Full Description
'a brilliant history'
The Sunday Times
'makes for riveting reading'
The Independent
Modern pagan witchcraft is arguably the only fully-formed religion England has given the world, and has now spread across four continents.
This second edition of The Triumph of the Moon extensively revises the first full-scale scholarly study of modern pagan witchcraft. Ronald Hutton examines the nature and development of this religion, and offers a history of attitudes to witchcraft, paganism and magic in British society since 1800. Its pages reveal village cunning folk, Victorian ritual magicians, classicists and archaeologists, leaders of woodcraft and scouting movements, Freemasons, and members of rural secret societies. We also find some of the leading figures of English literature, from the Romantic poets to W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves, as well as the main personalities who have represented pagan witchcraft to the public world since 1950. Thriller writers like Dennis Wheatley, and films and television programmes, get similar coverage, as does tabloid journalism. The material is by its nature often sensational, and care is taken throughout to distinguish fact from fantasy, in a manner not previously applied to most of the stories involved.
Meticulously researched, The Triumph of the Moon presents an authoritative insight into an aspect of modern cultural history which has attracted sensational publicity but has hitherto been little understood. This edition incorporates new research carried out by the author as well as research by others who have been inspired by this book over the twenty years since its first publication.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Macrocosm
1: Finding a Language
2: Finding a Goddess
3: Finding a God
4: Finding a Structure
5: Finding a High Magic
6: Finding a Low Magic
7: Finding a Folklore
8: Finding a Witchcraft
9: Matrix
10: God (and Goddess) Parents
Microcosm
11: Gerald Gardner
12: Gerald's People
13: The Wider Context: Hostility
14: The Wider Context: Reinforcement
15: Old Craft, New Craft
16: The Man in Black
17: Royalty from the North
18: Uncle Sam and the Goddess
19: Coming of Age
20: Grandchildren of the Shadows
Notes
Index
