Ronald Hutton > Quotes

“human beings traditionally have great trouble in coping with the concept of random chance. People tend on the whole to want to assign occurrences of remarkable good or bad luck to agency, either human or superhuman. It is important to emphasize, however, that malevolent humans have been only one kind of agent to whom such causation has been attributed: the others include deities, non-human spirits that inhabit the terrestrial world, or the spirits of dead human ancestors.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“I am Pan, and the Earth is mine.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“I have been waiting for this second novel - The Keys of Hell and Death by Charles Cordell - and am not disappointed. Once again he evokes the experience of the Civil War soldier more vividly than ever before.”
― Ronald Hutton

“All have validity in the present, and to call anyone wrong for using any one of them would be to reveal oneself as bereft of general knowledge and courtesy, as well as scholarship.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“[Algernon] Swinburne’s influence upon modern paganism can hardly be overestimated; he was much admired, and quoted by (to name but three figures who will feature prominently in its story) Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, and Gerald Gardner.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“This was, however, no straightforward stone circle of the Cumbrian sort, but a collection of trilithons, chambers, altars and monoliths intended to represent the elements and the signs of the zodiac; as if Stonehenge had mated with a Neolithic passage grave and produced offspring.”
― Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

“…between 1840 and 1940 historians and archaeologists had turned Neolithic spirituality into a mirror-image of Christianity, emphasizing female instead of male, earth instead of sky, nature instead of civilization.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“Of all the many novels set in the English Civil War that I have read, this was the one that described most perfectly the use of the different arms and the experience of the face of battle. It was also the one that made me care most about the characters.”
― Ronald Hutton

“Now that modern Western culture is itself starting to abandon rigid gender divisions and polarities, to challenge its customary sharp distinction between animal and human, and to admit to fluidity in the making and remaking of individual identity, it is beginning to perceive the same patterns in the creations of the Palaeolithic.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“Religion is characterized as belief in the existence of spiritual beings or forces which are in some measure responsible for the cosmos, and in the need of human beings to form relationships with them in which they are accorded some respect. When a group of people operates it in the same way, it becomes ‘a’ religion”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“The geographical emphasis is also important, because the unique significance of pagan witchcraft to history is that it was the first fully formed religion which England has given the world, and may, subject to definition, still be the only one.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“magic had nothing to do with witchcraft because the former was mostly the preserve of men, who sought to control demons, while the latter was mostly that of women, who were servants and allies to them.5 The self-image of such magicians, in the medieval and early modern periods, drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, representing themselves as part of the elite of pious and learned men.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“Those of the masons themselves do suggest that the Charges were a development of the late medieval period—the oldest is the ‘Regius Poem’, from the end of the fourteenth century—and that they grew more elaborate throughout this period. They instruct the newcomer in rules of conduct, and in masonic tradition, and assume the existence of an assembly of initiates, and (from the ‘Regius Poem’ onward) have a standard cry of endorsement: ‘so mote it be’ (the standard Middle English for ‘so must it be’). None, however, implies any ritual action, of the sort found by the 1690s.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’. In stating this, he was self-consciously not providing a personal view of the matter, but summing up an established scholarly consensus, which dealt with the witch figure as one of those whom he termed ‘primordial characters’ of humanity. He added that no more rigorous definition was generally accepted.1 In all this he was certainly correct, for English-speaking scholars have used the word ‘witch’ when dealing with such a reputed person in all parts of the world, before Needham’s time, and ever since, as shall be seen. When the only historian of the European trials to set them systematically in a global context in recent years, Wolfgang Behringer, undertook his task, he termed witchcraft ‘a generic term for all kinds of evil magic and sorcery, as perceived by contemporaries’.2 Again, in doing so he was self-consciously perpetuating a scholarly norm. That usage has persisted till the present among anthropologists and historians of extra-European peoples: to take one recent example, in 2011 Katherine Luongo prefaced her study of the relationship between witchcraft and the law in early twentieth-century Kenya by defining witchcraft itself ‘in the Euro-American sense of the word’ as ‘magical harm’.3”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“Roman scholar and administrator Pliny, in the first century, that ‘nobody is unafraid of falling victim to an evil spell’.74”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“he explicitly recognized the change in anthropology, acknowledging that its practitioners had become wary of using Western concepts to understand non-Western cultures and preferred to employ those of the people whom they were studying.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“the burgeoning of research that had occurred since, internationally, and taking ever more sophisticated forms, had passed them by completely.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“any formalized practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world’.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“It may be argued instead that the characteristic language of a committed modern paganism has its direct origin in German Romanticism, the result of a fusion in late eighteenth-century Germany of three powerful forces: admiration for ancient Greece, nostalgia for a vanished past, and desire for an organic unity between people, culture, and nature.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“philosophes alike, the ancients were signposts to secularism’.34 It may be argued instead that the characteristic language of a committed modern paganism has its direct origin in German Romanticism, the result of a fusion in late eighteenth-century Germany of three powerful forces: admiration for ancient Greece, nostalgia for a vanished past, and desire for an organic unity between people, culture, and nature.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“THIS BOOK HAS been over a quarter of a century in the making,”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“The painter Edward Calvert, who worked from the 1820s to the 1870s and loved Greek subjects, erected an altar to Pan in his back garden.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“Anthropologists who studied this phenomenon found themselves needing to dissuade fellow Westerners from attributing the persistence of a belief in witchcraft in Africa to any inherent disposition to ‘superstition’ or ‘backwardness’ on the part of its peoples. Such a strategy called for a new emphasis on the prevalence of such beliefs across the globe, including in the relatively recent European past, and a return to a comparative method; and direct calls for that were being made by prominent Africanists by the mid-1990s.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“imposition of European terms and concepts on studies of other societies and the offering of comparisons between those societies which the imposition of the terms concerned made easier.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“This caused him to condemn archaeologists (in general) as ‘stuck in the past’.”
― Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain

“historians have largely ignored the opportunity for a new dialogue, and anthropologists have largely ceased to offer it.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

“The first absolutely certain record which places it upon 25 December is the calendar of Philocalus, produced in 354 and apparently at Rome.”
― Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain

“Each was, depending on the person and the judgement of observers, either a romancer, a crank, an eccentric or a charlatan. It seems that such quirks of character may be the vital ingredient that enables a human being to push forward and succeed, with confidence and charisma, where the more scrupulous and level-headed would not venture.”
― Ronald Hutton, Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

“The first is that in medieval British records the terms ‘art’, ‘craft’, and ‘mystery’ are used interchangeably for any trade or calling which required particular skills.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present