Interview Questions /

PROFESSOR RONALD HUTTON:

1) So, Professor Hutton, would you mind telling us something about how you came

to write your new book, The Witch, A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the

Present?

Reply: I have long been interested in the reasons behind the notorious early modern

European witch hunts, and from an early stage it seemed to me that they could only be

properly understood and explained in a much broader context than had usually been

employed hitherto. That context would include ancient and global perspectives. This idea

also connected neatly with a lot of my other interests in ancient paganism, in ritual

magic, in shamanism, and so on and so from 1990 onward I slowly began accumulating

the different expertise needed for it. On the way, I realised how great a problem witch

hunting still was, in the developing world, and became involved in the public debate over

whether to revive laws against witchcraft in South Africa. I came to hope that a book

which explained the roots of the fear of witchcraft might play a part in eradicating that

fear. In 2014 I was ready to write it, and got the Leverhulme Trust to fund a team of

researchers to work upon aspects of the subject with me, for three years. It was eight

strong, including an artist, entirely female apart from me and a quarter self-identified as

Pagan, and aimed to produce three books, four doctoral theses, five symposia and the art

works. My own book was the largest of those outputs and completed punctually before

the project concluded in February 2017.

2) You have achieved a considerable level of acceptance and appreciation among

the broader contemporary Neo-Pagan and Wiccan communities how do you

imagine that they will receive The Witch?

Reply: It is not really written for them, but for the wider reading world, although I would

hope that they benefit from it. It is designed as a contribution to ending the fear of

witchcraft, and so the persecution of people as witches, across the world, in the manner in

which humanity has combined to eliminate diseases such as smallpox, polio and leprosy.

This need is still especially acute in the developing world, but has resonances even in the

West, where the early modern stereotype of Satan-worshipping witches that produced the

great witch hunts underlay the Satanic Ritual Abuse scares of the 1980s and 1990s and

fuels much of the Deliverance Ministry in contemporary North America. More generally,

the name witch still inspires a vague but intense fear and hostility among many ordinary

people in the West which makes life uncomfortable for Pagans who use it for themselves.

I want to show where this comes from, and why it is not necessary. In addition, however,

Pagans of all kinds will probably find much of direct interest in my book, such as

attitudes to witchcraft in the ancient world, the origins of the Western tradition of ritual

magic, the history of the idea of the Wild Hunt, and the relationships between witches and

fairies, and witches and animals.

3) You are well-known and greatly appreciated for the series of books in which you

explore all manner of different aspects of the Pagan world, from Druidry to King

Arthur, Shamanism, and now Witches. Your 1999 volume, The Triumph of the

Moon, is practically required reading in Wiccan circles! What is it that you think

drew you to explore these areas in the first place, and how do you find it sits

alongside your, shall we say, more mainstream work as an Historian?

Reply: I was brought up as a Pagan, in a non-denominational, Victorian and Edwardian

sense, of regarding the Greek and Roman pagan classics as the best introduction to the

nature of divinity and sensing an immanent sanctity in the land, and especially natural

places. This meant that when I first encountered Wicca, in my teens, I liked it at once and

found it made perfect sense as a mystery religion within the wider and vaguer Paganism

to which I adhered. I did not start my career as a historian by working on such subjects, as

I knew that I would never get a job if I did, but on more mainstream political history, in

areas which I also genuinely enjoyed. Once firmly established, however, I felt able to turn

to paganism, witchcraft and magic at last. In doing so I underestimated both the security

of my position and the blind hostility to anything associated with witchcraft that even

members of my own highly educated profession could manifest. Although I never

publicly identified myself as a Wiccan, or any other kind of Pagan, my identification with

both, when I published Triumph did me enormous damage. An American historian

visiting Cambridge at that time asked my colleagues there what I was doing and was told

that he could forget about me, as I had gone mad, become a witch and left the profession.

The student newspaper at my own university denounced me as a satanic witch and

warned people against me. Research grants and invitations to speak the life blood of my

profession dried up, and my career stalled. However, I stood firm and carried on

writing, and after some years it all died down. My progress in my profession which had

initially been unusually rapid resumed, and I received its highest honours, such as

election to the British Academy, to both history and archaeology sections, in the end.

4) What would you say to anyone who was troubled by the somewhat pejorative

definitions of the term witch that you open the discussion in your book with?

(For example, leading anthropologist Rodney Needhams 1978 summing up of

the Witch as someone who causes harm to others by mystical means.)

Reply: I start the book by apologising to anybody offended by my employment of that

pejorative term as my standard one for the rest of the contents. The problem is that four

different definitions of the word witch are circulating in the current world, and they all

have some legitimacy. The first is somebody who uses magic to harm others. The second

is somebody who uses magic for any means, positive or negative, with the positive often

distinguished by calling those practitioners good or white witches. The third is a

practitioner of a surviving or recreated Pagan nature religion. The fourth is a strong and

independent woman victimised by the forces of patriarchy. The first two are old, the last

two modern, but still established for well over a hundred years. Pagans generally use one

or all of the last three, but most of British society, at all levels, still uses the first, and

equivalent terms and attitudes are found all over the world. I am trying to stop belief in

such a figure for good, or rather am striving to make a contribution to a long, long

struggle of re-education which will achieve that work.

5) Down through the ages and from culture-to-culture there have been

innumerable men who have pursued the study and practice of everything from

Alchemy to Cabala and Ceremonial Magic: all those Wizards and Warlocks,

Sorcerers and Shamans and yet the stereotype of The Witch has almost

always remained defiantly female. Why is that, do you think?

Reply: This is because most Europeans in sharp contrast to many other peoples across

the world, and some in Europe itself (most of these in the far north and east of the

continent) have traditionally seen women as the more magical sex. They believed that

men can learn magic, from books or teachers, but women just have it in them. That is why

women were traditionally brought in by ancient Europeans, whether Greeks, Romans,

Germans or Celtic-speakers, when established religious and magical processes could not

cope- as prophetesses, seeresses, sybils and pythonesses. It also means that they were
 more readily suspected of witchcraft, because magic was regarded as inherent in them and

could be used spontaneously.

6) Are you aware of recent movies like Robert Eggars The Witch (2015) which,

even though it does not reference the Salem Witch Trials directly, makes use of a

comparable setting? Or even Anna Billers comedy-horror-thriller, The Love

Witch (2016)? What are your thoughts on films like these (if any), and why the

figure of the Witch continues to interest and intrigue, or even inspire fear, still?

Reply: The enduring power of the figure of the witch lies in the very versatility which it now

possesses, to which I have referred above. She (or sometimes he) can represent the ultimate

force of evil, or of good, or the ultimate victim, and the apotheosis of either power or

vulnerability. So she is very, very exciting for modern creative minds. Of the specific works

mentioned, I have not seen The Love Witch. I did see The Witch, in a special screening

arranged for me by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which wanted me to review it for

Jonathan Rosss national radio show. I thought that the costumes, acting, and period setting

were all excellent, but the moral message completely haphazard, being sacrificed to a series

of dramatic effects. At the end, the story-line seemed completely to reaffirm the early modern

stereotype of the satanic witch of a conspiracy of witches who have sworn allegiance to (an

objectively real) Devil and are given superhuman powers, in turn, with which to torment and

murder humans and so effectively to justify the witch hunts. You may gather that this is not

a message which resonates well with me.

7) Even though we no longer live in a Culture where the majority subscribe to an

official worldview which promotes belief in malevolent supernatural forces,

nevertheless a certain kind of attitude remains and resurfaces, often in only

slightly modified form: the misogynistic rhetoric that was directed at Hilary
 Clinton in the 2016 American Presidential Election Campaign and the absurd

allegations that were made in connection with Marina Abramovi and her

Spirit-Cooking took the idea of Media Witch-hunt to a whole new level of

grotesquery. Yet, at the same time, among the Trump supporters were a vocal

contingent claiming that meme-magic was helping their cause! Do you have any

thoughts that you would be willing to share on such matters, and any suggestions

as to how we all might assist common sense in prevailing?

Reply: I can only comment rather lamely that all this is a powerful illustration of the way in

which the witch figure, witchcraft and magic all remain very active in contemporary culture

as metaphors, and to an extent as phenomena still vaguely half-credited. I am not acquainted

with the particular cases you have cited, as I do not follow overseas political events closely

enough, and so cannot comment on them. There are no parallels of which I am aware in

recent British politics. My own desire to work to remove fear of the witch and witchcraft

should be some contribution to reducing the frequency with which such metaphors are used,

and claims made.

8) Is there anything you feel you were unable to include in The Witch that you

would have liked to? Or anything, conversely, that you regret, and wish you had

left out?

Reply: I would have liked to have prefaced the book with an extended discussion of the

history and significance of the different meanings of the word witch, and followed it with a

study of treatments of the figure in the years 1800 to 1940, to plug the chronological gap

between this book and Triumph. However, I was up against the deadline for the project and

the word limit for the book, and the latter was compact and effective enough as it stood, so I

delivered it without these extras.

 9) So, what is next for Professor Hutton, professionally and personally?

Reply: In literary terms, I am busy writing the extras which I did not put into The Witch:

essays on the meaning of the word, on images of witches and cunning folk in British fiction

between 1800 and 1940, and on the place of the Wild Hunt in the modern British imagination.

The first two are already finished, but I am not sure yet whether to put them separately into

academic journals or to publish them together as part of a collection of essays from Yale

University Press. My editor at Yale is seeking opinions on this, and I shall follow them. A

proper revised second edition of Triumph of the Moon is due, twenty years after the original.

My main next project, which will take years, will however be to return to my original power

base of mainstream political history and produce a study of Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to

subjects concerning Paganism and magic, it is really easy to get leave and other support

systems for a topic like that, and I have already been granted them. As for my professional

and personal future, I shall as usual work with whatever opportunities fate sends me.

Professor Hutton, Thank You so much for your time!

Reply: Thank you very much for yours.

Emma Doeve & Matthew Levi Stevens, for New Dawn, June 2017.