Anyway, there was something a while back on the American Chesterton Society blog that I wanted to comment on, but I saw it too late; also they try to keep things classy, whereas I "play in the street," as capoeiristas put it.
Last week, Dr. Thursday over on the American Chesterton Society blog quoted GKC on something touching on paganism. His post from this week also touches, more tangentially, on paganism; one wonders if it, like the last one, will attract odd little gadflies. See, on that first post, someone (plainly not having really read the quote, and not knowing the context), decided to post this comment:
If Chesterton said that, then he was an ignoramus. I doubt that he had ever knowingly met a contemporary Pagan or spoken with one. Of course, they largely kept quiet in 1931, since Witchcraft was still technically illegal in the U.K. at that time ("The Dark Ages called--they want their laws back.")They were so well hidden, in fact, that they didn't even exist yet—hiding out from being itself, they had reached the apotheosis of stealth!
See, the branch of Neo-Paganism of which Wicca is a part dates to the later thirties, building on anthropological theories from the 20s, and really took off in the 50s. Truly the mind is toppled by that vista of cyclopean time—how could anyone be expected to get any of the details of that era right?
Leaving to one side that the witch-hunts happened post-Reformation, a good 700 years after the Dark Ages ended, one wonders why Neo-Pagans would be hiding out in the 1930s—considering Aleister sodding Crowley didn't seem to feel the need.
Then again, anyone who actually believes there was a "hidden witch-cult"—which even Wiccans don't teach anymore!—probably also thinks Madagascar is the end of a sunken continent called Lemuria, that there is such a thing as luminiferous ether, and that the moon was spun off from the Pacific Ocean. The 1920s called, they want their science back.
3 comments:
So, with delightful (dare I say wicked?) comments such as that one - you are going to come to the Chesterton Convention outside of Washington DC next August, aren't you? You will find many like minded people there. (Loved your closing line especially.)
On the other hand, if you knew where to look, you could find what are now called, among other things, "traditional witches" or "hedgewitches." Some of their descendants live even now in Appalachia as well as in the U.K. And, yes, some of them were/are Goddess worshippers.
Anonymous: no, probably not; I don't really like conventions (crowds, mainly).
Makarios: And on the first hand again, a few practitioners of folk-magic—which probably dates to the Renaissance at the earliest—do not constitute a surviving ancient "witch cult". There simply is not, to wring a little more work out of an overused expression, any "there" there.
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