuisco, and conflated by the Romans with Mars (in the picture he is, delightfully, in medieval armour and a Roman leather skirt or pteruges). Thor was represented on a throne-like bed wearing a crown set with stars and holding ‘a Kingly Scepter’. The regal was always dangerous imagery, and the Restitution’s Thor bears a striking resemblance to James I, to whom Verstegan dedicated his book from the safe distance of Antwerp. He had fled England in 1581, having printed an account of the martyrdom of the Jesuit Edmund Campion and was unable to return. Speaking as a Christian, Verstegan remarks that Thor was actually ‘of as little worth as any of the meanest of that rabble’ – which establishes his position as an author who is not over-interested in non-Christian deities. But the words ‘of as little worth … meanest … rabble’ are not happy accompaniments to the royal imagery. And Verstegan adds to the unease with the information that He [Thor] was of the seduced Pagans believed to be of most marvellous power and might, yea, and that there were no people throughout the whole world, that were not subjected to him, and did not ow him divine honour and service … 14 It is the first paragraph of a passage occupying half the page, and has a distinctly satirical tone. Thor’s claims seem to be being mocked as those of an over-greedy imperialist not unlike James himself. Bremmer calls Verstegan’s dedication to the king ‘downright hypocritical’, suggesting that the book is a piece of propaganda urging England to return to Catholicism, but he does not comment on the figure of the king directly and I would suggest that Verstegan’s divided loyalties manifest themselves just as strongly in this god as elsewhere in the book.15 The old question of identity recurs: is the Netherlandish and Catholic Verstegan one of ‘them’

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or one of ‘us’? Has he inherited the mantle of the heathen men, or is he a good British Christian? With his mind running on hierarchy and power, Verstegan turns next to the goddess ‘Friga’, ‘next following in rank and reputation’. This gives unusual potency to a female deity – something not found in contemporary accounts of the British pantheon, which has Andraste as counterpart to Taranis but gives her no authority over other gods. Yet Friga is not wholly feminine, as seen in the confusion of sources brought together by Camden. Verstegan does what he can with this: Friga was venerated as both goddess and god, he decides, and like some versions of Venus (e.g., the one worshipped in The Faerie Queene) s/he ‘represented both sexes … as an Hermaphrodite’. His illustration of Friga holds a sword and bow, ‘signifying thereby, that women as well as men should in time of need be ready to fight’. Friga is also the goddess of ‘love and amity’, Verstegan continues: some antiquaries call her Frea and position her as Woden’s wife. This is a mistake, he tells us – and here is a further confusion between like-named goddesses, so that Friga/Frico/Fricco/Frea is now multiply ambiguous.16 More straightforwardly, next comes Seater, a saturnine god whose statue stands on the back of a fish and holds a wheel and a pail of fruits and flowers. He is a god of safety, unity and plenty after whom Saturday is named. Verstegan also illustrates ‘Ermensewl’, ‘the Pillar or stay of the poor’ and ‘Flynt’, representing death.17 Other deities are not dwelt upon – Verstegan regards them as too long a list ‘and too worthless’. But his key point has been made: pagans were mistaken in their worship, going so far as to sacrifice humans to their devilish idols. Verstegan’s only professed interest in them is that ‘these idols before named, with other the like, the Pagan Saxons brought with them at such time as they came into Brittain’. Thus they were established firmly by 1605 as ‘English-Saxon’ deities. Verstegan’s account was highly influential; indeed, together with Camden he codified the long British literary tradition of associating Nordic and Germanic gods with a warrior masculinity that is both undermined and enlivened by concerns about sexual identity, transformation and authority. He also struck the characteristic note of later stories of the pantheon that, while it appears initially well defined, melts into confusion and multiple identities shortly thereafter. Verstegan even gives us mugshots of the deities, but we still can’t quite catch up with them. We shall explore this multiple ambiguity further in this chapter and the final chapter.

Britain begins its ‘Saxon date’: but not just yet Verstegan’s book did not spark an immediate interest in Anglo-Saxon deities, although Selden, in his notes to Poly-Olbion, noticed them enough to recall Camden’s statement that a god called ‘Heil’ was worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons at Cerne in Dorset.18 In the early 1620s, in his only history play, the prolific dramatist Thomas Middleton wrote an Anglo-Saxon tale of contested kingship, Hengist King of Kent. Although it did not feature pagan worship, it did call the

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Saxon Roxena a queen of ‘Pagan bloud’, conflating religion and racial identity like an updated version of The Battle of Maldon. Yet things are seldom simple in Middleton’s plays. When the bad British king ‘Vortiger’ discovers Roxena’s treachery he insults her with the words ‘Toad, Pagan’. But her lover Horsa replies ‘Viper, Christian’ with equal justice since the leading Christian characters are just as guilty of murder and lust. The play ends with a Christian victory, as is conventional, but there is not much faith in it. As he usually did, Middleton appeared to enjoy writing wickedness more than goodness: the Saxons’ Machiavellian bloodlust is graphically portrayed. And, as Julia Briggs points out, although he was not greatly interested in antiquarian scholarship, he did give his characters an Anglo-Saxon phrase to speak, the first use of the language onstage. Revealingly it was ‘nemp yor sexes’, draw your weapons.19 Hengist King of Kent was one of a number of early modern Anglo-Saxon plays, but almost all focused on Christian figures and post-conversion times. In contrast, Middleton offered a glimpse into the Anglo-Saxon mind: villainous but tragically human. In its turn, Middleton’s play influenced the work of the forger William Henry Ireland, who in 1796 attempted to pass off his play Vortigern and Rowena as a work by Shakespeare. Although it is an amusingly poor imitation of a Renaissance play on the whole, Vortigern gets its politics of pagan fictions right in that it does not mention heathen deities. Ireland might have followed eighteenth-century fashion and squeezed Odin in: surely he must have been tempted. Instead, because he is trying to imitate Macbeth, a reference to Hecate is inserted in Act 1, Scene 3 and there are some scattered metaphorical Joves and Dians. A reference drawing on later scholarly work on the northern pantheon would have given the game away. The Icelandic Eddas, which contained stories of deities (especially Odin), were rediscovered and translated only in the mid-seventeenth century and, as Seaton explains, they greatly stimulated interest in northern pagan religion.20 A second edition of Verstegan’s Restitution appeared in 1628 and joined work by Henry Spelman, Thomas Browne and Robert Sheringham on English, Danish and Germanic antiquities. Sheringham, a Cambridge University linguist, was ‘the first to profit by the Edda’ in his De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio (1670) since he introduced Odin’s mythic relationship with runes and poetry to British readers. Suddenly Odin was of especial interest to literary culture. Sheringham retold many of the Norse legends: the beautiful god Balder, Odin’s summoning of war-dead to his hall, the inglorious dead’s journey to Hela in Niflheim, and so on.21 Six years later, our old friend Aylett Sammes did the same in English. Sammes offers an excellent example of the overlap sometimes imagined between Anglo-Saxon-Northern and Romano-British-Celtic deities instead of a sharp division between them: he thought of all these as versions of one another. Taranis was Thor, Hesus was Mercury – all were one big happy family including Phoenician and Greek deities too. When he looked specifically at northern deities, Sammes tried to unpick the knot that had grown around ‘Fricco’, since ‘we know not of what Sex to take her, having the Members of both’. He too fell back on the Venus-hermaphrodite

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theory, but he added ‘Freya’ to the confusion: now the god/dess had five possible names. He returned to Bede to discuss ‘Eoster’ and Rheda and found other gods and goddesses in Danish sources: Nocca the sea-god, Tanfana (mentioned by Tacitus) whom he and Sheringham thought to be a god of fate, and so on. Sammes thought Woden, not Tuisco, was the chief Saxon god – a suggestion that would find favour. He also discussed four idols whom he thought to be Saxon: Rugivith, Porevith, Porenuth and Suantovite. These were in fact Slavic or Wendish deities taken from the writing of Saxo Grammaticus. They were many-faced and/or many-headed and Sammes included some striking illustrations.22 These four stray gods would end up in the work of William Blake, another highly original mythmaker like Sammes. All these works on Norse and Germanic deities had a limited impact, however: even their most inflammatory ideas failed to find a mainstream place in a literary world now obsessed with ancient Britons, druids and Stonehenge. As we saw in Chapter 2, Walter Charleton tried to insert Danes into the narrative of Stonehenge’s building, and John Dryden supported him. Yet once again, the Britons were preferred – accurately, but for all the wrong reasons. However, there were some limited stirrings of what was to come: Gibson’s Britannia attributed a great number of barrows to Saxons or Danes, and Dryden’s interest in Germanic antiquity found more successful expression on the musical stage.23 His King Arthur, or the British Worthy (an opera of 1691, with music by Henry Purcell) imagines a magical battle between King Arthur and the heathen Saxon Oswald – a curious idea in itself and open to all manner of embellishment, which it duly receives. Ethel Seaton defends Dryden from accusations of ‘merely pretending to study the rites and customs of the heathen Saxons’ in his re-creation of pagan activities, although she admits that almost all literary references to northern mythology are open to the charge of confusion in some way or other. Dryden is no exception.24 In King Arthur’s first act, set in a ‘place of Heathen worship’, the Saxons sacrifice horses and men to Woden, Thor and Frea, as in the Swedish temple described by Adam of Bremen. The Saxons Osmo and Oswa pray to all three too, stressing the religious difference between themselves and their Christian enemies: Father of Gods and Men, great Woden, hear. Mount thy hot Courser, drive amidst thy Foes; Lift high thy thund’ring Arm, let every blow Dash out a mis-believing Briton’s Brains … Give Conquest to thy Saxon Race, and me. Thor, Freya, Woden, hear … In response a wicked spirit rises from the earth, promising six willing human sacrifices who, ‘for their Country … devote their Lives/A Sacrifice to Mother Earth, and Woden’. Mother Earth might be Camden’s ‘Herthus’, since Camden’s influence on the rest of the scene is so strong. As with Fricco, his/her sex was

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debatable – often referred to by Tacitus’ designation, the masculine-sounding Nerthus, she later appears as ‘Hertha’ in Algernon Swinburne’s poem of that name in 1869.25 Meanwhile, Dryden’s god and goddess’ victims’ entrails will be used for augury while their souls will go to ‘Woden’s Hall’; ‘Tanfan’ is also mentioned, in a debt to Sammes via, Seaton suggests, Sheringham. Luckily, Arthur’s magician Merlin’s magic is more powerful and virtuous than the Saxons’ and they are defeated.26 Dryden’s opera follows the line of the medieval poems in its confused sense that the Saxons are both terrifying pagan savages and also homely Englishmen in the making; the scene closes with a statement that Britain is now beginning its ‘Saxon date’. Although the invaders and their ill-defined pantheon are repelled this time, we know they will be back. Indeed, in literature they returned familiarly four years later in the physician Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, an epic of 1695, with enough debts to Dryden to cause him to accuse Blackmore of plagiarism. This was partly politically motivated, however: Blackmore was a supporter of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the new king, William III, while Dryden was opposed to the regime. It might have been expected that, given William’s Dutch origin, Blackmore would portray the continental Saxons as friends of Britain, but he did not. Instead, he perversely followed Dryden in imagining them as enemies of Arthur. Indeed, so much did he dislike them that he conflated Thor and his fellow-gods not only with Jacobites but also with devils, so that Lucifer appears as one of them. A further debt, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, becomes glaring: Th’ Apostate raging at his own Defeat And envying this new Prince [Arthur/William] his happy Seat; Labours to win him to his Side, to bear Arms against Heav’n, and wage Confed’rate War … Great Prince, then Thor reply’d, Who rul’st the Realms of Hell with Soveraign Sway, Whom all th’ Infernal Thrones, and Pow’rs obey, I own Obedience to thy high Command, Who putt’st this Scepter first into my Hand. Blackmore’s northern deities thus appeared in a ‘welter of confused mythology’, as Seaton puts it. This at least proved that Blackmore was not wholly guilty of copying Dryden, for he had inserted several new gods. Here are Odin and ‘Irmansul’ and Jove and Tuisco and so on in a very long poem.27 It was clear that interest, if not expertise, in heathen religion was growing, and that the northern deities would soon be mounting a challenge to British druidic dominance.

Odin’s renaissance and its perils Indeed, the deities of ancient northern literatures would eventually become part of Romanticism. In the early eighteenth century, the Danish physician Ole

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Worm’s Runick Antiquities (the contemporary name for his works on Danish monuments) and other Scandinavian works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the Eddas and a few sagas, began to be popularized beyond the small band of ‘septentrionalists’ (scholars interested in northern culture).28 Their novelty of form and subject matter provoked a desire to write imitative poetry about virile warriors bleeding heroically, with sublime scenery.29 Much of the work centred on Odin. He had now been shown by the ancient texts to be at the forefront of the pantheon, as Sheringham and Sammes had hypothesized. Further, Odin was right for the time, and for the writers who wanted him. He was re-imagined as the perfect Gothic god: brooding, lonesome and twisted. He was also a suicide who in the Hávamál of the Poetic Edda is represented as sacrificing himself to himself to gain wisdom in the form of runes. This was heroic and despairing in equal measure, a perfect combination. Odin was thus the right god for the Romantic male poet: a little mad and bad, the Satan for a sub-Miltonic age. Accordingly, Thomas Warton wrote two short, slightly hysterical ‘runic odes’ about him in the 1730s. Both celebrated the life of a dying warrior who, freed from his wallowing in ‘hostile Gore’, goes to Valhalla at last: ‘Death, to the Brave a blest Resort,/Brings us to awful Odin’s Court’.30 Although an Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster, Warton was capable of most bloodthirsty sentiment: the ‘pioneer of Romanticism’ in his emotive histrionics, as David Fairer notes.31 His fellow early or proto-Romantic James Thomson likewise lauded the freedom of the brave and desperate who were destined for ‘Odin’s hall’ in Liberty (1734) while Thomas Penrose imagined the ‘grisly lord’ sweeping out with his warriors, ‘panting for carnage’ in Flights of Fancy (1775). The reputation of northern pagans for savagery resurfaced from the early medieval literature so that in the Newcastle vicar John Brown’s 1756 play, Athelstan, the Christian AngloSaxons are the victims of specifically Danish atrocity, including being sacrificed to Danish ‘idols’. The play dwells on: … the Terrors Of the dread Sacrifice; the Victims bound; The howling Incantations of our Priests Invoking Hell … 32 Even as Romanticism rushed to claim Odin as its own, for more conventional writers the pagans – this time the Danes – were still ‘them’. The tide was unstoppable, however. Most influentially, in the 1760s Thomas Percy published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry translated from Icelandic and Thomas Gray published two paraphrases from Old Norse via Latin, including ‘The Descent of Odin’, a rendering of Odin’s consultation of Hela to learn the fate of his son Balder.33 Balder had been killed in an ‘accident’ arranged by the malicious god Loki, and thus had not died a brave death, only a tragic one. As such, he was destined for Hela’s misty realm, not Odin’s hall, which received

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those fallen in battle. This borderland between the heroic masculinity of the warlord and the misfortune of the kind and gentle Balder was revisited several times. In 1790, Frea was the subject of a verse play by Frank Sayers, ‘The Descent of Frea’, which paralleled Gray’s ‘The Descent of Odin’ but dramatized the confrontation between the two goddesses over Balder’s death. Walter Scott admired it and based some of his own Nordic work on it.34 Balder might represent the new man of feeling of the period, set against the traditional warriorhero Odin – but was he not a bit soft for the angry young Romantic man? Odin was preferred, in the end, offering a wilful, doomed protagonist associated with gore and transgression. This group of works, and Odin’s possible appearance in the Ossian poems discussed in Chapter 2, was part of the fascination with what was now being labelled ‘Gothic’: a word often at the time confused with ‘Celtic’ but in this sense associated with the north. The extent of the terminological blurring is evident in Macpherson’s Loda and also in John Fisher’s 1774 Masque of the Druids. These druids are worshipping Woden instead of any god that we might now plausibly label ‘Celtic’: Taranis, perhaps, or Belenus.35 In the 1760s and 1770s, northern identities and pantheons were easily shuffled and reformed, since it was not really clear who the Goths had been. Were they Germans, or Celts, or both, or neither (or Scythians, or not)? The ‘Gothic’ more widely was a cultural shift in taste that, as Barrett Kalter says, was at once ‘a category of historical research, a literary style and a consumer preference’. The same few Gothicized images of Odin thus floated freely and recurred across all three spheres of activity. In literature, the Gothic thus expressed itself partly in a choice to write about paganism, which involved a choice of pantheon – just as we saw in the last chapter with classical deities squaring up to Celtic ones across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Gray is now better known for his interest in Celtic literatures, especially The Bard (a poem about the suppression of bardic culture in medieval Wales); but he also found Nordic material inspiring. He summed up perfectly his desire for anything other than Christianity or classicism in a letter to his friend William Mason, of Caractacus fame: he lusted for an ‘agreeable pitch of heathenism’ and deplored any literary descent into ‘moral philosophy, & cold good sense’. He wanted ‘superior wildness, more barbaric fancy’. Classical paganism was no longer pagan enough and Venus herself, he swore, could not tempt him.36 Robert Southey was even more explicit about the conflict between what he called ‘genuine’ Odinic poesy and its outmoded classical competitor, writing of the north in the 1790s that There genuine poesy, in freedom bright, Diffus’d o’er all her clear, her all-enlivening light. From Helicon’s meandering rills The inspiring goddess fled; Amid the Scandinavian hills In clouds she hid her head … 37

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As historians such as Samuel Kliger and Christopher Hill noticed in the 1950s, the association of the north with ‘freedom’ had a distinguished intellectual history from Tacitus, for whom the Germanic tribes represented a purer form of living than the Roman one, through European Parliamentarians from the early modern period onward: Christine Gerrard, for example, explores ‘Patriot Gothic’ and Whiggery in a book on opposition to the government of Sir Robert Walpole.38 As Peter Mortensen puts it, for much of the history of literature ‘Gothic’ meant ‘anti-aristocratic, anti-absolutist and at least potentially radical’. This was certainly the impression given by the Swiss Paul-Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities as translated by Percy in 1770 and read by Southey before writing his Odinic poems.39 This liberty was what early Romantics had in mind when they chose Odin. In 1792–93 Southey wrote two poems in letters to friends featuring Odin as exactly the heroic king pictured by Mallet, imposing laws by bloody but necessary conquest and driving out tyrant gods and men alike. Here is ‘The Death of Odin’: Soul of my much love’d Freya, yes I come. No pale Diseases haggard power Has hasten’d on thy husbands hour Nor pourd by victor’s thirsty hand Has Odin’s life bedewd the land — I rush to meet thee by a self will’d doom. No more my clatt’ring iron car Shall rush amid the throng of war No more obedient to my heavenly cause Shall crimson Conquest stamp her Odin’s laws … Let conquest fell the Roman wall. Revenge on Rome my Asgard’s fall. The Druid throng shall fall away, And sink beneath your victor sway; No more shall nations bow the knee, Vanquish’d Taranis, to thee; No more upon the sacred stone, Teutates, shall thy victims groan; The vanquish’d Odin, Rome, shall cause thy fall, And his destruction shake thy proud imperial wall.[sic]40 The Romans and the Celts are both to fall beneath the sword of Odin’s successor Thor, and he will replace all their gods in his turn with more enlightened governance: explicitly, Taranis and Teutates can go. In his last words, Odin warns against the ‘luxury’ that led to Roman decadence and fall: here he is clearly both man and god, and definitely an anti-imperial insurgent.

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Yet Southey’s views changed over time. ‘The Race of Odin’ and ‘The Death of Odin’ were written in the early 1790s but by 1814 the poet was dreaming of writing a long ‘Runic romance’ about him. However, he no longer saw Odin in the same light, stating in his commonplace book that now ‘Odin must be the god, not the hero’. As a euhemerized tribal leader, the ‘extraordinary person’ described in Mallet, he was not now poetical enough. Mallet had drawn on Thormodus Torfaeus and the medieval Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson to portray Odin as a man named Sigge who had cunningly and heroically transformed himself into a god-priest-king and who, as Woden, was the ancestor of Hengist and Horsa. He presided over his people in an enlightened and inclusive style, was the founder of parliaments, and had defeated the despotic Romans. Yet neither he nor the people who worshipped him in this state were worthy of a starring role in Southey’s planned epic. Now he pompously wrote that ‘the history of savages is never important enough to furnish an action for poetry’.41 In Southey we find a particularly self-contradictory expression of the difficulties of writing about the Anglo-Saxon deities and their earlier Norse and Germanic incarnations. Firstly, the racial/tribal question perplexes, as can be seen from Odin’s plan to stamp out druidry as part of toppling Rome: who exactly were the Goths, again? Which groups had druids and which did not? Individual writers stabbed hopefully at divergent answers. Secondly, what of the political implications of the northern deities’ violence – freedom, perhaps, but also apparently indiscipline and brutality? Then, how to reconcile the intellectual and ethical pretensions of a Christian writer with the portrayal of gods and goddesses who, in his terms, represent the most immoral of lifestyles? Finally, at least in Mallet’s influential reading, these deities were self-invented out of Machiavellian deceitfulness and foisted on their worshippers – as Southey put it in a letter to Grosvenor Bedford in 1793, ‘Odin passed himself for a God’.42 This shocking idea haunted pagan fiction, as we have seen, and would become especially pointed in stories of post-Darwinian prehistory (see Chapter 5). This kind of controversy was not what Southey was looking for. And as Mortensen and Philip Connell have shown, all this contested ideology did turn out to be too difficult for later Romanticism to process.43 The French Revolution had shown Romantic aspirants to liberty that, while society and religion could be reinvented, the cultural challenge might turn into an orgy of bloodshed – rather reminiscent of the terror unleashed by Odin on his enemies. Odinic violence fell from favour in literature accordingly, Mortensen argues. And I would add to Mortensen’s analysis that as writers became more politically conservative, so they also became less interested in portraying religion simply as a man-made fraud, in the old deistic, cynical way – even if, like Southey, that was what they thought paganism was. As well as the consequences of political agitation, the French Revolution demonstrated the consequences of discovering such a kingly-godly fraud as Odin’s – a supposedly divine king who was not divine at all. If Southey had carried his views on Odin’s deceit to their logical conclusion

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he might have discovered a similar euhemerist trick perpetrated against the immediate ancestors of the modern English – a little too close for comfort. Early Romantics such as Gray and Percy had a clear sense of what the northern deities represented. Percy’s translation of Mallet’s work, which Southey read, stressed on its title page that its subject was partly ‘OUR OWN SAXON ANCESTORS’ and for Percy this was a thrilling attraction: these gods actually were ‘us’, had become ‘us’. Thomas Carlyle, in treating Odin as a human hero, was equally clear, although he thought euhemerism an honest mistake.44 But for Southey all this raised too many obstacles. Was Odin man or god, fraud or hero? He fancied the grander part of Odin for his poems, but was perturbed by historical reconstruction of actual ‘superstitions’ and ‘idolatries’. He also wanted to push the whole pagan problem further north: There have been fouler and bloodier superstitions than that of the Scandinavians; but none, either among earlier or later idolatries, that has produced so great a degree of national ferocity; none that has ever made war the great and all-absorbing business of life, and represented the souls of the happy in paradise as cutting each other every day to pieces for amusement, and assembling after such pastime, when heads and dissevered limbs were reunited, to drink together out of the skulls of their enemies … 45 Odin, Loki and the rest were too difficult for long contemplation for religious as well as political reasons and Southey’s planned epic was never written.46 His contemporary Walter Scott echoed his concerns in Harold the Dauntless (1817). When the North British lord Harold converts to Christianity and forswears his barbaric past, Odin appears to explain what he will be missing. His words remind readers of the pleasures of power and unfettered will incarnated in Norse deities by earlier writers: ‘Harold,’ he said, ‘what rage is thine, To quit the worship of thy line, To leave thy Warrior-God? — With me is glory or disgrace, Mine is the onset and the chase, Embattled hosts before my face Are wither’d by a nod. Wilt thou then forfeit that high seat Deserved by many a dauntless feat, Among the heroes of thy line, Eric and fiery Thorarine? – Thou wilt not. Only I can give The joys for which the valiant live, Victory and vengeance – only I

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Can give the joys for which they die, The immortal tilt—the banquet full, The brimming draught from foeman’s skull.’47 But Harold rejects Odin and embraces instead Christian charity and meekness.48 Paganism now seemed to some to be a brutish fraud and by the end of the Napoleonic War the ‘Gothic’ gods were nervously being framed with Christian material. The compromise choices made by different poets are exemplified by two prize-winning poems on the theme from mid-century Oxford University. The competition for which they were written required a poem on ‘The Hall of Odin’. T.F.S. Rawlins’ first-prize poem initially spoke conventionally of ‘dread Odin’ and his warriors: ‘the charnel-house their hellish feast supplies … idol god … mangled victims’ and so on. But the end of the poem was devoted to celebration of the fact that The Scythian bards no more Their Odin’s deeds proclaim from shore to shore; No Pagans worship where the temple stood, No human victims bathe the shrine with blood. William Christopher Valentine’s second-prize poem is even more confused: he focused first on the ‘Queen of Beauty and of Grace, Friga’, asking her ‘be thou my Muse … O dearest Dread’. Implausibly, he then requested that ‘Love and Peace’ should flourish in Odin’s hall. Of course there would still be battles in ‘Freedom’s cause’, but afterwards there might be an Hellenic-sounding civility and calm. Valentine herds his muse in different directions: ‘therefore shall softer strains awhile my Muse/Engage’ followed swiftly by ‘but cease, my Muse, to touch so soft a string’. He also complains of his assigned task – quite rightly, given its complexity – ‘how hard the task to paint those goblets strange … the foeman’s skull’. The poem thus makes evident the difficulties of a Victorian engagement with Nordic paganism – as Andrew Wawn notes, ‘gruesome scenes’ were not going to be popular without a Christian clean-up. Odinic gore was oldfashioned: as well as its Spenserian echo ‘dearest dread’, Valentine’s poem also suggests that a successful poet of Valhalla ‘on honey-dew should feed’, pointing back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. It suggests that in order to fit in Odin the poem must be conceptualized as a Romantic work although its actual date is 1850.49

From Odin to Balder Between Romantic and Victorian literary worlds there had been a major political shift: the Christian Anglo-Saxons were now welcome in works that aimed at canonicity but their pagan forebears and associates less so. An abhorrence of

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disorder and fear of too-radical questioning were part of the reason, but there was also the fact that the popular queen and her consort were of proudly Germanic origin and six of their children married into German princely houses. It was insensitive to portray their ancestors as heathen thugs in the old tradition, when – unlike most of her Hanoverian forebears – Victoria presented herself as a pious, peaceful, amiable matriarch. Saxons were no longer an acceptable enemy, which explains in part the rise of the term ‘Viking’. Danes became less easy to demonize, too, when the Prince of Wales married the Danish princess Alexandra in 1863. Victoria’s 64-year reign was thus one that prized rectitude and piety, re-imagined as a shared northern heritage. Victorian literary interest centred on the later Middle Ages and the versions of Gothic that included cathedrals, law-codes, saints and educators rather than mayhem and human sacrifice. Lynda Pratt has explored the early-nineteenth-century epic poetry of Anglo-Saxonism while Andrew Sanders has focused on the Victorian novel.50 In both genres, the good king Alfred the Great and the later Anglo-Saxons were almost wholly heroic and safely Christian. Where a pagan element did appear it was often fudged by writers who were more interested in sensation than doctrinal detail. For instance, the religion and magic of Hilda the prophetess in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings (1848) is extremely confusing. Hilda is nominally a Christian (this is, after all, Wessex in 1066) but she is also a Danish ‘vala’ or seer and she consorts with a witch or ‘Wicca’ in the hope of learning the future of King Harold. Yet she is not a devil-worshipper. She is not even wholly wicked but instead ‘a woman of sublime desires and extraordinary gifts’, driven by ambition and grief. She is also described as ‘the Morthwyrtha’ (a ‘worshipper of the dead’ as Bulwer-Lytton explains, without really explaining anything). The dead are not deities, and Bulwer-Lytton also tells us that even Odin and his ilk were only ‘demi-gods’, partly euhemerized heroes (but how only partly?). Seeking guidance from these men long dead and part-gods, Hilda stages a ceremony in a ‘druidic’ stone circle, at ‘the altar of Thor’. She explains the altar’s siting thus: On yon knoll, Aesc (the first-born of Cerdic, that Father-King of the Saxons,) has his grave where the mound rises green, and the stone gleams wan by the altar of Thor. He smote the Britons in their temple, and he fell smiting. They buried him in his arms … Fate hangs on the house of Cerdic, or the realm of the Saxon, when Woden calls the laeca [body] of his son from the grave. The stone circle, then, is a British pagan site added to by the burial of a Saxon chief and both Thor and Woden (not now called Odin as before) can be invoked there. Further to this specifically Saxon ambiguity, Bulwer-Lytton imagines such henges to have been sacred in pre-Roman times to Bel. In a note, he removes Bel’s Christian associations as attributed by the proto-Christian hypothesis and makes him clearly pagan:

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Have we not given too much faith to the classic writers, who assert the original simplicity of the Druid worship? And will not their popular idols be found to be as ancient as the remotest traces of the Celtic existence? Would not the Cimmerii have transported them from the period of their first traditional immigration from the East? and is not their Bel identical with the Babylonian deity? So the site is twice pagan: British-pagan with Bel and Saxon-pagan with Woden/ Odin and Thor. Both Celts and Saxons are immigrants from the east, and successor paganisms came with them. But note Bulwer-Lytton’s question marks: he is far from certain. Nevertheless, working by magic there, his seer Hilda raises spirits and gets the answers that she needs.51 More generally, though, as Joanne Parker sums up, ‘the omnipresence of the Catholic church in the medieval period meant that it was … looked back upon as a golden age of faith’ pushing Anglo-Saxon paganism aside. And where earlier times were of interest, Alfred was the central figure, as Parker has documented in the aptly-titled England’s Darling.52 Odin/Woden, Thor and Friga were definitely not darlings, so a succession of historians played down paganism: writers such as Sharon Turner (1799), Francis Palgrave (from the 1830s to the 1870s) and John Green (1870–80s) led the way.53 Here is Palgrave on the subject in 1874: Amongst the heathen, we may discern several shades or graduations of delusion. Some … have erred, not so much by denying the Almighty, as by bestowing his attributes upon his creatures … the lawgivers, the rulers and the warriors of the people have been deified … Ignorantly worshipping, and knowing not how to seek the truth, they [the Anglo-Saxons] felt the insufficiency of their belief, and yearned for a better creed. Palgrave had been born and raised Jewish, changing his name from Cohen in 1823 to marry an Anglican: it is hard not to see here both a defence of the Anglo-Saxons as proto-Christians and, in the last line, a reference to the rightness of his own conversion.54 Yet here is the Anglican clergyman Green taking exactly the same line in 1883: Such a faith [paganism], linking itself as it did with the new settlers mainly through the blood of their kings, embodied only in nature-myths or poetic legends, and without any moral significance for the guidance of men, had in it little of what the modern world means by a religion; and the faint traces of worship or of priesthood which we find in later history show how lightly it clung to the national life.55 Anglo-Saxon paganism was portrayed as a mere habit of mind, broken for a better faith as soon as one appeared, very much like the process that Victorian missionaries imagined was at work when they converted African or Asian tribal

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people from their ancestral localized religions. This was limiting. But now that depictions of it had departed from the tradition of the ‘hæðene scealcas’, some work on the more acceptable aspects of English ancestral religion could continue. Poems on Balder rather than Odin enjoyed a vogue in mid-century because it was possible to see Christian goodness and beauty in Balder and his tragic death, especially when linked with the apocalyptic Ragnarok. Matthew Arnold hinted at this likeness when in his ‘Balder Dead’ (1855) the ‘ray-crowned’ but doomed Balder prophesied: … there spreads Another Heaven, The Boundless: no-one yet Hath reach’d it: there hereafter shall arise The second Asgard, with another name … We in Heaven shall find again with joy The ruin’d palaces of Odin … Here was all the promise of resurrection in a pagan prophecy, also contained in Robert Buchanan’s 1866 Balder the Beautiful, where Balder and Christ meet and recognize their affinities. Yet this wishful-thinking was tinged with the doubt and grief that lurked as – despite its urgent Victorian promotion – the Christian narrative of world history unravelled. Indeed, ‘Balder Dead’ has been read as an allegory of the passing of modern Christianity by Frederick Page and C.H. Herford. Arnold’s poem ends with Balder bound for a gloomy confinement in Hela’s ‘Hell’ rather than the promised new Asgard, in a section pessimistically titled ‘Funeral’. As Clyde de L. Ryals says, a ‘fatalistic … brooding, melancholy atmosphere’ hangs over the poem.56 Both Nordic and Germanic literatures contain strong elements of wyrd, the notion that each person or deity has a destiny, often ending in defeat or tragic mischance.57 Mid-Victorians such as Arnold and William Morris caught the tone of wyrd perfectly, and in their works the northern deities were less potent and bloody and more tragic and wistful, like the humans whose destinies they were supposed to be governing. In Morris’ ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ the young Icelandic girl Gudrun is told her fortune which ‘shall hang above thee, as on unheard wings/The kestrel hangs above the mouse’. She will cause deaths and lose loves, she hears. The seer Guest then goes to her neighbour Olaf Peacock’s hall to see his murals of Balder, Frey, Niord, Freyja, Thor, Heimdall and Odin – the traditional Nordic literary pantheon has grown and been sharply defined by Morris’ expertise but all the deities are involved in stories of ‘snares and mockeries … /Death even amid the Gods’. Morris’ Icelandic researches and retellings (here, the Laxdaela Saga) were a high point in both scholarly and poetic engagement with northern cultures and their deities. But it was not the potency of the deities that drew Morris, as it once had the seekers of Romantic masculinity: it was their temporary illusion of control set against an inexorable doom that was the stuff of story. The same idea haunts Swinburne’s

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verse, as we saw in the last chapter: gods die. His northern-focused work was no different and although in his ‘Hertha’, Hertha, the earth, lives, she does so only through ‘Man, equal and one with me’. It was a mid-nineteenth-century poem on the death of Balder that started the young C.S. Lewis on the road to a lifelong fascination with paganism, Christianity and ‘northernness’ through the chill of the dying god and the void that he left.58 The notion of dying gods and their ‘twilight’ would find most resounding expression in Germany, with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. But in Britain, too, new readings of the northern deities flourished alongside more standard adventure stories of ‘Vikings’ and longships, such as those by the enthusiast for northern cultures W.G. Collingwood (Thorstein of the Mere of 1895) and by Henry Rider Haggard (Eric Brighteyes of 1891).59 James Frazer found in Odin a version of Christ and all the other sacrificed god-kings of The Golden Bough (see Chapter 5). But was a suicidal, hanged pagan god really the same as a crucified Christian one? The implications were extremely disturbing. More promisingly, Morris’ fellow-socialist Edward Carpenter found in the hermaphrodite figure of ‘Friga’ an inspiration as one of his ‘intermediate types’ – homosexual or bisexual characters from myth and story. Other northern deities also bent gender: in the Poetic Edda Thor and Loki both dress as women in þrymskviða while Odin and Loki accuse each other of sexual ambiguity in the Lokasenna. Carpenter began to unpick the notion that ‘northern’ meant ‘manly’.60 Northern deities occur most frequently in this way in fin de siècle literature, challenging categorization and boundary, often as uncanny presences suggesting but not wholly revealing troubling, even horrifying, home-truths. It is a new version of their liminal ‘us’/‘them’ identity in medieval and Renaissance works.

‘Unheimlich’ deities and ‘bloody pagans’ The notion of uncanniness was a preoccupation of the turn of the century and will be further discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to prehistoric peoples and their religions. In its German form ‘unheimlich’ it was described in 1906, but came to prominence in Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Das “Unheimliche”’ in 1919. There it was defined as being something indeterminate, familiar yet unfamiliar, perhaps connected with doubling, dual status, a confusion of definition or coincidence.61 Ill-defined as it is (or was yet to be), it is definitely present in R.H. Benson’s 1903 short story ‘The Blood-Eagle’, where two boys find a man trying to sacrifice a pig to a goddess. The object of his worship stands on a mound in a wood: an unnamed blonde woman whom only one of the boys can see. He falls into a trance and begins to speak a strange language. Later he remembers nothing of the events. The inference is that the woman is a Norse goddess, for the retelling of the boys’ story has been prompted by a discussion of ‘the far-off days when the religion of Christ and of the gods of the north strove together in England’. It was certainly northerners who were thought to use the ‘blood-eagle’ method

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of execution, in which the human victim was cut open and offered to Odin. Some scholars, such as Roberta Frank and Simon Coupland, have now questioned whether the rite actually took place.62 Benson, however, although he evidently believed the rite to be historically accurate, would not subject even a pig to it and it escapes. The reader who has expected sacrifice, and human sacrifice at that, is puzzled: where is this inconsequential story going? It ends with a scholarly commentary by a professor. We are told that Norse religion was ‘brutal and disgusting’. But the boy – now an adult and a priest – offers his own comment in the story’s last line: ‘very brutal and disgusting; but is it not very much higher and better than the Professor’s faith? He was only a skilled Ritualist, after all … ’.63 This is a jibe at High Church Anglicans, who valued ceremony in church services. Benson’s last line is evidence of his own troubled journey from Protestantism to Catholicism, then: the point of the story has never been to make the reader shiver at the terrors of other deities, but rather flinch from the implications of misbelief closer to home. In Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies (1910) this troubling pagan/Christian slippage seems at first to be made a joke in the story ‘The Conversion of St. Wilfrid’. Wilfrid, a Northumbrian Christian, has come to Sussex as a missionary to the Jutish South Saxons. He debates weakly with the local lord Meon: ‘My dear man … surely you, as an educated person, don’t believe in Wotan and all the other hobgoblins … ?’ In fact, however, he is right: Meon is confused. When a storm wrecks their ship he speculates ‘if this keeps up we shall go to our Gods. I wonder what Wotan will say to me. He must know I don’t believe in him.’ Wilfrid, succumbing in a reversed conversion to the pagan ethic of personal loyalty, tells him that he should stand by his gods and paradoxically Meon is converted by this manly attitude far more than the desire to become a Christian. So he tells his people to live as Christians: If I find any more old women being sent to Wotan [drowned], or any girls dancing on the sly before Balder, or any men talking about Thun or Lok or the rest, I will teach you with my own hands how to keep faith with the Christian God. All this seems quite amusing until the possibility of Kipling’s seriousness is considered. If taken seriously, here is Kipling as Warren S. Archibald saw him in 1914, an adherent of a stern warrior God of Battles (as in ‘Recessional’), of an Old Testament Jehovah who had found himself completely at home in England, firstly among Saxon warriors and then the British imperial armed forces. Archibald called Kipling’s piety ‘impenetrably Anglo-Saxon … his religion is the faith of Beowulf’. Beowulf, of course, was actually a pagan; and Kipling’s portrayals of religion are, in many ways, inherently anti-Christian or at the least set against New Testament Christianity – which of these descriptions is the more correct is hard to say. Kipling wrote in 1919 of the harsh laws of ‘The Gods of the

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Copybook Headings’ – children’s schoolbook maxims – such as ‘if you don’t work you die’: With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things … As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! These are the gods whose pitiless moral realism has throughout human history ensured retribution for the self-indulgent. As a result of their judgements in the past, ‘a tribe had been wiped off its icefield’, ‘the lights had gone out in Rome’. But they are not the Christian ‘god’; they are ‘gods’. Kipling has a pagan sensibility, seen in this light, for which his Saxon characters are perfect vehicles: they are nominally Christian, but their instincts are not, being brutal, coercive and imperial out of perceived necessity.64 Noel Annan suggested that Kipling … regarded the truth of religion as irrelevant because religion was a medium through which men [sic] expressed their aspirations and found solace when frustrated. There were many gods, and men changed and discarded them … James Whitlark speaks of Kipling’s tales as ‘multi-religious … dialogic’, while John Coates notes the imaginative appeal of Norse gods for Kipling as individualistic but with firm values and group loyalties. In ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’, a man’s sacrifice actually creates a Norse god, Tyr, and Tyr is to be admired for his fortitude and social responsibility (see also Chapter 5).65 Religion for Kipling in this mood was a medium, a force, not a particular deity – and ironically paganism expressed that at least as well as the harsher kinds of Christianity. Once again the boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’ was blurred, confusing and unstable. This willingness to weigh paganism’s virtues along with its vices is also evident throughout Kipling’s precursor to Rewards and Fairies, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). It begins with a Norse and Anglo-Saxon deified hero, Weland the smith.66 Weland ‘claimed kin with Thor’, Puck tells us, and when he was brought to England in the form of a wooden image announced that his altars would smoke from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight. But like the other imported idols whose ‘Old Things … insisted on being Gods, and having temples, and altars, and priests, and sacrifices’, Weland was reduced to accepting mock-sacrifices that were ‘as much pretence as a dolls’ tea-party’. Eventually he turned to smithing (‘if you don’t

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work you die’ applies to Kipling’s gods too).67 Weland has been responsible for sacrifice, arrogance and cruelty of the worst kinds, but in the end he is judged kindly – although he was ‘not a gentle God’, a Christian wishes him well, pronouncing the magic words that will let him ‘get back to Valhalla, or wherever [he] came from’. Christian and pagan meet on common ground and become ironically interchangeable codes of behaviour. The theme of uncertainty and doubling between Christian and pagan continued through the First World War, but there was a deadly seriousness about it when Britain’s Germanic and Norse heritage became a focus of national anxiety. Kipling summed it up in a chilling 1915 story, ‘Mary Postgate’ and an accompanying poem, ‘The Beginnings’. In the poem we are told how ‘the English began to hate’, the object of their hatred being the attacking Germans. The companion story seems simple – an English woman allows a German airman to die after he has fallen from his plane, and the moral appears to be ‘serve him right’. In 1915, the Bishop of Hereford had described German culture as ‘brutal and ruthless paganism’ while the army chaplain Basil Bourchier spoke of ‘Odin … ranged against Christ’.68 ‘Bloody pagans! They are bloody pagans!’ Mary Postgate accordingly hisses, telling the groaning man ‘Stop that, you bloody pagan!’ But although she thinks the airman German, he speaks French, and it is far from clear that his bombs have killed the little girl, Edna, who has died in the collapse of a house. Mary thinks she heard a plane before the collapse, but did she? The ‘German’ did not kill the son of the house, Wynn, either, since Wynn died in training. Mary is burning Wynn’s possessions, humming to herself, as she watches the airman die, and she tells him in bad German ‘Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn’ (I have seen the dead child). Yet neither of these deaths can definitely be said to be his fault. And he most certainly is not a pagan in any meaningful sense of the word: ‘pagan’ here simply means ‘German’, and we are not sure he is even that. Nor can Mary’s belief in just retribution account for her ‘secret thrill … long pleasure’ as the airman dies.69 Mary enjoys killing her imaginary pagan foe, in revenge for – what? The Battle of Maldon? Kipling’s poem ‘Beginnings’ has been quoted as an example of the end of the Anglo-German friendship as if Kipling were endorsing its sentiment – by John Ramsden, for instance, in a study of Anglo-German relations since 1890. But in the context of the story we can see that Kipling offers no such certainty. Indeed, Norman Page has suggested Mary Postgate’s whole experience is an hallucination.70 In this reading, Kipling is not a hater of Germans or of pagans. Others undoubtedly did hate both in a shocking outburst of prejudice, and they repudiated the claim of a shared heritage with Saxons.71 But for all the vicious words – indeed, prompting their viciousness – was the difficult consideration that a mere decade ago the English had been celebrating the fact that ‘they’ were ‘us’ and not really very pagan at all. The unheimlich otherness of us also haunted fiction of the period about Danish versions of Saxon deities. In 1919, for instance, the Northumbrian historian and novelist Howard Pease wrote a mystery in which a Christian alehouse-keeper

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from Cleveland is revealed to be leading a secret life as a pagan Danish reiver (raider). He is not a German and there is a highly localized reading to be done here about Northumbrian identity and its Danish roots. But for a wider readership I think the reiver is simply a less controversial part of the continuum of Germanic invaders and Odin-worshippers that we have already seen labelled ‘Saxon’, ‘Viking’ and ‘Gothic’. The story is told by a learned landowner to a Christian vicar, framing the narrative in just this antiquarian and religious context, and it concerns ‘Red Tom’, an apparently unintelligent, henpecked man. This effeminized character is, however, transformed on stormy nights into an axe-wielding killer. The narrator sees Tom praying in old Danish as he prepares to go hunting and, helpfully, is able to translate: Vafoder [allfather], the swiftness of Sleipnir Breathe Thou into my roan [horse], Let him fly like Thy ravens, Black Munin and Hugi. May my axe be as Thor’s, When he wielded Miolnir, Winged Thor’s mighty weapon, The pride of Valhalla, This grant me, O Odin, Grim, Ygg and All Father.72 He recalls that the area was inhabited by Danish settlers and the setting of the reiver’s activities was once called Odin’s Hill, but cannot explain how Tom came to be worshipping him. The reader might conclude that Tom is possessed or, as with Jekyll and Hyde, living out an instinct of which he is not consciously aware. Pease’s story ‘The Doppel-ganger’, in which an ancestral spirit appears to expose the sins of his descendant, visits the same Freudian ideas.73 So ‘In the Cliff Land of the Dane’, the story of Tom, is the story of a man leading a double life as both Victorian Christian and Romantic Odinist pagan, civilized, woman-ridden Englishman and savage, manly Dane. He embodies the fratricidal violence of the recent war and makes an apt metaphor for the religious roles that Danes, Saxon and ‘Vikings’ played in fictions of the early twentieth century – which are so often far less clear than they originally seemed.74

Don’t let’s be beastly to the pagans Ongoing tensions with Germany from 1918 to 1939 and the Second World War made it hard to refer to Saxons or Vikings in literature without a shadow of modernity falling over the text, or vice versa. For Arthur J. Ireland, who broadcast the first history lectures on British radio in 1923, the Saxons were simply ‘warlike barbarians … treacherous neighbours’.75 The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1933 that Hitler’s Germany was heading back to ‘the modes and

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manners of the Middle Ages, if not of Odin’.76 Noël Coward’s notorious satirical song ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ (1943) argued that in addition to earlier Saxon gifts ‘they also gave us two world wars and Dr. Rudolf Hess’.77 This uncompromising view of the linked Anglo-Saxon and ‘Viking’ past and present survived well into the later twentieth century among historians. In 1963, Peter Hunter Blair – a BBC European correspondent in the 1939–45 war – imagined Romans and Normans as organized, soldierly peoples and Saxons and Vikings as greedy, disorganized looters: economically ‘a disaster’, a ‘barbarian invasion’.78 These were violent raiders who could not read, destroyed everything they found and caused irreparable cultural loss, as Hunter Blair took the trouble to point out in a letter to The Times as late as 1980.79 Although he was himself Northumbrian, like Pease, he could not imagine those whom he regarded as his ancestors in the roles of traders rather than raiders. Yet that was exactly what was being urged upon him by Michael Frenchman’s article on the British Museum’s new Norse exhibition, ‘Finding a Good Word for the Poor Old Vikings’, to which Hunter Blair’s Times letter was a brisk reply.80 Times were changing: the 1980 exhibition was curated by David Wilson, who had been taught by Hunter Blair and T.C. Lethbridge when both were Anglo-Saxonists at Cambridge in the 1950s.81 Wilson’s more sympathetic understanding of the heathen invaders was evident from the early 1960s and led to his study AngloSaxon Paganism in 1992. This change of mood is also caught in Rosemary Sutcliff’s stories of the end of the Roman empire in Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth and its successors. In The Lantern Bearers (1959) Sutcliff’s hero Aquila – descendant of Marcus in The Eagle of the Ninth – is captured by ‘the wolves of the sea’, who have killed his family and abducted his sister. Yet he must come to terms with his loss and save his half-Saxon nephew in a later battle. He also learns that these ‘Saxons’ are really Jutes, driven to migrate by famine; and he finds a common love of literature and the warrior life among his captors. He is a Christian while they worship Odin, but when he prays in ‘the Gods’ House’, with its ‘bloodstained, serpent-carved door post’ he finds his prayer answered. In Dawn Wind (1961) similarly the Briton Owain learns to live among Saxons, saving his master Beornwulf from a wreck very like Kipling’s in ‘The Conversion of St. Wilfrid’, and later fighting alongside him. Sutcliff retold Beowulf for children to accompany her two Saxon-period books, and in 1976 in Blood Feud wrote a novel set exclusively among the ‘northmen’.82 The ability to maintain and recover a positive strain of depictions of Germanic and Nordic paganism is most obviously related to the discovery and publication of the Anglo-Saxon archaeological finds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk from 1938 to 1996. If Stonehenge is the poster-site for those interested in ancient British religion, then Sutton Hoo plays that role for Anglo-Saxonists.83 In 1938, excavators began to dig at one of a group of mounds that were found to contain important Anglo-Saxon burials, including the now famous ship burial in Mound One. The story of the ship and its excavation is an evocative one.

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Here was the craft of a Germanic warrior invader and settler being uncovered just as his new homeland was once again threatened by his old one. Yet no one attempted to suggest that he had been like Hitler – a genocidal, invading barbarian – the sort of thing that would have been said in, say, 1815 or 1915 and was actually being said instead of the Iron Age builders of Maiden Castle (by its excavator Mortimer Wheeler).84 Instead, the Mound One ‘king’ has always been portrayed as an inspiring example of the merger of two or more cultures, a memory of a shared Germanic and pagan heritage. The response of the excavators to the cultural and religious politics of 1939 was a wonderfully bland refusal to engage with them in any cheap or ugly way.85 The impact of the ship burial continued for decades: war prevented further analysis so that it was not until 1947 that a Provisional Guide was published. It had sold more than 20,000 copies by 1967. In 1968, after a further season of digging, a Handbook was published, giving more, newer information and colour plates.86 It was 1975 before the first volume of the definitive report came out, with the last volume in 1983. Interest in the site was high outside the scholarly world: the BBC showed a documentary, The Million Pound Grave, in 1965 which was revised and re-shown in 1985. It was the consensus view that the man buried in the ship was probably a pagan who converted to Christianity and lapsed or hedged his bets – there were, in particular, two spoons marked Saulos and Paulos in the boat, seeming to allude to the conversion of St. Paul.87 Yet the burial in a ship, surrounded by worldly goods – gold ornaments, coins, silverware, armour – was most unChristian. It was concluded that, because of the magnificence of the finds and the pagan–Christian confusion, the man was probably Raedwald, king of the area around Rendlesham.88 To loop back to where we began in Chapter 1, Bede described Raedwald’s conversion and lapse in his Ecclesiastical History.89 In their enthusiasm for Sutton Hoo and its pagan–Christian king, as well as for the fragmentary texts that we saw in Chapter 1, post-war historical novelists, practising pagans and poets have begun a joint enterprise with scholars in reconstructing Anglo-Saxon paganism, very much like the process that the Celtic deities underwent in the last chapter. Indeed, several of the players were involved in both reinventions, as we shall see. And the reinvention is still going on today: indeed, this book is part of it in some ways, discussing the less popular Anglo-Saxon-Northern strand of British pagan culture alongside its widelyknown and accepted Celtic cousin. Some of this has been done before, in popular books by writers like Ralph Whitlock and Christina Hole, or the BBC producer Brian Branston. Branston focused on Anglo-Saxon deities in The Lost Gods of England in 1957.90 Among scholars, the folklorist and Cambridge lecturer Hilda Ellis Davidson was the best-known historian of northern paganism, and often linked her discussion of individual northern deities with Celtic ones, as in Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (1964). She contributed to a book on Sutton Hoo in 1992. Ronald Hutton included the Anglo-Saxons in his Pagan Religions of the British Isles in 1991 and The Stations of the Sun (1996).91 David Wilson’s

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Anglo-Saxon Paganism appeared in 1992, as we have seen. And the extent to which that paganism is still open to multiple readings was illustrated by Richard North’s Heathen Gods in Old English Literature in 1997. But compared with the volume of literature on Celtic paganism, this is very limited indeed. North is the scholar who has explored the subject of deity in most detail. He took up a suggestion by the Cambridge philologist H.M. Chadwick that Nerthus, described by Tacitus as the goddess of the German Anglii tribes, was in fact a god, Njo˛rðr (pronounced ‘Nerth’), and that Tacitus confused him/her with his own experience of the Roman cults of Magna Mater and Cybele.92 The idea of a goddess going in procession in a cart is common to both: Tacitus may have misunderstood informants who were telling him about an earth-goddess married to a god in a cart – hence the ‘-us’ suffix denoting a male deity. Meanwhile, North notes that Ing, the son of Njo˛rðr, appears with a wagon or chariot in ‘The Old-English Rune Poem’. Ing is a rune-name but also has a complex narrative attached, suggestive of its being the name of a god or hero. Ing could also be associated with ‘Ingeld’, a name that appears in Beowulf as ‘Hinieldus’. The Christian priest Alcuin described Hinieldus as the subject of pagan songs that ought not to be sung alongside sermons about Christ (‘Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?’ – ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’). In Beowulf, Hrothgar is said to be ‘se wisa frea Ingwina’, ‘the wise lord of the Ingwina’ or people of Ing: perhaps, says North, the Netherlandish people described by Tacitus as the Ingaevones, descended from Ing, were early migrants to Britain, taking Ing with them.93 Perhaps the altar to pagan gods described by Bede as being maintained by Raedwald alongside his Christian altar was to Nerthus? That would be a very neat fit.94 But whether or not it is true is for readers to decide. In fiction, a different and far less detailed view was advanced by Gerald Gardner, whom we met as the founder of modern Wicca in Chapter 3. Yet in certain ways, both tend in the same direction of re-enchanting the Anglo-Saxon world. As we have seen, Gardner’s witchcraft novel, High Magic’s Aid (1949), claims to be about a medieval witch cult but is based on the rites of a modern one.95 But High Magic’s Aid is also surprising in that it is set initially in an AngloSaxon world rather than a Celtic one. Witchcraft, as a modern religion, is associated most often in popular culture with Celtic imagery and prehistory: indeed, the novel is important for understanding modern fictions of Celtic deities, which is why I discussed it in Chapter 3. Yet Gardner was not solely interested in his novel in the emergent Celtic deities that were available to him – Ceridwen, Cernunnos and the pantheon from the Mabinogion. He knew about the Summerland, which was mentioned by Iolo Morganwg as the origin of the Welsh, and he described a hill as having once been called ‘Kerewiden’s Hill’, but he did not actually pick up much material from Celtic sources. In the novel, he chose to associate his high magic – a blend of influences from British and American occultist texts – with Anglo-Saxon rites/rights and liberties. This puts him squarely in the tradition explored in this chapter, as well as the Celtic one.

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One of the protagonists of Gardner’s novel is a fictional version of Stephen Langton, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1213. He was instrumental in forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215: the ‘Great Charter’ that made it clear no king was above the law, the key mythic document of AngloSaxon England in the eyes of historians. For Gardner, magic offers Stephen and his companions victory over ‘the hated Norman Fitz-Urse’, who has built his castle on the ashes of the Saxon house whose ‘good Thane’ he killed. It is the thane’s Saxon son Olaf Bonder and the leech Thur Peterson who perform some of the magical rites of Gardner’s own version of Wicca – which is, after all, an Anglo-Saxon word, as Bulwer-Lytton used it in Harold.96 The Anglo-Saxon magicians of Gardner’s novel need help to topple the Normans and they find this in the related Celtic witch cult described in Chapter 3. Together the Saxon and Celtic witches discuss their beliefs and practices and decide that they are similar, a proper adoration of ‘the Life-spring of the world’. They agree that their traditions can work together. Here is an aspect of Wicca often overlooked in contemporary perception of it in fiction, journalism and writings by practitioners that focus on its Celtic and druidic background. What was it that brought such different traditions together in Gardner’s novel – regardless of the suspicions of Germanic paganism that we have seen voiced here – to create a magic related to notions of political liberty and unity? Gardner only rarely steps out of his character as a narrator during High Magic’s Aid to allude obliquely to the appeal of the syncretic pagan religion that he is creating. Here is one such aside: It is the fashion today to laugh at the Magus and his pretensions, to picture him as either a charlatan or a doddering old fool, and bearing the slightest resemblance to the men who were, in fact, the scientists of the day, who gave us alcohol, but not the Atom Bomb. Here is an important context in the post-war age: the Second World War had ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945, only four years before Gardner published his novel. Public concern led eventually to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, with marches to and from the Aldermaston weapons research base from 1958. Gardner’s novel promised an Anglo-German friendship, booze not bombs, magic and science united among its pleasures. It promised to the mid-twentieth century a safer and more natural world, where pleasure was important, and bodies as well as minds mattered. It gave a central role to women and goddesses but did not deny magic, theatricality and emotion to men and gods. It brought together different religious traditions instead of setting them against one another, under ‘the Old Gods of Love and Laughter and Peace and Content’. It was with this in mind that in his ‘Introduction’ Gardner invited readers to ‘come with me into the past’ and it was partly the Anglo-Saxon-Northern past, as well as the Romano-British-Celtic one.97 Contemporary fictions about paganism, and contemporary practices of it,

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thus can be seen to owe a good deal to ideas about liberty and shared heritage worked out through engagements with the Anglo-Saxon-Northern pantheon up to the mid-twentieth century. Here we have seen a hazy notion of a pan-European religion which promotes political liberty, empowers female deities, tolerates departure from traditional sexual categories and accepts that deities, like people, are limited in their power and lifespan. What I expected to find in literature when I began to research this chapter was a fascistic carnival of bloodletting and masculine violence, punctuated by periods of xenophobic rejection, but what I found was multiple ambiguities, in the spaces of which a surprisingly attractive paganism was imagined from Verstegan to Gardner. It is thus no surprise at all that the Anglo-Saxon-Northern tradition of imagining the pagan past has continued into modern fiction, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

5 NEW AGES Melting the ice-gods

Some writers have assured us that, in the words of Palgrave, ‘We must give it up, that speechless past … lost is lost; gone is gone forever’. While if others, more hopefully, have endeavoured to reconstruct the story of the past, they have too often allowed imagination to usurp the place of research, and written rather in the spirit of the novelist, than in that of the philosopher. John Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times

Uniformity, evolution and survival In the mid-nineteenth century, a scientific revolution overtook the depiction of both Romano-British-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon-Pagan pantheons. So far we have seen only a limited effect of this paradigm shift in the stories and scholarship that we have examined, focusing more on continuities than changes. But it is now time to explore the changes that did occur and the new fictions that they created to add to the existing rich mix: fictions of ‘Pre-History’. The first people to grapple with the problem of representing the pagan past once it had been re-labelled ‘Pre-History’ were the later Victorians. Gone was the short span of time between Genesis and the present, with its speculations about the Flood, proto-Christianity and Brutus. The ‘Palaeolithic’ was now the proper term for the earliest period of human existence, as explained by John Lubbock in 1860. So scientific and creative writers set about imagining what it must have been like to live in this newly-identified age. The term carried with it notions of technological progress to come, and questions about the age and form of cultural rules. How did customs, laws and institutions develop? What were the period’s politics of sex, tribe, class and age? The ‘Neolithic’ was named as its successor age.1 Here, a new breed of archaeologists struggled to reclassify ‘druidic’ artefacts. In Cornwall, the Liberal MP

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William Copeland Borlase, who was the great-great-grandson of the eighteenthcentury antiquary William Borlase, followed in his ancestor’s footsteps: he thus encountered head-on the difficulties of unpicking the elder William’s theories on rock-gods. Sensibly, he ignored them and in Naenia Cornubia (1872) produced a sparsely described catalogue of monuments, followed by The Dolmens of Ireland in 1897.2 One approach to past narratives, then, was to erase them, to consign the notion of speculative narrative to the past and replace it with new scientific terminology. Alongside the new archaeologists, however, were anthropologists. Their outlook was determined by perceptions of change and difference within, and contacts between, societies across Britain’s empire – stories were important to their work. They continued to draw on older narratives of paganism, but offered wholly new conclusions. The discourses of archaeology and anthropology would replace the Christian historians’ versions of the pagan past and create new fictions of prehistory, and the first important figure in that transition was Edward Tylor. Tylor made his debt to the sciences of geology and biology clear from the first page of his summative study Primitive Culture (1871) when he gave a definition of culture in terms of ‘uniformity’ (across civilizations) and ‘evolution’ (from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’, ‘tribe’ to ‘nation’). Charles Lyell’s doctrine of ‘uniformity’ had argued that geological processes had operated in the past as they did in the present – very slowly – pushing back the world’s age beyond the date assigned by theologians. The word had thus become a signifier of rational modernity of thought. Charles Darwin and others had likewise embedded the notion of ‘evolution’ in the public mind, implicitly questioning the Biblical account of the creation and explaining the presence and form of fossils. So Tylor was claiming for himself and for anthropology a place among the leading sciences of his time. He continued to strengthen his case by distancing himself from ‘transcendental philosophy and theology’, in favour of the ‘practicable’. These practical conclusions, drawn from the observations of travellers to many different cultures, had shown him that human nature was essentially the same across the world (uniformity) and that societies and individuals in some parts of the world could show what Europe had been like at stages of development ‘lower’ than the present (evolution).3 He was supported by contemporary opinion-formers such as Lubbock, who – in a wonderful drawing together of Victorian preoccupations – likened modern ‘primitive’ peoples to living fossils whose counterparts were still to be found buried in the stratified ‘soil’ of the ‘civilized’ mind.4 Literary writers found that soil very fertile ground in which to grow stories and, as the title of Lubbock’s work The Origin of Civilisation suggested, they were interested not just in the Darwinian origin of their species but in the beginnings of its cultural habits too. The second important figure was James Frazer. From the 1880s he was working on theories of the prehistoric development of religion, inspired by investigation of the shrine of Diana at Nemi in Italy. Frazer thought that early people had imagined the world to be governed by laws that might be manipulated by magic.

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But once they had realized that their magic did not always (indeed, ever) work, magicians became convinced that there were more powerful beings than themselves in control of the universe. They imagined them as human-like deities, who needed to be propitiated. The invention of gods and goddesses thus involved a loss of power for humankind, and introduced the notion of subjection, ‘an attitude of lowliest prostration’ to beings who were super-magicians. It also produced a doctrine of reliance on ritual that bridged the gap between the old world of pure magic and the new one of magical religion.5 Frazer imagined the ‘savage’ magician as a literary character defending his religion against a sceptic: ‘Can anything be plainer’, he might say, ‘than that I light my twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I have put on my green robe in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same? These are facts patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic … Give me leave to stick to facts; then I know where I am.’ Frazer gave his priest a voice familiar to readers: for all his melodramatic potential, he sounds like Jerome K. Jerome’s incompetent suburban patriarch Uncle Podger or the Grossmiths’ pretentious Mr. Pooter. Eventually – sadly for humanity, Frazer thought – such limited men were identified as embodying the god himself, through temporary or permanent spirit-possession. This gave them and their worshippers an apparently powerful means of controlling their world.6 Yet the all-powerful figure in Frazer’s priest-god’s world was really the goddess, a deity with whom he was mated to ensure the fertility of vegetation. At Nemi it was Diana, and Frazer inventively morphed the chaste goddess of the woods into a fertile mother goddess, the spirit of plants, ‘the ideal and embodiment of the wild life of nature’.7 There was a significant drawback for the priestly Pooters in being the goddess’ husband: eventually their strength would fail. It would be time to pass on the god’s soul, and thus the spirit of the natural world, to another body. This body would be the goddess’ new lover, since it was her fertility that must be ensured. So the mortal god would be killed.8 In some myths, the goddess was unmoved by her lover’s death, absorbed in her own ecstatic sexuality; in others she was distraught and sought his body in order to grant it renewed life. Such a story was that of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who tracked down (almost) every part of her husband Osiris and reanimated him. Frazer was particularly struck by Isis, a wifely and kindly goddess unlike the ‘dissolute’ Astarte and Cybele or the cruel Diana. Her ‘beautiful Madonna-like figure’ was ornamented with virtues, ‘graces’ and ‘sweets’, to create a goddess of ‘superb efflorescence’, the ‘beneficent queen of nature’, ‘like a star in a

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stormy sky’.9 But although he was attracted by goddesses, Frazer thought religion was man-made: If women ever created gods, they would be more likely to give them masculine than feminine features. In point of fact the great religious ideals which have permanently impressed themselves on the world seem always to have been a product of the male imagination. Men make gods and women worship them.10 This was a point of view that would be challenged sooner than he might have expected. Meantime, like Tylor, Frazer bridged the gap between Palaeolithic and Neolithic. He argued that his ‘vegetation’ or fertility cult must date back to very early human history (because of its focus on woods and the wild), but that it had survived into the Neolithic and found expression in harvest and sowing cycles: the invention of agriculture was sometimes attributed to the god along with other arts.11 Frazer also thought that during the Neolithic the religion developed: the god-kings grew canny and began to offer up mock-kings or animal substitutes for their own death. In each case, the ritual death would be followed by a resurrection, either in the body of a new king or by the re-emergence of the old one in supposedly reinvigorated form. In Neolithic times, then, ‘the slain god was the corn’ and the rite was designed to ensure a good year.12 Frazer was officially a Christian, of course, but he clearly liked much of what he imagined in prehistoric pagan deity, while other elements both fascinated and repulsed him. He did not favour ‘the bloody orgies of the Asiatic goddess’, preferring the ‘good taste and humanity’ of the Greeks. Yet he disliked Christian asceticism and withdrawal from society, preferring as a god ‘the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country’. Mithraism appealed because it had ‘a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral purity and a hope of immortality’ and Frazer drew attention to the likeness of Mithra, the sun, to Christ the Sun of Righteousness. He respected Christ and Buddha, ‘two beautiful spirits … like beings come from a better world’ (note the lack of conviction that they actually did come from a better world) but argued that ‘the world cannot live at the level of its great men’. At the end of The Golden Bough, conventional Christian certainties have disappeared despite Frazer’s evasions: Christ was merely a human being drawn into the cultural pattern of pre-existent religions; there had been many gods, sons of gods and redeemers; there always would be.13 The paganism that Frazer offered as the pattern of all religion was often beautiful, often repellent but it appeared as an inevitable outcome of human nature. Frazer’s work was built upon by two female scholars of very different kinds but each delighted by the idea of ecstatic worship of god and goddess. The first, Jane Harrison, was working along the same lines as Frazer but with an emphasis on the cultic origin of Greek drama. Harrison provided a new understanding of

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Greek paganism in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis, and refocused it around the ‘eniautos-daimon’ or spirit of the agricultural year. In her view goddess-worship was key: ‘Themis, as the Mother’ was the centre of a matrilineal culture that pre-dated patriarchy.14 Meanwhile, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray suggested that a religion of god and goddess had survived in Britain for centuries after its supposed extinction by Christianity. Among others, witches had practised it. Like her contemporaries, Murray thought this Frazerian religion dated back to the earliest times: it was enough to say that ‘whether the religion which survived as the witch cult was the same as the religion of the Druids, or whether it belonged to a still earlier stratum, is not clear’. She did believe that, because of the dates of what she conceived to be its ‘chief festivals’ at May Eve (April 30–May 1) and November Eve (October 31–November 1), that ‘the religion belonged to a race which had not reached the agricultural stage’, which ruled out the later Neolithic period but left open all periods before.15 Thus Frazerian religion was accepted and refined by fellow-scholars until its existence was unquestioned. The final key development in the late Victorian discussion of early societies that structured new literary work was the theory of totemism and taboo. It found its punchiest statement in the work of the therapist Sigmund Freud, but he was building on the work of Andrew Lang and James Frazer (among others) in the 1880s and early 1900s.16 Where Tylor had provided a scholarly methodology of comparison across cultures, Frazer, Freud and his fellow-workers put flesh on the bones of Palaeolithic people. By likening them to Australian or African tribes, they imagined their familial structures and everyday habits and attempted to draw large conclusions about the origin of modern tastes.17 In Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1918 English translation) they examined the idea of taboo – forbiddenness but also sacredness – in early society, arguing that modern taboos and neuroses preserved memories of prehistoric customs. Freud began to use this insight in his psychoanalytic work. For example, a patient troubled by the taboo on incest was a living reminder of the ancient practice of group-marriage, where a number of men might lay claim to a number of women and vice versa. Modern fear and loathing of one’s mother-in-law could be traced back to repressed desire that would once have been a ‘holy dread’ enforced by tribal penalty. Freud thought that taboo, especially sexual taboo, pre-dated religion and thus must be a very early human formulation.18 For Freud (and for Frazer to a lesser extent), sexual politics was the key factor in the formation of early human societies. This tied in with contemporary theories of Celtic goddess and god and with the familial elements in the northern pantheon. Freud also investigated Tylor’s ideas about animism as an early religious impulse, the notion that the natural world and animals were imbued by ‘primitive’ peoples with a spirit like the human soul. Totemic societies divided themselves into clans symbolized by a particular animal, which was also thought to be their ancestor and deity. Killing the animal was taboo, as was sex with

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any member of the same clan. Tribespeople were thus forced to look outside their immediate society for a partner. An individual might also have a totem animal, which was part of the rites of passage of his or her life. On special, communal occasions the animal might be sacrificed and shared to show that ‘the sacrificing community, its god, and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood’. While Freud was keen to state that ‘the reader need not fear that psychoanalysis … will be tempted to derive anything so complicated as religion from a single source’ the notions of totem and taboo would play a large part in theories of religion’s origin.19 For the key thinkers of this group, then, the mind of modern humans was formed in the Palaeolithic, with all its cultural preoccupations already determined. These were modified in the Neolithic by the invention of agriculture but otherwise there was a continuity between the periods and both formed modern human society. It was thought to be possible to study these origins of modernity through extraordinary survivals, both in ‘primitive’ societies and in exceptional individuals in ‘civilized’ communities, such as the mentally ill. These ‘living fossils’, as Lubbock labelled them, caused great excitement in the scientific community and among creative writers. One example of a story of living fossils pits the rational, modern detective Sherlock Holmes against an Andaman islander. Andaman people were thought to be the smallest human type and were associated with cannibalism, primitivism and degrading vice – just the kind of things that writers thought were buried in the ‘strata’ beneath Victorian self-control. Conan Doyle may have seen the skeleton of an Andaman woman when he was at the Royal College of Surgeons, so his islander character, Tonga in The Sign of Four (1890), may be based on conceptualizing her as a scientific ‘artefact’.20 Tonga is a ‘monkey-faced’, ‘less civilized’ man as small as a child, who creeps into a home to poison its inhabitants. As many literary critics have pointed out, he embodies not just the dangers of Empire but especially, as Lawrence Frank summarizes, ‘the prehistoric past’.21 Conan Doyle’s interest in prehistory and its presence in modernity further led him to invent a ‘lost world’ of remnant prehistoric people (and dinosaurs) on a remote plateau in South America (this book, The Lost World, was published in 1912). The ‘primitive’ peoples here are ‘ape-men’ who kill trespassers for pleasure. Yet in fighting them the modern humans become savage themselves, although in a heroic way. Thus the features of the ‘missing link’, the ape-man between monkeys and humans, survive in the modern characters.22 This kind of anthropology, which saw the prehistoric as a set of savage biological imperatives lurking just beneath the surface of civilization, famously informs Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr Hyde too. The desire to contrast, to make one group bad/‘savage’ and another good/ ‘civilized’, pervades late nineteenth-century writing about Palaeolithic and Neolithic religious cultures. Yet it is often the religious similarities between savagery and civilization that fire the writer’s imagination, the notion of survival. Two kinds of survival might occur. One was the mental survival of primitive impulses

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in religion, but the other was more tangible: the survival of religious rites from very ancient times into the present. Tylor again was the key figure here – his belief was that in some parts of society, less exposed to modern culture, some things had hardly changed at all and those things were uniform across human cultures; so that for example in superstition and beliefs in witchcraft there was ‘scarce a hand’s breadth of difference between an English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa’.23 Sometimes relics of such beliefs would survive in customs even when the original belief had long gone. In this way, Tylor opened up the prospect of discovering survivals of British prehistoric religiosity in the folklore customs of modern rural Britons. The idea was so alluring that for all its logical pitfalls it was irresistible. There were several quite important pitfalls. How would it be possible, for instance, to verify that a British ‘survival’ into the 1870s was unchanged since pagan times? Tylor’s archaeological work had led him – in his 1865 book Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation – to theorize similarities between past practices, as inferred from artefacts, and present ones. But inference from objects is not the same kind of evidence as observation of a living culture, with all its opportunities for questioning and checking. Further, the idea that a custom had survived unchanged against the grain of an aggressively missionary religion like Christianity for more than 1,000 years was questionable. It could not fairly be said to be impossible, but how likely was it? Then there was Tylor’s basic framework, the hierarchical grading of cultures from primitive to civilized. This language led him into assumptions about development which were linear and singular rather than multi-directional and multiple. A must have led to B, rather than A and B co-existing with N and being influenced in a number of directions by F. Tylor’s books had many virtues, often due to his Quaker liberalism: his rejection of crude notions of racial difference, for instance, and his attractive belief in the progress rather than the degeneration of humanity. But his reforming desire to do away with superstition in favour of science led him to oversimplify, in ways that were then seized on by those desperate to find traces of ancient paganism in modern British life, and to write about them, such as Murray.24 All in all, there was ample scope for imagining the Palaeolithic and Neolithic through the doctrine of survivals and this extended into late Victorian fiction.

Dawn of the gods = twilight of the gods? The contemplation of the prehistoric past, then, seemed to offer new access to truths about the origin of present-day religious rites. But it also raised questions about the uniqueness and divine design of Christianity. Discovering the origin of the idea of deity thus also seemed to involve destroying it: the dawn of the gods was also their twilight. The implications were so troubling that contemporary debate about the validity of religion began to be conducted through fictions about prehistory as well as in essays and treatises. Writers imagined that there had

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been prehistoric non-conformists and Tractarians but, most pressingly, freethinkers and atheists as well. This debate was a peculiarly British one. ‘PostDarwinian’ prehistoric fiction actually began in France, with a few novels of the 1870s offering heroic depictions of France’s ‘Celtic’ and ‘Aryan’ ancestors. The first of these to be translated into English, as Nicholas Ruddick has documented, was Elie Berthet’s Romans Préhistoriques: Le Monde Inconnu (1876, translated in 1879 as The Pre-Historic World).25 But in Britain the first modern fiction of prehistory was post-Tylorian or post-Frazerian, written in a very different spirit, as if in answer to the excesses of the French romances. It was a short story, ‘The Romance of the First Radical’, and its author was Andrew Lang, the Scottish anthropologist and folklorist. It contained what would become the usual Tylorian focus – the persistence of prehistoric behaviours in modernity – but it also returned to concerns with prehistoric religion that would have been familiar to William Harrison or Camden. It explored these old anxieties about right religion through extremely modern questioning of the religious establishment. ‘The Romance of the First Radical’ begins a dialogue between the positions developing in late Victorian Britain that religion is either a good and natural phenomenon or a wicked forgery, designed to oppress and delude. British prehistoric fictions from 1880 onward operate on a tick-box model in this binary debate, whose extreme ends are faith and atheism: in this they are looking back to Toland and deism, the notion of euhemerism in (for instance) Southey and Carlyle, as well as Harrison and his good and bad ancient British religions. Yet far from being a tale of high seriousness, the ‘Romance’ of the title was a satirical one. The story dealt with Why-Why, the first man who ‘reviled against the despotism of unintelligible customs, who asserted the rights of the individual against the claims of the tribal conscience’. He was inclined to think the customs of his tribe were ‘“bosh-bosh”, to use the early reduplicative language of these remote times’. He had always been informed that a serpent was the mother of his race, and that he must treat serpents with the greatest reverence. To kill one was sacrilege. In spite of this, he stole out, unobserved, and crushed a viper which had stung his little brother. He noticed that no harm ensued … He became suspicious of all the ideas and customs imposed by the old men and wizards. For this offence against totem and taboo, Why-Why is accused of heresy. His career of religious scepticism progresses through a violation of tribal burial customs, during which he ‘kicked the chief medicine-man into a ravine’, and eventually he commits the ultimate heretical act by marrying a fellow-worshipper of the serpent god. For breaking this taboo, he and his wife are executed. The story ends with the tribe repenting their act and forswearing ‘the follies of the medicine-men’, but not before Lang has enjoyed several digs at contemporary

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society and especially religion – points made through the use of Tylor’s theory of survivals and using his wide frame of reference too, with the customs discussed drawn from Native American, Yoruba, New Caledonian and Australian Aboriginal cultures. Why-Why, says Lang wryly, would recognize customs still present in late Victorian Britain as those of his religion – the knocking out of the teeth of schoolboys as a rite of puberty, the separation of husbands and wives in high society, and so on. But in particular readers cannot help noticing that the tribal medicine-man’s belief in ‘the bad black-fellow with a tail who lives under the earth’ is very like the simpler Christian conceptions of Satan, or Lang’s sly likening of Why-Why to more recent radicals like John Stuart Mill and Percy Shelley. The story’s last line offers an equivocal comment on the most contemporary religious radicalism, suggesting that ‘our advance in liberty is due to an army of forgotten Radical martyrs of whom we know less than we do of Mr. Bradlaugh’.26 Charles Bradlaugh was the recently-elected atheist MP for Northampton, who was refusing to swear the compulsory Oath of Allegiance to the Queen because it contained the phrase ‘so help me God’. From its outset, then, late Victorian prehistoric fiction set itself to explore notions of religion in a way that connected it directly back to its pre-Victorian equivalents but also dramatized contemporary debate. As an anthropologist on the one hand and a poet and literary critic on the other, Lang was ideally placed to explore the points of connection between fiction and scientific writing – so much so that Julie Sparks describes his short story as belonging to both genres – and that made him an ideal beginner of post-Darwinian pagan poetics.27 A similar critical engagement with religion can be found in H.G. Wells’ A Story of the Stone Age (1897). Less satirical and more immersive than Lang’s story, Wells’ novella (originally published in parts) tells a suspenseful tale of Ugh-lomi and Eudena, fugitives from a cannibal tribe that has designated Ughlomi its next victim. However, in the course of their persecution of the couple, the tribe invent a semi-totemic religion. Believing their former leader Uya, whom Ugh-lomi had killed, to have been reincarnated as a lion, they leave him offerings – including Eudena, whom they have captured for human sacrifice. When Ugh-lomi kills the lion and rescues Eudena, they begin to leave pieces of meat in the belief that the lion is still alive and demanding revenge on Ugh-lomi: they took the ashen stake with the meat upon it and thrust it into the ground. ‘Uya!’ cried Siss, ‘behold thy portion. And Ugh-lomi we have slain. Of a truth we have slain Ugh-lomi. This day we slew Ugh-lomi, and to-morrow we will bring his body to you.’ And the others repeated the words. Their religion is a false one in every way, however. Not only do the tribe lie in their worship – they have not killed Ugh-lomi – but the entire concept of the divine lion is the idea of a repulsive and malicious old woman who invents

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it as part of her bid to dominate the tribe. Uya, says Wells chillingly, ‘had let her live beyond the age to which it is seemly a woman should be permitted to live’, and this cunning crone’s religion is rejected when she is killed by the hero.28 Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’ from Rewards and Fairies (1910) echoes many of the concerns of Lang and Wells about manmade religion. His approach is to interrogate the ideas in a story of euhemerism, the creation of a god (Tyr) from a human being. His time period is rather vague but might be the late Neolithic for the story deals with the bringing of iron to a tribe previously reliant on stone technology. It is ‘The Neolithic Age’ as sketched in Kipling’s witty poem of that title, which includes the Upper Palaeolithic Solutrean culture and the Iron Age Allobroges culture for good measure.29 In Kipling’s story, different tribes are living in different ‘ages’: the unnamed hero fetches his iron from a neighbouring tribe, the wood-dwelling Children of the Night, at the cost of losing his eye. But his tribe make the mistake of deifying the iron-bringer as a ‘culture-hero’ like the ones described by Rhys in the third chapter. And they do it despite his protests that ‘we talk too much about Gods’. After deification the man is treated, he laments, like one of ‘the Old Dead in the Barrows’. His tribe sing hymns to him: ‘this is the Buyer of the Blade – be afraid! This is the Great God Tyr!’ ‘Oh poor, poor God!’ sympathizes the storyteller Puck, but there is no escape from deity. Becoming a god is not a triumph of will but a misfortune requiring further self-sacrifice – not of life, as in Frazer, but of happiness. Kipling dramatizes the disorientating realization that god is in oneself. Yet in this case, the bringer of the iron knows even this potential comfort to be a lie.30 A similar fate afflicts the hero of Henry Rider Haggard’s Allan and the Ice Gods, a story in his Allan Quatermain series, from 1927. Here, the adventurerhero Quatermain takes an African drug and finds himself living through a vision of his prehistoric forefather, Wi the Hunter. Wi’s tribe worship ice gods, ‘terrible powers to be feared’ who dwell in the glaciers. Two of them are especially visible, and with his modern mind Quatermain can see they are a man and a mammoth frozen in the ice, the creature pursuing his former hunter. But his prehistoric avatar Wi sets the tone of the book’s dark and complex religious politics when he offers his own exegesis of their meaning: Behold the gods hunting man, who flees and screams, filled with the terror of he knows not what, till they have him by the throat. The book follows Wi’s loss of faith in the ice gods until, like his slave Pag the Sceptic, he regards their priest as ‘a cheat and a liar’ and is unsurprised when the priest and believers are killed in a sudden glacial collapse as if by their own false gods. He himself, as Quatermain sums up, adopts a ‘higher religion’ centring on an afterlife in the sky, and eventually offers himself up as a sacrifice to help his people. Quatermain’s fellow time-traveller describes Wi as a ‘Christian martyr’,

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but the book is not satisfied with this simple reading. Its central message seems instead to be Wi’s unhopeful insight that the ice gods were ‘naught but the Evil in [the people’s] own hearts given form and name, and that the Unknown One whom now he worshipped was the Good in their hearts’. This cannot save his people from death or Wi himself from a flight south as the ice age swallows his world.31 Neither godlessness nor trust in savage nature deities and their sly priests offers the reader any hope at all. This bleak ending suggests the despair that afflicted many writers in the years after the First World War; a habit of mind that, as Richard Overy has shown in The Morbid Age, lasted through the 1930s.32 Fictions of prehistory mapped out this mood of Depression, so that equally problematic gods inhabit the accountant Sydney Fowler-Wright’s peculiar prehistoric romance Dream (1931). Here the tribe’s god is a totemic alligator, whose priestess Thekla wears a reptile skin, deer horns and a luminous stone as sign of her status. The tribe used to feed its god on surplus babies and the unwanted old or maimed – one way of dealing with economic crisis, as Jonathan Swift had first suggested in the 1720s – but the god also ate the previous priest after he offended the tribe’s king, who ‘had a dream in which the god came to him wrapped in a red flame, and in wrathful mood, saying that the priest was too old, and that it was time he should come to his jaws’.33 Quickly, a new doctrine is pioneered by Thekla. She continues to feed the god, but uses the rite as a means to control tribal politics for herself, hunting down all the novel’s protagonists as she consolidates her power. Once again, issues of authority are debated – kings, priests and priestesses are carnivorous by association with gods who, in the form of lions, mammoths or alligators, hunt human beings. Much of prehistoric fiction of the period 1880–1940, then, is a godless wasteland where religions of poly- and monotheism, nature worship and the worship of good itself are all tested and found empty of either comfort or narrative certainty.34 That the writers discussed here took a wide range of religious positions in their lives is indicative of the depth of religious turmoil in the period and the compulsion to work it out in relation to prehistory by writing fiction. Lang wrote extensively on the history of religion, especially in Myth, Ritual and Religion (1886) and The Making of Religion (1898). Responding in the latter to the notion that deities had originated in the idea of spirits, debated by Frazer, Grant Allen and Frank Jevons among others, he argued that early humans had firstly imagined a ‘powerful and beneficent Maker or Father’ and only later turned to deities who played ‘silly and obscene tricks’ such as the Greek gods. ‘Higher’ deities might not, then, have evolved from spirits, dreams or ghosts; indeed, it was more likely that god-kings and spirits were degenerations from them. He thought that many religious phenomena could be explained by ‘freakish’ abilities of thought-transference or clairvoyance and urged anthropologists to study psychical researchers’ reports. But beyond all that lay an ineradicable wish to believe in the reality of a god, and Lang ended his Gifford Lectures series of 1889–90 by explaining ‘primitive’ people’s knowledge of a good and dignified god.

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He quoted St. Paul: ‘that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them’.35 Early religion was revealed by the Christian god himself, or so Lang hoped. H.G. Wells, in contrast, was for much of his life famously anti-Christian in his social Darwinism. Raised on the library of the Uppark freethinker Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh and the teachings of Thomas Huxley, he was regarded as an egregious example of prejudiced atheism by his critics, such as Hilaire Belloc. Willis B. Glover sees him as a ‘caricature of a scientific humanism’ during this period of his life.36 In 1908 he expressed his need for faith because ‘I cannot contemplate an ineffectual life patiently … I assert … that I am important in a scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road and the fly drowning in the milk are important and correlated with me’. There had to be a scheme, though he was not ready to imagine a ‘schemer’. Yet in the years after the First World War he evolved the concept of a ‘personal’ God out of aspects of several world religions, theosophy and anything – in a nutshell – that he personally thought true. Religion, he argued in 1917, filled a ‘God-shaped blank’ in atheism and was acceptable if it could be dragged away from ‘the idolatry of altars, away from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbolical cannibalism, beyond the sway of the ceremonial priest’. This was all part of the ‘persistent wickedness’ of humankind, an ‘evil and corruption’ that Glover rightly notes he saw as ‘a carry-over from [Man’s] subhuman ancestors’ (as we shall see later in this chapter). For Wells, god lay in ‘freedom’ to believe as one saw fit, but a kind of god did exist; indeed William Archer accused Wells of trying to become that god’s apostle.37 Kipling has been variously described as a deist, a hoverer between Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, a Christian fixated by Old Testament tribal law, and an unbeliever. In Chapter 4, I suggested that he also had sympathies with his version of Anglo-Saxon paganism. He was an inconsistent writer, often undermining his own stories by playing with the reader’s perception or sympathies, and his religious sense seems to have been consistent only in its sense of trouble and strain. By the 1940s, his damaging upbringing by a violently Christian guardian was known – from his memoirs – and was being discussed as a factor in his complex attitude to religion. Seen in this light, his portrayal of the self-sacrificing human god denying his own deity looks like a way of expressing profound scepticism about deity’s incarnate presence in the world, its purpose and character.38 But Kipling’s feeling seems to be that sacrifices are still worth making: the story, overtly a story for children, thus dramatizes a painful struggle between belief and unbelief.39 If not a god, then at least great natural forces might account for the vicissitudes of human life. Sydney Fowler Wright, the son of a Baptist preacher, was a freethinker and worked out for himself such a cosmology. It was as pessimistic as that of Wells in its predictions for humanity. In The New Gods Lead, Fowler Wright stated that the ‘new gods’ were ‘comfort and cowardice’: society was being guided by its weakest members ‘from below’, into a ‘blind leaderless

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self-slavery’. What was needed was strong leadership. Yet both Christians and utopians were wrong to think this could lead to a perfect world: endless struggle was the only future for human beings. The odds were also stacked against them in Fowler Wright’s world. In his most famous work, Deluge, a global flood destroys civilization and humans are at the mercy of its uncontrollable might.40 Brian Stableford argues that Fowler Wright’s Dream also ‘presents an argument about the principles on which the natural world operates, regardless of the presence or efforts of man’. Mary Weinkauf sees Fowler Wright drawing on his Baptist past in attempting to deliver post-Christian ‘sermons’, but for her they amount to little more than ‘cranky’ opinions on the evils of abortion, motor cars and the loss of individual freedom that intrude into his later fiction. In his gloom, Fowler Wright is most like Wells in full atheist-Darwinian mode.41 Perhaps the most interesting of the five is Haggard who, as Hutton has documented, was a devout Bible-reading churchwarden but also explored theosophy and Egyptian and Nordic paganism.42 This yearning for religious experience is strongly present in his work. John Senior shows how Haggard explored spiritualism, ghosts and past lives in the 1920s, attempting to reconcile Christianity with the notion of reincarnation in the years leading up to Allan and the Ice-Gods.43 Yet he had always been attracted by paganism: ‘I venerate Isis and always feel inclined to bow before the moon!’ he wrote in his autobiography. It is this strain of Frazerian thought that leads him to create Wi’s teacher Laleela in Allan and the Ice-Gods, as well, arguably, as Ayesha in She.44 It is Laleela who brings Wi his ‘higher’ sky religion, because she is a moon-worshipper. She is also a character reincarnated in Haggard’s other fiction as a priestess of Isis and, later, Lady Ragnall, Quatermain’s elusive and forbidden lover. It seems that Haggard played out in Allan, Wi and his other stoical adventurers a fatal attraction to goddesses and their seekers, figures such as the theosophist Helena Blavatsky, whose Isis Unveiled appeared in 1877. Yet his male protagonists seem unable to trust or fully connect with this feminine mysticism – Wi cannot marry Laleela because he has sworn to take only one wife, and both she and Lady Ragnall die during the story. Deities from the pagan past are dismissed or whisked away – but the manly religion of self-sacrifice and self-denial that is left proves deeply unsatisfying.

Dawn of the goddess: an alternative spirituality The dissatisfaction with masculine religion felt in Haggard’s novel picks up on similar chafing in several previous works. Its most interesting forebear, and one that has a completely different response to the atmosphere of religious crisis, is The Master-Girl (1910) by Ashton Hillers (Henry Marriage Wallis), a vigorously feminist story of the first female warrior and chieftain and discussed as such by Trussel and Ruddick. But in particular Wallis’ story offers more spiritual hope than any of the works explored so far: it decides to invest in the goddess and

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celebrate her power instead of sinking into gloomy suspicion. The ‘master-girl’, Deh-Yan, is so named because she is a ‘governess’ to the other girls of her tribe, all of whom are being brought up to a life of servitude to men who may not only beat but also eat them. Like others before and after her, this Jane Eyre tires of stitching clothes and gathering sticks, and rebels. In the process of killing bears and wolves, inventing the bow and arrow, slaughtering would-be rapists and murderers and surpassing in every skill her loving but inferior husband, she is sustained by her moon religion. The moon is a male deity, counterpart of the female sun-god, and Deh-Yan finds it inspirational in aspiring to masculine strength and power. But when she becomes Chieftainess, she founds an Amazonian religion of ‘virgin priestesses’ who celebrate their rites ‘under the light of the New Moon in forest retreats, to which no man was ever admitted’. DehYan is deified after her death – and her name is clearly related to Diana, moon goddess, archer and Frazer’s inspiration.45 Tacitly, The Master-Girl is Wallis’ euhemeristic explanation for the goddess’ attributes. The male moon-god has been feminized, most successfully. Wallis’ own religion perhaps helps to explain his optimistic embrace of female sanctity: he was a Quaker corn-merchant and the Society of Friends had some of the first female preachers and business managers in Britain.46 Inspired by this he imagined a prehistoric equality greater than that of his own society, and gave it a religion that contained many of the seeds of goddess fiction today.47 Other writers followed suit: Frederick Britten Austin, for example, wrote a number of short stories in When Mankind was Young (1927) exploring a feminine spirituality dating back to the earliest human times. In ‘The Taming of the Brute’, before humanity has even left the trees women are believed to control the ‘fire-spirit’ with magic words unknown to men and they use this power to ‘tame’ the men of their group – who are in many ways ‘the brute’ of the title. Austin calls the women ‘the first … Feminist movement’ and in a later story examines how their power grew into a story of ‘Big Mother’ who made the earth. Indeed, Austin dedicated When Mankind was Young to his mother.48 He overtly genuflected to Frazer too in ‘Isis of the Stone Age’, a story in Tomorrow (1930). This ‘Isis’ is Star-of-Dawn, who is ‘of the “Blood” … sacredly descended from that vaguely omnipotent, primeval Great Mother, creatress of all things, inventress of all those multitudinous taboos’. Women drudge in her society but they are ‘the sole recognised parent’ and ‘the really important sex’ while men are ‘essentially extraneous … the docile agent of her sacred will’. Star-of-Dawn, strikingly like Elizabeth I’s version of Isis, is strong enough to remain a royal virgin for as long as she chooses. Even when she is surprised and captured by a stranger, she asserts herself to claim him forcefully as her husband. Unfortunately, he is of the same totemic clan and the tribe kill him, but not before he has fathered a daughter. As ‘the Mother’ and ‘Holy One’ she can revenge herself on his killer and have him dismembered in his turn, and Star-of-Dawn invents agriculture in sowing grass seeds on the grave: result, progress.49

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Another story of Neolithic feminism is the socialist-feminist Naomi Mitchison’s epic The Corn King and the Spring Queen, an evocative novel of Frazerian paganism imagined in 1931 from ‘my dear old Golden Bough’ and the folk-tales of Lang. Here the god-king Tarrik and his queen-goddess Erif Der are the protagonists in their Black Sea kingdom: their shared rites are sexual and magical, and each also performs specific rites in a cultic house in order to ensure good luck and good harvest. At the annual Plowing Eve rite in March, people watch for ‘signs of the godhead that was ripening in both of them’. Erif wears a ‘white dress with hundreds and hundreds of little coloured wool flowers’, and awaits her Corn King, who ploughs the field until he reaches her. ‘I am the plow. It is my body,’ he announces. Erif embodies ‘the hard, fallow field; the cold, reluctant spring’. Her life has been hard, of late: last year’s rite did not go well, her father has killed her child and her husband has murdered her brother. But suddenly she is ‘unreasonably and beautifully glad’. She welcomes Tarrik, leaping over the ploughshare to him. ‘All the growers of corn could look on the hard and upright sign of the godhead’ as he parts his garments. The god and goddess have symbolic sex and the rite finishes with the community happy, orgiastic and drunk. Mitchison’s heroine’s name is ‘red fire’ reversed, suggesting her passionate, warm investment in her human goddess of community and fertility, and her socialist paganism is in the tradition of E. Belfort Bax, who in 1912 had proclaimed that ‘socialism represents a return, with a difference, of course … to the pagan view of the world and of life’. For him, paganism and socialism meant ‘the “joy of life” as the right of all’ and socialism was itself a religion. Ironically, since Bax loathed feminism, for Mitchison socialism was a religion of heroic human god and goddess.50 For all the brutalities of their prehistoric worlds, then, these stories are much more positive in their depictions of religion than those focused on the traditional male protagonists – Wi, Ugh-lomi and the others. Goddess religion is often seen to work for its female protagonists, providing comfort and direction in hard times, while masculine religion seems to have lost its way in a crisis projected back to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic. But the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century were not necessarily a morbid age for those writers willing to imagine a can-do goddess religion. Prehistory seemed to offer hope where modernity did not. Here is the socialist and sexual reformer Edward Carpenter, with a hauntingly beautiful vision of what he believed to have been the pagan ‘primitive’ religion of mankind and which he hoped would return when modern civilization was swept away by socialism. Once again, man would feel connected to The Sun or Sol, visible image of his very Soul, closest and most vital to him of all mortal things, occupying the illimitable heaven, feeding all with its life; the Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective thought, the conscious Man, measurer of Time, mirror of the Sun; the planetary passions wandering to and fro, yet within bounds; the starry destinies; the changes of

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the earth and the seasons; the upward growth and unfoldment of all organic life; the emergence of the perfect Man, towards whose birth all creation groans and travails – all these will return to become realities … The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great procession of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind – the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin Mary … The same sense of vital perfection and exaltation which can be traced in the early and pre-civilisation peoples … will return to irradiate the redeemed and delivered Man.51 Carpenter loathed civilization, but he did not hate all religion too. In fact, he craved a revived version of the pagan past. Once again it is goddesses who take the lead, especially Frazer’s goddesses, and Carpenter imagines that men may partake of this religion fully.52 The creation of the notion of a Palaeolithic and Neolithic goddess cult was thus shared between men and women, and it joined recreations of the Celtic religion discussed in the third chapter to create a strong new set of mythic memes and literary tropes that survive today.

Them and us: modern humans and other hominids There was another genre of prehistoric stories running alongside the ones of early human society, however, which we must examine before we move on. This group focused on ‘anatomically-modern’ humans, as they are known today, and their relationships with Neanderthals. The Neanderthal stories are different from those discussed above because instead of explaining the origin of modern human beliefs and practices they focus on defining what they are not. The Neanderthal route is the ‘path not taken’ in human history for these writers, and it has religious aspects. Sometimes Neanderthals are introduced into the stories to allow the imagination of a world entirely without religion. This was one of their functions when H.G. Wells revisited the Palaeolithic for his 1921 story ‘The Grisly Folk’. The ‘Neanderthal’/‘Mousterian’ creatures in Wells are more animal than human: ‘not of our blood, not our ancestors’, solitary, sinister and cannibal. In contrast, the narrator describes ‘the true men’ (modern humans) as capable of creating art and language. Wells identifies with ‘the true men’. Indeed, they are the infancy of humanity: we can understand something of what was going on in their minds, those of us who can remember the fears, desires, fancies and superstitions of our childhood. Their moral struggles were ours – in cruder form. They were our kind.

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In contemporary palaeo-anthropological writing this theory is crisply summed up as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ (the developmental processes of childhood repeat the ‘infancy’ of the species). The implication is that because of their ‘moral struggles’ when they ‘grow up’ the modern humans will develop religion and become ‘us’. They will do so through the rejection of the Neanderthal way, and through the civilizing female influence that creates social bonds, a theory Wells borrowed from James Jasper Atkinson’s Primal Law (1903).53 Somewhere in their future is the feminine spirituality that they will need to attain adulthood. Aside from demonstrating that religion is part of a civilizing culture (note the dramatic change from the story of Ugh-lomi, 30 years before), Wells’ early European species may lack religion because by the 1920s fictions of prehistory had begun to absorb influences from Diffusionism. Diffusionism was a broad label for those who believed that developments such as farming had their origin in a specific location and were then diffused, by invasion or cultural exchange, across the world. The best-known explicator of Diffusionist ideas in the 1920s was Vere Gordon Childe, a highly influential archaeologist. Childe’s The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) discussed the discovery of agricultural practices and their spread from the Near East. Within Diffusionism, however, was a group later named ‘hyperdiffusionists’ by the archaeologist Glyn Daniel. These were writers such as the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith and the anthropologist W.J. Perry, and they saw Egypt as the source of modern civilization.54 For Perry and Elliot Smith, religion did not exist before the civilization of ‘the Children of the Sun’ created it in Egypt, so it was not available to very early humans. As one of its mixed blessings, Elliot Smith argued, Egyptian civilization invented kingship and then Egyptians deified their rulers. Early kings such as Osiris were credited with bringing sun and rain, inundations and harvests. Thus religion was born euhemeristically, and with it rituals designed to honour and resurrect the god in seasonal festivals – we are back with Frazer again.55 But Elliot Smith saw the development of religion as damaging to human happiness. For him, pre-civilized life was ‘Arcadian’ – ‘Natural Man’ embodied ‘honesty and decency’ without envy, malice or uncharity. Therefore ‘he’ did not ‘develop any customs or beliefs to hamper his freedom or restrain his actions. He was content to remain the genial and happy child of Nature.’56 Religion put an end to that. The ‘Children of the Sun’ recur in prehistoric fiction, with the theory most closely followed in I.O Evans’ The Coming of a King (1950) where they are the antithesis of the Neanderthal. Here the Children are African immigrants, who show their new neighbours the way to farm grain and make all kinds of art and craft symbolic of civilization and progress. Yet some of their adherents have perverted their religion into a sacrificial one, where those tested and found wanting must lose fingers as a rite of passage into manhood. The Children can bring both good and bad religion, depending on individual character and taste.57 This sacrificial superstition is the kind of religion attributed to early Neolithic people in Henry Treece’s The Golden Strangers (1956). Here religion is a dog-eatdog horror. It is an Earth Mother religion, so that one might hope it had the

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redeeming features of the goddess faiths of Laleela or Deh-Yan. But it does not: instead, it demands continual human and animal sacrifice, a pointless waste of life and resource, and its adherents live in fear. To have ‘gone to the Earth Mother’ means to have been sacrificed on a stone altar. ‘At sowing time’ it is explained ‘she calls for a little drink, a little blood … one throat goes short so that a hundred throats be fed’. Yet the Children of the Sun, who come from the Baltic in this novel, bring a religion just as bloody in its sacrifices, where a Hornman (clearly based on Murray’s horned god but this time a eunuch, just to add extra perversion) is dedicated to ‘death and the sun’. The Earth Mother’s people change to a sun religion, but it is no less vile than the previous one: as corpse after corpse proves. Only by retreating from organized religion altogether can a few fugitives be safe.58 For the most extreme Diffusionists, imagining a religion of this sort arriving to afflict humanity, all religion was a disease. Adam Stout has explored how Diffusionist ideas grew in opposition to the toxic rhetoric of race, religion and tribal hatred that seemed to them to have promoted the First World War. An emphasis on blood and sacrifice had led to the notion, they thought, that human life was worthless and that people should be willing to die in their millions in the service of meaningless tribal dogma.59 Such ideas are explored in J. Leslie Mitchell’s Three Go Back (1932), a story that transports three survivors of an airship crash back some 20–30,000 years to an Atlantean continent inhabited by both Neanderthals and modern humans. The time-travellers bond with the modern humans or ‘Cro-Magnons’, but both early people are ‘without religion’ and they are not antagonistic. Indeed, the travellers’ new friends are ‘the most spiritual the world will ever see’. Without war, competition, hierarchy or ritual, they incarnate the Diffusionist belief that humans are essentially good and have been corrupted only by civilization. The characters debate the origin of religion accordingly. The militant pacifist Keith Sinclair argues that while early man was a ‘beast’ until ‘the strong men and the wise men, the warriors and the witch-doctors, bound him in chains of taboo’, these ‘obscene gods’ and armies now survive as a clog on the human spirit. The armaments manufacturer Sir John Mullaghan argues that both gods and armies are restraints still necessary to curb human evil. But the character who is proven right is the writer Clair Stranlay, who refuses to believe in the evil of either ancient or modern humans. Her lover died in the trenches in France in 1917 and by the end of the story she is able to recognize his benign innocence, as well as his actual features, in the faces of the Cro-Magnons. Looking back from World War I, ‘unemployment processions’ (such as the National Hunger March of 1932), and the civilization created by archbishops and motor-manufacturers, Keith accepts Clair’s belief.60 ‘Rousseau,’ he decides, ‘was right … These protoCro-Magnards, these earliest true men on earth [are] absolutely without culture and apparently absolutely without superstitious fears, cruelties, or classdivisions.’ Their descendants are Christ, Shelley and Giordano Bruno – radicals, as Lang would have called them, many of them the opponents and victims of

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orthodox religion. Inverting Nietzsche, Mitchell comments wittily that in his version of the Palaeolithic, God is not dead but happily ‘yet unborn’.61 In these texts, Neanderthals are marginal to the story, introduced largely as a comparator with modern human beings. They are alike in some ways and in others wholly different. But in 1955 William Golding’s The Inheritors provided a self-conscious ‘writing back’, to Wells’ ‘Grisly Folk’ story in particular. He suggests two radical notions: that Neanderthals did practise a religion; and that it was a better one than anything invented by modern human beings. The Inheritors begins by quoting Wells – not ‘The Grisly Folk’, but The Outline of History, where Wells described Neanderthals as characterized by ‘an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness’ and the stuff that nightmares are made of. In a straight inversion, Golding’s Neanderthals are sweet-natured communitarians. It is modern people who are selfish, predatory and unloving, even killing and eating Neanderthals.62 Their society is sick – an adult revisiting of Golding’s dysfunctional society in Lord of the Flies (1954). To the Neanderthal woman Fa the ‘new people’s’ inability to live well suggests that modern humans are unnatural: ‘Oa did not bring them out of her belly’, she concludes, naming the Neanderthals’ earth goddess. We might think of the new people as fallen, exhibiting all the ills that Milton listed at the end of Paradise Lost, a text that Golding kept revisiting.63 The new people have a religion, based on Frazerian sympathetic magic. They draw and colour pictures of stags, and make an offering of a severed finger, chopped from one of their own men, to the artwork – reminiscent of Evans’ Children of the Sun. One member of the tribe dresses in animal skins and dances as a shaman in his stag costume. His role is like that suggested for ‘the sorcerer’ figure painted at Les Trois Frères cave, on which he is clearly based, and may also have a debt to the antler headdresses discovered at Star Carr by the archaeologist Grahame Clark only about five years before Golding wrote.64 This stag-dressed man, who is probably the leader Marlan, presides over the finger offering. Hunters then fire arrows at the painted stag, to the accompaniment of clapping and chanting. They bow to the stag, too, propitiating it – as a stag god? We see the ritual through the Neanderthal man Lok’s puzzled eyes and he finds the whole performance incomprehensible and wrong.65 It seems devoid of proper reverence, cruel and foolish. Indeed, all is not well with this religion. Despite their material riches, these people are hungry. Later, obscurely, a Neanderthal child is sacrificed and eaten in a ceremony that we do not see or fully understand but which dominates the book: as James Gindin argues, their ‘worship is not respect or devotion, but predatory propitiation’. After their bruising, brutal encounter with the Neanderthals, the group feel ‘haunted, bedevilled, full of strange irrational grief ’. Their cosmos is in confusion, ‘untidy, hopeless, dirty’ and their religion offers no help.66 Meanwhile the Neanderthals have their own religion based on the goddess Oa and including a semi-sacred object, ‘the little Oa’, a root that Lok found and judged to be shaped like a pregnant woman, taken from an illustration in Wells’ Outline.67 This suggests the ‘big’ Oa’s imagined form. Oa manifests herself in

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snowmelt and fertility in spring, and in protection for all living things: in conversation with John Carey, Golding likened Oa to Gaia, the goddess-name bestowed by the environmentalist James Lovelock on his hypothesis of ‘the earth as a self-regulating system’. Golding gave Lovelock the idea for this name so that Oa actually is Gaia.68 With this goddess as their focus, the Neanderthals’ world is thus whole and potent: animist, alive with deer that are Oa’s children and ice-caves where the goddess inhabits ‘ice women’, bulbous and beautiful icicles. As the mother of all creatures, Oa is offended by deliberate killing and although the Neanderthals eat meat, they scavenge rather than hunt.69 Theirs is a kindly religion, not a would-be manipulator of natural forces like the modern humans’.70 Oa is not the saviour of her people, even so: they will die out because it is inevitable. She may be a more ethically- and environmentally-pleasing deity but she does not help Lok any more than the modern humans’ god helps them. Lok concludes that Oa and the new people are like each other – simply an irresistible blind force, ‘nothing stands against them’.71 In this way, Golding returns to the world of Lang and Haggard, and his ice-women of the goddess clearly recall Haggard’s figures in the glacier in Allan and the Ice-Gods. As in Haggard’s novel, women have a better access to religion than men do: ‘religion belongs to the women … it is the women who have Oa’ notes Peter S. Alterman. Feminizing that religion and translating it to the Neanderthals has not helped Golding to any more optimistic a conclusion about the truth or comfort of religion; but it has given form to a wholesome, maternal deity that inspired Lovelock in an important attempt to reverse some of the more damaging errors of real, contemporary modern humans.72 Something similar is attempted in Roy Lewis’ What We Did to Father (1960). Lewis’ Cold War satire rebukes a godless world about to commit ecocide, and possibly suicide as well, by telling a story of the Palaeolithic. Its characters are contemporaries of the Neanderthals, but a more successful species who will become modern humans. Yet this progress is regress, as in Golding. As the treedweller Uncle Vanya laments to his progressive, fire-making brother Ernest (‘Father’): ‘You were a simple child of nature, full of grace … And now where are you? … Cut off … from Eden.’ Nature’s commandments are clear, he says, and Lewis expresses some of them in Christian language: ‘Thou shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’ A world without this stark religious reverence, in prehistory or the present, is one where humanity may easily destroy itself: Father has abandoned his origins and will suffer accordingly. His fire sets the plains alight, on a page illustrated with a giant mushroom cloud to point up the contemporary relevance. For all its comedy, What We Did to Father suggests that the restraining influence of nature’s religion would be good, if only modern human beings could be persuaded to listen to it. The trouble is that they cannot – either they have no religion, or what they have is a hopeless corruption.73 In representing Stone Age religiosity, then, British writers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century created a wide variety of religious

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practices and beliefs. Often they were hampered by their own reservations about the goodness or the existence of deities and/or by a mistrust of established religions, some of which was inherited from earlier scholarship on and fictions about British paganism. In only a few cases – Wallis, Mitchison and Golding most obviously – could it plausibly be said that any of the religions imagined in the new era of prehistory has positive value. All these visions (Deh-Yan, the Spring Queen and Corn King and Oa) feature goddesses.74 The goddess and her paradise have usually already been lost in Palaeolithic and Neolithic fiction; and it certainly is not the kind of proto-Christian Golden Age imagined by William Harrison, Camden and all the others. It was also most unlike the warm parental religion of contemporary Celtic imaginings. Apart from a few brighter tales of feminine religiosity the prehistoric fiction of the 1890s to 1960s created a dark, saddening literature of uncertainty and unanswered questions, of competing species scuffling in the dark and of melting ice-gods.

6 ‘FIND ME IN YOUR OWN TIME’ Three schools of contemporary god and goddess fiction

I’ve touched the source. That was a story from the beginning … I’ve touched the source. Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss There is a sense, I would say, in which history which is both recorded and unrecorded can only find its way through to personal substance if it then becomes a novel, becomes a story. Raymond Williams, interview

So far, we have traced three ‘schools’ of writing about pagan deities. I’ll call them Romano-British-Celtic, Anglo-Saxon-Northern and Stone Age. In this chapter I want to bring their stories up to date, but first let’s survey where we left each school, in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

Three ways to imagine the pagan past In Chapters 1–3 we looked at the most prolific school of writing, which developed and responded to notions of a Romano-British-Celtic continuity of deities. In examining this school, we saw how depictions of classical paganism came and went, beginning in the Middle Ages with Diana and facilitating the upsurge of interest in paganism during the Renaissance. This initial focus then gave way to a greater concentration on supposedly British-named deities such as Taranis and Andate. They in turn were replaced by names taken from Irish and Welsh tales. Although classical religion fought back in literature during the nineteenth century, it has now taken a back-seat to fictions based on the ‘Celtic’ notions of paganism, with some interest still taken in selected ‘Romano-British’ deities.

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Contemporary stories and poems have come to focus on a god and a goddess, without worrying too much about individual names, as aspects of one whole. Meantime, from the late eighteenth century, the Romano-British-Celtic school was influenced by encounters with Indian faiths, especially Hinduism. And it was also successfully, if over-enthusiastically at times, hybridized with Christianity, another eastern faith imagined as coming to Britain in various ways at various times. This, the proto-Christianity hypothesis, created an almost unchallengeable story of a British paganism that was not really pagan at all. It was not until the twentieth century that this story waned in its appeal, and even now it can still be found echoed in new versions. Meanwhile, the northern pantheon also became important in scholarship and fiction from the mid-seventeenth century onward. It was initially of interest to historians as the faith of the English people’s law-making and parliamentarian Anglo-Saxon forefathers. By the eighteenth century it was being imagined as both generally northern and specifically Anglo-Saxon, and creative writing about it focused firstly on Odin or Woden. In the nineteenth century, encountering a wider range of Icelandic and Nordic scholarship, writers moved on to stories of Odin’s extended family, with most attention going to Balder. The similarities between Balder and Christ were explored: the comparison made northern tradition more broadly palatable to Victorian Christianity than it would have been if it had continued to focus on Odin. Anglo-Saxon-Northern paganism struggled against classical and Christian trends in the same way as Romano-British-Celtic paganism, although there was a steady interest in ‘Viking’ matters and sagas by the end of the nineteenth century. In the atmosphere of distrust and outright hatred linked to the First and Second World Wars, paganism associated with Germany was sometimes used to demonize the enemy, and some groups still associate it with fascism. It was not until the later twentieth century that a sizable group of creative writers began to find inspiration in it again. As we shall see below, new scholarly hypotheses about specifically Anglo-Saxon deities have reinvigorated creative writing on the topic. Finally, we saw in Chapter 5 how in the late nineteenth century pagan fictions developed to cope with the modern conception of a lengthy prehistory, a period of tens of thousands of years of human existence before Greek, Roman, Celtic or German religion arrived on the scene. Most Stone Age fictions focused on the Palaeolithic, with its politics of origin and development, examining social institutions and the politics and hierarchy of religions in particular. For most writers, Stone Age fiction offered an opportunity to debate contemporary concerns about the truth and power of religious dogma: deities were present, but were constantly questioned and undermined. In setting up these debates, fiction followed Frazer and Freud, and other key theorists, quite slavishly. From the 1880s to 1930s, stories continued along similar lines as ‘science fiction’, and it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that some works challenged the conventional model by, for example, offering Neanderthals as role-models for contemporary society. Once the kneejerk emphasis on progress had been questioned, fictions of

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the Stone Age kind became freer to imagine early people as benign natureworshippers rather than victims of intellectual mistake or priestly fraud. While some Stone Age religions were still being imagined as sanguinary and exploitative, then, others were focused on earth-goddess worship – an idea that, in the form of Gaia, has made its way back into scientific discourse. In this chapter, it is time to look at the past 40 years or so of literature, to see where we are now in the portrayal of British pagan deities. By the 1980s, there was a striking focus on goddesses at the expense of gods across all three schools of writing, with gods often appearing as frightening rather than uplifting presences. Meanwhile alternative forms of religion, such as animism, have appeared alongside fiction of traditional deities – and even these are often in nontraditional form. The intense negativity of portrayals of deity has almost wholly come to an end, and in this sense the movement towards a new paganism that began in stories of Celtic deities has overcome the reservations about paganism as foreign and/or deluded which had dominated Anglo-Saxon-Northern and Stone Age fictions in the first half of the twentieth century. The invention of stories of benevolent Celtic gods and goddesses has allowed the invention of Stone Age and Anglo-Saxon ones too. Further, in wider society the freedom to believe or disbelieve as one thought good – a choice that was widely acceptable by the end of the Second World War – has made the idea of religion per se less of a coercive constriction and more of a positive commitment. It is thus likely to be portrayed more warmly in literature. This chapter surveys some literary developments in the representation of pagan deities, focusing on a few of the many writers currently working in the field.

A new Stone Age: ‘people began to make up stories’ In Chapter 5, we looked at fictions of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, the Stone Ages. These were terms adopted in the 1860s to describe the whole of early human history, and creative writers used them in similar ways in their fictions. But a further term had also been proposed: the Mesolithic, or ‘middle Stone Age’. It was not widely adopted, however, until the mid-twentieth century. The archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe was its popularizer, as the preeminent publisher of Diffusionist studies of European prehistory. He was talking about ‘the mesolithic economy’ by 1940.1 The Mesolithic period in Britain, it was agreed among archaeologists, was characterized by the use of microlith technology – tools made with very small flint blades – climatic and cultural change and the rise of sea levels. As usual, there was a time-lag before the concept entered fiction, but by the 1980s it was established as part of the continuum from the earliest times to the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age, to which major megalithic works were dated. It could be discussed in fiction as a time of great importance to human development. The first novelist to engage in detail with the technological and societal changes of the period in their new guise was probably the literary critic and

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Marxist Raymond Williams, in his novel People of the Black Mountains.2 It was published posthumously in 1989, but Williams had been working on it throughout the preceding decades. As a Marxist, he was especially interested in change and liminality, the economic ‘base’ and cultural ‘superstructure’ of society: how phases of development began, overlapped with one another and established new practices. He was also interested in, as John Mullan puts it, ‘how social history lives in literature’. As Williams said in an interview about his own novel, he wanted ‘to be able to say: right, that is the base of the society, now what is it like just to live and fall in love, or get in a quarrel or a fight, in those quite different conditions?’ If, he explained, history did not ‘become a story’ then how could it be felt personally? Dinah Birch describes People of the Black Mountains as answering the question ‘how is history made?’ In this sense, Williams’ novel was part of his teaching and the Mesolithic was a perfect illustration of the possibilities of social improvement. His three Mesolithic stories explore a time of transition between the hand-to-mouth lifestyle of the two Palaeolithic stories that begin the book and later self-sufficiency with the coming of the New People. Williams’ modernity is shown in that the immigrants are not the Children of the Sun, but more prosaic herders from the European continent, the first wave of Gordon Childe’s diffusers bringing domesticated animals. Williams dated each story: he cared about scientific precision and followed the best guesses of his time. The three Mesolithic tales are dated c.10,000 BC, c.7000 BC and c.5400 BC.3 In the first, two families are spending the summer apart from the rest of their tribe, foraging. When the two sons of one family are lost hunting, the only possibility for continuing their line without incest is for the old man to have a child with his wife’s niece. This is agreed by all the parties and so the tribe continues, just. In the next story it flourishes: ‘the small families living at the very edge of survival had grown and extended until they were large and prosperous’.4 Frazer and Freud’s fingerprints still shape the saga but Williams adds a realism that comes from recent archaeological theory, a rejection of bloodthirsty and melodramatic versions of prehistory in favour of mundanity. Perhaps most interestingly, there is no mention of a deity or priesthood but there is no sense of absence: the focus is on the people’s undogmatic attempts to find a workable plan for living. Even when aspects of superstitious ritual begin there is no drama about them, as there was in the Stone Age fictions of Chapter 5. The characters remain practical, kindly on the whole and egalitarian. From his earliest critical work, Williams had insisted on the importance of the ‘ordinary’ – on mundanity itself and those whom the upper classes called ‘ordinary people’, the provincial workingclass people among whom Williams grew up. The forebears of these people fill his novel. In ‘Culture is Ordinary’, an essay of 1958, Williams had extended the notion of ‘culture’ to them in a way that drew on Tylor’s understanding of culture – culture is everything that all people do – but stripped it of its more patronizing assumptions. And he saw change as a long-term process rather than a series of shocks; what he called a ‘long revolution’, ‘unevenly, tentatively’ moving

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towards betterment.5 So in the Mesolithic stories we see small everyday decisions among ‘ordinary’ people, small flexibilities and kindnesses, making great differences eventually. ‘Cara Daughter of Cara’ shows how the now-enlarged tribe meets with others each midsummer to exchange commodities and arrange marriages: society is being born, ideas are being shared. Boys must engage in a ritual hunting race to determine who gets first choice of a bride, although girls can refuse proposals. The boy Cara likes comes last but extenuating circumstances are taken into account and he is allowed to marry her. While there are customary rules, then, we see how they can be bent to ensure individual happiness: the society has built into its ritual the possibility of choice as well as Darwinian notions of competition. This helps it to shape its next generation of parents wisely. Similarly in ‘Incar’s Fire and Aron’s Pig’ the boy Aron decides to keep a pig, although no one before him has domesticated an animal. The pig escapes or is stolen, but the idea’s seed has been planted. And along with a new insight into the management of nature comes a further-developed notion of something ill-defined: spirit or magic, fate and guidance from non-human forces. We see that fire is becoming not just a practical tool but something to be addressed personally, propitiated and herded, just as a pig may be controlled rather than randomly hunted. When fire is used to clear some land, Incar says ‘the old words of the fire’: Leap, but leap away Burn, but burn from us Rise, but not against us Eat, but eat only your own.6 Nevertheless, this is the only indication of a developing religiosity in the Mesolithic world, and Williams was content to leave it that way. By the Neolithic (stories set in c.2000 BC and c.1600 BC, ‘The Coming of the Measurer’ and ‘The Earthstorm’), the local people have adopted goddess-worship, believing in signs from Danu of the tuatha dé danann. The religious ceremony described focuses on the apparent rebirth of a woman (by playing dead and then moving), which is linked to the rebirth of the midwinter sun. But the people are concerned that in moving from stone to metal tools they may offend Danu: indeed, an earthquake seems to confirm her offence. Favouring progress, their elders explain that since the Earth Mother Danu gave all things, she gave copper and tin as she gave stones and grass. She gave signs with pink flowering thrift where copper could be found. She taught her children to dig metals as she had taught them to dig and break soil to plant grain and herbs … Danu contained all things. To be sure of protection, however, the protagonist Carvor proposes that large stones should be set up to create a ‘place of safety and fertility’. Carvor got this

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idea from a ‘Measurer’, from Stonehenge. There another religion is practised, with priests of a ‘Great Order’, the Measurers. They live parasitically upon their community by demonstrating their knowledge: predicting an eclipse, for instance, causes fear and the workers of the community bring them supplies accordingly. This Measurer has revolted against the imposition of priestly hierarchy and come away, to Wales where he was born. Although he is regarded as a ‘heathen’ by the locals he gives them the idea to calculate Danu’s festivals more precisely and, later, to erect megalithic monuments to her in a gentler, provincial version of his own religion. Thus Williams suggests the slow emergence, merging and splitting of pagan traditions, with a debt to the Celtic school of pagan fiction but his own interpretation of its relationship with the Stonehenge religion.7 Williams’ Black Mountains religion is one of sensible debate about kindly, reverenced nature deities. Although he was a committed Marxist atheist, he did not see all religion as bad: his version of socialism may indeed have owed a good deal to Methodism as well as to Marx. His paganism has Welsh Methodism’s minimal hierarchy and simplicity, certainly. And perhaps because he wished to stress locality, Williams did not imagine a national religion, instead splitting Britain into at least two sects. In fiction of his time this foregrounding of the local became important: it led to diverse results, ‘local epics’ as John Kerrigan calls them, like Heaney’s poem on the Northumbrian Coventina and, less cheerfully, Alan Garner’s 1973 depiction of tribal religion in Red Shift where different religions divide the British tribes. In Garner’s novel, one area of the north-west, with a sanctuary where birch trees are twisted into animal and human shapes, belongs to the Cat tribe, while those who worship the Mothers hold an adjacent territory. They take over Cat sanctuaries if they can, performing a ‘reconsecration’ by channelling the spring and offering some human heads.8 Williams’ imagined religion is more flexible and humane than Garner’s, with no set-piece cruelties of this kind. As Christianity has slackened its grip on modern British society so novelists have moved away from the portrayal of religion in terms of Reformation violence or Victorian morality, as well as ceasing to imagine it as proto-Christian in other ways. With a wider understanding of anthropology and comparative religion in contemporary Britain than ever before, late twentieth-century writers had many models from which to choose. There was often an attempt to imagine religion anew and this led to highly individual versions of paganism as tied to particular sites or tribes and with a range of pragmatically-flexible deities. Many of these are goddesses, a reflection of greater interest in goddess spirituality in prehistory, most notably in the work of the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas whose first book on the subject, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, was published in 1974. By 1991, in The Civilization of the Goddess, she was arguing a position drawing on that of the late nineteenth-century theorists Bachofen, Harrison and others, now suggesting that ancient European religion had been goddess-centred and matriarchal as well as matrilinear.9 Responding

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to this, novels began to imagine goddess religions in profusion. The American Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a goddess-based version of the Arthurian myth in The Mists of Avalon (1983) that was very widely read. In Britain, Cecelia Holland’s Stonehenge novel Pillar of the Sky (1985) saw the sun as the ‘Mother of all things’ and named goddesses such as ‘Hortha’, presumably Dryden’s Mother Earth and Swinburne’s Hertha.10 Naomi Mitchison’s Early in Orcadia (1987) offers an example of the new mood that is all the more interesting for its relation to her 1931 novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Like her fellow socialist Williams, Mitchison imagines the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to Neolithic farming in a carefullyresearched and specific instance, Scottish rather than Welsh this time. Like Williams’ earliest Black Mountains hunters – or her fellow Scot Leslie Mitchell’s Palaeolithic people – Mitchison’s first Orcadians are without an organized spirituality, but she suggests that some time in the early Neolithic ‘people began to make up stories’. Here is religion as fiction, with all the imaginative truthfulness and falsity that the term allows. These ‘stories’ centre on the notion that some people know when good or bad times are coming, and ‘there might be one person who could tell you the way, who would make a little light so that the dark would go back into corners’. Some self-sacrifice might help keep the dark at bay, and ‘if one person was hurt – badly – might that do for everyone? Difficult questions floated up from the dark.’ Frazer still haunts the imagination of the writer of The Corn King more than half a century before, but he is less insistent and has to come to terms with Mitchison’s specific archaeological case-study: sacrifice and the vegetation-spirit will not suffice. The Orcadians must begin the religion that Mitchison imagines led them to build the Eagle Tomb at Isbister on South Ronaldsay, which dates back some 5,000 years and contains the bones of more than 300 people together with those of sea eagles.11 As Mitchison’s religion develops, it becomes matriarchal as in Gimbutas’ theory, and linked to eagles as symbols of nature. In the second story set near the Tomb, the girl Little Honey lives in a society dominated by ‘the Big Woman who was also the Good Woman’. The Woman lives in her own hut, filled with dangling eagles’ claws. She keeps a houseful of virgin girls, awaiting a rite in which they are marked with a slight scar by a claw and have their hymen broken. The Woman is thus the gatekeeper of adulthood. She is also – and here Mitchison’s long-term interest in birth-control and eugenics surfaces – the toughminded Malthusian guardian of her community’s resources: If there were too many bairns the Big Woman would need to feed the eagles and there would be a strong smell of what was making bubbles in the great trough, with herself leaning over it … Then all the people would drink and dance and fall over … and then the eagles came and their wings swished but you could not hear it any longer nor yet what might be screamings and sobbings and crunchings …

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The Woman also reads the moon and tells the community when to plant its crops: ‘without her to call the moon up it could be dark all night … ’. In short she is a powerful, benign but necessarily murderous leader to whom no one objects. She is inevitability, survival, goddess-priest-queen – a more central, authoritative and older version of the Spring Queen, Erif Der. A few generations later, however, the Woman has lost some of her power and been renamed. In the third story she is the Moon Woman, representative of a goddess ‘who pulled the sea’ and has to be propitiated with sacrifice, and she is teamed with the Sun Man, whose sacred animal is the bull. The religion of the second story has evolved into a more dualistic one of sea and land, male and female. The Moon Woman’s old ‘honouring place’ has been pulled down and rebuilt as the Eagle Tomb. Here, the Sun Man keeps the bones of the dead, but it is still the role of the Moon Woman to watch over the excarnation of the bodies. Reincarnation is imagined as the future of the dead. Priestess and goddess merge confusingly in the minds of worshippers, but the Sun Man is now the predominant figure, at least in the mind of the boy narrator Pigsie.12 Yet despite a belief that goddess religion has been challenged, in Mitchison’s final story we see more of the Moon Woman’s power as one of the two priestleaders of the community, like the Corn King and Spring Queen in the agrarian south. In the last story, the Moon Woman must travel to another people whose Moon Woman has died. We see localized religions spreading and blending, as in Williams’ stories. The other people have built a megalithic sun temple to ‘tie down the ways of the sun’. ‘They said the moon was the servant of the sun, to do what he wanted, but that, Moon Woman knew, was not right.’ These patriarchal sun-worshippers need the Moon Woman to help them manage the moon, and she is ‘glad that these strangers … had understood that the moon also must be cared for and praised and strengthened’. She agrees to help. As the book ends she is considering becoming the lover of the sun-worshipping Great Man of the tribe: ‘he would be mine as the sun is the moon’s. Should I, then?’ It seems that the two cults are to be united, but the question that ends the story is typical of Mitchison’s undogmatic style, and that of the new Stone Age fiction. The reader is left to imagine a good deal of the detail of each religious stance, and even the scientific-sounding taxonomies of archaeology and anthropology – priestess, priest-king and so on – are replaced with far more ambiguous words. The book is full of moments of silence about the pagan religions: ‘the eagles – she did not have the words to say it’, ‘it is not clear to me why … ’ and so on. ‘Probably,’ Mitchison says in her introduction, ‘it wasn’t like that at all. But yet perhaps it was.’13 This is a text that like its contemporary, People of the Black Mountains, dwells on fiction, dream, humanity rather than deity and a benign doctrinal mutability. More traditional genres of writing about prehistoric religion are still extant today, however. Bernard Cornwell’s Stonehenge (1999), set in the years around 2000 BC, describes a religion on a Frazerian model like Mitchison, but it is

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coercive and sexist in ways that recall the worst elements of religious history. It is not tentative or dreamy, and deities are explicitly labelled and named from its first sentence: ‘The gods talk by signs.’ The ‘Old Temple’, a wooden version of the stone henge that is built by the book’s characters, is dedicated to the sun god Slaol. Arryn is the valley-god and his wife Mai is the river. The moongoddess Lahanna is most worshipped by the people of Avebury, here called Cathallo, and she is at odds with the sun-god, her former lover. The tribe at Stonehenge, like their fellow ‘Outfolk’ people of Sarmennyn in Wales, reveres the sun-god more. Unpleasantly, both tribes sacrifice humans, especially children and virgins, to him by smashing their skulls with an auroch-bone known unambiguously as Kill-Child, or burning them alive. But following a failed sacrifice at Ratharryn and the murder of a stranger who has come to the village bringing gold objects, the Stonehenge tribe’s cosmology begins to fall apart. They debate the meaning of events: ‘the gold had gone to the Old Temple and that was surely a sign that Slaol wanted the temple remade.’ ‘In Cathallo,’ Gilan urged Hengall, ‘they have one great temple for all the gods and it has served them well. We should do the same.’ At Cathallo, the people and their sorceress, Sannas, jump over midsummer fires, dress in bull skins and perform fertility rites. In a sharply gendered world where men have all the power, Cathallo is unusual in the greater equality, sexual freedom and tolerance expressed in its temple, although it still has a religion founded on sacrifice. Ratharryn, meanwhile, has become an aggressively masculine community where women are treated as possessions. So, of course, the building of the new temple to sexual equality does not go smoothly. Like Mitchison with her Eagle Tomb, Cornwell must account for Stonehenge’s multiple stages and he does so by having its first dedication day interrupted by an attack by the Welsh. There is war with Cathallo, and new customs are brought by the Outfolk. Influenced by their example, the tribe at the henge then make the momentous decision to become monotheists – or, at least, to reverence Slaol as the prime god – and their priest Camaban murders Lahanna’s devotee Sannas. Slaol has become slay-all. The new Ratharryn temple is given a second, monotheistic phase, using stones sent as gifts by the Outfolk – the ‘bluestones’ of today’s Stonehenge. But the henge is now a temple to inequality, which Camaban the priest and Aurenna playing the parts of Slaol and Lahanna sexually as well as ritually. Since Aurenna is Saban’s wife and Camaban his brother, he is not happy. Aurenna sacrifices Saban’s child to try to stop the slide into chaos, but the novel ends with Stonehenge emptied of religious dignity. The hero has been betrayed by his wife and his brother because of their religious fanaticism, and his child has been sacrificed to the gods. He finds himself unable to connect with the temple, whose final phase he built: ‘Saban did not look back. He knew he had built a great thing and that folk would worship there until time itself was ended, but he did not look back.’ He walks ‘free of the temple’s shadow’ (free, too, of religion’s shadow) and the novel ends. Saban agrees with his friend

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Haragg: ‘it is always the priests who demand sacrifice … most priests are weak men, but like all men, given some small authority, they become tyrants … Things change, but priests do not change.’ Cornwell’s novel focuses on fear of religion, and it is hard not to see in it his own upbringing by members of a strict Christian sect, the Peculiar People – ‘and they were’ he comments, describing leaving home as an ‘escape’.14 Perhaps because of this view, his Neolithic religion is a constricting Victorianesque nightmare rather than a liberating dream. Some of the more characteristically twenty-first-century versions of Stone Age pagan fiction dispense with deities altogether and imagine an animist world. Michelle Paver’s 2004 Wolf Brother and its sequels tell the story of a boy named Torak and his ally Wolf, who actually is a wolf cub. The book pairs human and animal so as to make them indistinguishable – the boy is almost as much wolf as the wolf is human. Here is a kind of totemism, but without the heavy anthropological theory that had previously accompanied it. As we have seen with Williams and Mitchison, modern pagan fiction often rejects this clunkier kind of science fiction and has instead become more mystical, shedding the desire to distance reader and author with exposition. As a result, religion is imagined as an organic, emotionally satisfying experience, damaged rather than revealed by the word. If we read word as ‘Word’ we might see here the ‘pagan/Catholic’ emphasis desired by some readers of Hughes and Heaney, rejecting voluble Protestant dogma. In new Stone Age fiction, characters often speak for themselves directly or indirectly, rather than having an omniscient narrator label their beliefs. Here is Wolf thinking about Torak and the girl Renn, after Torak has nearly drowned in a river: The female tailless was whimpering and waving her forepaws, so Wolf left her … When he smelt Tall Tailless among the willows, he began to whimper too. His pack-brother was slumped over a log … Here is Torak meeting Wolf and experiencing a vision: Black fur. Warm darkness. Rich, fatty milk. The Mother licking him clean … He fought the urge to put his head back and howl. Torak has shaman-like abilities to empathize with wolves, and the novel encourages the reader to emote rather than think about these through a modified wolf/boy language. ‘This is a world I want to spend more time in,’ summed up Jessica Lada in a review.15 Paver’s world is an ecosystem where everything is interconnected: no separation has yet occurred between people and their environment. When Torak kills a buck he speaks to the dying creature: ‘You did well … you were brave and clever, and you kept going all day. I promise to keep the pact with the World Spirit, and treat you with respect.’ Although there are menacing spiritual forces in the forests, there is also a caring World Spirit that unites, sustains and protects.

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Paver based some of her fiction on research among the Sami people of Lapland, as well as the work of the prehistorians Steven Mithen and David LewisWilliams, who specialize in the mental world of early humans.16 She comments on this, tying her work to academic research in a way that suggests a commitment to accuracy as well as imaginative satisfaction. Similarly, Jacqui Wood’s unpublished Mesolithic novel Cliff Dreamers is based in a carefully-researched world. Wood is an experimental archaeologist so that her details of food, clothing, log boats and so on are based on actual artefacts. In addition to this realism, Wood imagines an ‘earth Goddess’ or ‘Golden Goddess’ and plant spirits like fairies watching over her heroine, who begins her story on Dogger Island in the middle of what is now the North Sea. She thus sets her story not just in the newly-exciting Mesolithic, but even in a new fictional territory.17 And as with Wood’s book, so with Paver’s: the reader finishes feeling that a valuable spiritual sense has been lost to modern humans. Paver’s World Spirit is described as something ‘like a great river that never ends. Every living thing has a part of it inside them. Hunters, prey, rocks, trees.’18 Writers of creative fiction have thus created a new Stone Age – not just adding the Mesolithic to the range of possible settings but reshaping the entire genre so that it is less about wicked priests and false gods and more about a rewarding eco-spirituality centred on an earth-goddess or earth-spirit.

Dark gods and bright goddesses: Romano-British-Celtic deities There is, of course, an overlap between deities originating in the RomanoBritish-Celtic school of fiction and those in modern Stone Age fiction: thus we find Danu moved back in time to the Neolithic in Williams’ novel above. But as well as this good goddess, the ‘dark god’ of Pinner’s Ritual and The Wicker Man continues in the Romano-British-Celtic school of thought: in fictions about him, religion is often still associated with predatory, judgmental deities. In Barbara Erskine’s Midnight is a Lonely Place (1994), Nion, a Trinovantian Druid – whose name is taken from Graves’ White Goddess listing of the ‘Celtic Tree Calendar’ – returns as a ghost to revenge his murder by Marcus Severus Secundus. Marcus is based on Marcus Favonius Facilis, whose grim-faced tombstone is in Colchester Castle Museum, and true to his contextualization in the museum as a cruel imperialist he has arranged for Nion to be killed by his fellow druids. But he had not taken into account the power of the gods – Nion’s gods, who even before his murder are angry at his disrespect to them in taking Marcus’ wife Claudia as his lover: ‘his gods were powerful, cruel, demanding … jealous, biding their time.’ Claudia worships Fortuna, who in rational Roman fashion wants her followers to be happy, something the British man cannot understand. So he dies at his gods’ behest and returns as a ghost to madden the novel’s contemporary competing males.19 These dark gods undermine and betray their worshippers: they demand sacrifice, and indeed that their followers sacrifice themselves.

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Likewise in Kathleen Herbert’s Bride of the Spear (originally published as The Lady of the Fountain in 1982) the god Lugh resurfaces in darker form than in Sutcliff’s version 30 years before. The eight-year-old Lothian princess, Taniu, is taken to a stone circle by Pictish priestesses. There she finds a druid armed with a flint-tipped spear. Surrounded by naked women dancing, Taniu is laid on a stone and her hymen is broken by the spear. In this way her virginity is sacrificed to Lugos – a rite which is thought to aid fertility but ruins her life when she is later misjudged as unchaste.20 There are other examples, too, of once protoChristian gods going bad. In Catherine Fisher’s Belin’s Hill, Selden’s favourite god Belinus returns in the form of both ghostly presences and a ‘Celtic stone head’ dug up in an archaeologists’ trench. In a village near Caerleon, Huw is hit by a car and begins to hallucinate fires on nearby Belin’s Hill. In a dream-like state, he visits the trench and digs up what is already rising to the surface there: a ‘stone face … the thin gash of its lips mocking him … its features were hacked out – dark, empty eyes, a thin, crude mouth … it terrified him’.21 Once in his bedroom, the head moves about in the night and it cannot be thrown away or buried, for always it returns. Clay replicas appear in the pub, the post office and the church. The vicar collects them, but Christianity cannot stop the progress of the god’s evil and a heath-fire destroys the village. The novel follows the form of Edward Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan but to a far nastier conclusion. Although parts of his harm turn out to be illusory, there is no easy, comforting end and the old god claims his victim – Hal Vaughn, the descendant of a burnt witch who raised Belin in the form of a tattooed hunter centuries before.22 Sinister ancient hunters also haunt Robert Holdstock’s mythic universe, first created in the novel Mythago Wood (1984). Here, creatures like Jungian archetypes come alive in an English woodland, beings animated by both the ‘collective unconscious’ and the power of primal forest. They spring from ‘mythopoetic energy flows’ in the brain, an investigator explains.23 The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung hypothesized that some cultural forms could be explained as recurring because they were necessary, based on an archetypal figure such as the hero: in Holdstock, these heroes are ‘mythagos’ like Arthur and Robin Hood. An early prehistoric one is ‘the Twigling’, a skin-clad bowman ‘harassing the Romans’, while the latest is a Second World War soldier. The mythagos grow from the power of hate, and fear, and form in the natural woodlands … I imagine that it is the combined emotion of the two races that draws out the mythago … Arthur forms and helps the Britons against the Saxons, but later Hood is created to help the Saxons against the Norman invader … The oldest mythago is the ‘Urscumug’, an animal-man and female mythagos exist too. One, Guiwenneth, is ‘a girl from Roman times, a manifestation of the Earth Goddess, the young warrior princess’. This is a potent, slippery euhemerist idea: a deity incarnate in a real but yet imagined human body. It prompted

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Holdstock to produce mythic fiction half-scientific, half-spiritual. ‘I’ve touched the source. That was a story from the beginning,’ thinks one creator of mythagos and their tales, Tallis, in the second book Lavondyss, and indeed Holdstock’s work suggests a powerful need to find a beginning, a first cause, what would once have been a deity but now cannot quite attain reality beyond the human.24 Jung’s ideas drive a good deal of contemporary fiction about pagan deities, suggesting that they were created by human beings but endowed with a power far beyond the individual because they were shared creations. Scholars of myth also took on Jungian concepts to explain the continued relevance of folklore and old tales. Writing in 1961, Alwyn and Brinley Rees suggested that old Celtic tales could provide ‘an inexhaustible fount of inspiration for poets and artists’ – the language of founts recalling Squire and Jones before them and opening the door for creative writers such as Holdstock. Psychologists, they said, had found that recourse to ‘this treasure-house of archetypal forms’ was invaluable for the cure of psychological illnesses – a rediscovery within a limited sphere of the ‘life-giving’ powers which the stories were believed to possess in days of old. The phrase about archetypes is, of course, Jung’s, and it is framed by the idea that storytellers, from prehistory to the present, provide healing tales to help cope with human vicissitude. Recurrent themes are recovery from war and issues of heroic masculinity in an age of supposedly ‘new’ men.25 Holdstock’s first book’s protagonists Steven and Harry, a soldier and a pilot, have returned injured from the Second World War, while Kevan Manwaring’s Windsmith (2006) tells a related story of an airman lost in the ‘Afterlands’ where he meets euhemerized deities: Taranis, Ogmios and Cernunnos among others.26 Sometimes writers adopt an existing pantheon, sometimes they create one: David Gemmell’s Rigante series reimagines British deities in versions tailored to his own needs: the Dagda is renamed Thagda, the Brigante are Rigante, and so on.27 James Lovegrove (see also below) co-opts the northern pantheon in a story of post-traumatic recovery. These deities are not always comforting presences, however: they have powerful independent wills and are just as likely to turn on their creators and hunt them – like Haggard’s ice-god the mammoth – as they are to nurture and revive them. In Stephen Lawhead’s The Paradise War (1991) Nudd or Nuada, lord of the underworld, goes on ‘a savage spree of death and destruction’ in early-1990s Britain.28 Similarly, Mark Chadbourn mixes and matches deities to create a war among the supposed tribes of gods that erupts into modernity, the tuatha dé danann battling the Fomorians over Dartmoor, London and the M4 in his series The Age of Misrule (begun in 2000). Here are Balor, Nuada, Epona, Cernunnos and Ogma, gods ranging from the frighteningly aloof to the outright murderous: human beings are wholly expendable to most of them.29 Even Holdstock’s earth-goddess mythago Guiwenneth considers knifing

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Steven before accepting him and subsequently stabs his brother, the significantlynamed Christian.30 Such aloof and relentless gods seem connected with the decline of traditional Christian belief in Britain after about 1960. As church attendance fell and youth culture became more secular in its focus, deities of all kinds perhaps seemed less benevolent and worthy.31 But they might still inspire guilt and fear in the supposedly rational atheist. In this way, Lugh, Belinus and his fellow-gods could still be seen as avatars of the Christian god, this time not as benevolent prototypes but as returning uncannily to demand the worship that has been taken from all of them. Pagan gods thus appear infrequently in genres other than supernatural or horror fiction, and very seldom as comforting figures. Yet as gods declined, by contrast goddesses proliferated and took the place vacated by benevolent male deities in historical fiction. To return to Herbert’s novels, alongside Lugos there are omnipresent goddesses, multitudinous aspects of the same figure. First we meet the triple goddesses, the Mothers. The goddesses’ shrine is a pool: on the stones at the pool’s edge lay an odd little collection of objects: a bunch of wild flowers, some oatcakes, a bronze hairpin … Looking up to the rock face [Owain] saw [the deities] watching him. They sat side by side in a niche, squat and shapeless. They had been carved clumsily but there was power in their blank faces and huge eyes. In their laps they carried the signs of their fruitfulness: one had apples, one a sheaf, the third a lamb … this place belonged to the Mothers, the three-fold Goddess of the earth. For devout and humble worshippers, this is a sanctuary. But arrogant Owain, prince of Cumbria, offends the goddesses’ priestess Lurga by rejecting her advances and is cursed. He loses his lover and his father, and his wife betrays him. It is not until he has learned from his experiences and been healed by Christian nuns, who are seen as parallels to the pagan priestesses, that he revisits the pool in a dream and can recover himself. The goddess here is a stern figure, though she teaches truths.32 She is rather like Nemain, the version of Andraste chosen by Manda Scott as the British battle goddess in Boudicca: Dreaming the Eagle (2003). Nemain (in various spellings) appears as one of the tuatha dé danann in Irish texts, and in her we find the savage Andraste newly revived and definitively Celticized to offer tough love.33 But there are also more softly nurturing representations of ‘the goddess’ in fictions about Iron Age Britons. A typical example is the Scottish-Australian novelist Jules Watson’s Dalriada trilogy (beginning in 2004), one of many fictions about the mysterious Pictish cultures of Iron Age Scotland. Watson’s heroine Rhiann is a priestess of the Goddess, to whom she refers as ‘Great Mother’.34 Priestesses favour the female aspects of the Source (the source, that is, of life itself – described in a word also favoured by Holdstock) arguing that

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the Source wears many faces, of many gods and goddesses. We call on Rhiannon as guardian of mares, Ceridwen in childbed, Sulis at the spring and Andraste when our men go to war. But the mystery is that they are all one … 35 Watson says that she based her pantheon on Welsh legend, since nothing is known about Pictish religion, and certainly Rhiannon and Ceridwen come from the Mabinogion and Davies’ old Welsh poem, while Sulis and Andraste are from Roman inscription and history. Meanwhile Rhiann’s enemy, the druid Gelert, and his fellow priests ‘drew increasingly close to their sword, thunder and sky gods, although most of them at least still paid their respects to the female face of the Source’. Taranis is among the gods mentioned.36 These gods are seen as malign influences, as with the ‘dark gods’ above. In contrast, Watson imagines Celtic goddess religion as embodying a symbiotic relationship with nature, something like that of Paver’s books. She finds this personally inspiring, she told an interviewer, connecting to her interest in the divine spirit in nature, past lives and enspirited places and objects bearing memories. For her, novel-writing is not fantasy but ‘spiritual writing’ about an ancestral connection to the Celtic world.37 As Rhiann sums up, unlike the Picts, ‘the Romans bribed their careless, absent gods with oils and gold, but they did not bless tree or river or spring … She could sense the wound they made even now, the scar on the earth.’38 The Romans, then, represent masculine violation in their gods, while the Picts’ goddess is the earth, the Celtic land. Often this is demonstrated during an episode staged at a prominent landscape feature. Despite knowing that Iron Age Britons were not the builders of stone monuments from the Neolithic, authors often cannot resist the temptation to conflate the two cultures. The usual fusion is at a set-piece fertility rite in which later people make use of the Neolithic site. In Watson’s case, this occurs when Rhiann is chosen to be ‘a vessel for the Goddess’ at the ‘Beltaine rite’, taking a representative of the horned god as her lover in a circle of standing stones. Watson explains the apparent anachronism as a survival from the religion of ‘the Old Ones’, who built the circle and, because they were hunter-gatherers, worshipped a stag god whose rites are now incorporated into modern Celtic religion. As is now usual, the god is unnamed, although he is of course like the deity we have met before as Cernunnos in Sutcliff, Hill and other texts.39 This fertility-rite recurs in Janet Paisley’s Warrior Daughter (2009), which imagines quarterly festivals each celebrating an incarnation of the ‘great triple goddess’. Three of these are taken from the tuatha dé danann and one name is added, meaning ‘hag’ in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic: Bride/Brigid (maiden), Danu/Anu (mother), Carlin/ Cailleach (crone or hag), with the fourth festival, Lunasa, innovatively devoted to a foster-mother goddess, Telsha/Tailtiu. Male and female druids share knowledge and power in a compelling vision of gender equality and a golden age of humanity. The book’s heroine, Skaaha (a version of the legendary warrior-woman Scathach from the Ulster Cycle), is chosen in one year to represent both Bride

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and Danu, the second incarnation involving celebratory sex with a chosen consort at a stone circle.40 But at this point the book takes a darker turn, since shortly after the festivities Skaaha is raped and begins a life of revengeful violence that caused one critical review to describe the book as succumbing to the clichéd ‘spear and sex genre’. Indeed, there are a number of such stories, usually based in Celtic religious contexts.41 However, for all its explicitness, this novel intends to make a serious contribution to thinking about prehistoric religion. As her ‘Author’s Note’ and bibliography explain, Paisley based her matriarchal society in part on the work of Jeannine Davis-Kimball, an American archaeologist who from the early 1990s onward took part in and wrote accounts of Black Sea steppe excavations of the high-status graves of women warriors. Paisley also mentions rich female burials at Stanton Moor in Derbyshire as an inspiration, and the books of Barry Cunliffe, Peter Berresford-Ellis, Francis Pryor and Jean Markale on druidry and Iron Age British religion. While Davis-Kimball’s work has been taken up by a number of writers and activists for goddess and other pagan religion along with the work of Gimbutas, the religion of Warrior Daughter is thus Paisley’s own, an amalgam of information from reading on goddesses, druids and her own feminist stance.42 Further south, the archaeologically well-documented Sulis is a popular choice for storytellers of goddess religion and creative writers are similarly keen to stress the authenticity of their locations and the care of their research. Sulis appears in Bob Stewart and John Matthews’ ‘The Goddess Speaks’ (1989) as ‘a sinuous female figure with a hood’, prophesying, alongside a factual account of Bath’s antiquities.43 Moyra Caldecott’s The Waters of Sul posits that Bath was home to an internationally-renowned female oracle of the goddess Sul, renamed Sulis by the Romans. In Caldecott’s vision, the city and the wider district have many cults and shrines so that the focus is on multiplicity of deities. There are temples to Sulis Minerva, Orpheus, Jesus Christ and Isis, with shrines to Claudius and Jupiter planned. The Celtic militant Owain complains: ‘there are too many shrines and too many gods here … everyone who comes to town seems to bring his own god … you can hardly hear yourself speak for the noise of foreign tongues praying to foreign gods.’ The diversity makes the novel an exploration of comparative religion and the insights and pleasures afforded to worshippers of each facet of deity, as well as the political games played by the supposedly devout in trying to promote their cult. Ultimately these human designs are frustrated by what appears to be the divine will of many deities working as aspects of each other. Caldecott herself is a writer on mysticism and past lives and is evidently willing to accept both pagan and Christian religions as truthful. The shamanic teacher Caitlín Matthews’ books are an inspiration listed in her bibliography, sat alongside archaeological reports, classical texts and works on ancient religion, and these explore many different, related faiths and lores. Caitlín is the wife of John Matthews, so that ‘The Goddess Speaks’ connects to The Waters of Sul: in both we see goddess visions experienced as real. Caldecott’s Sul appears to her

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priestesses when her old oracle dies and a new one is to be chosen. During the ceremony of choosing, a rival candidate snatches the effigy of the goddess as it is passed to the new oracle. Immediately a vision of Sul fills the room: ‘transparent, made of light, growing larger and brighter every second until it towered above them – a woman of startling beauty’. The vision is contrasted with the mundane and irreverent lives of some of the priestesses: ‘for years they had served the Goddess … but most of them had never expected to see her’. The priestess who strove to make herself oracle is driven out, the effigy dropped and broken and when the new oracle flees from the temple, ending centuries of her tradition there, the vision of the goddess is interpreted as sanctioning this ending. Therefore the subsuming of Sul in Minerva comes about both by Roman pressure and Sul’s divine will. Meanwhile the Christian Martha sees the triple goddess at Glastonbury, while Owain’s granddaughter Megan summons the Morrigan by cursing the sculptor who is to make a statue of Claudius-asgod for the temple forecourt. All these visions are accepted as real and interrelated manifestations of deity.44 The goddess is also real and potent in Catherine Fisher’s Crown of Acorns, in which a girl hiding from a traumatic death in her past renames herself Sulis and moves to Bath. Seeking help, she throws into the goddess’ sacred spring a message analogous to the curse tablets found there by archaeologists. These are quoted in the book: ‘to the Goddess Sulis Minerva … I give to your divinity the money which I have lost and may he who has stolen it be forced to … ’, ‘these are the names of those who have sworn at the spring to the Goddess Sulis … whosoever has lied you are to make him pay for it to the Goddess Sulis in his own blood … ’. The girl Sulis writes on a scrap of paper: To the Goddess Sulis Minerva. There is someone following me. He killed Caitlin. I want you to punish him for what he did. I want you to end the shadow on my life.45 It appears that the goddess responds, for the girl Sulis is able to unlock her memories of Caitlin’s death and free herself from the fear that she is being followed by a murderer. More than that, the scrap of paper also travels through time to the part of the story unfolding in the eighteenth century around the life of Jonathan Forrest. Forrest is an architect based on the historical John Wood, the antiquarian we met in Chapter 2. The girl Sulis and the goddess Sulis have, in effect, sent a message to Forrest’s ward Sylvia who keeps the paper and may be able to heal her own life as a result. All this is in sharp contrast to Fisher’s vision of Belin as a sinister, vengeful god: Sulis heals and protects across time.46 Sulis and Belin, as imagined by the same author, are a perfect example of a bright goddess and a dark god drawn from the same Romano-British-Celtic tradition but forced apart by the contemporary politics of gender: put simplistically, in most cases gods are bad news, goddesses good.

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The Anglo-Saxon-Northern pantheon Meanwhile, in eastern and northern England in particular, the Anglo-SaxonNorthern pantheon is being revisited. Although it is sometimes claimed by far-right or nationalist groups, it has found a mainstream following in a very different spirit, picking up assertively where Gardner left off.47 The major work is Brian Bates’ 1983 novel The Way of Wyrd, which brings together many of the influences that we discussed in Chapter 4. It begins with a shaman dressed in a wolf-skin who is curing a woman by driving out a spirit. The shaman uses an authentic Anglo-Saxon charm against a wen, among other imagined rites. The narrator Wat Brand, a Christian, is converted to paganism during the book by experiences like this. First, he is told a story of Thunor, the thunderer (Thor), but does not find his comic heroics impressive. Yet, with a shiver, he realizes that he has already encountered Woden in the forest, part dream and part reality in the form of the Wild Hunt: a pack of monstrous black dogs, pounding past me with a horrible rasping howl … a herd of enormous horses, black as night … Astride the leading horse rode a shadowy figure, cape flooding out behind him like the wings of a demon, bearing straight down on me. At the last moment the horse veered … The shaman Wulf explains: ‘Woden is the greybeard among our gods … he is the god of the magic song, incantations, words of power.’ It is these that really attract Wat. Woden, who has marked him out in this spectral encounter, shapes his destiny from then onwards. Wat begins to see that his own symbols of blood, crucifix and so on are echoed in pagan practice, and he learns to carve runes and read them. In a climactic shamanic journey, a vision of the meaning of runes, he learns that his god is accessible via both Christianity and paganism but especially the latter – he is: ‘the One who ruled from the Beginning … Allfather … Lord of Hosts … Lord of the Spear … Smiter’ and so on. Bates’ book was self-consciously written to challenge what Julian Cope called ‘our overly Keltically obsessed British mind set’. Bates felt that in the early 1980s ‘few people knew about Anglo-Saxon spiritual teachings … People of English, West European and Scandinavian heritage had been left with the sense that wisdom traditions were something other cultures had.’ The book was also written, like Holdstock’s novels, as an intervention in psychological discourse: Bates was a psychologist and was looking for an equivalent of the Eastern mystical traditions that he had found useful in his work. He conceived of the project as ‘research’, a ‘report’ in the scholarly sense, and indeed he now teaches a course on Shamanic Consciousness at the University of Sussex based on his findings. In a Preface to the 2004 edition of the novel, he gives a 12-page bibliography including leechbooks, Aecerbot, The White Goddess, books on Sutton Hoo, Bede, Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon history and folklore scholarship. Bates came to believe that

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ancient literary texts had preserved memories of shamanic practices which might help modern Britons recover ‘a psychological and spiritual dimension of life’, and enable the reader to go ‘on a journey to discover the nature of your own soul’.48 Thus the book is both an academic and mystical text as well as a novel, collapsing the generic boundaries in the way that my study has sought throughout to achieve in examining how our imagination of the pagan past works. Here, fiction = scholarship = occultism in a full, interlocking unity – although how much one assigns The Way of Wyrd to each category depends on one’s own judgement of its creativity, scholarship and usefulness as a spiritual guide. The same is true of Bob Stewart and John Matthews’ Legendary Britain (1989), which alternates essays on history, place and legend with short stories of deities and spirits. It too tried to reinsert northern gods into the British landscape. In ‘The Smith King’, Weland puts the fear of god into three drunken treasurehunters during a vision of the other world. The book is dedicated to Rudyard Kipling – which suggests where the desire to write about Nordic gods halfacademically, half-fictively has come from.49 More generally, in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, AngloSaxon religion has become a focus of interest indirectly through developments in the fields of translation and adaptation. In 1999 the Poet Laureate, Seamus Heaney, finished his retranslation of Beowulf in a version that will continue to be the canonical one for the foreseeable future. In 2002 he was chosen to open the new visitor centre at Sutton Hoo because of his work. Several films and even a video game have celebrated the new interest in the poem, which is now familiar to schoolchildren and university students as a set book, so that Beowulf and its hero’s pagan world are better known to a wider readership than ever before.50 The filming of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, which is ongoing with The Hobbit, has also brought Anglo-Saxon literature into the cultural mainstream. Although the books are set in a fantasy world, Tolkien’s influences from Anglo-Saxon literature, in which he lectured at Oxford, are well known. Tolkien was also an early popularizer of Beowulf, writing a pioneering and witty critical essay promoting the poem in 1936, which has come back to prominence with Heaney’s new translation and is included with it in some editions.51 The social scientist and pagan Jenny Blain also published Nine Worlds of SeidMagic in 2002, a study of the history and present practice of northern shamanism. Blain pointed to the literary nature of modern Anglo-Saxon-based paganism, saying that when she meets practitioners of heathenism she is ‘dealing … with people who have immersed themselves in the mythology, literature and folklore of the North’. As we have seen, unlike almost all of the paganism discussed in this book, Anglo-Saxon paganism has left some native literary records.52 These helped to structure Raymond Buckland’s Seax-Wica, a version of modern pagan witchcraft based on Woden and Freya in the 1970s and the northern movement has since grown in different forms, as documented by Blain.53 These books were joined by Bill Griffiths’ Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic in 1996, which retranslated

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and publicized the old leech-charm texts more widely, and which was revised in turn in 2003.54 And Ashcroft’s publisher, Anglo-Saxon Books, are particularly active in bringing out titles on magic, deities, Sutton Hoo and Anglo-Saxon culture and religion more generally. When joined with the Sutton Hoo Society, Tha Engliscan Gesithas/The English Companions, Wuffing Education and Deben Radio, among others, they make a formidable group of eastern English enthusiasts promoting understanding of the Anglo-Saxons.55 It is from this group that the most oft-seen book on the Anglo-Saxon pantheon emerges, although it brings with it an interest in the northerness of this strand of paganism too since it is by Kathleen Herbert, whose heart, she said, was in Cumbria.56 We have already met Herbert as a novelist but she published both fiction and amateur historical texts. Firstly she created an interlinked series of pagan worlds in her Cumbrian trilogy of novels (1982–88). And her vision of Anglo-Saxon paganism was eventually articulated in non-fictional form in Looking for the Lost Gods of England (1994). This little book is widely sold as a guide today, including at Anglo-Saxon heritage sites: for most people it will be their first, and only, source of information on the subject. Herbert took Tacitus’ account of the Anglii more literally than North did, as we explored in Chapter 4, and argued that this Anglian religion would have transferred unchanged to ‘New England’ – Britain – when the Germanic tribes migrated. Next she examined Aecerbot (see Chapter 1), the description of the ceremony for reviving the fertility of fields.57 Herbert argued that in this charm ‘earth, mother of mortals’ is Nerthus, and that her summer progress through her lands in a wagon were still vaguely remembered in harvest home and hockcart celebrations in England in the Renaissance (a hint of Aubrey here). Meanwhile, the otherwise unknown word ‘erce’ might mean ‘high or exalted one’ (as in ‘arch’, such as archangel) and so earth’s exalted mother Erce would be a sky-dweller, the Queen of Heaven, known to the Anglo-Saxons as Frea. Tacitus had helpfully recorded that he had found the Germanic Aestii worshipping ‘the Mother of the gods’ and some of the Suebi worshipping Isis, although he thought the latter a foreign importation. Herbert briskly told him that he was wrong: this was a native goddess.58 She believed that she had found evidence of this ‘high’ goddess being remembered as late as the thirteenth century, when Laȝamon included a speech in praise of Frea in his Brut (see also Chapter 1). So in Herbert’s 1983 novel Queen of the Lightning, it is not surprising to find this goddess worshipped in the Mercian shrine at Arnemeton (Buxton) and conflated with British goddesses – especially Annis or Anu59 – once worshipped there. Known simply as ‘The Lady’ or ‘Queen of Heaven’, Frea is a formidable goddess: The Lady could call down rain on a battle-line, driving the wind into the warriors’ faces, making their spears and arrows fall short or awry. She could hide a boar or king stag in a thicket and then trip or entangle a huntsman as

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it charged to gore or rip him. Most terrible of all, the cold dread that lurked in every man’s heart. She could strike at his manhood … But Frea protects the women of the story, like so many of the goddesses that we have seen in this chapter. The heroine, Riemmelth, takes refuge at Arnemeton after being raped by the Mercian king, Penda. After the rape, Penda is horrified when he discovers – as he thinks – her identity as the goddess’ priestess. He believes her to be a priestess because of a moon-shaped necklace that she wears. The Lady’s priestesses are not virginal, though. As one says ‘we … take our men as we choose. Woden or the White Christ – what odds to us which you serve? She swaddled them both and held them to her breast.’ The priestesses take lovers at the shrine in exchange for silver (Frazer would recognize this as his ‘sacred prostitution’) and present themselves to supplicants as Virgin, Harlot and Hag, a white-robed sisterhood reminiscent of Wiccan notions of the goddess as in Paisley’s later novel. Later, Penda’s fate as one who has offended the goddess catches up with him when he is wounded in the groin and eventually he is drowned in Frea’s river: the goddess moves in mysterious but poeticallyjust ways.60 Other Anglo-Saxon goddesses, Eostre and Hreda – both mentioned by Bede – are also present in Herbert’s fiction. In the third novel of the trilogy, Ghost in the Sunlight, we visit the Hope valley and Mam Tor, where the Lady’s Bower spring and cave complex honours both the mother Frea and her daughters. The heroine Alchflaed is a Christian but she knows that folk were going to Peaclond in springtime to bid farewell to Hreda, the wild virgin of the cold winds, and to welcome Eostre the flower-bride – or rather, to rejoice as the one turned into the other. The festival revolves around the mating of Eostre, in the form of a priestess from Arnemeton, with a young man chosen as King of the Wood after winning a deadly race across the hills (Frazer would recognize that, as well). At the heart of the caves, events are governed by Frea’s priestess Lady Freawynn, who dispenses justice and wisdom. The cave is known as the Mother’s Womb and its labyrinth is negotiated with a familiar mnemonic rhyme: Thrice to thine and thrice to mine And thrice again to make up nine. Macbeth’s witches’ charm is here given a rational origin in a set of left-and-right directions (thine = right), one of Frea’s sacred mysteries.61 The equation of witches and pagan priestesses further demonstrates the feminist-occultist influences on Herbert’s fiction, which might stem from her god-daughter, Caitlín Matthews, one of the writers mentioned most often by recent novelists as an authority on pagan deities. And it was Caitlín’s husband

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John who first published Herbert’s fiction. This debt to modern paganism is also evident in Herbert’s 1989 poem ‘Eve and the Earth Goddess’: In the days of the Earth Goddess, Eve was her chosen handmaid, Till Adam came up with the notion, That she was a flaw in the Garden, An offence to the male Jehovah … Adam became ‘the hero … ’ Woman, the serpent-headed, Fell to his domination, And with her the Earth Goddess. Herbert sums up: Eve and the Goddess both had the purpose of nurturing humankind with ‘the warm milk of living’. By dismissive comparison, ‘what had Adam to offer?’62 Indeed male deities, especially Woden, Frea’s lover, do not come out of Herbert’s fiction well. Early in Queen of the Lightning, Riemmelth’s enemy Elfwyn dedicates her to the god by throwing a spear over her head. Elfwyn is a villainess and Woden’s other worshippers are bone-headed misogynists, cheerfully drowning an adulteress in a bog and offering to add Riemmelth herself, to please Elfwyn, ‘send her to ask Woden to come back to us, with the gods and the heroes, like the old times’. It is Riemmelth’s destiny, it seems, to be Woden’s toy yet she is also his handmaiden, a ‘waelcyrige’. These fight for the god and hang their defeated opponents on ash trees in his name, a sacrifice actually enacted by Penda in Ghost in the Sunlight. But if the waelcyrige are captured by their enemies, they are raped and drowned. Riemmelth is indeed subjected to rape by Woden’s follower Penda, but not to death by water, which is reserved for him – and Elfwyn’s treachery catches up with her too. So much for Woden’s faction, who want ‘that Christian dung swept out on to the midden and to call back the true Gods to our land’. Wodenism appears fascistic and cruel, so much so that even its god is repelled by his worshippers and, as so often with the gods that we have seen in this chapter, betrays them despite their loyalty.63 Herbert’s feminism helped to inspire another English teacher, P.M. (Pauline) Sabin Moore, in writing her 2009 novel Storm-Frost. Here it is the East Anglian king Raedwald’s imagined first wife Niartha who embodies Anglo-Saxon religion, and her story is based on the speaker of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Wife’s Lament’. Niartha lives in a richly pagan world, where (Bede’s) Mother’s Night, Yule and Midsummer are celebrated, and deities such as Thunor, Woden, Freya, Eostre and Nerthus reverenced. The book begins with a human sacrifice to Nerthus as earth-goddess, an erotically-charged laying of ‘the prick of the plough’ in the earth – based on Herbert’s sexual reading of Aecerbot – and the bedding of a virgin by the king. Sex is ‘how best to honour the earth-goddess’, although death is closely linked. In this, Sabin Moore’s vision of paganism is

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strikingly reminiscent of other feminist prehistoric fiction, such as Mitchison’s Corn King and Paisley’s Warrior Daughter. Her pagan world is not a kind one for women: Niartha narrowly escapes being sacrificed at her father’s funeral and after she is exiled for adultery, assaulted, robbed, raped and her lover murdered, she begins ‘to distrust the gods’. Other characters, too, consider the addition of another god and his son Jesus Christ, to their insufficient pantheon: ‘perhaps one more god would not make much difference’.64 Things seem likely to end well for Niartha. However, in the sequel, Brightfire, Christianity proves that it too is a cruel religion for women: Niartha is accused of witchcraft by a successor king, desperate to ingratiate himself with ‘zealous, new Christians’. She sees the old gods disappearing from the lands they used to inhabit. No greenwood spirit was going to rise from these woodlands to protect her … No wind from the heath would take shape and bear her away … She had no faith in the new god … Nothing could save her. Yet when she is burned as a witch, she realises that ‘only the Earth Mother is left to me’ and so the sequel ends where the first book began, with Nerthus. Niartha (named after the goddess) is buried at Sutton Hoo.65 Sabin Moore’s fiction is interesting because of the trick it plays on the reader. The first novel has what appears to be a conventional Victorianesque ending: Christianity is coming and all will be well for the Anglo-Saxons. But this is not the case at all, and the second novel overturns the usual narrative completely. Niartha’s anti-Christian identification with a feminist version of Anglo-Saxon paganism is the more remarkable since Sabin Moore is both the daughter and daughter-in-law of Church of England priests, whom she thanks in her acknowledgements for their belief in educating women and for taking her to Sutton Hoo. Brightfire’s subtitle is ‘A Story of Sutton Hoo’, primarily because Sabin Moore found the place so ‘inspirational’ in her work: she is a National Trust guide there. From this it might also be expected that her work would offer a pleasant, uncontroversial view of the Anglo-Saxons, but it does not: indeed, the group clustering around the site is associated with open and radical ideas about it rather than conservative ones. ‘Women barely get a look-in’ in Anglo-Saxon literature, Sabin Moore flatly told an interviewer for Deben Radio. So she places a goddess-worshipping woman at the centre of her narrative. She writes back to ‘The Wife’s Lament’ as the banished wife rejects her husband’s forgiveness and she writes back to Bede and the early East Anglian Christians using exactly the version of paganism found in Herbert’s Looking for the Lost Gods of England.66 It is a heady blend of sex and feminism centred on Nerthus as the key Anglo-Saxon goddess. Kevin Andrew’s Ship Burial: The Rune of Ing takes a similar approach to the sexual politics of the Anglo-Saxon world, focusing on ‘the Great Goddess’, ‘the Lady of the Earth’ more than Lord Ing, her counterpart, who is named in

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the title. Other goddesses, too, flavour Andrew’s text: Lady Dawn, the Moon Goddess, the Lady of the Sun.67 Ing, however, is of interest because Andrew seems to be following North’s theory in his portrayal of Ing as god. ‘Ing’ is the name of a rune. But in the ‘Old English Rune Poem’ the name is also that of someone/something travelling over seas in ‘his’ wagon. The poem’s last line connects this whatever-it-is with a hero: ‘ðus Heardingas ðone hæle nemdun’ (translated by Griffiths as ‘thus the Heardings named the hero’). And Andrew’s novel is about a search for male heroism in the space between the Goddess and Lord Ing. It follows Imma, grandson of the shaman Mother Sheaving, towards inheriting her role as a ‘man-witch’ belonging specially to the Goddess. Normally the Goddess’ shamans are female, so Imma is the first of his kind. ‘No man has ever … ’ falters his guardian Aldwulf, too shocked to continue. And so the novel embarks on its gender-bending revision of the pagan practices of the village. The queen helps Imma to understand his unusually-gendered role: ‘a man may become his … mother’, he realizes, rather than automatically following his father. Imma is not homosexual, although the Anglians in the novel accept this orientation in their society. He is simply a male vessel of the Goddess.68 Here we see a reworking of the insistent sexual ambiguity that has haunted literature on Germanic and Nordic paganism from its earliest expressions. Some genres that we have examined – runic odes and their Gothic ilk in the eighteenth century, for example – are happy to celebrate a hyper-masculine set of warrior gods unproblematically. A more recent example occurs in the contemporary ‘Viking’ stories of writers such as Robert Low and Giles Kristian, which focus delightedly on the warrior figure and his undomesticated violence, lust and muck. They also focus on his deities (the protagonists swear ‘by Thor’s balls’ and keep reminding each other that ‘Oðinn All-Father despises weakness’).69 Here is the male god as he might wish to be seen by his devotees: hard, dirty, wilful, although still doomed by wyrd, as are his worshippers. But the more detailed literary treatments of northern paganism are interested in ideas of duality of gender: which can be traced to Herbert, but then back through Carpenter to Camden and Verstegan’s statements about Frigo and to the Lokasenna and related works before that. In modern fictions focused on pagan beliefs, then, there is often a concern about the nature and role of masculinity and men’s religion, which is expressed by an engagement with that old duality. Andrew sums this up perfectly in Imma.70 The habit of cross-dressing disguise teased out in þrymskviða also appears with comic effect in James Lovegrove’s military fantasy novel The Age of Odin (2010). Here, the northern deities have a secret base in England where they are being menaced by a Christian fundamentalist American President much like Sarah Palin. But actually the female President turns out to be the male god Loki in disguise. Meanwhile the hero is also discontented with his assigned gender role: he is Gideon Coxall, a traumatized veteran. Gideon fights, drinks and does not talk about his problems – society has no place for men like him and he has no tenderness or joy to add to his puissance. But he finds a way to regain

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his purpose as a man, a soldier and a father by fighting for Odin as a berserker. The gods, the book suggests, were designed for this therapeutic purpose by their human creators, the Norse storytellers. They, the god Bragi explains, ‘assigned us [the deities] our personalities and patterns of behaviour in order to help their people understand the universe and their own environment’. Bragi refers to the deities as ‘archetypes’ – here comes Jung again. As in Mythago Wood, the storytellers’ imaginations made the gods physically ‘real’, so that Gideon is forced to admit ‘that everything I’d agreed to myself must be absolute bollocks was, in fact, true’. With this ringing but paradoxical affirmation of the fictiveness and yet reality of the northern deities, Lovegrove makes them accessible for any modern interpretation that is desired.71 In 2010 the Essex poet Victor Tapner also explored notions of androgyny in a collection focused on the earliest British religion and potentially also AngloSaxon England’s deities. He suggested with his poem ‘Thames Idol’ that the pagan goddess was still more powerful in the poetic imagination than the pagan god. ‘Thames Idol’ is indebted for its creation to ‘the Dagenham Idol’, a wooden figure found in 1922 by workmen digging the foundations for the Ford car factory. Tapner describes the poem as the one that ‘sets the overall metaphorical theme’ for his collection Flatlands, and describes the ‘Idol’ thus: a battered pinewood figure that has been radiocarbon dated to around 2,500 BCE. One of the oldest human representations found in the country, it’s almost like a child’s doll, though the expert consensus seems to veer towards some sort of fertility symbol. While the figure’s gender is ambiguous, the poem’s voice is that of a female god.72 Tapner’s realization that he has made a choice about the figure’s sex is made plain. He gives it breasts in the poem – in reality it is flat-chested – and interprets the hole in its lower abdomen as a vagina rather than as the socket once occupied by a phallic peg. The archaeologist Bryony Coles has suggested that the figure represents an early precursor of Odin, and could change sex as he does in myth by the addition and removal of a phallus.73 So Tapner’s phrase ‘female god’ leaves open that ambiguity. And it is this ‘female god’ that speaks to him and us most potently in what he calls ‘the most important early piece’ in the book: Your hand will draw me from the mud Find me in your own time find me in your own face.74 The lines encapsulate the appeal of Tapner’s haunting sequence. The Thames Idol looks forward to Tapner’s poem ‘Herdsmen’, 11 pages later, in which the tribe pray to the ‘fathers of the grassland’, their ancestors who are also deities: ‘you who are us’.75 It is the female god who first makes the point that not only are we our ancestors, we are also the deities that were our ancestors too.

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Euhemerism means the inheritance of deity, and at the moment the most popular choice is that we are descendants and associates of goddesses – especially, perhaps, those of us who write. In many ways, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess is a tissue of fantasy, but in predicting the direction of the British literature of the pagan past he was not far wrong. Indeed, his own renderings of ancient Irish poetry inspired Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series with its haunting riddle (‘I am the womb of every holt’) driving forward the quest that forms the plot and involves Merlin, the Fisher King, Tethys and Bran. Graves’ fingerprints are all over the modern pagan novel and poem.76 Literature and scholarship have converged in the early twenty-first century with a profound desire to re-enchant creative writing, history, geography, psychology, archaeology, the world and its literatures by looking back to prehistoric pagan deities. Simon Brighton and Terry Welbourn’s gorgeously-illustrated Echoes of the Goddess (2010) focuses on ‘a quest for the sacred feminine in the British landscape’ and asserts that, for instance, at Nottingham ‘Maid Marian … was a personification of the May Queen’ and, more gingerly, that in Cornwall the Padstow hobby horse celebrations every May might be an echo of pagan deity: ‘it has … been proposed that the worship of horse deities such as Epona was found in ancient Celtic societies’.77 The psychologist Edward Whitmont argued in the 1980s that we needed a ‘return of the Goddess’ to heal a broken society.78 In the discipline of archaeology, Adam Stout examines the creation of the notion of prehistory and its unexpected fruit in ley-line hunting and earth mysteries in Creating Prehistory (2008) while Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley’s Stone Worlds offers a multi-vocal exploration of the Cornish prehistoric village at Leskernick in which every landscape feature is read as potentially sacred. ‘We believe,’ one essay concludes, ‘that the people of Leskernick Hill regarded the stones as animate sentient beings.’79 The landscape is thus imagined once again as animated, having a soul or spirit. The great boom in the publication of stories of ancient Romano-British-Celtic deities and lesser but still significant trends in the other two schools of pagan fiction – Anglo-Saxon-Northern and Stone Age – has been partly documented above. Even the more conservative national institutions seem to have caught the mood: the National Trust’s poetry competition winner for 2011 was a poem by Lesley Saunders that imagined the woods as alive in ‘Leaf Goddess’.80 And royalty itself is not spared the pagan turn. In Mark Chadbourn’s World’s End we find the following encounter between his hero Jack Churchill – whose nickname ‘Church’ signposts Chadbourn’s interest in religion – and Marianne, a little girl who worships a photograph of Princess Diana. When she turned back to him, she’d pulled out a locket … she opened it and held it up to show him the tiny picture squeezed inside. ‘Princess Diana’, he noted. ‘Did you like her?’ ‘I loved her … I think she died for a reason … To make us see how bad we were all living our lives. So that we could learn from her and live more like her, you know, doing good,

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helping the world … I’ve got a little table with the best photo I could find in a frame … Before bed, I kneel down in front of it and pray to her.’ For Marianne, Diana is at least a saint, but she sounds most like a euhemerized ruler-goddess or a Frazerian sacrificial god, a female Christ. And in Chadbourn’s bibliography, there is Robert Graves and his White Goddess, smiling at one of their odder offspring.81 In a peculiar and unexpected way, we can finish this book right back where we started: with Geoffrey, Brutus and his ‘diva potens’, Diana.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Carry On Cleo, directed by Gerald Thomas. 2 For brevity’s sake, notes refer to the bibliography with an ‘author, title’ reference at the first occurrence. Websites are identified by root URLs and section or link titles or page numbers, where available. 3 Schwyzer, ‘Intimate’. 4 I have added references to my related chapters and articles appearing in 2012–14.

1 Breaking the pagan silence 1 Hanning, Vision, 23–43 shows how Orosius’ notion that God controlled the destinies of all nations (not just Israel) and chose some as elected could be transferred by Gildas from Rome to Britain. 2 In some versions, The Ruin and Conquest of Britain – De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. 3 Gildas, ed. Winterbottom, 26, 17, 16. See also Giles, ed. Works of Gildas and De Excidio at Fitzpatrick-Matthews website (based on Mommsen’s text): www. kmatthews.org.uk/history/gildas/gildas3.html. Higham surveys the historiography of the period in ‘Sub-Roman’. 4 See Law, ‘Gildas’; Stevens, ‘Gildas’, 357; Thompson, ‘Gildas’, 208. 5 Miller, ‘Bede’s’ reminds readers that Bede’s silence about British matters indicates choice rather than ignorance (242). See also Owen, Rites; Meaney, ‘Bede’; Page, ‘Anglo-Saxon’; Wood, ‘Pagan’; Blair, ‘Anglo-Saxon’; Wilson, Anglo-Saxon in Chapter 4. 6 Bede, History, 42–43, 45–46. Church in ‘Paganism’ surveys Gregory and Bede’s portrayal of paganism noting that Gregory may be importing Italian experiences of conversion into his understanding of Britain, which Bede then recounts as fact; further, Bede is influenced by Biblical accounts of conversion. On Lucius see Knight, King. 7 Grimm, Teutonic, vol. 1, 289–90; Tille, Yule, 141, 144–45, 152–57. See Hutton, Stations 6 and 180 for a more positive reception of Tille’s critique of Bede. 8 See Manz, ‘Translating’, 121–24. ‘Es wird eines Tages in blutigem Kampfe entschieden werden müssen, ob von den europäischen Germanenstaaten Deutschland oder Großbritannien

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30

31

die erste Stelle einzunehmen hat.’ (‘One day it will have to be decided in a bloody struggle whether the European German states or Great Britain has taken first place’, quoted in Manz, 124, my translation.) Tille did not list the English among those of German (spilt) blood, parentage and speech in his song Das Alldeutsche Lied (1900), those who ‘deutsches Blut vergießt’, ‘von deutschen Eltern stammt,/Und unsere Sprache spricht’ (quoted in Manz, 125, my translation). Tille was also a member of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pan-German League). Grimm, vol. 1, 289. On Bede more generally see Gransden, Historical, 13–28. Bede, Reckoning, ed. Wallis, 53–54 and Latin text of Bede, Temporum. Bede, Reckoning, 53–54. Wallis’ specification of Mother’s Night rather than Mothers’ Night does not follow the textual ‘matrum noctem’ and she prefers ‘necht’ to ‘nicht’. See Chapter 4. Hanning, Vision, 2. The prologues to the book name Nennius but are likely of later date – see Dumville, ‘Nennius’. Virgil, Jerome and Eusebius, in particular – see Newell, ‘Doubts’. Confusion surrounds Gildas’ and Nennius’ identity and writings. Nennius, Historia, 15. Nennius, 22–23. See Ingledew, ‘Book’, 677, on Nennius’ multiple-choice history. Nennius, 55, 41–43, 71, 67. The Parker Chronicle; Giles, ed., William, 8. Simeon, Historia in Symeonis, vol. 1, 202. BL Harleian MS 3859 (see also Jesus College MS 20). Beli is mentioned by Sturluson as an enemy of Freyr, and in the Voluspa – quoted in North and Allard, eds., Beowulf, 373 (and see Chapter 4). ‘Nine Herbs Charm’; Hávamál from Larrington, ed., Poetic, 14. William, quoted and translated in Howlett, ‘Literary’, 60. Henry, Chronicle, 9, 37. Paris and Walsingham, Gesta, ed. Riley, vol. 1, 27. Quoted and translated in Howlett (63) from BL MS Cotton Nero D I ff. 31vb–32ra. My interpolations from Riley’s Latin text. The book came ‘ex Britannia’: Thorpe translates this as Wales (History, 284 – hereafter ‘Geoffrey’) while Evans’ translation prefers Brittany. It is now accepted that Flinders Petrie’s theory that the book survives, mistaken for a Welsh recension, is wrong – see ‘Neglected’. To take three examples, Thorpe wonders if it is a metaphor for oral tales (15), Hanning calls it ‘pseudohistory’ (Vision, 4), while Howlett regards its claims to Celtic language source material as a literary ‘fraud’. But his argument depends on branding a number of medieval authors liars or jokers, and, as Hanning suggests, it portrays Geoffrey as a rivalrous fabricator (Hanning, ‘Inventio’). Debates over the existence of the book often miss Geoffrey’s significance, as noted by Ingledew. See also Griscom, ‘Date’; Ashe, ‘Certain’; and Chambers, ‘Date’. Thorpe, introduction in ‘Geoffrey’; Warren, ‘Making’. For debates about Geoffrey’s purpose and ethnic affiliations, see Thorpe in ‘Geoffrey’; Tatlock, ‘Geoffrey’; and Ashe (who broadly argue for Welsh sympathies); Gillingham, ‘Context’; Roberts, ‘Geoffrey’; MacDougall, Racial, Chapter 1; and Faletra, ‘Narrating’, especially 65. Dalton, ‘Topical’ suggests the text warns against further conflict. In these readings Geoffrey is educating the powerful. Throughout the book, references to such archaeological remains will be explained individually in footnotes. Generally valuable studies of deities are Ross, Pagan, and de la Bédoyère, Gods. Other accounts are Green, Gods, Celtic and a range of other works (by Green, also publishes as Aldhouse-Green). These are based on Green’s archaeological work, such as Corpus of Religious and Corpus of Small. They are informative,

178 Notes

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

but Green offers a discussion of Celtic religion that is, for me, surprisingly confident given the difficulties of interpreting artefacts. Henig has also offered readings of contemporary religion, e.g., Pagan and Religion. At length, by William of Newburgh, Historia. Since he believes Geoffrey to be a liar, he omits all reference to the early Britons. Gransden, 202. She suggests his ‘principal object was to amuse’ (207). Geoffrey, 72–73. Waswo, ‘Ancestors’. Tomaselli, Coexistence (37) argues that Geoffrey exhibits a ‘strong suspicion of and contempt for’ pagans, but I do not think that he is nearly as suspicious as he should be. Despite this disagreement, Tomaselli’s thesis is a valuable contribution. See Faletra, 71–72 on the ‘empty’ land and Cohen, Giants for a reading of the invaders as Saxons. Tatlock, Legendary, 258–61, 274–75 (which notes that Bladud’s inextinguishable fires are reported in parallel with Elijah’s drought, etc.). Ingledew (677) even sees him as anti-Augustinian, although his argument is about Geoffrey as a historian of prophecy and agency rather than non-Christian beliefs (680). Geoffrey, 80–81, 90, 113; Tatlock, ‘Geoffrey’, 696; Robertson, ‘Geoffrey’, 43–45; Salter, ‘Geoffrey’, 382–85; Ingledew, 703–4; see also Flint, ‘Historia’ and Tolhurst, ‘Geoffrey’ and the special issue it prefaces. Tatlock, Legendary, 277. Tolhurst, ‘Britons’. Geoffrey, 86–87. Geoffrey, 124–25, 266. Geoffrey, 51. Ingledew noted that this had yet to be explained and positioned Geoffrey as a new type of Virgilian historian in ‘Book’ especially 669–70, 702. On Paris see Gransden, 356–79. Here I have tried to discriminate between authors who were ‘fascinated with magic and paganism’ as Tomaselli puts it, cutting out the focus on magic to explore exclusively references to pagan deities (Tomaselli, 23). Tomaselli is right to ask why instead of eliminating paganism from their texts, ‘they either maintain the level of paganism in the legend or even increase it’ (8). Tomaselli, 38–39. She shows how Wace and Laȝamon equate pagan deities with demons, a harder version of Geoffrey’s position. Darrah seeks classical sources in Paganism, continuing the tradition of Weston, Ritual. See Tracy, ‘Knight’. Tatlock, Legendary, 261. He identifies two ‘great’ scenes, the other being Cassibellaunus’ mass sacrifice. Geoffrey, 65. Wace, Roman, 16–19. Middle English text from British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.IX; translation Allen, ed., Lawman, 4, 15–16. Thanks to Adam Stout for suggesting this. On Laȝamon and Wace’s hostility to the Anglo-Saxons, see Weinberg, ‘Victor’. Allen, ed., 180, 216 and notes on 434, 439. Allen can’t explain ‘Dido’ and ‘Mamilo’ – the Carthaginian queen Dido was deified in some sources but the context is, as she puts it, ‘odd’. ML MS Cotton Otho C.XIII and MS Cotton Caligula A.IX. Robert, Chronicle, vol. 1, 14. Robert, 113, 120. Robert, 229. Shaw, ‘Robert’ and Mitchell, ‘Kings’ for a more positive view of Robert’s Saxons. Robert, 364, 230–32. Richard, Chronicon. Richard’s intentions have been debated – is he promoting or critiquing anti-Semitism? (Bale, ‘Richard’ and Gransden, 251). Richard does not cover history before Richard I’s reign so has no comment on ancient paganisms.

Notes 179

61 Robert, vol. 2, 485, 532; such as Matthew Paris and Gervase of Tilbury. See also Dahood, ‘English’, though Robert is not mentioned. 62 Meyer, ‘Making’. 63 Chronicle … Tysilio, 16–18, 27. This has little concern for Saxon paganism – only Woden and Friga are mentioned out of Geoffrey’s list (112): Jesus College MS 28. 64 Fowler, ‘New’; Greetham, ‘Models’. 65 Mapping Medieval Chester project website, www.medievalchester.ac.uk/index.html. 66 Higden, Polychronicon, vol. 2, 83. 67 Higden, 83–85. 68 Related examples are discussed by Minnis, Chaucer, 64–65: while Higden is cautious about repeating pagan material, Trevisa actively seeks to avoid ‘blame’ for it. He describes Nectanabus, father and tutor of Alexander of Macedonia, as a ‘wicche’ and sharply dissociates Christians from such a story. On Higden and euhemerism, see Ferguson, Utter, 18–20. 69 St. Erkenwald is in BL MS Harley 2250 72v–75v; the dating is that of Peterson, ed., St. Erkenwald. See Schwyzer, ‘Exhumation’ on the poem’s place in the debate about successor peoples (thanks to Philip for drawing my attention to it); Whatley, ‘Heathens’ surveys the theological arguments. My reading follows McAlindon, ‘Hagiography’ and Morse, ed., St. Erkenwald in seeing the poem as about salvation by merit and works, drawing on Stouck’s reading in ‘Mournynge’. 70 Fabyan, New, 6. 71 Fabyan, 3, 2, 36. 72 Mendyk, Speculum. There is still a surprising concentration on seventeenth-century work. 73 Barclay, Shyp, 220. 74 Hutton, Blood, 56. 75 With this uncertainty in mind, it is interesting to note that Barclay did not introduce the druids into Brandt’s text: that was done by Locher’s Latin translation. Locher portrays his druids both as dancing on Mount Ida and, potentially contradictorily, beating ‘gallic’ drums. Owen, Famous, 27–28 also noticed this, and suggests that Locher confused the word ‘galli’ meaning ‘priests of Attis’ – actually, as Hutton points out in Blood, of Cybele with ‘galli’ meaning ‘Gauls’. Whatever his thinking, these druids have a fluid identity allowing the possibility of a more local western European habitation for them in (among other places) Gaul or Devon. For Brandt and Locher see Zarncke, ed., Narrenschiff. ‘Von Dantzen’ is poem 61. See also Locher, Stultifera, 117. 76 Boece, Historia. 77 Hutton, Blood, 52. 78 Fabyan, 6. 79 Fabyan, 9. 80 See Hutton, ‘Paganism’ on neoPlatonism (179, 187). This book expands on Hutton’s insight that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must be seen as a period of pagan revival, by suggesting that if we include the historiography of pagan religions in the notion of ‘revival’ the time span might be lengthened back into the Middle Ages in Britain and continued unbroken into the present – in certain ways. Paganism is thus always being revived in English literature after about 1130, and this book further argues that certain deities were being established as ‘British’ in that period. 81 Boece, Historia: ‘Caeterum religionem cum ante susceptam fidem insigniter nec imperite, ut tum mos erat, cognovissent, testante Caesare ac Tacito, sedem enim eius ac scholas quasdam etiam Galliarum fuisse in Britannia meminit, Druydesque sacerdotes inde ortos. Quod etiam historiae rerum nostrarum referunt: Monam insulam fontem tum extitisse omnium rerum sacrarum ac secretioris doctrinae. Tum initio statim nullaque reluctatione veram religionem suscipientes maxima eam retinentes synceritate, neque haereses invenerunt, neque unquam assuere inventas.’ Bellenden changes the text to read ‘Catholik’ rather than ‘True Religion’.

180 Notes

82 On Boece’s French and Catholic influence see Hutton, Blood, 53–54. 83 Ferguson, 2–3. There are some limiting reflections on ‘credulity’ in early modern, American and African aboriginal societies that underestimate the complexity and worth of alternative discourses to scientific rationalism (e.g., 6). 84 Du Bois’ term ‘double consciousness’ was coined to describe the experiences of African-Americans. In using it, I am not implying a strict parallel but that Christian Britons had opened a space in their self-consciousness (self-fashioning, Greenblatt would say) for pagan imaginings viewed through a Christian lens. How far these Christian and pagan elements conflicted or coalesced varied, but – as with Du Bois’ term – there was always a gap and therefore a doubling. To find a unity of ‘soul’, the doubleness had to be negotiated. Du Bois, Souls. 85 Leland, Laborious, 11; see Herendeen, ‘William Camden’ and Vine, Defiance, 24–29. 86 Some, like Stow, continued to repeat his version of the past without its pagan baggage while expressing reservations (Survey). Other examples of encounters with Geoffrey include Twyne (De Rebus – the invention of the Phoenician theory, see Chapter 2), Price, Smith, Lhuyd, Bacon and Herbert, Lord Cherbury. For a survey see Ferguson, 27–34, 86–105 and, with the focus on nation-building, Schwyzer, Literature. 87 Chandler, ed., John Leland’s, 407; Tacitus, Agricola, 108. On Vergil and Renaissance history see Dean, ‘Tudor’. Vergil, Anglica. 88 Annius (or Pseudo-Berosus-Berosus) was a Chaldean, supposed author of Defloratio Caldaica. Annius was a Dominican friar, author of Commentaria or Antiquitates. Identifying Noah with Janus, Annius makes him founder of Etruscan and Assyrian civilizations, the first pope and thereby the spreader of true religion. See Ligota, ‘Annius’, especially 49–50 and, on euhemerism, 54–55; Grafton, ‘Invention’; Stephens, ‘Pope’ and Giants. More generally, Kidd, British. 89 Bale, Illustrium and Scriptorum; MacColl, ‘Construction’ suggests this theory lasted 50 years – but that minimizes its contribution to writings on paganism. No Bale and Harrison, no Stukeley. I also differ from MacColl in emphasizing Harrison’s contribution to the proto-Christian hypothesis as well as Bale’s. Hutton points out that Bale drew on Boece, Blood, 56–57. 90 Story Donno comments on the providential pattern and originality of the Chronicles in ‘Review’. On the Preface and censorship see Kelen, ‘Dangerous’; Booth, Book; and Patterson, Reading, especially 12–15. 91 Harrison, ‘Historicall’, 47; Bale, First, A2-v. MacColl discusses parallels with Catholic history – e.g., burning human sacrifices suggests Marian persecution. 92 Harrison, ‘Historicall’, 43, 44, 47, 113; Hutton, Blood, 57–59. 93 Translated and quoted in Edelen, ‘William Harrison’, 258. Bale had been an internal critic of Catholicism as a monk and never looked back: his experience of the sectarian border was uni-directional. 94 Parry, ‘William Harrison’ and Protestant. 95 Harrison was radical, although to later godly his advocacy of episcopacy and pluralism looked reactionary (Edelen, 261–45). 96 On Harrison’s empathetic attitude to other recusants see Edelen, 262–63. 97 On historical and antiquarian writing in the period: Kendrick, British; Fussner, Historical; Levy, Tudor; Woolf, ‘Senses’, Idea. 98 Parry, Trophies, 23; Rockett, ‘Structural’. On Roman studies see Hingley, Recovery. On Camden’s method and aims, see Powicke, ‘William Camden’; Kendrick, Piggott ‘William Camden’; Woolf, Idea; Helgerson, Forms; and Vine, 85–108; on the College of Arms and comparison with Leland, Lambarde, Harrison, Lhuyd, Carew, etc. see Herendeen, especially 201, 205. On druids, see Hutton, Blood, 59–60. 99 Camden, Britannia, ‘Cumberland’, ‘Northumberland’, ‘Middlesex and London’, ‘Essex and Suffolk’, ‘Yorkshire: West Riding’, ‘Durham, Lancashire and Westmorland’, ‘Scotland south of the Antonine Wall’; among identifications of tutelary

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100 101 102

103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120

deities ‘Vitirineus’ and ‘Suria’ or ‘Syria’, a Cybelean image, ‘Magon’ and ‘Hercules’ in Northumberland; at St. Paul’s the names of houses by the church (‘Dianaes Chamber’) and the excavation of many ox skulls there added to Camden’s suspicion of a Dianic temple; Mars Camulus, ‘Andates’ and Claudius in Essex; the ‘god or genius of the Brigantes’ and ‘Verbeia’ whom he thought goddess or the river Wharf on the grounds that Gildas had said the pagan Britons reverenced rivers, in Yorkshire; mother goddesses and Mars in Lancashire; ‘Belatucadro’ in Westmorland and Cumberland; Apollo Grannus in Scotland. Camden, Britannia, ‘Britaine’. Hutton, Blood, 59 for druids. Chaucer, ‘Wife … Prologue’ from Canterbury line 610. On Chaucer and paganism see Minnis, and Fumo, Legacy. Gower, Confessio, Book 8, lines 2761–72; Henryson, Testament especially stanza 4. Henryson’s dream sequence in the deities’ court has been read as possessing a pagan sensibility, while others situate it as Christian (Nell, ‘Testament’; Macnamara, ‘Divine’; McDonald, ‘Venus’; Patterson, ‘Christian’); Skelton, Phillip, lines 67–96; Wyatt, ‘Satire’, line 23, also Pan and Apollo (lines 48–49); Gascoigne, ‘Worthy’, line 124. Spenser is hailed as the ‘New Poet’ by E.K., Shepheardes in Brooks-Davies, ed., Edmund Spenser, 23. See Hawkins, ‘Mythography’, 51. Brooks-Davies, ed., 68, 70, 74. On Spenser and antiquity Anderson, ‘Antiquities’. For instance, Spenser was granted a pension in 1591. Spenser, Faerie, ed. Roche, 39–40, 21. Dekker, Pleasant in Works, vol. 1, 83. As usual Spenser provides parallel/countervailing episodes: the satyrs’ wrongheaded deification of Una ‘as Queene’ and ‘Goddesse of the wood’ (c.f. Belphoebe, below), a worship ‘in vaine’ and ‘th’Image of Idolatryes’ which is mixed with their worship of Sylvanus and Una’s ass; Spenser, 1.6.9–16, 19. Rust, ‘Image’ offers a reading relating to Elizabeth. Spenser, 16; sonnet to Raleigh, 31. Spenser, 2.3.21–39. Spenser, 3.6.4, 28. Greenlaw debates the significance of fairy ‘race’ in ‘Spenser’s’, 118–20; Woodcock, Fairy. Rust, 137, 139. Rust concentrates on Book One but her analysis can be extended; it rightly allows consideration of the Virgin Mary overlapping with pagan goddesses. This has been both emphasized and played down: e.g., Hackett, Virgin; McEachern, Poetics, Chapter 2, especially 57–58; McClure and Headlam-Wells, ‘Elizabeth’. Classic discussions include Roberts, Faerie, Chapter 1; Greenblatt, Renaissance, Chapter 4; Lewis, Allegory. Waters Bennett discusses Venus as a neo-Platonic ideal in ‘Spenser’s Venus’ 164–66 and the Garden in ‘Spenser’s Garden’ and ‘Spenser’s Garden … Revisited’: see also Harrison, ‘Divinity’; Tonkin, ‘Spenser’s’; Geller, ‘Venus’ and ‘Acidalian’. On Agdistes as Cybele’s male aspect see Greenlaw, ‘Some’, 235. Spenser, 4.10.5–7, 31–35, 39–41; 3.6.30–34, 44–46. Spenser, 4.10.44–52, 56. O’Brien argues in ‘Astarte’ that the Temple represents the threat of idolatry but this depends on identifying Venus with Astarte and believing Spenser found Astarte more threatening, neither of which is clear. Other readers identify unexpected goddesses – Hughes, ‘Virgilian’ sees Venus in Belphoebe and Lemmi in Britomart (‘Britomart’). But the Book Four Venus episode is important precisely because it is not ambiguous or recherché, or like the simpler ‘beware-idolatry/lust’ episodes. Roberts, Chapter 1. Graziani, ‘Elizabeth’, 377. On justice and crocodiles see Aptekar, Icons and Miskimin, ‘Britomart’s’. Gross, Spenserian, 175. Macey, ‘Fowle’, 286, 288; Bieman, ‘Britomart’.

182 Notes

121 Waters, ‘Spenser’; Davidson, ‘Idol’; Bieman. The Geryoneo episode provides antithesis to Isis Church – to show what Spenser was not endorsing? 122 The Sidney circle to which Spenser belonged was known for its syncretic interests: Phillips, ‘Spenser’s’. 123 Spenser, 5.7.5–8, 12–16, 21–24. 124 Graziani, 377. The episode draws on Plutarch’s De Iside; Davidson also unpacks Apuleian and Biblical elements and Renaissance theories of dream-interpretation (77–79), and Apuleius’ vision of Ceres/Isis in Golden Ass is further explored in Macey. 125 On Spenser’s debt to Geoffrey’s history, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s, 87, focusing on him as chronicler. 126 Spenser, 4.11.28. On Astraea see Yates, ‘Queen’ and Astraea; Hulse, Weiner and Strier, ‘Spenser’. See also Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Muse’; Wilson, ‘Queen’. On Cybele see Greenlaw, ‘Some’, 218–37 and very similarly Hawkins, especially 53–62 (Hawkins sees Britomart as Cybelean since Cybele was associated with lions); Oruch, ‘Spenser’. 127 See Hawkins, 63–64; on neoPlatonic thought in the Mutabilitie Cantos see Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Venus’, 160–92.

2 ‘Gods of every shape and size’ 1 On Spenser’s influences on chorographical identity poetry see Hadfield, ‘Spenser’. On Shakespeare, a classic account is Hamilton, ‘Venus’; Daniel, ‘Vision’. The trend was not confined to male poets: Elizabeth Cary’s 1602 Tragedy was published in 1613 with a dedication to her sister-in-law as ‘Diana’s earthly deputress’ and later in the poem simply ‘Diana’ (47). 2 Jonson, Masque, 662. 3 Munday, Triumphes. The child-actors in the 29 October pageant represented deities and river-nymphs like Drayton’s (below). See Hill, Anthony Munday. 4 Ryence (Urien) was king of Rheged, a kingdom based in Cumbria; Elizabeth was entertained by a song about him at the Kenilworth pageant of 1575 according to Percy’s Reliques, vol. 3, 64. 5 Gupton’s review of Serban’s New York Shakespeare Festival production describes the audience ‘scratching their heads’ over this scene. It has been suggested the scene may be an addition (Rogers, ‘Prophetic’) and it was not until Wilson Knight firmly stated that it was Shakespeare’s, in 1948, that it was routinely assumed to be so (Crown, 191). But the play is full of riddles of this kind (Marcus, Puzzling, 116–48 and Crumley, ‘Questioning’). Hoeniger, ‘Irony’, 219. Maisano, ‘Shakespeare’s’ suggests that the scene’s oddness can be explained by reference to Jupiter as a planet. 6 Lawrence, ‘Natural’, 450. 7 See Chapter 1 for Holinshed; Stow, Summarie; Munday, Brief; Moffet, ‘Cymbeline’, 209, 211 explores why Shakespeare chose Cymbeline’s reign for reworking a tale from Boccaccio, finding the nativity to be the only likely reason; see also Frye, Natural; Jones, ‘Stuart’; and Richmond, ‘Shakespeare’s’, which also concludes that the play tends towards Christianity. Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 1.7.168 and 4.2.311–12. For an influential account of the play as hovering between chronicle-based history and romance see Ribner, English. 8 For a neoPlatonic reading (but in other respects echoing Moffet) see Hunt, ‘Syncretistic’. 9 Moffet, 215–16; Geller, ‘Cymbeline’, 252–53. They reject the worship of ‘dirty gods’ in favour of purer, natural (though ill-defined) religion such as that of the ‘goddess … divine Nature’. 10 The figure of 30 is Bergeron’s in ‘Cymbeline’, 35.

Notes 183

11 Kirsch, ‘Cymbeline’ explores the self-consciousness of the new Blackfriars drama and concludes that the play is ‘frankly experimental’ (295), as did Kermode for whom Shakespeare was ‘playing with the play’ (Shakespeare, 22) and Frye, 70. 12 Bergeron analyses the notion of interpretation in ‘Treacherous’; Simonds argues that the play can be read in the hermeneutic tradition of emblem literature in Myth; Cunningham discusses issues of truth in the play and state trials in ‘Female’; Crumley, 308, 300–1, suggests that the play is concerned with the subjectivity of historiography. 13 Hoeniger, 223. 14 Landry, ‘Dreams’, 75. 15 On the Romans and British nationalism, see Mikalachki, ‘Masculine’; on the Welsh, see Boling, ‘Anglo-Welsh’; on Celts, see Escobado, ‘Britannia’. King’s Cymbeline offers a useful survey. 16 See Hart, ‘Great’. 17 Hutton, Blood, 60. 18 Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, 1: 498–501: ‘those who pacify with blood accursed/Savage Teutates, Hesus’ horrid shrines,/And Taranis’ altars cruel as were those/Loved by Diana, goddess of the north … ’ He also mentions bards and druids in the next lines. 19 Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies, 55–57 (3.1 and 5.3, no line numbers). Critical commentary has focused on the play’s resonance in Jacobean politics, with Boling and Crawford suggesting the play is critical of James I through Caratach (Boling, ‘Fletcher’s’; Crawford, ‘Fletcher’s’). Hickman, ‘Bonduca’s’ notes that audiences may sympathize or not with both Roman and Briton. Clark notes the preference for masculine honour over female vindictiveness in Plays, 85–88, and see also Mikalachki, Legacy, 103–5. Green notes that the pre-Christian setting contributes to debates about the relationship between honour and ethics in war in ‘Theme’ and Jowitt reads the play in the context of the encounter with Native Americans in Virginia in ‘Colonialism’; I have found no discussions of the play’s paganism. Bonduca was revived in the 1690s, coinciding with the new edition of Camden’s Britannia (Nielsen, ‘Boadicea’; Hutton, Blood, 74). 20 On Camden’s surpassing Harrison and Holinshed see Herendeen, ‘William Camden’, especially 196–97. 21 Selden, annotations to Drayton, Poly-Olbion, ed. Hooper, vol. 1: 27. For Drayton/ Selden see Hutton, Blood, 61–62: he explains how Selden created the illusion that in venerating all-healing mistletoe, druids worshipped an all-healing god; see also Hutton, Druids, Piggott, Ancient and Druids as well as Chapter 1’s discussion of Barclay. 22 Dryden, Absalom, lines 49–50; Thomas, Crafting, 30. 23 Selden’s notes cover only the first 18 books; Part Two of the poem was published without notes in 1622. The title is a pun on Albion and means ‘very happy’ (Hooper, ‘Introduction’ to Drayton, vol. 1, xxii). For critical reception and patronage problems, see Duchemin, ‘Barbarous’, especially 130–32 on Poly-Olbion; on Selden see Parry, Trophies, 95–129. 24 For related chorographical and poetic sources see Moore, ‘Sources’; Gourvitch, ‘Drayton’s’ and ‘Welsh’. 25 On Drayton’s animated landscapes see Revard, ‘Design’ and Ewell, ‘Drayton’s’. Both see the mythic landscape as pacific and ordered, but I prefer Lake Prescott’s notion of discord (‘Marginal’), as does Hadfield, ‘Spenser’; McEachern’s discussion in Poetics and Helgerson, ‘Land’ examine politically radical elements in the text; see also Schwyzer’s ‘Map’ and Klein’s ‘Imaginary’. Hiller, ‘Sacred’ examines Drayton’s bardic self-image; Curran examines his paradoxical claim to a ‘lost’ bardic identity (‘History’). 26 Drayton, second song, vol. 1, 43.

184 Notes

27 Drayton, second song, vol. 1, 49. Here Drayton retells the story of Bevis of [South]Hampton who slew many ‘paynims’ in Armenia and Syria and destroyed their ‘idols’. 28 Drayton, third song, vol. 1, 73, following closely Camden, ‘Dorset and Somerset’, although the always-pacific Camden thinks both might be honoured equally. The evidence is both literary and in the form of tablets showing a figure grasping a snake, a club, etc. 29 Drayton, ninth song, vol. 2, 14–15. 30 Drayton, third song, vol. 1, 77; sixth song, vol. 1, 154, 157 and Selden’s note on vol. 1, 162; eighth song, vol. 1, 189, 197. 31 Lake Prescott, 309; Parry, Trophies, 110. 32 Selden in Drayton, vol. 1, 83; Camden, ‘Wiltshire and Hampshire’. See Vine, Defiance on Drayton’s debt to Daniel for this passage, 130–31; on Drayton and Selden, 169–99; on Selden’s notes as a game, 186–93. 33 Ausonius, Ausonius 103–5; e.g. Belatucadros inscription RIB 1977 in Cumbria, as Selden notes, Drayton, vol. 1:210–11, 216. Camden (see Chapter 1) ‘Cumberland’. On Belatucadros and Belenus see Hutton, Pagan, 217, 225, 151–52 and on the relationship between British and exotic deities, 206–24. 34 Selden in Drayton, vol. 2, 34–37, 39–40 (note ‘I omit … their sacrificing of human bodies, and such like’). Origen was an Egyptian first–second-century theologian; Diodorus, Bibliotheca (historical library or ‘universal history’) of 36 and 30 BC says ‘there is an island in the ocean over against Gaul … where the Hyperboreans inhabit; so called, because they lie beyond the breezes of the north wind … They say that Latona was born here, and therefore, that they worship Apollo [her son] above all other gods … these inhabitants demean themselves, as if they were Apollo’s priests, who has there a stately grove and renowned temple, of a round form … some of the Grecians passed over to the Hyperboreans, and that Abaris formerly travelled thence to Greece’ (vol. 1, 139). 35 Jonson, ‘Epistle’ in Works, 698; Milton, Areopagitica, 58. 36 Drayton, vol. 1, 219. 37 Hutton, Blood, 63–64. Fuller, Church-History and Appeal, 54–55; Heylyn, Certamen, 343. Although both were Anglicans and royalists, Fuller and the always-peppery Heylyn differed in their interpretations of church history and the politics of parliamentary freedoms. Heylyn is effectively accusing Fuller (as he had previously accused Baxter and puritan worthies from Elizabethan times onward) of being too Christian. On Fuller as antiquarian see Parry, Trophies, 267–74. 38 Hutton, Blood, 63. 39 Milton, History, vol. 1, 10. 40 ‘Ad Patrem’ in Shawcross, ed., John Milton, 41, 45; see Samuels, ‘Development’, 231–40 including a discussion of Milton and neoPlatonism; Hutton, Blood, 63, discusses Milton’s conflicted and shifting attitude to druids. 41 Milton, ‘Morning’ in Poems, lines 74–90. Swaim, ‘Mighty’ suggests that this moment bridges the birth of Christ as ‘an exercise in point of view’, before/after (491) and Jordan agrees in reading the poem as a ‘process’ (‘Movement’). Pan also appears in Comus, Paradise Lost, 4.266–68 and Paradise Regained, 2.190. Although Swaim suggests the Comus reference is to the ‘usual’ louche figure, it is an image of shepherds ‘thank[ing] the gods amiss’ that for all its warning signals echoes the nativity ode in its tolerant possibilities. See also Tuve, Images, 46–48; both Spenser and Milton are thinking of the Plutarch story retold by E.K. in Shepheardes, as Brooks and Hardy note in Poems, 101. 42 In particular see Huttar, ‘C.S. Lewis’. Lewis rewrote the ode including its pagan elements. 43 Hyman, ‘Christ’s’; Lewalski, ‘Milton’, 215 – Lewalski shows how Milton’s wide definition of idolatry encompassed anything that replaced or distracted from worship

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44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52 53

54 55

56 57 58 59 60

of the true God (kings, representations, human institutions of all kinds); Fawcett, ‘Orphic’ makes a similar point; Parker, Milton, vol. 1, 55; Kingsley, ‘Mythic’; Hunter, Milton’s, 97–99. Milton revisits some of the exiled deities in Paradise Lost: Moloch 1.4.13–17; Baalim and Ashtaroth 1.4.453–54, etc., and directly explores and endorses uncompromising resistance to idolatry in Samson Agonistes (Dagon this time). See Buhler, ‘Preventing’. Norbrook points out that the poem intervenes in the seasonal cycle of festivity as well as in theology and thus has profound implications for the English countryside as well as more exotic cultures (Poetry, 230). Milton, Areopagitica, 46. Blake, Marriage, plate 6. Diana of the Arician grove and her King of the Wood (see also Chapter 5) in Cummings, ‘Forest’; Herrick, ‘Hymn to Venus and Cupid’ (one of several, such as ‘A Short Hymn to Venus’) in Hesperides. Aubrey, Remains, 108, 34. For example he borrows from Selden the subversive idea that Christmas was a successor feast to the Saturnalia (Selden, Table-Talk, 27). Hutton, Blood, 64, 131–32. Belisama was a goddess known from inscriptions in Gaul (Lejeune, Receuil, 153) and possibly as the goddess of the Ribble valley in Lancashire, since the valley was so-named by the second-century Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy in his Geographia or Cosmographia (Hutton, Pagan, 218). For Hercules-Ogmius see also below: Lucian described Ogmius in the second century AD in ‘Heracles’ as an old god, associated with eloquence (Works, vol. 3, 256–59). For Thor, and Sammes’ northern gods, see Chapter 4. Hues (a variant of Hesus thought to derive from a sacred exclamation at festivals) will return, transformed, as Hu in Chapter 3. Sammes also explored other deities: Anglo-Saxon ones, discussed in Chapter 4, Hesus (whom he equated with Mars Camulus) and Andraste/Anda[n]te (Venus), whom he thought were worshipped at Maldon, Essex, once identified as Camulodunum (see Hutton, Pagan, 166). Sammes, Britannia, Preface, 55–56, 61–62, 125–39. On Twyne see Vine, 37–43, Ferguson, Antiquity, 93–94 and Champion, ‘Appropriation’. On Sammes, see Hutton, Blood, 65, 69–70; Parry, Trophies, 308–24. Hutton, Blood, 65–68, 70–72, 73; Gibson, ed., Camden’s (1st edn) and Britannia (3rd edn), xliii. On the editions see Piggott, ‘William Camden’, 44–49. E.g., Speed, Theatrum, Wiltshire plate. Vine discusses Speed’s comic dramatization of Geoffrey’s Stonehenge theory, 109–11. As argued by the physician Charleton, Chorea. The monument was not a temple (as Dryden’s prefatory poem made clear, line 48), but a place for electing and crowning kings – an early statement of the association of northern European prehistory with parliamentary rights (see Chapter 4). Yet Dryden calls the kings ‘earthly gods’ (line 49) at odds with Charleton’s tone. Camden thought the Rollright stones a Danish monument (‘Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire’) but made surprisingly little comment on Stonehenge given the importance it was to assume. But he also says little of the druids, even when discussing Anglesey in ‘Rest of Wales’. Gibson, ed., Britannia, column 108–9. Gibson further endorses it at, for example, Britannia, column 637 and 683, by which time he is referring to stone monuments as ‘Druid-stones’. On Tanner see Parry, Trophies, 331–57, especially 336–39. On Stonehenge theories see also Vine, 113–25 and on Aubrey, Parry, Trophies, 275–307. Gay, ‘Fool’s’, published in Hearne, Works, vol. 4. Hearne, vol. 3, lxxix–lxxxii. See below, Hearne, vol. 3, lxxxiv. See Legg’s obituaries (‘Rodney Legg’) for a summary of his career including the transcription and publication of Monumenta Britannica with the novelist John Fowles. Legg, Stonehenge, 8.

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61 Hearne, vol. 4, 471. Gay was a parliamentarian and said to have been imprisoned for attacking Nettlecombe Court with a mob in 1643 (Legg, 8). He seems to have called himself ‘Philantiquarius Britannicus’, since this name is attached to another tract published by Hearne, whose MS he said was in the same hand as the ‘Fool’s Bolt’. The other tract deals with Roman antiquities found in Somerset in 1666. The Gays later provided land to the antiquary and architect John Wood to build Bath’s Queen Square, Gay Street and other developments. 62 On the Cangi see Camden, ‘Shropshire and Cheshire’. 63 Cassius Dio gives both names (Andraste and Andate) in his Historia Romana of around 230 AD (Roman History, 93–96). The origin of the name Anaraith remains obscure. 64 Hearne, vol. 4, 512–13, 515–16. 65 Hearne, vol 4, 490. Gay’s text appears to be unfinished and ends abruptly. Fowles points out that Gay’s tract influenced Aubrey but also wonders if at least some of it is intended satirically (quoted in Legg, 11). 66 Bolton, Nero-Caesar, 111. 67 Parry, ‘Ancient’. Parry says (175) that Bolton was ‘the first person to suggest that Stonehenge might be an Ancient British monument’ (Bolton, 182: ‘Stonage was a work of the Britanns’), rather than of Roman or Romano-British construction, although in the structure of his argument Bolton is echoing but altering Geoffrey of Monmouth’s notion that Merlin built the monument rather than making a wholly radical claim; he sees it as a British monument to Bunduca. 68 Hutton, Blood, 64. 69 Webb and Jones, Most, 1–2, 66, 91–107, 67. 70 Webb and Jones, 8, 2–4. Webb and Jones have received little credit for their vision of ancient Britons as nomadic peoples living in huts made of sticks, tents and caves (9–12) – a far more accurate picture than that of most contemporaries. 71 Hutton, Blood, 67–68. 72 Herbert, Antient, 32. 73 Toland, Critical, 88. Sadly, Toland’s stance was justified: Findlay’s preface trumpets Toland’s conversion from ‘Popery’ (6). Rejection of Catholicism led to what was perceived to be rejection of religion, or at best deism, when Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious argued that reason should be applied to religion. This led to a warrant being issued for his arrest in Ireland and he fled to England, ending his life as a pantheist: Daniel’s ‘John Toland’ explores his theology and influence on European philosophy and see also Sullivan, John Toland; Hutton, Blood, 72, 78–83. 74 For a sensitive discussion of Toland’s Irish or pan-Celtic focus as secondary to a claim to erudition and universality see Champion, ‘John Toland’, especially 324–26, 337. 75 Toland, Critical, 45–46. 76 E.g., Toland, Critical, 69. 77 McCallum and McCallum, Original, lxxx; Barker, Parriana, vol. 2, 435–36; Huddleston, ‘Ancient’. Born in Dumfries, Huddleston was schoolmaster at Lunan from 1789 to 1821, when he died: Jervise, Memorials, vol. 2, 269. 78 Toland, New, ed. Huddleston, 6–7. 79 Harrison, ‘Historicall’, 42. 80 Toland, Critical, 70–77, 81, 100, 194–95. See also Chapter 3. 81 Toland, Critical, 101–4, 132, 136, 188–89, 194. 82 In Catasterismi (a collection of tales about the mythic origins of the stars) now not thought to be by Eratosthenes. Among others, Herodotus also mentions the arrow, though in the context of rubbishing the whole idea (Herodotus, Herodotus, 199). For a recent retelling of the myth see Battlestar Galactica. 83 Toland, Critical, 98, 110, 134. See Camden, ‘Scotland south of the Antonine Wall’; Grannus altar RIB 2132; Maxwell, ‘Two’, 388. It was found in 1565. 84 Firstly in an MS of 1721–24, now published as Burl and Mortimer, eds., Stukeley’s, 38. On the significance of gardening to antiquaries in the context of

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85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96

97

98 99 100 101

reformed religion see Walsham, Reformation, especially 311–26. Relatedly, on new uses for old monuments, see Whyte, ‘Landscape’. Stukeley, Stonehenge, 103. Stukeley, 9. Stukeley, 3–4. Piggott, William Stukeley (above); Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley; Hutton, ‘Religion’. On Stukeley and other eighteenth-century antiquaries such as Gough, Borlase, etc., see Sweet, ‘Antiquaries’; Piggott, Ruins; on Wood see Hutton, Blood, 102–7. Hutton, Blood, 86–102 provides a masterly analysis of Stukeley, adding to Piggott’s and Boyd Haycock’s accounts. He sees Stukeley’s early writings as going so far as ‘indifference to Christianity’ (92) as a ‘pagan Neoplatonist’ (94). Later on, he became firmer in his commitment to Christianity as the truth among an assortment of comparative truths, attributing pagan error decisively to the devil (99). Hutton situates Stukeley in a longer tradition as I do, although I emphasize Stukeley’s similarity to his medieval and renaissance forebears more. Gay, Enlightenment. On Gay, Hutton, Triumph, 20. Glover, ‘Religious’, 119. However, some scholars – such as the Cornish vicar Borlase – had been unable to accept the notion of good druids, recalling the human sacrifices attributed to them by Caesar, etc., it was unthinkable to them that right religion was uppermost in such minds. In the mid-1760s, Borlase imagined druids had created stone altars on west country tors and worshipped rock deities: rock basins were to receive pools of human blood. These pagans ‘dyed their altars with human gore’ like Canaanites or Moabites, not like patriarchal Jews. Borlase, Antiquities, 6–7, 11, 13, 25; Hutton, Blood, 107–11. On the druids in fiction in the mid-eighteenth century see Hutton, Blood; in Thomson’s Liberty (112–13), a planned but unwritten epic by Pope (113), in Joseph and Thomas Warton’s verse (114), in Collins’ Castle of Indolence and poems (114–15). On Gray, see Chapter 4: his The Bard is medieval rather than prehistoric and his works on paganism focus on Nordic deities. Mason, Caractacus, 17, 26–27, 60, 64, 34, 56, 81–82. Hutton, Blood, 117. On Mason and Gray see Snyder, ‘Thomas Gray’s’ and on Mason and Wordsworth, Nabholz, ‘Wordsworth’. On Macpherson, forgery and the notion of authenticity, see Haugen, ‘Ossian’; Porter, ed., James Macpherson; Hall, ‘James Macpherson’s’; Hutton, Blood, 116–17, 187. The controversy is detailed in Stafford, Sublime; Gaskill, Reception and Ossian; Moore, ed., Ossian, which includes reviews and reports on the works’ authenticity; on Macpherson and Percy, see Groom, Making, especially Chapter 3. Macpherson’s chief backer and defender was the minister Blair, especially in Critical (reprinted in editions of the poems from 1765), while the leading detractor was the historian Laing, who demolished the case for the poems’ ancient origin in his History, 409 – naming Toland among Macpherson’s inspirations. Macpherson, Poems, 171–72. See also the poems ‘Cath-Loda’, which describes a place where Loda appears to be invoked as a ‘dark-red cloud’ (144–45). He is also referred to in ‘Cruth-Loda’ (150, 155), ‘Oina-Morul’ (197), ‘Temora’ where he is apparently invoked in a stone circle at ‘Brumo’ (334), etc. Blair refers to him as ‘the Scandinavian god’, ‘that awful spirit’ and finally ‘Loda, that is, Odin, the great Scandinavian deity’ (84, 96). On Loda’s afterlife in Scotland see Wawn, Vikings, 46. Stukeley, letter (12 May 1765) in Moore, ed., vol. 3, 107. Salverte thought the druids might have fled to Scandinavia having been driven out by the Scottish kings: History, 57–66. Similar but different, Shaw argued that Loda was based on the Irish name for Leinster, Laidhan (in his Enquiry, in Moore, ed., vol. 3, 256).

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102 See Schmidt, ‘Homer’, 99–109. The passage became a key one in German scholarship of the eighteenth century for debating the relationship between humans, deities, identity and modernity (see Schmidt’s bibliography, 108). 103 Laing, 417, 419–20; Macpherson, 166. 104 RIB 643 statue or altar-base; RIB 2175. See also RIB 2152 (Castlecary) and RIB 2195 (Balmuildy). 105 For an early example see Peacham, Minerva; Thomson, ‘Britannia’ in Works, vol. 2, 191; Colley, Britons, 10–11, 38, 70, 133, 341. 106 Hutton, Blood, 118–24, 160–63, 174–77 discusses the outpouring of druidic literature from the 1760s–1880. 107 Polwhele, History, vol. 1: 141–42. Belisama is mentioned by Sammes (135). Hutton, Pagan, 218. Onca is Minerva, a Greek name mentioned in Aeschylus’ Seven, 18, and also mentioned by Sammes, 136. 108 For some examples of the debate ranging more widely see the Welsh and Scottish sections of Gibson’s edition of Britannia; Martin, Description discussed by Hutton, Blood, 75; Rowlands, Mona discussed in Hutton, Blood, 76–78; and Borlase, above, on Cornwall; Hutton, Blood, 74–78. 109 Blake, Jerusalem, plate 27; Marriage, plate 12. 110 Blake, Marriage, plate 11; Hutton, Blood, 193–96. 111 Blake’s sources included Speed, Milton, Sammes, Mason, Chatterton, etc. – see Worrall, ‘Blake’s’ and other English antiquaries; Fisher adds weight to the contribution of Davies’ Celtic Researches (see Chapter 3) and Williams (Morganwg) as exemplars of the influence of Welsh triads and bardic poetry, in Fisher, ‘Blake’; see also Gleckner, ‘Blake’s’; Cunningham, William Blake’s, 16; Johnston, ‘William Blake’; Mee, Dangerous stresses Macpherson’s influence, in particular the location of druids as ‘on the wrong side’ against Fingal and Ossian’s proto-Christianity (89–90); Whittaker, William Blake. See also Whittaker’s ‘Albion’s Spectre’, in Gibson, Trower and Tregidga eds., Mysticism. On visual sources see Blunt, ‘Blake’s’. 112 Blake, Marriage, plate 27. 113 Blake, Marriage, plate 8 and Everlasting, 55–61 (written about 1818 and unpublished by Blake) as well as Descriptive (1809) in Erdman, ed., Complete, 543; Essick, ‘William Blake’. 114 Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 1, lines 402, 466–68 and, originally, ‘Nutting’ in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical. Indeed, he refers to the Christian god frequently (e.g., Prelude, Book 3, line 144). On the numerous but inconsistent references to druids and paganism in Wordsworth see Hutton, Blood, 206–9 and Triumph, 10. 115 Wordsworth, ‘Excursion’ in Louis, ‘Gods’, 332–33, 338. On Wordsworth, druids and Wales and his ongoing ambiguity see Wright, ‘Vile Saxons’. 116 Louis, ‘Gods’ passim and see also Murphy, ‘Ethical’; Kissane, ‘Victorian’; and Jenkyns, Victorians. 117 On druids in the works of, among others, Hemans, Peacock, Tennyson and BulwerLytton see Hutton, Blood, 210–15, and in less well-known novels 237–39. It might be argued that engagement with British deities continued through Arthurian myth, but it was later, with Weston’s Ritual of 1920 in particular, that the Grail legends came to be widely regarded as stories of a lost pantheon. 118 Mouldy, Stonehenge, vol. 1, 21, 49, 77–78, 140, 176–77, 184, 192, 219, etc.; Adraste, vol. 3, 223. Lucan is a character in the story, and the Britons are his informants about the gods. The Romans worship Mercury, Diana, Terminus (vol. 1, 216; vol 2, 21, 35, 67) and other classical deities. Roscrana/Claudia’s conversion is in vol. 3, 50–52, her father’s at 229–30 and Joseph at 218–21. See also Hutton, Blood, 238–39. 119 For Bath’s archaeological history see Cunliffe, Roman and Roman Baths. Cunliffe also thought Sulis might have been male, but Green is surely right to insist on her femininity on the grounds of her title ‘dea’ and linkage with Minerva (Celtic, 94).

Notes 189

120 Lisle Bowles, Hermes, 15, 17, 22. Bowles was also the editor of the works of Pope and a poet in his own right (Marston and Litvack, ‘William Lisle Bowles’). See Hutton, Blood, 221.

3 Something old, something new 1 Gale, Court, Book 2: 16–19. 2 A phrase used by Jones in a letter: see Mulholland, ‘Connecting’, 4. Thanks to James for letting me read his work pre-publication. 3 Delany, Autobiography, vol. 5, 539–41 (the poem’s MS was incomplete and has since been titled ‘Kneel to the Goddess’ in some versions). Mary Granville Delany was a bluestocking and botanical decoupage artist. Franklin, Orientalist, 107–11. 4 Franklin, ‘Sir William Jones’, 30–31. See also Hutton, Druids, 131–32 where the poem is given the title of the essay. Hutton is right to ask how the poem should be read – a problem that recurs in this chapter, especially with Peacock and Hughes. 5 Franklin, Orientalist, 173. 6 I have retained Jones’ spellings throughout. 7 Mulholland, ‘Connecting’, 5–6, and, for the politics of Jones’ work, Sounding, Chapter 4. 8 Jones to Charles Wilkins 1784 quoted in Johnson, ‘Lisping’, 48. The ‘gopia’ are girls devoted to Krishna. 9 Thanks to James Mulholland for alerting me to Britain Discover’d, a poem that was not completed. See Mulholland, ‘Connecting’, 13–15. 10 Jones, Poems … from the Asiatick Languages and Poems in Three Parts; Works vol. 1, 229, 249, 258, 269, 276, 278–80; vol. 6, 367–69, 355–57, 365; Cannon, ‘Sir William Jones’ Indian’, 419–20 and ‘Sir William Jones’; Johnson discusses the hymns’ influence on Percy Shelley and other radicals and, challenging Teltscher’s reading (India Inscribed, 210), points out that Jones uses classical forms in his hymns rather than ‘anglicising’ Hinduism (or Anglicanizing it), which for me renders his enterprise more pagan. It is, as Johnson says, a ‘bilateral process of cultural exchange’ (52), a view confirmed by Mulholland’s work. 11 A woman who was probably Jones’ wife Anna Maria also wrote approvingly of Hindu deities, such as Brahma in her ‘Ode to Della Crusca’ and ‘Adieu to India’, as Mulholland shows (‘Connecting’, 20–24). 12 Johnson quotes a letter from Jones on the ‘horrid opinions’ of Christians about Hell (58). 13 Hutton, Triumph, 52–65, 18–20, 73–74. On ways of demonizing druids with reference to Hindu culture – sati, etc. – see Hutton, Blood, 229–31. 14 Owen, Heroic; Morganwg, Poems. See also Mouldy’s celebration of reincarnation in Stonehenge, 77–78. 15 ‘Let in the Celtic Twilight’ is the subtitle of ‘Ye Olde Maye Game’, a poem by Valiente, Charge, 32. 16 Danu appears as an ancestress in the Rigveda and was later conflated with the name of the ancient Irish people, the tuatha dé danann (people of the (either male or female) deity (dé)). The word danann is difficult – is it a name such as Danu or Anann, or something else? It is sometimes spelt domnann, which might link the Irish to the Dumnonians of south-west Britain or a rival goddess, Domna. See Koch and Carey, eds., for a summary of interpretations in Celtic, 245 and Hutton, Pagan, 150–52. Guest, ed., Mabinogion; Guest and John, Lady Charlotte Guest. White defends Guest against allegations that she bowdlerized or plagiarized her translations or that they are unusually flawed: ‘Crimes’ and ‘Further Crimes’. I have used the title The Mabinogion, as coined by Pughe. This was its contemporary name; now it is correctly Y Mabinogi.

190 Notes

17 Aneirin is the author of the Llyfr Aneirin (Book of Aneirin, Cardiff MS 2.81), a later thirteenth-century manuscript preserving older work. The fourteenth-century poet Dwygraig contributed poems to The Red Book of Hergest (Jesus College MS 111), his contemporary Goch mentions a Hu in his fourteenth-century poem on a ploughman, ‘Y Llafurwr’, while Taliesin’s Llyfr Taliessin (Peniarth MS 2) is a fourteenth-century text: see Clancy, Earliest for these. 18 Bryant, New; Maurice, Indian; Faber, Dissertation and later Origin (see 19–25 for a summary); see Kuhn, ‘English’ and Seznec, Survival. Kuhn also discusses Toland and Stukeley among other antecedents of Bryant and Davies. Maurice’s ‘Elegiac and Historical Poem’ marks Jones’ influence in the next generation of scholars: ‘the mystic veil that wraps the hallow’d shrines/Of India’s deities, ’twas thine to rend’ (1795) in Westminster. 19 Nodens’ temple at Lydney in Gloucestershire was fully documented in Bathurst and King, Roman, but excavated from the 1720s onward, with a publication of a description by Rooke, ‘Lydney’ in 1777. The excavation detailed in the 1879 volume began in 1805 (Bathurst and King, 3) and is likely Meyrick’s source of information. See www.roman-britain.org/places/lydney.htm for the altars and plaques there. See also Hutton, Pagan, 244–46. 20 Meyrick, ‘Helio-Arkite’ Parts 1 and 2. Malen is a name that Davies (Mythology, 616–17) took from Baxter’s Glossarium, 177–78. Baxter asserted that Malen was another name for Andraste in Wales, as the great goddess, possibly mother of the gods – a direct link with Davies’ conception of Ceridwen, and also linked with Minerva. On Meyrick’s antiquarian works see Hutton, Blood, 233–34. 21 Anon, ‘Review’, 246–49; Arnold, ‘Study’, 282–96 (on Davies see 292–94). The review expresses similar opinions to that of an anonymous reviewer of Probert’s Ancient, 1823. 22 Stephens, Literature and Nash, Taliesin; see Hutton, Blood, 260–62, and on Davies’ ideas as championed and extended by Myfyr Morganwg and Morgan (‘Morien’) 271–73, 274–79. Hutton also found an anonymous work, Guide, appropriating Hu and Ceridwen for Nottingham – see Hutton, Blood, 223. 23 Taliesin, ‘Marwnat Aeddon’ (‘The Elegy of Aeddon Mor’), Jones’ Celtic Encyclopaedia, with text from Skene’s Four. Davies, Mythology, refers to this passage on 181. 24 Cuhelyn, ‘God supreme’, Skene’s translation and Welsh text from www.maryjones. us/jce/ogyrfen.html. Davies, Mythology, refers to Cuhelyn and this passage on 186 and then retells the Hanes Taliesin or ‘History of Taliesin’ featuring Ceridwen. On Ceridwen in Welsh sources see Hutton, Pagan, 322–23 and more generally 147–48, 154–55. 25 Jones, Williams [Morganwg] and Pughe, eds., Y Myvyrian Archaiology, vol. 2. The ‘third series’ triads are Morganwg’s; translation by Probert, Ancient, 374, 396–97, 406. On Davies and Morganwg see Dearnley, ‘Mad’. 26 Davies, Mythology, 109–11, 114–15, 119, 126, 136, 175, 179, 215 and see also Celtic. Hutton surveys Davies’ work and Morganwg’s forgeries in Blood, 172–79 and notes in particular that Davies’ deification of Ceridwen, the witch-like figure in the sixteenth-century story Hanes Taliesin, has made a ‘modern goddess’ (Blood, 178). On Morganwg, see also Stout, Creating, 60–61. Davies concludes that the British religion was ‘like the general error of other nations’: ‘some perverted reliques of the patriarchal religion, blended with an idolatrous worship of the host of heaven’ (Mythology, 624), a return to Christian orthodoxies drawing on Bryant and Faber – see Hutton, Blood, 176–77. See also Hu Gadarn (pseudonym), ‘Ancient’. 27 Eliot, Middlemarch (Casaubon). 28 Higgins names as the direct source the Swiss linguist Pictet, e.g., De l’affinité. 29 Higgins, Celtic, 167–71, 299. Higgins details his pamphlets: reports on the maltreatment of inmates in York ‘Lunatic Asylum’, on currency reform and the Corn Laws. Several are available in the Bristol Selected Pamphlets archive via JSTOR. He was an

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34 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45

anti-sabbatarian (316) and engaged in controversy with Lisle Bowles, who defended Christianity. Hutton, Blood, 225–27. See also Higgins, Anacalypsis and for his continuing importance Muhammad, ‘Black’, as well as Robertson, History, 89. Seton, Mistletoe, 61. Seton was American, daughter of Ernest Thompson Seton, the Scots-Canadian founder of the Boy Scouts and Woodcraft movements. See Hutton, Triumph, 162–63 on Ernest. Bonwick, Irish, iii–iv. See Chapter 4 for Goths and the gothic. This gothic, Germanic aspect – now usually seen as opposed to Celticity – dominated the century. Hutton, Blood, 278. Peacock, ‘Cauldron’. ‘The rites and mysteries of the old religion flourished in secrecy … a stray proselyte of the new light was occasionally caught and roasted for the glory of Andraste’; druidry is ‘a quantity of allegorical mummery’ for Peacock; meanwhile King Arthur is using Diana’s Caerleon temple as a wine cellar. Peacock burlesques national poetic treasure and antiquarian effort. See Hoff, ‘Paradox’, 481 and Dawson, Fine. Le Hardy, Agabus, 104, 106, 147–48. Le Hardy, Agabus, 12–13, 16–17, 30, 40, 57, 70, 92, 115. The action is hard to follow: I still have no secure understanding of what happens to Annette – does she just disappear? See also Hutton, Blood, 212–13, 214–15. Le Hardy (1807–81) also wrote as Nenné Caton in Jérriais (‘Poems’) and on nursing (Home). On her antiquarian activities, briefly, see: Stevens, ‘Beneficiaries’. Her poem was based on recent archaeological discoveries on Jersey at Mont Ubé (1848), a ‘passage-grave’ site. Le Hardy, Agabus, ix–x (italics in original). For example, Mary Shelley’s Proserpine, the latter containing Percy’s ‘Hymn of Pan’ and ‘Hymn of Apollo’, as well as his Prometheus; ‘Ianthe’ from Landor’s Simonidea and ‘Ternissa!’ which refers to Proserpine and Pluto, as well as Imaginary Conversations. On pagan Romanticism, see Hutton, Triumph, 21–25. Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, Poems, 90–91, also ‘Boadicea’ (224–26), ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (785–87) and ‘Lines’ (850). Squire, Celtic, 354 – for an alternative view stressing Tennyson’s Celtic researches; see Cross, ‘Alfred Tennyson’; Swinburne’s Tale shares the now-odd-looking mix of classical/Arthurian (Harrison, ‘Tale’). On identity politics and Arthuriana, see Bryden, ‘Reinventing’ and Francis, ‘Tennyson’s’. Tennyson also wrote anti-French poems pseudonymously as ‘Merlin’ and ‘Taliessin’, associating Welshness with both Englishness and violent resistance, in dialogue with ‘Boadicea’. Swinburne, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (Poems – see also ‘Garden of Proserpine’ and ‘Sapphics’ (‘implacable Aphrodite’)). The Cytherean goddess is Diana; Venus rose from the sea; the mother of Rome might be Roma or Cybele – but all are also Proserpine. See Louis, ‘Proserpine’ and Peters, ‘A.C. Swinburne’s’. On Victorian classical paganism see Hutton, Triumph, 12–17, 25–31. Quoted in Radford, Lost, 59. Arnold, Culture and the book-length Study. In the latter, Arnold saw the ‘Celtic soul’ (iii) as a necessary corrective to the middle class (Saxon/Hebraic) philistinism (19) discussed in the former. On Davies, Study, 32–33. Delany, Neo-Pagans. Joyce, Ulysses, 169, 174 – also mentions ‘the druid priests of Cymbeline’ (196). Dunsany, Blessing, 22, 26, 38–39, 54, 56, 58. Machen, Great – a terrifying version of Pan and Nodens; Grahame, Wind, 135–36 where Pan is more like Christ. Merivale, Pan; Boardman, Great and Hutton, Triumph, 23–24, 28–29, 43–51, 154–55. Louis, Persephone; Bachofen, Mutterecht. Lawrence, ‘Bavarian Gentians’ in Sagar, ed., D.H. Lawrence, 240. On Lawrence and paganism generally see Hutton, Triumph, 159–61. Vickery has surveyed Frazer’s effect on Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Joyce (Literary). Persephone was not the only goddess linked with religious doubt: Hardy’s ‘Aquae Sulis’ links that goddess (and/or

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57

58 59

60 61 62 63

64

Minerva) with the doubted Christian god – both ‘fail as a song men yesterday sang’ in Satires. On nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Celtic prejudices see Curtis, AngloSaxons and relatedly Paz, Popular as well as Arnold, Study, and MacDougall, Chapters 2–8. On Celts, mysticism and race, Silver, Strange, especially Chapter 4. Macbain, Celtic; Nutt, Voyage; Gregory, Gods; Gomme, Ethnology; Elton, Origins. Rhys, Lectures, v. Rhys explained Nodens’ association with Mars in inscriptions by saying that gods had many attributes. On Rhys’ influence see Stout, Creating, 121, 169–70 and Hutton, Blood, 303, 338. On Rhys’ milieu see Morgan, Rebirth, Chapter 4; Wood, ‘Folklore’ and on Rhys specifically ‘Perceptions’ and ‘Folk’. See also Parry-Williams, John Rhys and Dorson, British. Rhys, Lectures, 107–12, 120–22, 125, 128–29, 131, 160–66, 168, 674. See also Celtic Folklore and Celtic Britain, from which the discussion of folklore observation comes (2). Squire, Celtic; Wood, ‘Early’. Squire produced another volume of similar material, Mythology, noting once again that he has ‘based his work upon the studies of the leading Celtic scholars’ (‘Foreword’). Squire, Celtic, vi–3, 16–17. Herbert, Essay – see Hutton, Blood, 289. The cuts were restored in Jones and Jones, Mabinogion with a discussion of Guest’s editorial practice on xxxi. See White, ‘Further’, 160–61 for an earlier version of their critique in the first publication of the translation, 1948. On Lugh and Gwydion see Hutton, Pagan, 150 and Triumph, 303. Guest, ed., Mabinogion 2nd edn, 417, 419 and 420 onwards. Even in this abridgement without notes the rape is made clear and, although it is not explained how the brothers return from their time together with a third animal, it is not hard to work out. Now the latter passage is seen as one of the most interesting in its non-pejorative queering tendencies: see the retelling in Lewis’ Meat. See White, ‘Further’, 165. Squire, Celtic, 47–61, 251–75, 282, 306–12. MacCulloch, Religion, which was dedicated to Andrew Lang (see Chapter 5). Lang argued against a linguistic origin for myth, as in Müller’s claim that myth was ‘a disease of language’ in which processes and objects were gradually deified by repeated allusion (thus, Toland’s view of Hercules-Ogmius in Chapter 2 anticipates Müller’s theory), and opposed the notion that folktales were, as MacCulloch said, ‘broken-down myth’ (iii–iv, 49–59). On Lang as a folklorist see Dorson, British, 206–20. On MacCulloch see Hutton, Blood, 341. On Lang versus Müller on solar mythology see Dorson, ‘Eclipse’. One was Squire’s Mythology, the other Anwyl’s Celtic; on Epona, see Squire, Mythology, 30 and Hutton, Pagan, 216–17. For Weston, see Chapter 1 and Hutton, Triumph, 125. Mars Cocidius was worshipped at Bewcastle, among other places, where silver plaques as well as altars to him remained. See RIB 985–89, 993; Hutton, Pagan, 217. Doughty, Dawn, an epic of which this portion appears in Auden and Pearson, eds., Poets, vol. 5, 544–59. Cocidius is ‘chief of the four kings of noble Kent’ (556) but operates in a Christian world, Joseph of Arimathea having brought the faith to Britain in the first century. Nertha, meanwhile, is a Gaulish ‘EARTH-MOTHER’ goddess in the original poem’s 1906 vol. 2, 8–9, and we meet Strabo’s moonpriestesses on the island of Sena – but they are friendly (Auden and Pearson, eds., 546–47). See also Tucker, ‘Doughty’s’. Stout, Creating, 126–30 and ‘Universal’; other examples explored include Maltwood’s Glastonbury Zodiac (205). On MacGregor Reid, see Hutton, Blood, 348–58, 368–73 and on Blavatsky and Higgins, see Hutton, Triumph, 18–20.

Notes 193

65 Yeats, ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1893) and ‘Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (1903) in Collected. Yeats also wrote on ‘the children of Dana’, ‘Lu’, etc. – see Hutton, Triumph, 244–45 and Yeats, Writings. 66 Sharp, ed., with notes by Cecil Sharp, Lyra. E.g. druids in Brooke, ‘Song’ (99), the Christian god in Tynan, ‘Winter Sunset’ (174), shee in Boyd, ‘Lianhuan Shee’ (95) and ‘the Danaan shore’ in Yeats, ‘White Birds’ (183). Elizabeth’s husband William wrote Scottish novels under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod, further destabilizing both national and gender identities – see Hutton, Triumph, 28; Blood, 330 and on Yeats, Triumph, 155–56. Hunt, Popular; Bottrell, who described himself as ‘an old Celt’, collected Cornish folklore in Traditions. Allen’s fairy story ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’ appeared in The Illustrated London News. Thanks to Alex Murray for alerting me to this. 67 Evans-Wentz, Fairy-Faith. 68 Eliot, Wasteland in Selected Poems, 51–74. On Eliot and non-Christian religion see Harmon, ‘T.S. Eliot’, Narayana Rao, ‘T.S. Eliot’ and McCarthy, ‘T.S. Eliot’. 69 Jones, Parenthesis. 70 Auden, ‘Spain 1937’ in Another, 24. Toynbee, ‘Menace’. On pagan socialism see E. Belfort Bax in Chapter 5. Orwell, Clergyman’s, 56, 175. 71 Although see Chapter 5 for one, by Mitchison, and below for Fortune’s novels. But see also Chapter 5 for the ‘crisis of civilization’ literature of the period, led by classicists. On Satanism and Crowley see Hutton, Triumph, 171–80. 72 Graves, unposted letter 22 August 1959, quoted in Lindop, ‘Introduction’ to Graves, White, xx; Graves, ‘In Broken Images’, in Collected, 62. 73 As with everything about the book, even these dates are disputable. Graves dated the first edition to 1946, when he finished it, while the account given by Lindop curiously contradicts the publication data on the reverse of the title page of his edition. Clearly, however, as Lindop demonstrates, the 1960/61 edition was a revised one and was still being revised in 1961 (Lindop, ‘Introduction’, xvii–xix). 74 On the history of the white goddess in literature see Bourke, ‘Moon’s’. 75 Graves, White, 24, 56–57, 40, 98, 67, 21; see also ‘White Goddess’ in Collected, 157 and Lindop, ‘Introduction’ for Graves on Davies (viii). Seymour, Robert Graves, 306–16. She identifies Frazer and Jane Harrison as the most important influences but describes Davies as ‘unbalanced’ (he only looks insane until one has read enough comparative mythologists). On the poet as soldier of the Muse, see Kohli, ‘Necessary’, 54 and on Graves, war and the dying god, see Seymour, 314. On David Graves’ poetry see R.P. Graves, Robert Graves, 110–11. On the Virgin Mary as goddess see Graves, ‘Birth of a Goddess’ and on female druids ‘Druid Love’, in Collected, 485, 505. A parallel study was Levy’s Gate, which also examines the origin of epic poetry and continuation of prehistoric motifs into the present, but it was much less influential than the book by the already-famous Graves. 76 Lindop, ‘White’, 35. Lindop wonders if the book plays a trick on readers, obscuring its conclusions deliberately (like Frazer). On Graves see Hutton, Triumph, 188–93 and Pagan, 145. 77 On Graves, modernism and Georgian poets see Firla, ‘White’. Ironically, many of the poets Graves disliked were also flirting with paganism, however defined – see Eliot above as the best-known example. 78 Henty, Beric. 79 Henty was well-used to battlefields as a war correspondent and imperialist as well as a writer of educative books for ‘lads’; see the Henty Society website. 80 On Hole see Petch, ‘Christina Hole’; Ellis Davidson and Brown, ‘Christina Hole’; and Hole, Dictionary. On Briggs, www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/handlists/ 157MS1309Briggs.pdf; Briggs, Anatomy, Pale and British. On Fortune, see Clifton, ‘Novels’, which includes discussion of the ‘Isis’ novel, Sea, and Hutton, Triumph, 180–88; Spence, Mysteries, 200, 246 and Hutton, Blood, 344 and Pagan, 141–42.

194 Notes

81 82

83

84 85 86 87 88

89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

On Marten, see Whitlock, Search and Marten, ‘Letter’. One of Hutton’s oft-cited members of this group is Massingham (e.g., Triumph, 121–22). For more details see my ‘Old’ (forthcoming). Lethbridge, Gogmagog, 4–5, 13, 14, 33, and also quoted in Gibson, ‘Old’. Hutton, Triumph, 274–75, 364. Bayley, Archaic, vol. 1, 194; Spence, Mysteries, 170. Bayley’s book is an alphabet-soup of deities, relying on word association for its deductions and on Bryant and Faber (vol. 1, 125). He also wrote on symbols (Lost). His works were reviewed in Folklore and elsewhere (e.g., Lost in Folklore 24:4 (December, 1913) 531–33 and Isis 43:3 (September 1952) 301–2) and he wrote to Folklore himself in 1951 on the subject of reindeer, connecting Father Christmas to Diana. On Ogmios and Cernunnos see Hutton, Pagan, 151, 217. Murray, Witch, 11–12, 29, 60, 186; Murray, God, 23. Murray began her career with books on Egyptian stories such as Legends and continued to work on temples and Egyptian rites (Egyptian; Legends), which read as if they were by a different scholar. On Murray as an archaeologist see Drower, ‘Margaret Alice Murray’. Her work on witchcraft has been sufficiently critiqued by Cohn, Europe’s and is discussed in Oates and Wood, Coven and Simpson, ‘Margaret Murray’. For her life see Murray, First, 34, 62, 65, 104, 179, 181, 196–99, 205. See Hutton, Triumph, 194–201. Murray, God, 29; Koch, ed., Celtic vol. 2:396. Gardner, High, 8, 14; on Gardner and the creation of modern witchcraft, see Hutton, Triumph, 205–40 (on High, 224–26), as well as Bracelin, Gerald Gardner and Heselton, Gerald Gardner. Valiente, Rebirth, 39. Valiente, Charge, 16, 24, 40, 44, 54. See also Valiente’s interview in Akhtar and Humphries, Far, 54–59, and Hutton, Triumph, 246, 309–12. Alongside both of these traditions was a third: those writers who drew on paganism to create their own deities, sagas and languages. The most prominent were Tolkien and Lewis, but there were many others (Peake, Gemmell, etc.): see Gray, Fantasy and Hutton, ‘Inklings’ on pagan elements in Lewis and Tolkien. In an interview with Fisher quoted in Garner, ‘Sword’, 3; Mort, ‘Social’, 381. Mort attributes to Sutcliff the combination of ‘a Kiplingesque belief in the grand sweep of history with a miniaturist’s eye for detail’ (380). Sutcliff acknowledged Kipling’s influence, e.g., in her autobiography, Blue, 53–54; Withrington, ‘Interview’, 55; and in her appearance on the radio programme Desert Island Discs (Sutcliff, ‘Interview’). Marcus is named after the De Aquilas in Kipling, Puck as are his descendants in the later novels. Wright notes some basic similarities in ‘Shadows’. On Frazerian ideas in Sutcliff see Hutton, Triumph, 285 (and on Kipling, 152–54) and Talcroft, Death, although the latter reads these themes into a large number of episodes because its sources are Lethbridge, Graves and Murray. Stewart, Crystal, 159. Sutcliff, Eagle, 165, 64–65, 86, 121, 193–94. See also the light symbolism in Lantern. Detter, ‘Recommended’. Hill, ‘Mercian Hymns’ in New, 107. Sherry, Uncommon, 133; Bedient, ‘Thick’, 35; see also Horner, ‘Cernunnos’. Wicker (directed by Hardy); the remake (Wicker, directed by La Bute), Burley’s detective novel Wycliffe and the Scapegoat, the spoof film Hot Fuzz (directed by Wright). See also my ‘Wicker’ for further discussion. Pinner, Ritual, 7. Brown, Inside, 12–14. Pinner, 103–7, 78–81, 193–94, 188. Lomas, ‘Poetry’, 421. Letters from Hughes quoted in Seymour, 328. Holkeboer, ‘Review’, 467; Stevenson, ‘Recognition’, 322.

Notes 195

101 As if to add insult, he misspelt its title: Muldoon, ‘Review of Gaudette’, 13 (thanks to Nick Groom for pointing me to this); Moynahan, ‘Review’, 299. See also more positively Cooney, ‘Gaudete’, 2436. 102 Hughes, Gaudete, 65–66, 110, 113–14, 142, 145–47, 177, 179, 183–84. The tension between realism and surrealism is explored in Dickie, ‘Ted Hughes’. Dickie suggests Hughes is looking for a way of ‘naming what does not exist’ (62); Faas, ‘Ted Hughes’. 103 Lomas, 422–23; and he regards the poem as a ‘farrago’ of Gravesian materials. 104 Hughes, Lupercal (e.g., ‘Witches’) and Shakespeare. 105 Hughes, Remains especially ‘Where the Mothers’, ‘Bridestones’ and ‘The weasels we smoked out of the bank’. In contrast, Skea sees the poems of Remains as driven by energetic goddess paganism (‘Regeneration’) while Bedient (35) thinks the collection ‘slack, unfelt’ (surely wrongly). 106 Hart, ‘Seamus Heaney’, 76–90. 107 Heaney, Opened, 317. 108 Clayton, Temple, 15; Hutton, Pagan, 218. 109 Quoting an interview given by Heaney to Brandes, Tobin suggests that in poetry the challenge is to ‘keep the well spurting up in a dry place’, despite grief’s emptiness or a culture’s passing, a task that demands ‘a mixture of votive action and pure gift’, which balances its abstract and concrete elements. ‘Votive action’ suggests Grotus’ actual stone altar, an artefact offered up to a goddess believed to be real, whilst the ‘well’ has become a metaphor. Tobin, Passage, 240. 110 Dillon, ‘Classical’. 111 Vendler, Seamus Heaney, 127. 112 Ingelbien, ‘Mapping’, 645.

4 ‘I wonder what Wotan will say to me’ 1 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Manuscript E (Peterborough Chronicle) Bodleian Laud Misc. 636, ff.25v–26r. Scragg, ‘Introduction’, 3. 2 Bede, History, 62–63, 331. On this passage and related portrayals see Foley and Higham, ‘Bede’. 3 Annales Cambriae, 447–954, e.g., entries for 850, 853 and 866. This combines BL Harleian MS 3859, National Archives MS E164/1 and BL MS Cotton Domitian A.I (see Redknap, ‘Vikings’). Roberts conjectured that some Norwegians might have been of Moorish descent in 1811 (Chronicle … Tysilio, 366), an idea that has been explored intermittently since. 4 Seaton, Literary, 204; Wawn, Vikings, 3. 5 Battle of Brunanburh, Parker Chronicle, Corpus Christi College MS 173 A f.26r: ‘siþþan eastan hider/Engle and Seaxe up becoman,/ofer brad brimu Brytene sohtan,/ wlance wigsmiþas, Weallas ofercoman,/eorlas arhwate eard begeatan’, a translation by Dobbie in Carroll, ‘Viking’, 331; Fee and Leeming, eds., Gods, 162. 6 See Carroll, ‘Engla’ for the translation and on the poem’s context in the Christian literature of kingship. 7 Battle of Maldon, MS Cotton Otho A xii, lost but transcribed as MS Rawlinson B203. There has been dispute about how far the poem is structured by religious division: see Blake, ‘Battle’ and Cross, ‘Oswald’. Mills, ‘Byrhtnoth’s’ argued that Byrhtnoth made his fatal mistake in response to a taunt about his religion but the poem does not make this clear. Swanton provides a survey of the poem’s ambiguity in ‘Battle’ and Pulsiano, ‘Danish’ reviews the contemporary debate. 8 Carroll, ‘Viking’, 345–46; Gunnell, ‘Viking’. 9 Cotton Vitellius A xv, Nowell Codex (91(93)r). 10 Harrison, ‘Historicall’, 98.

196 Notes

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Camden, Britannia, ‘English-Saxons’. Bremmer, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, 148. Seaton, 245; Magnus, Historia, 100–2. Verstegan, Restitution, xv, xvii, 7–9, 48, 54–66. Bremmer, 146; although Parry points out that Verstegan reverenced James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and may have had pure motives for offering his work to James, including to establish the patriotic loyalty of Catholics (Parry, Trophies, 51). On the figures’ likeness to masque performers see Parry, Trophies, 60. Seaton, 245–46. Ermensewl is armed, and complexly ornamented with banners and escutcheons bearing the symbols of a rose, scales, a cock, a bear, a lion and so on. The Irminsul was a pillar mentioned first in Rudolf of Fulda’s De Miraculis Sancti Alexandri in the ninth century as having been destroyed by Charlemagne (Bremmer). Further names are: ‘Flynt’, mounted on a flint stone and representing death; Helmsteed, Crono, Fidegast, Siwe, the last four only noted in passing in the text. Selden in Drayton and Selden, Poly-Olbion, vol 2, 39. Middleton, Mayor, 55, 74. The only available Christian hero, Constantius, is murdered early in the play. The play’s chorus is Higden (just as Gower narrated Shakespeare’s Pericles) and the play also bears a strong resemblance to Middleton’s Changeling and Revenger’s Tragedy, especially in its female characters. From these indications it has been dated to the early 1620s by Holdsworth (‘Date’) and Briggs (‘New’). See Scragg, ‘Saxons’, 94–95 for a list of contemporary Anglo-Saxon plays and Ireland, Vortigern. The Prose Edda is thought to have been written down by Sturluson in the thirteenth century. A second version, the Poetic Edda, was rediscovered in 1643. See Larrington, ed., Poetic and Byock, ed., Prose. The Poetic Edda contains, in particular, the Voluspa, a story of Odin and the creation, and the Hávamál, in which Odin sacrifices himself to gain the wisdom of the runes. Spelman pioneered the study of Anglo-Saxon law, compiling a glossary of hitherto ill-defined law. This gave specificity to the growing association of Anglo-Saxons with legal freedoms (Archaeologusi; Parry, Trophies, 157–81); Browne discusses Saxon placenames and archaeology in Hydriotaphia and see Parry, Trophies, 247–60. Sheringham’s De Anglorum argued that the English were Germanic people but that the Phoenicians had also had significant influence in British culture; on the deities see 243, 284, 253–58. On runic and gothic see Seaton, 227–30, and on Browne, 236. Seaton also discusses seventeenth-century surveys’ repetitions of Camden and Verstegan’s work (248). Sammes, Britannia, 432–55, 447–52, 454–56; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta. Also important for the period was Hickes’ Linguarum, a philological work that pioneered a sense of a shared northern past (see Wawn, 19 and below, and on later eighteenthcentury works 19–24, 34). See Parry, Trophies, 339. Seaton, 255–56. Seaton, 248. Hutton, Triumph, 26, 35. Swinburne, ‘Hertha’ in Songs, 77. Dryden, King in Works, 17–21. Seaton, 234; Armistead, ‘Dryden’s’. Seaton, 257. Blackmore, Prince. Pope caricatured Blackmore in Dunciad: ‘all hail him victor in both gifts of song,/Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long’. On this friendly relationship between British and Scandinavian antiquarians see Seaton, passim. Farley, Scandinavian, 3–6. Texts by the Dane Bartholin and the Icelander Torfaeus are Gray’s particular sources (see below). Crane, ‘Early’, 30. Fairer, ‘Poems’, 404.

Notes 197

32 Brown, Athelstan, 18. See Hainsworth, ‘King’. Scragg, ‘Introduction’, 17; Richardson, ‘Atrocity’, which also discusses Mason’s Caractacus briefly. 33 Wawn, 24–27 on Percy and especially on competition with ‘Ossian’; on Gray, 28–30. See also Gray’s ‘Fatal Sisters’ of 1761. 34 Sayers, Dramatic. See Chandler, ‘Frank Sayers’. 35 Fisher, Masque; Hutton, Blood, 120. 36 Penrose’s poem is ‘Carousal of Odin’ at www.odins-gift.com/pclass/1pclass.htm; Percy’s volume Five appeared in 1763 with Gray’s Poems in 1768; Kalter, ‘DIY’, 991, 1010–12 and Gray quoted in Kalter, 1000–1. 37 Southey, ‘Race of Odin’ in Poems, 12. 38 Gerrard, Patriot, Chapter 5; particularly noteworthy is West’s poem Stowe: ‘Hail! Gods of our renown’d Fore-Fathers, hail!’ quoted by Gerrard. The poem celebrates Liberty as exemplified by Woden, Freya, Thor, etc. 39 Mortensen, ‘Descent’, 213–14. See also Kliger, Goths and Hill, Puritanism, 50–122. On Percy more generally see Groom, Making. 40 Southey, letter to Thomas Phillipps Lamb, c. 18 July 1792. Wawn, 188. 41 Mallet, Northern (1755–56 in two volumes under different titles, trans. Percy in 1770 in one volume), 50–58. Southey quoted in Wright, ‘Southey’s’, 149; Mortensen, 214–15. 42 Southey, letter to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 6–8 November 1793. 43 Connell, ‘British’. 44 Carlyle, Heroes. Carlyle saw the worship of humans as a distressing mistake, but not a con-trick (5–6). Instead, paganism was allegorical (9) and northern paganism a particularly ‘genuine … great and manlike’ enquiry (31). It was not graceful like Greek paganism, but it chose in its chief god, Odin, ‘a Teacher, and captain of Soul and Body’ (35). 45 Quoted in Wright, ‘Southey’s’, 153. 46 Mortensen, 212; I rather disagree that Southey’s Odin poems were a reversion to Mallet’s position – for me, their early date makes them part of that original trend which Southey, like others, later abandoned. The poems have continuing relevance for modern pagans: for many of the poems (or extracts) discussed here see the Asatru poetry website at www.odins-gift.com/pclass/1pclass.htm. 47 Scott, Harold, Canto 6, stanza 13; Wawn, 66. 48 Mortensen, 221–23. 49 Rawlins and Valentine, Hall, 3–4, 6–9, 11; Wawn, 206–7. Traditional Odinic works continued intermittently: Lisle Bowles’ ‘Hymn to Woden’ refers to Woden not Odin but is otherwise conventionally eighteenth-century – Gothic gore and masculine valour (Lisle Bowles, Poetical, 113). Odin, valkyries and Sigurd also populated, among others, the poetry of Hemans (Poetical, e.g., ‘Valkyriur Song’, 258), Borrow (Romantic, which contained translations from modern and ancient northern poets), Drummond (Odin on Odin as a king) and Smedley, ‘Odin’s Sacrifice’ (which portrays the god as ‘angry … ruthless’, ‘tremendous, cold’ (298, 303) bringing plague and demanding blood (Poems)). 50 Pratt, ‘Anglo-Saxon’; Sanders, ‘Utter’. 51 Bulwer-Lytton, Harold; Moore discusses Hilda and witchcraft, and Bulwer-Lytton’s own interest in magic, in ‘Bulwer-Lytton’s’. Bulwer-Lytton’s magical lore comes from Turner’s section on witchcraft in History (below). See Williams, ‘Forgetting’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonism’. 52 Parker, England’s, 35, 41, 129. See also Stout, Creating, 56–57 on Anglo-Saxons and Teutons. 53 Parker, England’s, 152–60; Turner, History; Palgrave, History partly reworked as History of the Anglo-Saxons; and Green, Making. Parker surveys the impact of these works (39). 54 Palgrave, 41–44. Francis Cohen became Palgrave since it was his new wife’s mother’s maiden surname. The History of the Anglo-Saxons was a composite

198 Notes

55 56

57 58

59

60 61 62

63 64 65 66

67 68 69

work of 1876 dedicated to the Quaker Saxon scholar and archaeologist Anna Gurney. Green, Making, 167. The marginal heading is a reinforcement: ‘Its weak hold on Englishmen’. Arnold, ‘Balder Dead’ in Poems, 3–41 (38, 69–70); Buchanan, Balder; Page, ‘Balder’; Herford, Norse, 14 – this is, after all, ‘Dover Beach’ Arnold; Ryals, ‘Arnold’s’ points to Arnold’s sources (Carlyle, Gray, Mallet and the eddic tradition) but also to his reinvention of Norse mythology as representing the boredom and aimlessness of modernity and Balder’s near-relief at the oblivion promised by Hell (68–69); Raisor, ‘Matthew Arnold’s’ examines how biographical the poem is. See also Cayley, ‘Death’. O’Donoghue surveys nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to Icelandic literature in Old, Chapter 5, and see also Frantzen and Niles, Anglo-Saxonism. Phillpotts, ‘Wyrd’. Morris, ‘Prophecy’ in Earthly Paradise, 252, 255–56. The book collects stories from assorted mythologies, including Icelandic: Morris was translating and publishing Icelandic works from 1869 to 1873, and published The Story of Sigurd the Volsung in 1876, from the Volsunga Saga and the Edda. See also Magnusson and Palsson, eds., Laxdaela. On the sagas (Morris’ was the first publication of part of the Laxdaela Saga in English) see Maurer, ‘William Morris’; Harris, ‘William Morris’; Boos, ‘Morris’; and Julian, ‘Laxdaela’ especially on the removal of ‘fairy-tale elements’ to focus on ‘fatalism’ (359). On Morris and wyrd see Wawn, 54, 245–82; on other saga-based works and Balder, 203–6, including Arnold and Buchanan’s poems; on fateful story in his work see Tucker, ‘All’; Swinburne, ‘Hertha’ (see also Chapter 3) and Sawhney, ‘Gestalt’; and on the relationship between the ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ and ‘Hertha’ (Swinburne described ‘Hertha’ as ‘a modern companion-in-arms-andmetre’ to ‘Hymn’); Greenberg, ‘Swinburne’. Lewis quoted in Carpenter, Inklings 4–5. Specifically, the poem was Longfellow’s ‘Tegner’s Drapa’. These are explored in my ‘Tholing’ (forthcoming). Ransome wrote an ‘Introduction’ to Collingwood’s Thorstein explaining how it had influenced his Swallows and Amazons stories. Collingwood was a member of the thriving Viking Society for Northern Research, founded in 1892 – see Townsend, ‘Viking’. Shippey surveys Vikings in popular culture and their triumph over Anglo-Saxons in ‘Undeveloped’. Carpenter, Intermediate, 77. Both poems appear in Larrington, ed. Freud, ‘Das “Unheimliche”’. Orkneyinga Saga has the fullest description of it, when the Earl of Orkney, the Norwegian-born Torf-Einarr, orders his men to ‘carve an eagle’ onto the back of a fallen enemy, cut his ribs from his backbone and draw the lungs out. The saga was written down in Iceland in around 1230, describing tenth-century events. See Palsson and Edwards, ed., Orkneyinga; Frank, ‘Viking’; Coupland, ‘Vikings’. Benson and Benson, Temple, 183, 189. ‘The Blood-Eagle’ was first published in R. H. Benson, The Light Invisible (1903); on Benson’s profound sentimental Catholicism see an obituary by Devas, ‘Monsignor Benson’. Kipling, Rewards and ‘Gods’; Archibald, ‘Religion’, 61. Annan, ‘Kipling’s’, 332; Whitlark, ‘Kipling’s’, 30; Coates, Day’s, 52. On differences between the Anglo-Saxon Weland and later rewritings see Bradley, ‘Sorcerer’. Weland originates in the Poetic Edda as a superhuman smith and appears in several Old English poems including Deor (from the Exeter Book, Exeter Cathedral Library, a tenth-century collection) and Beowulf. Kipling, Puck, 16–19, 22; Hall, ‘Ancestral’, 309–10; Lewis, ‘References’. The radical liberal Bishop Percival; Bourchier was later the charismatic rector of St. Jude’s, Hampstead, both quoted in Pearson, ‘Islam’, 61. Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’: the story first appeared in Nash’s and Pall Mall Gazette (September 1915) and The Century (September 1915) with the title ‘How Does Your Garden Grow’.

Notes 199

70 Page, ‘What’. See also Firchow, ‘Mary Postgate’ and Death, in which Firchow repeats Dobrée’s assertion that the story is a compassionate one, not embodying hatred but describing it, and then critiques it with reference to Kipling as a ‘Hun-hater’. Here, Mary is a version of his explanation for justified though deeply problematized hatred (103–8). An impromptu debate on ‘The Victorian Web’ in 2000 produced three completely different readings: Cody’s ‘Mary Postgate’, Hutchinson’s ‘Rudyard Kipling’s’ and a second posting by Hutchinson with the same title but containing the comments of Stuart. Bradshaw concludes that ‘the pagan and the Christian have fused’ in Mary’s domestic monstrosity in ‘Kipling’, 88 – Kipling may mean Mary’s fire to be pagan, but this is otherwise a rather broad reading of ‘paganism’. 71 Ramsden, Don’t, 91–97. The misreading of Kipling is a rare slip in a good book. Tate lists other critical readings of the story as an expression of hatred in Modernism, 32. 72 Collings, ed., Classic, 254. Originally published in Border Ghost Stories in 1919 (as were the other two Pease tales discussed here). 73 Pease, ‘Doppel-ganger’. 74 Pease, ‘Cliff Land’. Pease reworked this notion in ‘The Prior of Tynemouth’, where the Prior, a converted Danish invader, inadvertently kills his own son when the young man besieges his priory. 75 Ireland, Episodes, 82, 92. 76 Ramsden, 166; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 486. 77 Coward, ‘Don’t’ in Noël Coward. 78 Hunter Blair, Roman, 25, 83; ‘Peter Hunter Blair’, 10. 79 Hunter Blair, letter. 80 Frenchman, ‘Finding’, 12. 81 Wilson, ‘Sutton Hoo’, 1–12, 6. 82 Sutcliff, Lantern, 31–45, 52, 77 and Dawn, 167–69; Beowulf; Blood. See also the archive of Sutcliffeana at http://rosemarysutcliff.com, and also Lancelyn Green’s Myths. 83 The dialogue between creative writers and archaeological scholars was demonstrated when Hoppitt discussed Sutcliff’s Beowulf in an ‘Editorial’ in the newsletter of the Sutton Hoo Society. Likewise in a talk to Tha Engliscan Gesithas/The English Companions in 1986, Herbert (see below) linked her ‘hero’ Oswy to the Sutton Hoo treasure, imagining him offering a similar amount to her ‘villain’ Penda (Herbert, ‘Penda’), and she repeatedly uses Sutton Hoo as a reference point (e.g., in Peace, 11). The Sutton Hoo Society publishes related poetry on its website, www. suttonhoo.org – e.g. Mann’s ‘Roots’. 84 Stout, Creating, 221. 85 The closest comparison comes in Fanthorpe’s 1987 ‘Unfinished’, which sensitively inserts events of German aggression from 1938 to 1939 into the narrative of the dig in the form of chronicle entries (Thwaite, ed., Ruins, 56–58). See also Preston, Dig for an evocative novel of the excavation. Despite the fact that excavation has ceased, Sutton Hoo is still called ‘the dig’ by local people, as the taxi-driver who took me there proved: ‘You’re going to the dig, are you?’ 86 Bruce-Mitford, Sutton, 7. 87 See Kendrick, Kitzinger and Allen, ‘Sutton’, ii, 124–25, which points out, in Kitzinger’s section, that Saulos would not be inscribed on a liturgical object but posits that the spoon might have been brought by pilgrims as some kind of relic or gift; Kitzinger, ‘Sutton’; Kaske, ‘Silver’, 670–72 contrasts the spoons, arguing that Saulos is not related to Paulos except perhaps as a copy, unless it is of deliberately poor workmanship to suggest unregenerate man. Sherlock, ‘Saul’, 91–95 ingeniously explains that Saul did not change his name upon conversion but bore both names, Jewish and Roman.

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88 Chadwick first suggested Raedwald largely on the grounds of the pagan nature of the burial (Kendrick, Kitzinger and Allen, 114). 89 Carver, Sutton, 31, 41, 50; Million; Bede, History, 197, 122–25. 90 Branston, Lost. 91 Ellis Davidson, Gods and ‘Human’. She wrote extensively for Folklore on northern paganism. 92 ‘They share a common worship of Nerthus, or Mother Earth. They believe that she takes part in human affairs, riding in a chariot among her people. On an island of the sea stands an inviolate grove, in which, veiled with a cloth, is a chariot that none but the priest may touch. The priest can feel the presence of the goddess in this holy of holies and attends her with deepest reverence as her chariot is drawn along by cows. Then follow days of rejoicing and merrymaking in every place that she condescends to visit and sojourn in. No-one goes to war, no-one takes up arms; every iron object is locked away. Then, and only then, are peace and quiet known and welcomed, until the goddess, when she has had enough of the society of men, is restored to her sacred precinct by the priest. After that, the chariot, the vestments, and (believe it if you will) the goddess herself, are cleansed in a secluded lake. This service is performed by slaves who are immediately afterwards drowned … ’ (Tacitus, Agricola, 134–35). On Chadwick and in review of the similarity of northern European goddesses see Ellis Davidson, Roles (on ‘Kybele’ and Nerthus, 57). 93 North, Heathen, 26–28, 44–45, 56, 64. 94 North, 322. 95 On Gardner, Valiente and the book see Chapter 3. 96 Gardner, High, 2–3, 76, 37, 61. 97 Gardner, High, 8, 5, 14, 17. 26, 32–36, 45, 55, 63–64, 69.

5 New ages: melting the ice-gods 1 Lubbock, Pre-historic, 1, 3. Fictions of the Mesolithic – a later concept – will be discussed in Chapter 6. 2 Borlase, Naenia; Dolmens. 3 Tylor, Primitive, vol. 1, 3. 4 Lubbock, Origin, 1. On Tylor and Lubbock see Hutton, Triumph, 3–4, and Blood, 297–99 and on stratification, Bennett, ‘Geologists’. On anthropology in the period, Kuklick, Savage. 5 Frazer, Golden, ed. Fraser, 46–59. This edition is preferred because it reinserts controversial passages omitted from the usually-consulted abridgement, and it is far more readable than any other. Like White Goddess, the reader needs all the help s/he can get with Golden Bough. On Frazer’s changing views, see Hutton, Triumph, 114–16 and on his and Tylor’s influence, see Hutton, Pagan, 112–31; Stout, Creating, 118–19. On the ‘myth-ritualists’, Ackerman, Myth and a reader, Segal, ed., Myth. 6 Frazer, Golden, 62–65, 511; Jerome, Three; Grossmith and Grossmith, Diary. 7 Frazer, Golden, 11, 13, 18. 8 Frazer, Golden, 153, 166, 173–81, 228–31. For the sacrificial victim as cementing community identity, Frazer drew on Robertson Smith, to whom he dedicated his book, especially Religion. 9 Frazer, Golden, 387–89. 10 Frazer Golden, 358–59, 361–62, 364, 395. 11 For example, Osiris as the inventor of farming (Frazer, Golden, 367). 12 Frazer, Golden, 554, 83–93, 100, 320, 255–58, 280. 13 ‘The theory that Christ was put to death, not as a criminal, but as the annual representative of a god, whose counterparts were well known all over Western Asia,

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

may help to explain his early deification and the rapid spread of his worship,’ Frazer carefully suggested. But even this extremely ginger marginal note was so inflammatory that Frazer and his wife Lilly cut it from their abridgement of 1922, gutting Golden Bough of one of its central conclusions; Frazer, Golden, 674; Fraser, ed., ‘Introduction’, xli. Harrison, Themis, xix, 494. See also Prolegomena. On Harrison more generally, see Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison; Beard, Invention, which interrogates Harrison’s centrality and questions the existence of a ‘myth-ritualist’ school (especially 112–19); Robinson, Life; Hutton, Triumph, 37, 124. Murray, Witch, 19, 12. Frazer, Totemism and Golden; Lang, below and see also Secret. Freud thought Tylor, Lubbock and earlier writers overlooked the sexual aspect of early life in particular (Totem, 18) and Frazer certainly shied away from such discussion in later editions of his work. Freud, Totem, 27–29. Freud, Totem, 81–82, 14, 104–4, 107, 184–89, where Freud cites Frazer and Robertson Smith. Conan Doyle, Sign. Gardner, Macnicol, Endicott, Rayner and Geissner, ‘Littleknown’, 2–7. Frank, ‘Dreaming’; Harris, ‘Pathological’. Conan Doyle, Lost, 160–65. Tylor, Primitive, vol. 1, 7. Tylor, Primitive, vol. 2, 452–53. Ruddick, Fire, 26; Francophone prehistoric fiction flourished thereafter, with the best-known text becoming Rosny’s La Guerre, partly because in 1981 Annaud made it into a film, Quest for Fire (ICC/Ciné Trail). Lang, ‘Romance’. See www.trussel.com/prehist/lang.htm, part of an invaluable resource on prehistoric fiction. Sparks, ‘Intersection’. Wells, Story. Kipling, ‘Neolithic’. Kipling, Rewards. For further discussion of Kipling see Chapter 4. Haggard, Allan, 33, 230, 50, 259; Pringle, ‘Introduction’ to the above, v–xii. Overy, Morbid; Jane Harrison’s collaborator Gilbert Murray was an important contributor to the debate on civilization, as was the classicist G. Lowes Dickinson. Swift, Modest; Fowler Wright, Dream, Chapter 30. Fowler Wright’s story in particular rambles and is quite hard to follow. In a review of his Deluge (see below), Kincaid describes him as having ‘a talent for digression’ and ‘baroque linguistic curlicues’ (‘Apres’). On Dream see Weinkauf, Sermons, 71–73. Allen, Evolution; Jevons, Introduction and later in Idea. Lang, Introduction, Making, based on the Gifford Lectures. Romans 1:19. See also Oppenheim, Other; Welch, Protestant and Symondson, ed., Protestant. On Lang, see Stout, Creating, 118–19. Parrinder, ‘H.G. Wells’; Glover, ‘Religious’, 117–35. Wells, First, 66–67; God, 150–55, 84; Glover, 122–25; Wells’ god was finite, having originated in prehistory but was a being in his own right and not a Jungian archetype; his plan for humanity was a collective push towards shared goals with himself as a kind of Darwinian Leviathan in which the state was god – see Glover, 126–28, 132 for an acute summary; Archer, God, 32; for the controversy with Belloc see Belloc, Companion; Wells, Mr. Belloc; Belloc, Mr. Belloc. Wells is still regarded by creationists as an example of the ills of Darwinism: Bergman, ‘H.G. Wells’. Kipling, Rewards. On Kipling and religion see Allen, ‘Ruddy’s’; Salessis, ‘God’; Archibald, ‘Religion’, 60; Wilson, ‘Kipling’, 18–20. Kipling stated that Puck and Rewards were to be read by children before the readers realized they were meant for adults (Something of Myself quoted in Lewis, ‘References’, 192).

202 Notes

39 Archbishop Williams explored these tensions in a sermon to mark the 70th anniversary of Kipling’s death at www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1604/ rudyard-kipling-sermon. 40 Fowler Wright, Deluge. 41 Stableford’s ‘Introduction’ to Deluge l–lii; Stableford, ‘Foreword’ to S. Fowler Wright’s. See the story ‘Choice’ (1932) for the full bleakness of his vision. Weinkauf, 13. For a calmer view of the atheist Palaeolithic see Williams’ People (below, Chapter 6). 42 Hutton, Triumph, 151–52. The Haggard family had Danish roots, hence the Norse interest. 43 Senior, ‘Spirituality’, 264–68. 44 Haggard, Days, 153; Brantlinger, Taming, 171. In She, Ayesha explains to Quatermain that Isis, Aphrodite and so on are principles of nature, but he does not believe her (Senior, ‘Spirituality’, 278) and Haggard continued to explore the theme in later work. Senior describes Haggard’s entire output as driven by ‘the fear of a finite world of death and oblivion, born of rational scientific thought’ and ultimately finding no comfort in religion (291). Contextually see also Cohen, Rider Haggard; Ellis, H. Rider Haggard; and Green, Passing. 45 Hilliers, Master-Girl, 18, 21, 90, 40, 225–26, 241. 46 Wallis was a magistrate, part-time zoologist at Reading Museum, an amateur literary critic, archaeologist and historian. All these activities informed his fiction, but most notable is his insistence on the superiority of his heroine as an individual, and women’s right to equality in general. See also Ruddick, ‘Courtship’. Wallis gave papers on ‘Piltdown Woman’ and witchcraft to his local book club, as well as a paper critical of the fiction of Wells: see Beck, ‘Mary’; Reading Experience Database; Reading Museum’s ‘Henry Marriage Wallis’ page. 47 It is tempting to speculate that Wallis might have known Leland’s Aradia, since his Dianic religion has elements of Leland’s; see my Witchcraft for further discussion of Aradia and Leland’s influence in modern goddess religions as well as Hutton, Triumph, 141–48. 48 Austin, When, 9, 11, 23, 31. Austin was a short story writer for the Strand Magazine and a playwright: ‘Frederick Britten Austin’, 7. 49 Austin, Tomorrow, 2, 4–5, 6–7, 9–20, 17, 23–29. Her likeness to Isis is emphasized when she searches for her lover’s dismembered body and then mandates similar dismemberment for his murderer, her brother. Her lover is also her totemic brother, as Isis was Osiris’ sister. 50 Mitchison, Corn, Canongate edition with new Preface, viii and Virago edition, 238, 240–41, 243, 245. This is one of several Plowing Eves (Mitchison’s spelling) and harvest rites in the book. For Mitchison on Lang, see Calder, Nine, 5 and on Erif Der, 96–100. See also Benton, Naomi Mitchison. A further context for Mitchison’s interest in paganism is her first novel, The Conquered, which deals partly with a ‘Shining’ British god, probably Belenus. Bax, ‘Pagan’, 10. This tradition is Greek paganism (see Chapter 3 for its strength in this period) and although Bax acknowledges no deities he tries to answer assertions that socialism is anti-spiritual. Toynbee based his fears of ‘New Paganism’ on this view. See also Bax, ‘Socialism’, 2 with Frazerian emphasis on the incompatibility of Christian asceticism and social good but an insistence that religion and politics can be united; and an outright attack on Christian socialism in ‘Unscientific’. Bax was the editor of Justice and a social democratic associate of Morris. 51 Carpenter, Civilisation. 52 On Carpenter and his circle see Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter and Gagnier, ‘Literary’. 53 Wells, ‘Grisly’, 1–2, 6. Neanderthals eat their own and modern human children and have no domestic lives (14–15, 5). Atkinson, ‘Primal’. Atkinson helped originate the notion of the primal horde (hunter-gatherer group) in which the sons kill their father

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55 56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69

to attain dominance; Freud incorporated this into the Oedipus complex. The importance of society in evolving human mind and culture was revisited in 1976 when Humphrey argued that consciousness evolved only as a means of coping reactively with other people. No society, then, no human thought at all, like Wells’ bestial Neanderthals (Humphrey, ‘Social’). Both kinds of Diffusionist focused primarily on the Neolithic, but here their work is discussed in the context of the Palaeolithic because creative writers transported it there, lodging it uneasily alongside Neanderthals. A few tens of thousands of years are easily mislaid in creative fiction. Childe, Dawn; Elliot Smith, especially Ancient and Diffusion; Perry, Children. Elliot Smith, Human, 73, 190. Evans, Coming. As a children’s book, this takes Perry and Smith’s theories literally; Frazer is also referenced along with Sollas, Ancient and Peake and Fleure, Hunters. Finally Wells’ ‘Grisly’ provides the depiction of Neanderthals as ‘ogres’ to be ruthlessly exterminated (Evans, 255–56). Sollas is the source that most clearly justifies this genocide: and on Sollas as the precursor of Elliot Smith’s theory of progress through migration, see Sommer, ‘Ancient’. The Children, or a version of them, are best known today as the Goa’uld, power-hungry aliens who foist religion on humanity in the science fiction film Stargate (directed by Emmerich) and T.V. sequels Emmerich revisits the theme in 10,000 BC. Treece, Golden, 14, 49, 96–99, 154, 196. Treece’s pre-Children of the Sun paganism is a version of Mitchison’s turned rapist and murdering. Stout, Creating, 72–89; on Peake, see 105. The National Hunger March, organized by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, was one of a series of marches protesting against unemployment from 1922 to 1936 of which the most famous is the 1936 Jarrow Crusade. See Morgan, Conflict, 242 and Layburn, Britain, 33. Mitchell, Three, 108, 72–73, 90, 97, 165, 99, 131, 158. Mitchell more famously wrote as Grassic Gibbon, and Diffusionism influences these books too. Golding, Inheritors, 9, 151, 167, 165–66, 168, 172. Golding, Inheritors, 225, 173. For the ‘shaman’ see Hutton, Pagan, 10–13 and Witches, 34, which points out that the cave-wall marking as seen today bears little resemblance to the famous sketch of it as a figure, clearly human, apparently wearing an animal skin and horns; Breuil, Four; Laming, Lascaux, 156. For Star Carr, excavated by Clark in 1949–51, see Clark, Star Carr and www.starcarr.com. Lok is pronounced to rhyme with ‘smoke’, as Golding explains in Carey, ‘William Golding’, 188. Golding, Inheritors, 145–47, 128–29, 224–25. For a Freudian/Lacanian reading of Oa see Sugimura, ‘Reconsideration’. For discussions of the episode and Oa see also Gindin, William Golding, 30–37; Oldsey and Weintraub, Art, 43–72; Peter, ‘Fables’, 585; Bowen, ‘Bending’, 608; Kermode, ‘Novels’, 19; Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor, ‘Approaches’, 122–25; and Tiger, William Golding, 68–101. Carey, 171–89 (178). Here Golding explains the death of the Neanderthal child, which many readers do not initially understand has happened. Golding, Inheritors, 28, 33, 35, 54, 84, 30, 88–91. Contemporary scientific opinion has swung from Wells’ view to Golding’s. Neanderthals’ large brain size may have been caused by needing to store knowledge about social interactions; Neanderthals could have lived in groups of about 150 with complex internal structures (Dunbar, ‘Social’). However, artefacts suggest smaller groups, and people who did not practise artistic decoration or cultural ritual. Mithen answers this contradiction with a theory of the compartmentalization of knowledges in early brains (Prehistory, 196–97, 152–53) and see also Singing. See also Klein, ‘Whither’.

204 Notes

70 Golding, Inheritors, 216–20. Satisfyingly, Lalueza-Fox et al, ‘A melanocortin’ suggests some Neanderthals might have had red hair. 71 Golding, Inheritors, 195. In 2007, when I began this book, it seemed most likely that humans and Neanderthals had not interbred, and were possibly antagonists. Now in 2012, evidence points the other way. For the debate see Bocquet-Appel and Demars, ‘Neanderthal’; Caramelli et al, ‘Evidence’; Currat and Excoffier, ‘Modern’; Green et al, ‘Analysis’; Noonan et al, ‘Sequencing’; Wall and Kim, ‘Inconsistencies’; Trinkaus, ‘Modern’, ‘Early’ and ‘Human’ (arguing the case for modern humanNeanderthal interbreeding); Krause et al, ‘Derived’ (discussing what has been described as the ‘language gene’); decisively, Green et al, ‘Draft’; and most recently Dalén et al, ‘Partial’. It now appears that all non-African humans are part Neanderthal and that Neanderthal extinction as a separate species was well under way before the arrival of modern humans in Europe. 72 Golding is not always so pessimistic, though prehistoric theology is mocked as pointless masculine time-wasting in ‘Clonk Clonk’, his novella of Palaeolithic Africa in Scorpion. See his comments on it in Carey, 184–85. Alterman, ‘Aliens’, 8. 73 Lewis, What, 49–51, 132–33. See also my ‘Past’ on Clive King’s 1963 novel Stig of the Dump. The religion of the novel is a possibly human-sacrificial one – a disturbing reversal of the genial ‘hippy’ ethic advocated on the whole – but this is left unclear since Stig is a children’s book. 74 These religions are related to the prehistoric-feminist fiction of the American novelist Auel, which features a lost world of women talking to ancient spirits. This is a world even before the Neanderthal present in which Auel sets her fiction, for in the world of her heroine Ayla male totem spirits of wind, mist and so on called names such as ‘Zheena’ and ‘Eeesha’ rule – Auel, Clan, 357. See also 359–60, 448, 482–84, 502–7 and 512 for their exploitative and bloody religion.

6 ‘Find me in your own time’ 1 These terms are broad and subdivisions were and are preferred by archaeologists. Childe in his 1940 Prehistoric strove to establish an ‘absolute chronology’ and wrote of ‘mesolithic’ period phenomena under the headings ‘epipalaeolithic survivors’, ‘Tardenoisian immigrants’, ‘Azilian strand-loopers’ and finally ‘mesolithic’ as a term to cover all these groups’ co-existent period (17–24). 2 It might be argued that Evans’ Coming (see Chapter 5) is the first, but its theoretical paradigm is Victorian-Edwardian: it encompasses Palaeolithic and Neolithic (Neanderthals and the ‘Children of the Sun’) without gap. Because Williams was a Marxist scholar – interested in societal superstructures – he writes precisely about historic eras. 3 Williams, People, vol. 1, i; Mullan, ‘Rebel’; Barnie, ‘People’, 170, 174; Birch, ‘Dark’, 19–20. See Milligan, Raymond Williams, Chapter 6; Pinkney, Raymond Williams; Gorak, Alien; Eldridge and Eldridge, Raymond Williams. But all concentrate on Williams’ fictions set in modernity. 4 Williams, People, vol. 1, 41–42, 52–57, 58. 5 Williams, ‘Culture’, 10–24; Long, 383. 6 Williams, People, vol. 1, 74. 7 Williams, People, vol. 1, 156, 161, 180, 183, 186–87, 212, 214, 222. Williams may imagine himself in the Measurer, come home from the distasteful class politics of Oxbridge and London. 8 Garner, Red, 20–21, 23–24. Kerrigan, ‘Divided’. 9 Gimbutas, Goddesses and Civilization; see also Meskell, ‘Goddesses’ for an assessment of her work. For Bachofen and Harrison see Chapters 3 and 5. On ancient goddess worship, see Hutton, Pagan, 4–6, 37–44. Stone goddess figures often point to the

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10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

Diffusionist idea of a goddess cult: the Canadian Kernaghan’s chalk ‘Mother’ figure in Sarsen, a Stonehenge story, for example 9–10. Bradley, Mists. I have given the date of the first British publication, after which Bradley’s work influenced British writers. Holland, Pillar, 7, 199. Hedges, Tomb (for the site see www.tomboftheeagles.co.uk). Burgess, Naomi Mitchison’s, 15. Mitchison, Early, 88, 92, 106–8, 93, 119, 165, 170, 175–76, 155, 8. Cornwell, Stonehenge, 5, 9, 19–20, 23–24, 46, 145, 192, 52, 81–82, 133, 142, 147, 170, 558, 196–97; for his autobiographical note see www.bernardcornwell.net/ about; the Peculiar People are now the Union of Evangelical Churches and state their beliefs at: www.uec-churches.net/beliefs. Lada, ‘Review’; Armistead, ‘Yucky’. Paver, Wolf, 112, 16, 40. For Paver’s account of her research see www.michellepaver. com/Features/p2_articleid/9 and www.michellepaver.com/Features/p2_articleid/7. Floriensis, ‘Review’. Wood, Cliff, 4, 364. Thanks to Jacqui for sending me her novel. It features sea and star goddesses, gods and the ‘devils of the dark lord’ (361). Religion is not wholly good: there is a queen who sacrifices her enemies to ‘evil Gods’ (241) and a corrupt shaman menacing the heroine (34, 38). But Mia is guided by a crystal and visions towards a destiny in a matriarchal, goddess-worshipping society (243, 279, 300, 356–65, 372–73). For Wood’s archaeological work see www.archaeologyonline.org/ Jacqui%20-%20Biography.html. Paver, 102. Erskine, Midnight, 131, 196, 511. Herbert, Bride, 18–19, 191–92. Fisher discusses Belin’s at www.catherine-fisher.com/ pages/books/belins_hill/synopsis.asp, crediting Garner’s and Machen’s inspiration. Fisher, Belin’s, 58, 62, 128. Fisher, Belin’s, 87, 98–99, 150, 156–57. Under the 1604 Witchcraft Act, the punishment for witchcraft was hanging, unless there was a complicating factor, but fire fits Fisher’s themes. The vicar is named John Mitchel, perhaps because it was the mystic antiquarian John Michell who ‘found’ and named the Belinus leyline. Senior explores Jungian theory, ‘Embodiment’, as does Matolcsy, ‘Masks’. Holdstock, Mythago, 46–48, 52; Lavondyss, 190–91; Bone. Jung, Man and Selected. On Holdstock see http://robertholdstock.com and obituaries: Barnett, ‘Praise’, Grimwood, ‘Robert Holdstock’. Rees and Rees, Celtic, 23 Manwaring, Windsmith. Gemmell, Sword and successors. Lawhead, Paradise, 271. Chadbourn, World’s, 167, 187, 27–6, 277, 340, 364, 472–79, 501, 506, and www. markchadbourn.net. I discuss Chadbourn’s fiction in my ‘Old’. Several American fictions have featured Nodens, as a god of the abyss (a Davies/ Rhys invention, see also Lovecraft). Durgin’s Feral is an engaging supernatural romance which imagines Nodens as a protector of dogs because of the canine images found at his Lydney temple, while Keene’s Dark and Ghost are in the horror genre. Thanks to Doranna Durgin for her correspondence with me about her inspiration. See Brown, Death and Bruce, Religion for contrasting views. Herbert, Bride, 144–45, 290–91. Scott, Boudicca. Watson, White, 3. On Watson and Scott, see Hutton, ‘Druids’. Watson, White, 74. Watson, White, 23, 486.

206 Notes

37 Watson, ‘Interview’. Watson discusses her desire to depict strong, sensuous women as an antidote to demonization by later religious culture. For reviews: Marg, ‘White’; Nayland, ‘White’. 38 Watson, White, 183, 200. 39 Watson, White, 561, 577. 40 Paisley, Warrior, 383, and www.janetpaisley.com/start. Scathach also appears as a male warrior in Holdstock’s Lavondyss (above). 41 Ramaswamy, ‘Review’; Rowland, ‘Review’; Meghan, ‘Review’; Anon, ‘Review’; Seanchai, ‘Warrior’. 42 Paisley, Warrior, 379, 386–87; www.janetpaisley.com/read_biography. 43 Stewart and Matthews, Legendary, 78. 44 Caldecott, Waters, 33, 145, 275–88, and http://moyracaldecott.co.uk/2009/01/ the-waters-of-sul. 45 Fisher, Crown, 187–88; review at Pugh, ‘Crown’. 46 Fisher, Crown, 278. 47 See the ‘Heathen English’ at http://englishmovement.org.uk/englishmovement/ index.html and ‘Woden’s Folk’ at www.wodensfolk.org.uk/woden.htm. 48 Bates, Way, 40–44, 30, 241, 250, ix, xi, xiii–xix; Cope, cover blurb for Bates, 2004 edition, back cover. See also Bates, Real and www.wayofwyrd.com, on the inception and reception of the books. Especially influential were the works of Ellis Davidson, Chadwick’s Cult and Ryan, ‘Othin’. See also Ryan, ‘German’ and Meaney, ‘Woden’. Shamanic Consciousness course website, www.sussex.ac.uk/cce/index/ shortcourses/x90309 (taught with the anthropologist Greenwood). 49 Stewart and Matthews, 53–62 and iv. It is also dedicated to Sutcliff and Spence. 50 For Heaney’s translation see Donoghue, ed., Beowulf. Carver, Sutton Hoo, 190. Beowulf and Grendel directed by Gunnarson, Beowulf directed by Zemeckis; Beowulf: The Game. 51 Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’ in Donoghue, ed.; Hobbit; Fellowship; Two; and Return. The three films, directed by Jackson, appeared in 2001, 2002 and 2003. The blog for The Hobbit, a two-part film, is at www.thehobbitblog.com. 52 Blain, Nine, 12. See also Blain and Wallis, Sacred. 53 Buckland, Tree and Buckland’s. 54 Griffiths, Aspects. 55 See the websites of Anglo-Saxon Books (formerly based in Norfolk, now Cambridgeshire); The Sutton Hoo Society; Tha Engliscan Gesithas; Wuffing Education; Deben Radio (a community radio station based in Woodbridge). The Sutton Hoo Society published Markham’s Sutton to coincide with the visitor centre opening. 56 For a brief biography, updates and details of the republication of her trilogy see: www.trifoliumbooks.co.uk, especially Jensen’s ‘Trifolium’ blog. 57 Herbert’s translations. Herbert, Looking, 14. Jensen was taught by Herbert, was later a colleague and is now acting as her ‘literary executor’; thanks to her for emails to me. On the charms see North, Heathen and Jolly, Anglo-Saxon; Owen, Rites; Voigts, ‘Anglo-Saxon’; Hill, ‘Aecerbot’; Grattan and Singer, Anglo-Saxon; Storms, Anglo-Saxon; Magoun, ‘Some’; Grendon, ‘Anglo-Saxon’. 58 Herbert, Looking, 22–24; Tacitus, Agricola, 139, 108–9. North agrees that the earth could be the Anglian Terra Mater, although his male Nerthus cannot be the same figure (246–50). 59 In Herbert’s novel Ghost the British noblewoman Nest describes ‘Annis’s holy well’ at Arnemeton/Buxton. It is more conventional to name the goddess as Arnemetia (Buxton was Aquae Arnemetiae – the water of she who lives by the sacred grove (nemeton) and an altar at Brough-on-Noe is dedicated to ‘deae Arnomecte’ – RIB 281). But Nest is from (Hughes’) Elmet, a British polity surviving into the seventh century, and Herbert implies she knows the true history of the goddess. Spence suggested the

Notes 207

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

Leicestershire bogeywoman Black Annis – a hag who eats children – might be Danu and thus a goddess. See Hutton, Triumph, 274–75; Spence, Mysteries, 174. Herbert, Queen, 190–95; Ghost, 258, 273, 221–22. Herbert, Ghost, 220, 223, 233–37. Herbert, Here, 31; Thompson, ‘Interview’; the Matthews’ website at: www.hallowquest.org.uk/hallowquest-caitlin-matthews.html. Caitlín and John Matthews’ work on ancient goddesses appears, among other works, in Matthews and Matthews, Western; Matthews, Elements and King. Herbert, Queen, 111–18, 149; Ghost, 257–58. Sabin Moore, Storm, 49, 3, 53, 65, 240. Sabin Moore, Brightfire, 194, 197, 204, 210. Sabin Moore’s website, www.suttonhoonovels.co.uk, which includes a reading list with Herbert’s and Griffiths’ works alongside archaeologists such as Sam Newton; for biography see Harrup, ‘Local’; Hoppitt, ‘Interview’. Andrew, Ship, 122, 21, 80, 103, 100, 122. Griffiths, 212; Andrew, 63, 68, 130, 146. Kristian, Raven, 198. A former boy-band member and model, Kristian believes his ancestors were Vikings and is writing a trilogy of novels: Fox, ‘How’; Kristian’s website at: www.gileskristian.com; Low, Whale and successors; Low’s website at www.robert-low.com. See Gibson, ‘Tholing’. Andrew comments on paganism at his website, http://shipburialnovel.com/category/ anglo-saxon-faith. Lovegrove, Age, 267, 409, 412. The characters owe something to Lee’s Marvel comic strips: Age references the Marvel Mighty Thor comics (112), and on his website Lovegrove discusses with approval the film Thor, directed by Branagh (www.jameslovegrove.com/books/684/the-age-of-odin/). See also Marvel Avengers Assemble, directed by Whedon. Thanks to James Lovegrove for answering my questions. Tapner, ‘Finding’. Coles, ‘Wood’ and ‘Anthropomorphic’. Tapner, Flatlands, 4. See Pugh, ‘Interview’. Pugh comments on the feeling of inhabiting the ancestors in these lines, and Tapner discusses writing in genderbending voices. Tapner, Flatlands, 15. Cooper, Over; Dark; Greenwitch; Grey and Silver. The lines are Graves’ translation of the ‘Song of Amergin’ from White (see Chapter 3). On Cooper, see Mikkelson, Susan Cooper. Brighton and Welbourn, Echoes, 207, 211. Whitmont, Return. Stout, Creating (above) and What’s Real; Bender, Hamilton and Tilley, Stone, 225. The book is a striking example of post-processual archaeology, moving away from sciences towards humanities, favouring multi-vocal, open-ended conclusions presented as opinion rather than fact and involvement of all members of the team, including documenting anything that affects the dig’s conduct and ‘results’. See Leskernick Project at www.ucl.ac.uk/leskernick/home.htm; Tilley, ‘Archaeology’ and ‘Rocks’. Saunders, ‘Leaf’. Chadbourn, World’s, 186, 556.

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Kendrick, Thomas, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950) Kendrick, T.D., Ernst Kitzinger and Derek Allen, ‘The Sutton Hoo Finds’, The British Museum Quarterly 13:4 (December 1939) Kermode, Frank, ‘The Novels of William Golding’, International Literary Annual 3 (1961) 15–29 ——, Shakespeare: The Final Plays (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1963) Kernaghan, Eileen, The Sarsen Witch (1989; Rockville, MD: Juno Books, 2008) Kerrigan, John, ‘Divided Kingdoms and the Local Epic: Mercian Hymns to The King of Britain’s Daughter’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 13:1 (Spring 2000) 3–21 Kidd, Colin, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Kincaid, Paul, ‘Apres Moi’, Science Fiction Studies 32:1 (March 2005) 213–17 King, Ros, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Kingsley, Lawrence W., ‘Mythic Dialectic in the Nativity Ode’, Milton Studies 4 (1972) 163–76 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor, ‘Approaches to The Inheritors’ in Norman Page, ed., William Golding: Novels 1954–67 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985) 122–25 Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ (1919) at www.kipling.org.uk/ poems_copybook.htm. ——, ‘In the Neolithic Age’ (1892) at www.kipling.org.uk/poems_neolithic.htm ——, ‘Mary Postgate’ at www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/8332 ——, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906; London: Macmillan, 1950) ——, Rewards and Fairies (1910) at www.gutenberg.org/files/556/556-h/556-h.htm# 2H_4_0001 Kirsch, Arthur C., ‘Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy’, ELH 34:3 (1967) 285–306 Kissane, James, ‘Victorian Mythology’, Victorian Studies 6 (1962) 5–28 Kitzinger, Ernst, ‘The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial: V: The Silver’, Antiquity 14:53 (1940) 40–63 Klein, Bernhard, ‘Imaginary Journeys: Spenser, Drayton and the Poetics of National Space’ in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 204–23 Klein, Richard G., ‘Whither the Neanderthals?’ Science new series 299:5612 (7 March 2003) 1525–27 Kliger, Samuel, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952) Knight, David J., King Lucius of Britain (Stroud: Tempus, 2008) Koch, John, ed., Celtic Culture: An Historical Encyclopaedia, 5 vols (London: ABC-Clio, 2006) Koch, John T. and John Carey, eds., The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) Kohli, Devindra, ‘The Necessary Trance and Graves’ Love-Ethic’ in Grevel Lindop and Ian Firla, eds., Graves and the Goddess: Essays on Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (Selinsgrove and London: Susquehanna University Press and Associated University Presses, 2003) 52–66 Krause, J., C. Lalueza-Fox, L. Orlando et al, ‘The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans was Shared with Neanderthals’, Current Biology 17 (2007) 1908–12 Kristian, Giles, Raven: Blood Eye (2009; London: Corgi, 2010) Kuhn, Albert J., ‘English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism’, PMLA 71:5 (December 1956) 1094–116 Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Lada, Jessica, ‘Review of Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver’, 27 April 2010 at http:// blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-wolf-brother-by-michelle

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Wordsworth, William, The Prelude (London, 1805) Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798) Worrall, David, ‘Blake’s Jerusalem and Visionary History’, Studies in Romanticism 16:2 (Spring 1977) 189–216 Wright, Herbert G., ‘Southey’s Relations with Finland and Scandinavia’, The Modern Language Review 27:2 (April 1932) 149–67 Wright, Hilary, ‘Shadows on the Downs: Some Influences of Rudyard Kipling on Rosemary Sutcliff’, Children’s Literature in Education 12:2 (1981) 90–102 Wright, Paul, ‘Vile Saxons and Ancient Britons: Wordsworth, the Ambivalent Welsh Tourist’ in Katie Gramich and Andrew Hiscock, eds., Dangerous Diversity: Changing Faces of Wales (Cardiff: Wales Press, 1998) 69–88 Wuffings Education, www.wuffings.co.uk/education Wyatt, Thomas, ‘Satire I: Mine own John Poynz’ (1536) at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/ poem/mine-own-john-poynz Yates, Frances, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) ——, ‘Queen Elizabeth as Astraea’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947) 27–82 Yeats, W.B., Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996) ——, Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (London: Penguin, 1993) Zarncke, Friedrich, ed., Narrenschiff: Mit Vier Holzschnitten (Leipzig, 1854)

INDEX

Please note that page numbers relating to Notes will have the letter ‘n’ following the page number. Absalom and Achitophel (Dryden), 38, 45, 183n Adonis (god), 34, 36 Adraste (goddess; see also Andraste/ Andate), 45, 56, 62, 69, 72 Aecerbot, 12 Aeneas (Trojan hero), 11 afterlife, 69 Agabus (Le Hardy), 82, 191n Agdistes (spirit), 181n Akhtar, Miriam, 194n Albion, 26, 46 Alcuin (Christian priest), 125 Alexander of Macedonia, 179n Alfred the Great, 115 Allen, Grant, 89, 138, 201n Alterman, Peter S., 147, 204n alternative religion, 66 Ambrosius (visionary boy), 11 American Universalism, 89 Amphritrite (goddess), 39 Anaraith (goddess), 53, 54–55 Andaman people, 133 Andate see Andraste/Andate Anderson, Judith, 181n Andraste/Andate, 54, 62, 65, 72, 80, 82, 105, 149, 162, 163, 185n, 186n, 190n, 191n Andrew, Kevin, 171–72, 207n Aneirin (poet), 190n Anglesey, Wales, 185n

Anglo-Latin prose chronicles, 16 Anglo-Norman hegemony, 13–14, 15 Anglo-Saxon Books, 206n Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 99–100, 101, 195n Anglo-Saxon literature, 167 Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Wilson), 124–25 Anglo-Saxon paganism, 10, 12, 112, 116–17, 139, 167; Anglo-SaxonNorthern, 106, 124, 126, 127, 149, 150, 151, 166–75 Anglo-Saxons, 66, 109, 114, 115, 178n, 198n; see also Saxons animism, 66, 133 Annales Cambriae, 195n Annan, Noel, 120, 198n Annius of Viterbo, 25, 26, 44, 180n anthropology, 154 Antient Religion of the Gentiles, The (Herbert), 57, 186n antiquarianism, 21, 44, 45 anti-Semitism, 19, 178n Anwyl, Edward, 88 Apollo (god), 67, 70, 77 Apollo Grannus (god), 58, 77 Apollo’s temple, Trinovantum, 15 Apology for Mohamed, An (Higgins), 79 Appolin (god), 18 Aptekar, Jane, 181n Aquila, Marcus Flavius, 95 archaeological remains, 177n Arch-Druid, 69, 70, 82

244 Index

Archer, William, 139 archetypes, 173 Archibald, Warren S., 119 Aristotle, 24 Arnold, Matthew, 68, 84, 117, 191n, 198n Arthur (war leader), 11 Arthurian myth, 83, 87, 88, 90, 188n As You Like It (Shakespeare), 42, 43 asceticism, 131 Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Griffiths), 167–68 Astarte (goddess), 181n Astraea (goddess), 36 atheism, 60 Atkinson, James Jasper, 144, 202n Attis (consort to Cybele), 22 Aubrey, John, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 185n Auden, W.H., 90 Auel, Jean M., 204n Augustine, Saint, 7, 19, 24 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus, 46–47, 69, 184n Austin, Frederick Britten, 141, 202n Avebury, 53, 60, 68 Bacchus (god), 52 Bachofen, J.J., 85, 154 Balder (god), 110, 117 Bale, John, 26, 27, 44, 45, 54, 59, 66, 180n Barclay, Alexander, 21–22, 24, 36, 179n, 183n Bard, The (poem), 110 Barker, E.H., 186n Bates, Brian, 166–67, 206n Bax, E. Belfort, 142, 202n Baxter, William, 190n Bayeux druids, 47 Bayley, Harold, 94, 194n Beaumont, Francis, 183n Bede (the Venerable), 8–9, 10, 16, 103, 125, 169, 176n, 195n; Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 8, 124; The Reckoning of Time, 9, 177n Bedient, Calvin, 194n Belatucadros (god), 46, 47, 77, 184n Belenus (god), 56, 58, 184n Beli, 177n Beli (god), 12 Belin’s Hill (Fisher), 160, 205n Belinus, King, 20, 46, 160 Belisama (goddess), 185n, 188n Bellenden, John, 23

Belloc, Hiliaire, 139 Beltane, festival of, 58 Bender, Barbara, 174, 207n Benson, R.H., 118, 119, 198n Benton, Jill, 202n Beowulf, 103, 123, 167, 199n Bergeron, David M., 182n, 183n Berresford-Ellis, Peter, 164 Berthet, Elie, 135 Bevis of Southampton, 184n biblical religion, 25, 61 Bieman, Elizabeth, 35, 181n, 182n Birch, Dinah, 152 BL Harleian MS 3859, 177n, 195n Black Book of Carmarthen, 78 Black Mountain hunters, 155 Blackfriars theatre, 42, 183n Blackmore, Richard, 108 Bladud, King, 15, 25, 178n Blain, Jenny, 167, 206n Blair, Hugh, 63, 187n Blair, John, 176n Blake, William, 4, 38, 66–67, 68, 75, 79, 107; Jerusalem, 188n; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 66, 185n, 188n Blavatsky, Helena, 88, 140, 192n Blessing of Pan, The (Dunsany), 84, 160, 191n Blodmonath, 10 Blood and Mistletoe (Hutton), 48, 183n, 184n, 185n, 186n, 187n, 188n, 191n ‘blood-eagle’ execution method, 118–19 Boadicia, Queen, 53 Boardman, John, 84 Boccaccio, 31 Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., 204n Boece, Hector, 23, 24, 179n, 180n Boling, Roland J., 183n Bolton, Edmund, 55 Bonduca (Fletcher), 43, 65, 183n Bonwick, James, 80, 191n books of Roman period, burning of, 13 Booth, Stephen, 180n Borlase, William, 129, 187n, 188n Borlase, William Copeland, 129, 200n Bottrell, William, 89 Boudicca’s rebellion, 55 Bowen, John, 203n Boyd Haycock, David, 60, 187n Bracelin, Jack, 194n Bradlaugh, Charles, 136 Bradley, James, 198n Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 154, 205n Bragi (god), 173

Index 245

Brandt, Sebastian, 22, 179n Branston, Brian, 124, 200n Bremmer, Rolf H., 104, 196n Brennus, King, 46 Bride of the Spear (Herbert), 160 Briggs, Julia, 106 Briggs, Katharine, 93 Brightfire (Sabin Moore), 171 Brighton, Simon, 174 Britannia (Camden), 28, 44–45, 46, 53, 65, 181n, 183n, 196n Britannia (goddess), 39 Britannia Antiqua Illustrata (Sammes), 52 Britannia Discover’d ( Jones), 74, 189n ‘British Nomades,’ 56 British paganism, 8, 15, 21, 27–28, 38, 47, 148, 150; prehistoric, 74, 82; Romano-British paganism, 25 Britomart (Elizabeth’s avatar/ancestress in Faerie Queene), 34, 35, 36, 39, 40 Britons, 11; Christian, 8, 180n; Iron Age Romano-Britons, 14 Bronze Age, 151 Brooke, Rupert, 84 Brooks-Davis, Douglas, 181n brothels, 67 Brown, John, 109, 197n Browne, Thomas, 106 Bruce-Mitford, R.L.S., 199n Brunanburh, Battle of, 102, 195n Bruno, Giordano, 24 Bruts (Anglo-French-derived poetic romances), 16 Brutus, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 36, 39 Bryant, Jacob, 76, 190n Buchanan, Robert, 117, 198n Buckland, Raymond, 206n Buddha, 131 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 115, 116, 126, 188n, 197n Burgess, Moira, 205n Burl, Aubrey, 186n Burley, W.J., 194n Cabiri (Mediterranean deities), 52, 79 Caelus (god), 44, 55, 56 Caesar, Julius, 15, 75 Caldecott, Moyra, 164–65, 206n calendar, religious, 8–9 Camden, William, 29, 47, 62, 102, 103, 107, 135, 180n, 184n, 186n; Britannia, 28, 44–45, 46, 53, 65, 181n, 183n, 196n

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 126 Campion, Edmund, 104 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 30, 181n ‘Cara Daughter of Cara,’ (Williams) 153 Caractacus (Mason), 61–62, 110, 187n Caramelli, D., 204n Caratach (British soldier), 43, 183n Carey, John, 147, 203n, 204n Carlyle, Thomas, 113, 135, 197n Carpenter, Edward, 118, 142, 143, 198n, 202n Carroll, Jayne, 102, 195n Carry on Cleo, 1, 176n Carson, Edward, 99 Carver, Martin, 200n Cary, Elizabeth, 182n Cassius Dio, 54, 186n Cassivelaunus, King, 15 Catholicism, 23, 26, 27, 57, 104, 119, 180n, 186n ‘Cauldron of Ceridwen, The’ (Love Peacock), 81–82, 191n Cayley, George, 198n Celtic Druids, The (Higgins), 79 Celtic languages, 57, 177n Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance (Squire), 87 Celtic Revival, 58, 85–88 Ceridwen (goddess), 76–77, 78, 80, 82, 83; ‘Cauldron of Ceridwen, The’ (Love Peacock), 81–82, 191n Cernunnos (horned god), 95 Chadbourn, Mark, 161, 175, 205n, 207n Chadwick, H.M., 125, 200n, 206n Cham (Noah’s son), 26 Chandler, John ( John Leland), 180n Charleton, Walter, 107, 185n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 30, 181n Chester, 20 Childe, Vere Gordon, 144, 151, 152, 203n, 204n ‘Children of the Sun’ (Evans), 144–45, 146 Christian Britons, 8, 180n Christianity, 7, 10, 15, 27, 29, 42, 60, 66, 135, 139; Christian doubt, Celtic and classical in age of, 80–85; Christian-pagan synthesis, 45, 49; decline of traditional belief, 162; evangelical, 75; fundamentalism, 68; and heathenism, 47; Higgins on, 79–80; non-Christianity, 61; proto-Christian hypothesis see proto-Christian

246 Index

hypothesis; see also Catholicism; Judaeo-Christianity; Protestantism Chronicles (Holinshed), 26, 27 Cicero, 24 Civil War, 48, 55 civilization, 134 Civilization of the Goddess, The (Gimbutas), 154 Clark, Grahame, 146 Clark, Sandra, 183n Clayton, John, 195n Clergyman’s Daughter, A (Orwell), 71, 90–91 Cloten (in Cymbeline), 41 Coates, John, 120 Cocidius, Mars (god), 192n Cohen, Francis, 116, 197n Cohen, Jeffrey J., 178n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 114, 188n Coles, Bryony, 173 Colley, Linda, 188n Collings, Rex, 199n Collingwood, W.G., 118, 198n colonization, 14 Coming of a King, The (Evans), 145–46 comparative religion, 85, 154 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 30, 181n Connell, Philip, 112, 197n Connor, Kenneth, 1 Constantine, Emperor, 29 Cooper, Susan, 174, 207n Corineus (hero), 14 Corn King and Spring Queen, The (Mitchison), 171 Cornwell, Bernard, 156–58, 205n Coupland, Simon, 119 Coward, Noël, 123, 199n Crane, Ronald S., 196n Crawford, Julie, 183n credulity, 180n ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’ (Blair), 63 Critical History of the Celtic Religion, A (Toland), 38, 56, 58, 186n Cromwell, Oliver, 99 Crumley, J. Clinton, 42, 183n Crusades, 18 Crystal Cave, The (Stewart), 95, 194n Cuhelyn (poet), 78, 190n cultural fusion, 14 ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (Williams), 152 Cummings, Robert, 185n Cunliffe, Barry, 164, 188n Cunningham, Karen, 183n

Cunobelinus, King, 46 Curran, John E., 183n Currat, M., 204n Curtis, Lewis Perry, 192n Cybele (goddess), 22, 24, 36, 181n Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 39–42, 65 Dale, Jim, 1 Dalén, L., 204n Dalton, Paul, 177n Damnonium, 65 Danes, 101, 107, 109 Daniel, Glyn, 144 Daniel, Samuel, 38, 44, 182n, 184n, 186n Dante, 31 Danu (goddess), 76, 80, 153, 189n Dardanus, 11 Darrah, John, 178n Darwin, Charles, 82, 129, 139, 153 Davidson, Clifford, 35–36, 182n Davies, Edward, 76, 77–78, 79, 80, 81, 90, 91, 188n Davis-Kimball, Jeannine, 164 Dawn in Britain, The (Doughty), 88 de la Bédoyere, Guy, 177n Dean, Paul, 180n ‘Death of Odin, The’ (Southey), 111, 112 Deben Radio, 168, 171 Deeds of the Abbots of St. Albans (Paris), 13 deism, 57, 60, 135, 139 deities, 10, 12, 18, 30, 33, 177n; British, 46; classical, 46; foreign, 22–23, 184n; Greek and Egyptian, 41; new, 64–66; non-Christian/pagan, 11, 20, 25, 44 Dekker, Thomas, 31, 181n Delany, Mary Granville, 72, 189n, 191n Demars, P.Y., 204n Demeter (goddess), 85 demi-gods, 30 ‘Descent of Frea, The’ (Sayers), 109 Detter, Jill Warner, 194n deus ex machina, 44 Deutsche Mythologie (Grimm), 9 Diana (goddess), 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 29, 36, 39, 42, 44, 48, 72 Diana-Belisama (goddess), 52 Didon (god), 18 Diffusionism, 144, 145, 203n Dillon, John, 99, 195n ‘dirty gods,’ 182n Dolmens of Ireland, The (Borlase), 129 Doolittle, Hilda, 85 double consciousness, 25, 180n

Index 247

Doughty, Charles M., 89 Doyle, Conan, 133, 201n Drayton, Michael, 49, 69, 72; Poly-Olbion, 45, 47, 52, 105, 183n72; versus Selden, 45–48, 183n, 184n Dream (Fowler Wright), 140 Drower, Margaret S., 194n druids, 22, 24, 48, 52, 56, 62, 66, 179n, 188n Dryden, John, 38, 45, 107–8, 183n, 185n, 196n Du Bois, W.E.B., 180n Duchemin, Parker, 183n Dunsany, Lord (Edward), 84, 160, 191n Dunvallo, King, 15 Durgin, Doranna, 205n Dwygraig, Madog (poet), 190n Eagle of the Ninth, The (Sutcliff ), 95–96, 123, 194n Early in Orcadia (Mitchison), 155 earthly gods and goddesses, 151, 171, 185n Easter, 10 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede), 8, 124 eclecticism, 33 Edelen, Georges, 180n Edinburgh Magazine, 58 Edmund (Anglo-Saxon king), 102–3 Egyptian religion, 35 Egyptians, 22, 23 E.K. see Spenser, Edmund Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 79, 190n Eliot, T.S., 89–90, 193n Elizabeth I, Queen, 25, 30, 38, 141 Elliot Smith, Grafton, 144 Ellis Davidson, H.R., 124, 200n, 206n Elton, Charles Isaac, 85 emblem literature, hermeneutic tradition, 183n Engliscan Gesithas/The English Companions, 168 Enimie of Securitie, The (Rogers), 29–30 Enlightenment, The: An Interpretation (Gay), 60–61, 187n Eostre (goddess), 10, 169 Eratosthenes, 58, 186n Erdman, David V., 188n Erskine, Barbara, 159, 205n Esca Mac Cunoval (Sutcliff ), 95 Escobado, Andrew, 183n Essick, Robert N., 188n Ethiopian Cushites, 79

euhemerism, 11, 135 Evans, I.O., 144, 145–46, 203n Evans-Wentz, W.Y., 89, 193n ‘Eve and the Earth Goddess’ (Herbert), 170 Excoffier, L., 204n Faber, George, 76 Fabyan, Robert, 21, 23–24, 30, 179n Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 22, 30, 31–37, 39, 40, 51, 105, 181n Fairer, David, 109 Faletra, Michael A., 13, 15, 177n, 178n Fanthorpe, U.A. 199n Farley, Frank Edgar, 196n Fawcett, Christina, 51, 185n Feast of the New Spears, (Sutcliff ) 95 Ferguson, Arthur B., 25, 180n fertility of natural world, 85, 130 Fetherstonehaugh, Sir Harry, 139 Ficino, Marsilio, 24 fifteenth century, as period of pagan revival, 179n Fingal, King, 63, 64, 188n Firla, Ian, 193n First World War, 90, 91, 101, 121 Fisher, Catherine, 160, 165, 205n Fisher, John Abraham, 110, 197n Fisher, Peter F, 188n Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (Percy), 109 Fletcher, John, 42, 43, 44, 62, 65, 69, 183n Flinders Petrie, William, 177n folklore study, 87 Fool’s Bolt (Gay), 54, 55, 185n Forrest, Jonathan, 165 Fortune, Dion, 93 Fowler, David C., 179n Fowler Wright, Sydney, 138, 139–40, 201n, 202n Fowles, John, 185n Fragments of Ancient Poetry (Macpherson), 62 Frank, Lawrence, 133 Frank, Roberta, 119, 201n Franklin, Michael J., 72, 73, 189n Frantzen, Allan J., 198n Frazer, James George, 56, 85, 130, 131–32, 138, 141, 152, 155, 191n, 193n; The Golden Bough, 90, 118, 131, 142, 200n, 201n; Totemism and Exogamy, 132 French Revolution, 112 Frenchman, Michael, 123, 199n

248 Index

Freud, Sigmund, 118, 132, 133, 152, 198n, 201n, 203n Friga (goddess), 105, 118 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), 90 Frye, Northrop, 182n, 183n Fuller, Thomas, 48, 184n Fumo, Jamie Claire, 181n Fussner, Frank S., 180n Fynnane, King, 23 Gale, Theophilus, 72, 189n Galfridus see Geoffrey of Monmouth Gallo-Roman deities, 94 gardening, 186n Gardner, Gerald, 87, 94–95, 125, 126, 194n Garner, Alan, 154, 204n Gascoigne, George, 30–31, 181n Gaskill, Howard, 187n Gaudete (Hughes), 97, 98, 195n Gaufridus see Geoffrey of Monmouth Gaulish gods, 52 Gay, Peter, 60–61, 187n Gay, Robert, 54, 55, 185n, 186n Geller, Lila, 41, 181n, 182n Gemmell, David, 161, 205n Genesis, 128 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 77 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 13–16, 21, 25, 36, 37, 39, 46, 69, 77, 99, 177n, 178n, 182n, 186n; Historia Regum Britanniae, 7, 14, 15; as proto-Celtic-Revivalist, 13 German folklorists, 9 Germanic paganism, 101, 102, 105, 121, 123, 172 Germanus, Saint, 11 Gerrard, Christine, 111 Gervase of Tilbury, 179n Giants (Cohen), 178n Gibbon, John, 54 Gibson, Edmund, 51–56, 69, 185n, 188n Gildas, 7–8, 54, 101, 176n, 177n Giles, J.A., 177n Gillingham, John, 177n Gimbutas, Marija, 154, 204n Gindin, James, 146, 203n Gleckner, Robert F., 188n Glorious Revolution (1688), 108 ‘glory-twigs,’ 12 Glover, Willis B., 61, 139, 187n Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (Gimbutas), 154 god-smiths, 45

Godwin, Henry, 69 Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, 60 Gogmagog (giant), 14, 20, 26 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 90, 118, 131, 142, 200n, 201n Golden Strangers, The (Treece), 144–45, 203n Golding, William, 4, 146, 147, 148, 203n, 204n Gomme, George Laurence, 85 Gordon riots, anti-Catholic, 72 Goths, 110, 114, 115, 191n Gourvitch, I., 183n Gower, John, 30, 181n Grahame, Kenneth, 84 Grail legends, 188n Gransden, Antonia, 14, 177n, 178n Graves, Robert, 33, 92, 99; The White Goddess, 91, 97, 159, 174, 175, 193n Gray, Thomas, 109, 113 Graziani, René, 36, 181n, 182n Great Depression, 91, 138 Greece, 11, 58, 83 Greek paganism, 132 Green, John Richard, 116, 198n Green, Miranda, 177n, 178n, 188n Green, Paul, 183n Green, R.E., 204n Greenblatt, Stephen, 181n Greenlaw, Edwin, 182n Gregor, Ian, 203n Gregory, Isabella Augusta, 85 Gregory I (the Great, 590–604), 8, 13, 176n Griffiths, Bill, 167–68, 206n, 207n Grimm, Jacob, 9–10, 176n, 177n Groom, Nick, 187n, 195n Gross, Kenneth, 181n Grotus (Heaney), 99 Guest, Charlotte, 76, 88, 192n Gundestrup Cauldron, 94 Gupton, Janet, 182n Gwydion (Welsh princeling/god), 88, 92 Gwynedd, 12 Hackett, Helen, 181n Hadfield, Andrew, 182n, 183n Hadrian’s Wall, 47, 99 Haggard, Henry Rider, 118, 137–38, 140, 147, 161 Halegmonath (month of sacred rites), 10 Hamilton, A.C., 182n Hamilton, Sue, 174 Hampton Court, 38

Index 249

Hanning, Robert W., 176n, 177n Hardy, Thomas, 85 Harrison, Anthony H., 191n Harrison, Jane Ellen, 85, 132, 193n, 201n Harrison, William, 26, 27, 30, 44, 45, 54, 59, 66, 103, 135, 148, 180n, 181n, 183n, 186n, 195n Hart, F. Elizabeth, 183n Harvey, Gabriel, 31 Hawkins, Peter S., 181n, 182n Headlam-Wells, Robin, 181n Heaney, Seamus, 98–99, 154, 167, 195n Hearne, Thomas, 54, 185n, 186n heathen men, 99–100, 101 heathenism, 9, 10, 18–19; and Christianity, 47 ‘Heathens’ (Whatley), 179n Hedges, John, 205n Helgerson, Richard, 180n, 183n helio-arkite theory, 77 Hellenism, 68, 84 Hemans, Felicia, 188n Hengist, King, 18 Hengist King of Kent (Middleton), 105–6 Henig, Martin, 178n Henry of Huntingdon, 12 Henry VIII, King, 25, 31 Henryson, Robert, 30, 181n Henty, G.A., 92–93, 193n Herbert, Algernon, 88, 192n Herbert, Edward, 57, 186n Herbert, Kathleen, 160, 168–69, 170, 171, 205n, 207n Hercules, 25, 44, 45, 46, 52, 65, 185n; as Celtic linguist and megalithic builder, 56–60 Herendeen, Wyman, 180n, 183n Herford, C.H., 117, 198n Hermes, 58 Hermetic religion, 35 Herodotus, 186n Herrick, Robert, 51, 185n Hesus (god), 77 Heylyn, Peter, 48, 184n Hibbert Lectures (1886), 86 Hickman, Andrew, 43, 183n Higden, Ranulph, 20, 21, 30, 179n, 196n Higgins, Godfrey, 68, 79–80, 88, 190n, 192n High Church Anglicans, 119 High Magic’s Aid (Gardner), 94, 95, 125, 126 Higham, Nicholas J., 176n

Hill, Christopher, 111 Hill, Geoffrey, 96, 194n Hiller, Geoffrey G., 183n Hinduism, 74, 95, 139, 150, 189n Hingley, Richard, 180n Historia Gentis Scotorum (Boece), 23 Historia Regum Britanniae (Geoffrey of Monmouth), 7, 14, 15 History of Britain (Milton), 48 History of the Anglo-Saxons, The (Palgrave), 197n History of the Britons (Nennius), 11 Hitler, Adolf, 122, 124 Hoeniger, F.D., 42, 182n, 183n Hoff, Peter Sloat, 81 Holdstock, Robert, 128, 149, 160–62, 200n, 205n Hole, Christina, 93, 124, 193n Holinshed, Raphael, 26, 27, 28, 30, 41, 44, 58, 182n, 183n Holkeboer, Robert, 97, 194n Holland, Cecelia, 154 Homer, 22 Hoppitt, Rosemary, 199n Howlett, D.R., 177n Hreda/Hretha (goddess; see also Rheda), 169 Hu (god), 78, 83 Hu Gadam (pseudonym), 82, 92, 93 hubristic heroes, 30 Huddleston, Robert, 57, 58, 186n Hugh of Lincoln, 19 Hughes, Ted, 97, 98, 195n Hulse, Clark, 182n humanist movement, 21, 24, 29 Hume, David, 60 Humphries, Steve, 194n Hunt, Maurice, 182n Hunt, Robert, 89 Hunter, William B., 185n Hunter Blair, Peter, 123, 199n Huttar, Charles A., 184n Hutton, Ronald, 4, 22, 23, 52, 56, 60, 75, 79, 80, 84, 88, 176n, 179n, 180n, 181n, 183n, 190n, 193n, 202n; Blood and Mistletoe, 48, 183n, 184n, 185n, 186n, 187n, 188n, 191n; Pagan Religions of the British Isles, 124; The Stations of the Sun, 9, 124 Huxley, Thomas, 139 Hyman, Lawrence W., 51, 184n iconotropy, 33 Ida, Mount, 22, 179n

250 Index

idolatry, 22, 27, 184n; poet as idolator, 30–37 immortality, 46 In Parenthesis ( Jones), 90 Indian religion, 74, 75 Indo-European languages, 52 Ingelbien, Raphael, 99, 195n Ingledew, Francis, 177n, 178n interpretation, notion of, 183n interregnum, end of, 48 Ireland, 57, 58, 79, 99 Ireland, Arthur J., 122, 199n Ireland, William Henry, 106 Iron Age Romano-Britons, 5, 14, 162, 163, 164 Isaiah, 15–16 Isis (goddess), 33, 39 Isis Church (Spenser), 34, 35, 36, 182n Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky), 88, 140 Islam, 18, 139 Isle of Wight, 2 James I, King, 38–39, 43, 55, 104, 183n Japheth (Noah’s son), 11 Jehovah (Old Testament), 119 Jenkyns, Richard, 188n Jerome, Jerome K., 130, 177n Jerusalem (Blake), 188n Jervise, Andrew, 186n Jesus Christ, 24, 30, 56, 67, 131, 184n; and Krishna, 74 Jevons, Frank, 138, 201n John, King, 126 Johnson, Kurt A., 189n Johnson, Samuel, 41 Jones, David, 90 Jones, Emrys, 182n Jones, Inigo, 39, 44, 186n; The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, 55–56 Jones, William, 52, 72, 73–74, 75, 87, 95, 99, 189n, 190n, 193n Jonson, Ben, 39, 44, 182n, 184n Jordan, Richard Douglas, 184n Joseph of Arimathea, 70 Jowitt, Claire, 183n Joyce, James, 84 Judaeo-Christianity, 26, 44, 72, 76 Judaism/Jewish people, 11, 15, 19, 25, 44 Jung, Carl Gustav, 160, 161, 173, 205n Juno (goddess), 72 Jupiter (god), 16, 30, 52; in Cymbeline, 39–40, 41–42; as planet, 182n

kalends, 10 Kalter, Barrett, 110 Keats, John, 68 Keene, Brian, 205n Kelen, Sarah A., 180n Kendrick, Thomas, 52, 180n, 199n Kermode, Frank, 183n, 203n Kerriduen (goddess; see also Ceridwen), 88 Kerrigan, John, 154 Keynes, John Maynard, 122–23 Kim, S.K., 204n King, C.W., 204n King Arthur (Dryden), 107–8 king-lists, 11, 12 Kingsley, Lawrence W., 185n Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 203n Kipling, Rudyard, 119–20, 121, 139, 198n; Puck of Pook’s Hill, 95, 99, 119, 194n; Rewards and Fairies, 119, 137, 201n Kirsch, Arthur C., 183n Kissane, James, 188n Kitzinger, Ernst, 199n Klein, Bernhard, 183n Klein, Richard G., 203n Kliger, Samuel, 111 Knight, David, 176n Krause, J., 204n Krishna, 74, 189n Kristian, Giles, 172, 207n Kuhn, Albert J., 190n Lacnunga, 12 Lacshmi (goddess), 74, 75 Laing, Malcolm, 63, 64, 188n Lake Prescott, Anne, 45, 183n, 184n Lalueza-Fox, C., 204n Lamb, Thomas Phillipps, 197n Landor, Walter Savage, 83, 191n Landry, D.E., 42, 183n Lang, Andrew, 132, 135–36, 138–39, 142, 145, 192n Langton, Stephen (Archbishop of Canterbury), 126 Lantern Bearers, The (Sutcliff ), 123 Laocoon, 25 Larrington, Carolyne, 177n Law, Ernest, 38 Law, Philip H., 176n Lawhead, Stephen, 161, 205n Lawman see Laȝamon Lawrence, D.H., 85, 191n Lawrence, Judiana, 41, 182n

Index 251

Layamon see Laȝmon Laȝmon (poet), 16, 17–18, 19, 178n Le Hardy, Esther, 82, 83, 191n Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (Rhys), 86 Lee, Christopher, 96 ‘leech’ remedies, 12 Legendary (Tatlock), 178n Legg, Rodney, 185n, 186n Leir, King, 16 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 94 Leland, John, 25, 180n, 202n Lethbridge, T.C., 87, 93–94, 123, 194n Levy, F.J., 180n, 193n Lewalski, Barbara K., 51, 184n Lewis, Alun, 92 Lewis, C.S., 118, 181n, 184n Lewis, Roy, 147 Lewis-Williams, David, 159 Lhuyd, Edward, 57 Lindop, Grevel, 92, 193n Lisle Bowles, William, 68, 69, 70, 72, 77, 189n Livy, 15 Locher, Jacob, 22, 179n Loda (god), 63, 64, 110, 187n Lomas, Herbert, 98, 194n Looking for the Lost Gods of England (Herbert), 171 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 167 Lost Gods of England, The (Branston), 124, 200n Louis, Margot K., 67, 68, 84–85, 188n Lovegrove, James, 161, 172, 173, 207n Lovelock, James, 147 Low, Robert, 172, 207n Lowes Dickinson, G., 201n Lubbock, John, 128, 129, 130, 133, 200n, 201n Lucanus, Marcus Annaeus (Lucan), 43, 69, 77, 183n Lucian (writer), 52, 185n Lucius, King, 8 Lyell, Charles, 129 Lyra Celtica (Sharp), 89 Mabinogion, 86, 87 Macbain, Alexander, 85, 192n Macbeth, 106 MacColl, Alan, 26, 180n MacCulloch, John Arnott, 88, 192n MacDougall, Hugh, 177n, 192n Macey, J. David, 35, 181n

MacGregor Reid, George W., 89, 192n Machen, Arthur, 84 Macnamara, John, 181n Macpherson, James, 58, 62–64, 65, 69, 75, 110, 187n, 188n magic and paganism, 130, 178n Magna Carta, 126 Magnus, Olaus, 104 Mahomet (‘god’ or Islamic prophet), 18 Maisano, Scott, 182n Maldon, Battle of, 102, 106, 195n Mallett, Paul-Henri, 111, 112, 197n Mamilon (god), 18 Manwaring, Kevan, 161, 205n Manz, Stefan, 176n Marcus, Leah S., 182n Markale, Jean, 164 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 67, 185n, 188n Mars (god), 104 Marvell, Andrew, 51 Mary Queen of Scots, 196n Mason, William, 64, 65, 69, 188n; Caractacus, 61–62, 110, 187n Masque of Blackness, The ( Jonson), 39, 182n Masque of the Druids (Fisher), 110, 197n Master-Girl, The (Hilliers), 140–41, 202n matriarchs, pagan, 11 Matthews, Caitlin, 164, 169, 207n Matthews, John, 164, 167, 169–70, 206n, 207n Maunder, Roger, 54 Maurice, Thomas, 76 McAlindon, T., 179n McCallum, Hugh, 186n McCallum, John, 186n McClure, Peter, 181n McDonald, Craig, 181n McEachem, Claire, 181n, 183n Meaney, Audrey L., 176n, 206n ‘Measurers’ (Williams), 154 Mee, John, 188n Mellitus, Abbot, 8, 13 Mendyk, Stan A.E., 21, 179n Mercia, 2 Mercury (god), 16, 58, 65, 68, 77 Merivale, Patricia, 84 Merlin, 11, 108, 186n Mesolithic age, 151, 153, 159, 204n Meyer, Hannah, 179n Meyrick, Samuel R., 77, 190n Middle Ages, 12, 16, 21, 36, 99, 115 Middlemarch (Eliot), 79, 190n

252 Index

Middleton, Thomas, 105–6, 196n Midnight is a Lonely Place (Erskine), 159 migration, 14 Mikalachki, Jodi, 183n Mill, John Stuart, 136 Miller, M., 176n Milton, John, 3, 60, 67, 184n, 188n; ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ 48–50; Paradise Lost, 49, 51, 108, 146, 185n; and Spenser, 51 Minerva (goddess), 46, 52, 77 Minnis, Alastair J., 179n, 181n Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della, 24 Misfortunes of Elphin, The (Love Peacock), 71 Miskimin, Alice, 181n Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 154, 205n Mitchell, J. Leslie, 145, 146, 155, 203n Mitchison, Naomi, 142, 148, 154–55, 156, 171, 193n, 202n, 205n Mithen, Steven, 159, 203n Mithraism, 131 Moffet, Robin, 41, 182n Monumenta Britannica (Aubrey), 53, 54, 185n moon, 69, 104 moon goddess, 39 Moore, William H., 183n Morgan, Kenneth O., 192n Morganwg, Iolo (Edward Williams), 75, 76, 78, 79, 93, 125 Morris, William, 117, 198n Morse, Ruth, 179n Mort, Frank, 95 Mortensen, Peter, 111, 112, 197n Mortimer, Neil, 186n Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, The ( Jones), 55–56 Mother’s Night (modranicht), 10, 177n Mouldy, Malachi, 69–70, 72, 81, 188n Mount Ida, 22, 179n Moynahan, Julian, 98 Muldoon, Paul, 98, 195n Mulholland, James, 72, 74, 189n Mullan, John, 152, 204n Müller, Max, 86, 192n Munday, Anthony, 39, 41, 182n Murphy, Howard R., 188n Murray, Gilbert, 201n Murray, Margaret, 87, 93, 94, 132, 194n Muses, 31 Mutabilitie Cantos (Spenser), 36, 182n mysticism, 75

Mythago Wood (Holdstock), 160–61, 173, 205n Myvyrian Archaiology (Williams, et al.) 78 Nabholz, John R., 187n Naenia Cornubia (Borlase), 129, 200n Narayena (god), 74 Nash, David, 78, 81, 190n National Hunger March (1922–36), 203n Neanderthals, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 203n, 204n Nectanabus (father and tutor of Alexander of Macedonia), 179n Nell, Delores L., 181n Nemesis (goddess), 56 Nennius (Welsh monk), 10–12, 25, 177n; Trojan myth, 14 Neolithic age, 5, 129, 131, 134, 137, 142, 143, 151, 153, 155, 163, 203n neoPlatonism, 24, 30, 35–36, 44, 179n, 181n, 182n, 184n Neptune (god), 39 Nero-Caesar: or Monarchie Depraved (Bolton), 55 Nerthus (goddess), 200n New Chronicles of England and France (Fabyan), 21 ‘New Paganism,’ 90 New Testament, 59 Niles, John D., 198n ‘Nine Herbs Charm,’ 12, 177n Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic (Blain), 167 Noah and the Flood, 25, 26, 28, 76, 85 Nodens’ temple, Lydney, 190n, 205n Noonan, J.P., 204n Norbrook, David, 185n Nordic paganism, 101, 102, 105, 114, 121, 123, 140, 172 Norse deities, 113 Norse legends, 106 North, Richard, 125, 200n Northern Antiquities (Mallet), 111 Notre-Dame cathedral, Paris, 94 Nowell, Laurence, 103 Nuada (god), 86 Nutt, Alfred, 85 Oates, Carolyn, 194 O’Brien, Robert Viking, 181n ‘Ocean to Cynthia, The’ (Raleigh), 32 Odin (god), 12, 64, 106, 108–14, 150, 173, 187n O’Donoghue, Heather, 198n Oedipus complex, 203n

Index 253

Ogmius (god), 52, 58, 185n Old Testament, 59 Oldsey, Bernard S., 203n ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (Milton), 48–50 Origin of Civilisation, The (Lubbock), 130 Orosius, Paulus, 7, 14, 176n Oruch, Jack B., 182n Orwell, George, 71, 90–91 Osiris ( Justice), 34 Ossian (warrior-poet), 58, 63 Oswald, King, 107 Other, paganism as, 8, 18 Overy, Richard, 138, 201n Ovid, 15 Owen, A.L., 22, 179n Owen, Gale R., 176n Owen, William, 76 Pagan Religions of the British Isles (Hutton), 124 pagan year, 10 paganism, defined, 2 pagans: British see British paganism; Celtic, 56; Christian-pagan synthesis, 45, 49; magic and paganism, 178n; matriarchs, 11; pre-Roman, 71; Saxon/Anglo-Saxon, 7, 12, 179n; writing against, 7–13; writing with, 13–16; see also Germanic paganism; Nordic paganism Page, Frederick, 117, 198n Page, Norman, 121 Page, R.I., 176n, 199n Paisley, Janet, 163–64, 171, 206n Palaeolithic age, 5, 131, 133, 134, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151 Palgrave, Francis, 116, 197n Palin, Sarah, 172 Pan (god), 84, 184n Paradise Lost (Milton), 49, 51, 108, 146, 185n Paradise War, The (Lawhead), 161 Paris, Matthew, 13, 16, 177n, 179n Parker, Joanne, 116, 197n Parker, W.R., 185n Parker Chronicle, 11, 177n, 195n Parochial History of Bremhill (Lisle Bowles), 77 Parrinder, Patrick, 201n Parry, Graham, 28, 180n, 183n, 184n, 185n, 186n Parry-Williams, T.H., 192n Paschal, Andrew, 53, 54

Pater, Walter, 68 Patera, Attius, 47 patriarchs, Judaeo-Christian, 11, 44 Patrick, Saint, 11 Patterson, Annabel, 180n, 181n Paver, Michelle, 158–59, 205n paynyms (pagans), 22 Peacham, Henry, 188n Peacock, Sandra J., 188n Peacock, Thomas Love, 71, 81–82, 191n Pease, Howard, 121–22, 122, 199n Penrose, Thomas, 109, 197n People of the Black Mountains (Williams), 151 Percy, Thomas, 109, 113, 187n Pericles (Shakespeare), 42–43 Perry, W.J., 144 Persephone (goddess; see also Proserpine), 85, 191n Peter, John, 203n Petrarch, 31 Philharmonus (in Cymbeline), 40, 41, 42 Phillpotts, Bertha, 198n Phoebus (god), 23 Phoenicia, 79 Phoenician theory, 44, 68, 180n Picts, 12, 101 Piggott, Stuart, 52, 60, 183n, 185n, 187n Pillar of the Sky (Holland), 154 Pinner, David, 96–97, 194n Plato, 24 Platonic religion, 44 Pliny, 15 Plutarch, 182n, 184n Poetic Edda, 196n Polwhele, Richard, 65–66, 188n Polychronicon (universal history) (Higden), 20 Poly-Olbion (Drayton), 45, 47, 52, 72, 105, 183n polytheistic pantheon, 31 Poole Harbour, Dorset, 46 Posthumus (in Cymbeline), 39, 40, 41–42 Powicke, Maurice, 180n, 190n Pratt, Lynda, 115, 197n prehistory, 5, 74, 82, 128, 135, 138, 148, 152; stone circles, prehistoric, 53, 58, 67, 68 Primitive Culture (Taylor), 129 primitive people, 133 Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 108 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Harrison), 132, 201n Prometheus, 83

254 Index

Prose Edda, 196n Prosperine (goddess; see also Persephone), 83, 85 Protestantism, 27, 29, 31, 44, 119 proto-Christianity hypothesis, 25–27, 28, 44, 45, 47, 92, 150, 180n; and Blake, 66–67; and Gibson, 52, 53; and goddesses, 72; pure divinities and superior beings, 61–64; and Stukeley, 59, 61; and Toland, 56–57 Pryor, Francis, 164 pseudohistory, 177n psychoanalysis, 132 Ptolemy, Claudius, 185n Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), 95, 99, 119, 194n Purcell, Henry, 107 ‘Race of Odin, The’ (Southey), 112, 197n Radford, Andrew D., 85, 191n radicals, 145 Ragnarok, 117 Raisor, Philip, 198n Raleigh, Walter, 30, 32, 56 Ramsden, John, 121, 199n Ransome, Arthur, 198n Rawlins, T.F.S., 114, 197n realism, 195n Reckoning of Time, The (Bede), 9, 177n Rees, Alwyn, 161, 205n Rees, Brinley, 161, 205n Reformation, 16, 21, 25, 154 reincarnation, 75, 140 relativism, 30 Religion of the Ancient Celts, The (MacCulloch), 88 Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (Aubrey), 51 Renaissance, 2, 3, 21, 25, 29, 31, 36, 38, 44, 72 Restitution (Verstegan), 106, 196n Restoration, 52 Revard, Stella P., 183n revelation, 24 Rewards and Fairies (Kipling), 119, 137, 201n Rheda (goddess; see also Hretha/ Hreda), 10 Rheged, 182n Rhys, John, 85–88, 90, 192n Ribner, Irving, 182n Richard I, King, 19 Richard of Devizes, 19, 178n Richardson, John, 197n

Richmond, Hugh M., 182n rites, 85 Ritual (Pinner), 96–97, 194n Robert, Viscount Molesworth, 56 Robert of Gloucester, 16, 18–19, 178n Roberts, Brynley, 177n, 181n Robertson, Kellie, 15 Rockett, William, 28, 180n rock-gods, 129 Rogers, H.L., 182n Rogers, Thomas, 29–30 Roman de Brut (Wace), 16 Roman Empire, 7 Roman identity, 11 ‘Romance of the First Radical, The’ (Lang), 135–36 romance writers, 14 Romano-British paganism, 25; Romano-British-Celtic, 106, 126, 128, 149, 150, 159–66, 174 Romans, the, 62 Romantic era, 71, 109; Romanticisms, radical and conservative, 66–70 Rooke, Hayman, 190n Ross, Anne, 177n Rothwell, Talbot, 1 Rowlands, Henry, 188n Ruddick, Nicholas, 135, 201n Ruin of Britain, The (Gildas), 7 Ruskin, John, 68 Rust, Jennifer, 33, 181n Ryals, Clyde de L., 117, 198n Ryan, J.S., 206n Ryence, King (in Faerie Queene), 40, 182n Sabin Moore, P.M., 170–71, 207n Salter, H.E., 15 Salverte, Eusebius, 7, 64, 177n, 187n Sammes, Aylett, 52, 53, 54, 58, 70, 106–7, 108, 185n, 188n, 196n Samothes (hero/god), 25, 26, 27 Samothrace, 79 Samuels, Irene, 184n Sanders, Andrew, 115 Saturn (king/god), 11 Saturnus, 18 Saunders, Lesley, 174, 207n savagery, 134 Saxo Grammaticus, 107, 196n Saxon paganism, 7, 103–4, 121, 179n Saxons, 11, 12, 18, 101, 107, 116, 122 Sayers, Frank, 110, 197n Scandinavians, 64

Index 255

Schmidt, Wolf Gerhard, 188n Schwyzer, Philip, 4, 176n, 179n, 183n Scott, Walter, 110, 113 Scottish folk-tales, 63 Scottish isles, 64 Scragg, Donald, 101, 196n scribes, 12 Scudamour, 33, 34, 36 Seater (god), 105 Seaton, Ethel, 101–2, 107, 108, 195n, 196n Second World War, 91, 101 Secret Doctrine, The (Blavatsky), 88 Selden, John, 49, 52, 62, 67, 70, 79, 105, 160, 185n, 196n; versus Drayton, 45–48, 183n, 184n Senior, John, 140, 202n, 205n Seton, Anya, 80, 191n Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (Orosius), 7 Severn Bore, 11 Seymour, Miranda, 194n Shaffer, Antony, 96 Shakespeare, William, 44, 69, 182n; Cymbeline, 39–42, 65; Macbeth, 106; Pericles, 42–43; and Spenser, 40; The Tempest, 42, 43; Venus and Adonis, 38; As You Like It, 42, 43 Sharp, Cecil, 193n Sharp, Elizabeth A., 89, 193n Shaw, William, 178n, 187n Shawcross, John T., 184n Shelley, Mary, 83, 191n Shelley, Percy, 68, 83, 136, 191n Shepheardes Calender, The (Spenser), 31, 49, 181n, 184n Sheringham, Robert, 106 Sherry, Vincent, 194n Ship Burial: The Rune of Ing (Andrew), 171–72 Ship of Fools, The (Brandt), 22 Sidney, Philip, 30, 182n Simeon of Durham, 12, 177n Simonds, Peggy Munoz, 183n sin, 20 sixteenth century, as period of pagan revival, 179n Skelton, John, 30, 181n Skene, William Forbes, 190n Skidelsky, Robert, 199n Slavic deities, 107 Snyder, Edward D., 187n Society of Friends, 141 sonnets, Italian, 30

Southey, Robert, 67, 99, 110, 111, 112–13, 135, 197n Spanish Civil War (1937), 90 Sparks, Julie, 201n Speed, John, 185n, 188n Spelman, Henry, 106, 196n Spence, Lewis, 93 Spenser, Edmund, 4, 60, 69; and Drayton, 45, 46; The Faerie Queene, 22, 30, 31–37, 39, 40, 51, 105, 181n; influences on chorographical identity poetry, 182n; and Milton, 49, 51; as ‘New Poet,’ 31, 36, 38, 181n; and Shakespeare, 40; The Shepheardes Calender, 31, 49, 181n, 184n; and Toland, 57 Squire, Charles, 83, 87–88, 90, 91, 92, 161, 192n St. Erkenwald, 20–21, 179n St. Paul’s, London, 29, 44 Stableford, Brian, 202n Stafford, Fiona, 187n Stanton Moor, Derbyshire, 164 Stations of the Sun, The (Hutton), 9, 124 Stephens, Thomas, 78, 190n Stevenson, Anne, 98 Stewart, Bob, 164, 167, 206n Stewart, Mary, 95–96, 194n Stone Age, 149, 150, 151, 152, 158, 174 stone circles, prehistoric, 53, 58, 67, 68; see also Avebury; Stonehenge Stone Worlds (Bender, Hamilton and Tilley), 174 Stonehenge, 5, 44, 46, 53, 54, 55, 60, 66, 68, 93, 185n; likened to Solomon’s Temple, 55–56 Stonehenge (Cornwell), 156–58 Stonehenge (Mouldy), 69, 72, 188n Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids (Stukeley), 59, 187n Storm-Frost (Sabin Moore), 171 Story Donno, Elizabeth, 180n Story of the Stone Age, A (Wells), 136–37 Stouck, Mary-Ann, 179n Stout, Adam, 89, 145, 174, 178n, 192n, 199n, 207n Stow, John, 41, 180n, 182n Stukeley, William, 60, 63–64, 66, 180n, 187n, 190n; Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids, 59, 187n Sturluson, Snorri, 112, 177n, 196n Sugimura, Yasunori, 203n Sulis (goddess), 164, 165

256 Index

Summary of Famous Writers of Great Britain, A (Bale), 26 sun-gods, 58, 70 superstitions, 57 surrealism, 195n Sutcliff, Rosemary, 95–96, 123, 194n, 199n Sutton Hoo Society, 168 Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, 123, 124, 167, 168 Swaim, Kathleen M., 184n Sweet, Rosemary, 187n Swift, Jonathan, 138, 201n Swinburne, Algernon, 83–84, 117–18, 191n Table-Talk (Selden), 52 taboo, 132 Tacitus, 25, 45, 77, 103, 104, 108, 111, 125, 168 Taliesin (poet), 78, 81–82, 190n Tan Hill, near Avebury, 68, 70 Tanner, Thomas, 53, 185n Tapner, Victor, 173–74, 207n Taranis (god), 68, 69, 77, 80, 81, 83, 105, 111, 149, 163 Tatlock, J.S.P., 15, 177n, 178n Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 42, 43 Tennyson, Alfred, 83, 188n, 191n Terminus (god), 44 Tervagant (god), 18 Teutates (god), 56, 68, 77, 111 Teutonic (Grimm), 176n Themis (Harrison), 132 theosophy, 140 Thomas, Gerald, 176n Thompson, E.A., 8, 176n Thomson, James, 65, 109, 187n, 188n Thor (god), 104, 118 Thorpe, Lewis, 16–17, 177n Thoth (Egyptian god), 68 Thracian temples, 55 Tiger, Virginia, 203n Tille, Alexander, 9, 176n Tilley, Christopher, 174 Tiu (god), 86 Tobin, Daniel, 195n Toland, John, 56–57, 59, 62, 65, 76, 79, 135, 187n, 190n, 192n; Critical History of the Celtic Religion, 38, 56, 58, 186n Tolhurst, Fiona, 15 Tolkien, J.R.R., 167, 194n, 206n Tomaselli, Jessica V., 16, 178n Tonkin, Humphrey, 181n

Torfaeus, Thormodus, 112 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 132 Totemism and Exogamy (Frazer), 132 Totnes, Gogmagog’s attack on, 20 Townsend, J.A.B., 198n Toynbee, Arnold J., 90, 193n Tracy, Larissa, 178n Tragedy of Mariam (Cary), 182n translocal identity, 74 transmigration of souls, 46, 75 Treece, Henry, 144–45, 203n Trevisa, John, 20, 21, 179n Troilus and Cressida, 24 Trojan identity, 11 Trojans, 11, 14 Troy, 30 Tucker, Herbert, 192n Tudor monarchy, 30, 36 Tuisco (hero/god), 104 Turner, Sharon, 116 Tuve, Rosamond, 184n Two Noble Kinsmen, The (Fletcher), 42 Twyne, John, 52 Tydea (god), 18 Tylor, Edward, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 152, 200n, 201n Ullin (warrior-poet), 63 Ulysses ( Joyce), 84 uncanniness, 118 uncertainty, 121 unheimlich deities, 118, 121 uniformity doctrine, 129 ‘Upon Appleton House’ (Marvell), 51 Uppsala, temple at, 103 Upton, John, 36 Uranus (god), 55 Valentine, William Christopher, 114, 197n Valiente, Doreen, 93, 95, 189n, 194n, 200n vanities, 10 Vendler, Helen, 99, 195n Venus (goddess), 24, 30, 33, 34, 103, 181n Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 38 Venus-Adraste (see also Adraste), 52 Vergil, Polydore, 25 Verstegan, Richard, 103–4, 106, 127, 196n Verulamium, ruins of, 13 Vesta (goddess), 55 Victoria, 56 Victorian culture, 68, 84, 86

Index 257

Vikings, 2, 101, 102, 115, 118, 122, 198n Vindication of Stone-Heng Restored, A (Webb), 55 Vine, Angus, 45, 180n, 184n, 185n Virgil, Polydore, 22, 177n Virgin Mary, 18, 73, 97, 143, 181n Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The (Daniel), 38 Vortigern, 11 Vortigern and Rowena (Ireland), 106 Wace, 16, 17, 19, 178n Wall, J.D., 204n Wallis, Henry Marriage, 140–41, 148, 202n Walpole, Sir Robert, 111 Walsham, Alexandra, 187n Walsingham, Thomas, 177n Walter (Archdeacon of Oxford), 13 Wansdike, 46 Warren, Michelle R., 13 Warrior Daughter (Paisley), 163–64, 171, 206n Warton, Joseph, 187n Warton, Thomas, 109, 187n Wasteland, The (Eliot), 89–90, 193n Waswo, Richard, 178n Waters, D. Douglas, 35, 182n Waters Bennett, Josephine, 181n, 182n Watson, Jules, 162–63, 205n, 206n Wawn, Andrew, 114, 187n, 197n Weallas (Britons), 102 Webb, John, 55, 56, 186n Weinberg, Carole, 178n Weinkauf, Mary S., 140, 202n Weintraub, Stanley, 203n Welbourn, Terry, 174 Wells, H.G., 4, 136–37, 139, 143, 146, 202n Welsh language/poetry, 12, 57 Wendish deities, 107 West, James, 54 West Saxon dynasty, 12 Weston, Jessie L., 88, 90, 188n, 192n What We Did to Father (Lewis), 147 Whatley, Gordon, 179n Wheeler, Mortimer, 124 When Mankind was Young (Austin), 141 White, Donna R.W, 192n

White Goddess, The (Graves), 91, 97, 159, 174, 175, 193n Whitlark, James, 120, 198n Whitlock, Ralph, 93, 124 Whitmont, Edward C., 174, 207n Whittaker, Jason, 188n Whore of Babylon, 35 Whyte, Nicola, 187n Wicca, 126 Wife of Bath (Chaucer), 30, 181n The Wicker Man, 96, 97 Wilkins, Charles, 74, 189n William III, King, 108 William of Malmesbury, 12 William of Newburgh, 178n William of Orange, 99 William of St. Albans, 12 Williams, Edward, 75, 76, 78, 79, 93, 125 Williams, Raymond, 149, 151, 155, 204n Wilson, David, 123, 176n, 182n, 199n; Anglo-Saxon Paganism, 124–25 Wilson Knight, G., 182n Winner, Michael, 96 wish-fulfilment, 62–63 witchcraft, 17, 125, 134, 167, 171, 194n Withrington, John, 194n Woden (god), 10, 12, 13, 18, 46, 104, 112, 150 Wolf Brother (Paver), 158–59, 205n Woman Question, 70 Wood, Ian N., 176n Wood, Jacqui, 159, 205n Wood, John, 165 Wood, Juliette, 192n Wood-gods, 46 Woolf, Daniel, 180n Wordsworth, William, 68, 69, 187n, 188n Works of Ossian, The (Macpherson), 62 World Wars, 90, 91, 101, 121, 122 Worm, Ole, 108–9 Worrall, David, 188n Wright, Herbert G., 197n Wuffing Education, 168 Wyatt, Thomas, 30, 181n Yates, Frances, 182n Yeats, W.B., 89, 191n, 193n Zarncke, Friedrich, 179n