The Witch as Invention and as Archetype: Hutton's Heraclitan Historiography

Years ago, a friend, fresh from her first Gender Studies class, instructed me to avoid the expression "rule of thumb." "Don't use that phrase," she said. "It comes from an old English law that allows a man to beat his wife with a stick, as long as the stick is no thicker than his thumb." The idiom, my friend argued forcefully, was incorrigibly tainted by heteropatriarchal misogyny, and must be discarded.

Then in my last year of high school, I was even more ignorant than I remain, but this story didn't sound right to me. An etymological dictionary confirmed that "rule of thumb," in its usual sense of "a rough and ready guideline," comes simply from the practice of using the digit of one's thumb to approximate an inch. I was right, my friend (and her professor), were wrong. So there! And yet, if you already suspect that this story gets more complicated, you are also right.

What would Ronald Hutton have said in a similar situation? While any answer to this question must remain speculative, it can also, I think, illuminate some of what makes Hutton not only one of the most respected historians of our time, but also one of the most beloved. I'll return to this question at the end of my comments.

Fast-forward a decade or so: I am now a graduate student beginning the study of witchcraft that has been my scholarly preoccupation ever since. Unlike Hutton,¹ I didn't grow up Pagan, but I did grow up in post-hippy northern California. Pagan or Pagan-adjacent cosmologies such as Goddess spiritualism, were, accordingly, as familiar to me as were those of Abrahamic traditions: I had heard of the Burning Times; I briefly participated in a youth group led by a self-identified Crone; I knew people who knew Starhawk, and so on. So when I started to seriously study the early modern witch trials and began to realize how little the history of those trials had in common with the Pagan myths of origin I had learned in my youth, I felt I had been lied to. And I found it hard, with my newfound historical knowledge, to summon anything softer than a moralizing righteousness in my relationship with modern Pagan mythical narratives about early modern witches.

Thankfully someone steered me to Hutton's work, and specifically to his essay "Paganism and Polemic."² I am so glad I read this essay alongside, and as a complement to, Diane Purkiss's powerful essay "A Holocaust of One's Own," in her Witch in History.³ Purkiss shared and validated my righteous rage against contemporary appropriations of the judicial murder of early modern accused witches—most of them Christian—for contemporary political or spiritual projects with which those accused "witches" would not have identified.⁴

Hutton helped me see things differently. In response to a polemical attack by the "Pagan fundamentalist" Don H. Frew,⁵ Hutton in no way backed down from his historically grounded position that modern Gardnerian Paganism had very little relation to the practices of early modern accused witches or to ancient northern European paganisms. Neither did he deride Frew, however, despite the latter's intemperate and sometimes ad hominem attack on Hutton. Instead, he took the opportunity to reflect on the historical roots of modern Paganism, conceiving it as an invented tradition, but one that draws upon a variety of ancient or recent historical influences. Most importantly for my growing sense of myself as a historian, and my appreciation of Hutton's approach to history, he noted that a few ancient or early modern practices are taken up by modern Paganism; albeit these are by and large practices well outside the mainstream in their premodern contexts. His conclusion from all this is the opposite of dismissive: "Such an insight does no discredit to Wicca; rather, it further improves its credentials as a remarkably courageous countercultural religion."⁶ In this generous...