Pagan Britain, by Ronald Hutton

This is an expedition into deep time: a meticulous critical review of the known and sometimes shadowy rituals and beliefs in the British Isles from early prehistory to the advent of Christianity. Pagan Britain charts what we know of human spirituality across some 30,000 years. Such a broad sweep might have lapsed into mere description; instead, Ronald Hutton brings the discussion alive with detail and debate, interspersing accounts of key findings and theories with critical vignettes of the moment of discovery or the character of the antiquarian in question.

Drawing on archaeological and historical evidence, Hutton sets out what we know of prehistoric and early historic religion. He begins with some of the extraordinary early surviving Palaeolithic art found in British caves, then traverses the monumentalised Neolithic landscapes of Ireland’s Boyne Valley and Wessex’s chalk-lands, the sacred fenlands and pools of eastern England and the wild coasts of West Wales and North Scotland marked by prehistoric tomb-shrines and Viking burial mounds. The emphasis on landscape seems almost Romantic, but it accurately reflects archaeology’s recent preoccupation with place and the sensory qualities of spiritual and religious experience.

The use of material culture to explore prehistoric and proto-historic ritual practice remains contentious. Although significantly advanced by cognitive archaeological approaches in the late 20th century, many strands of interpretive work have drawn criticism. The great merit of Hutton’s approach is his willingness to eschew orthodoxies, and present and debate multiple viewpoints. In discussing ancient monuments such as Stonehenge, he considers contrasting recent interpretations – their possible roles as seasonal ancestral shrines, or places of healing whose stones possessed curative properties. Familiar themes are set against less popular and well-rehearsed interpretations.

Such multivocality makes Pagan Britain invaluable for a general audience, focusing on continuities and discontinuities of tradition and evidence in the archaeological and historical records. It also facilitates Hutton’s aim of stepping back from any single imposed view and presenting evidence and interpretations with clear oversight of the data’s limitations. Traditional viewpoints connecting painted and carved Palaeolithic images to fertility and hunting are set alongside more recent theories, such as those that connect more abstract early prehistoric imagery to the visuals one might encounter in entoptic or trance-like states. The rise and fall of arguments for the existence of divinities such as a female goddess in the early Neolithic are also carefully reviewed, and we are encouraged to consider that diverse meanings may well have existed.

This multiplicity works best when dealing with prehistory. When written sources provide some guide to contemporary practices, greater tensions emerge in rationalising textual and archaeological sources. Hutton’s discussion of early medieval Britain rightly makes reference to the sparse, difficult, written sources of the Christian era that mention pre- and non-Christian practices. Although he handles these critically and sensitively, when considered in the long view, their presence begins to feel like a constraint: accounts of designated deities including goddesses, the presence of cult structures and even male pagan spiritual leaders seem to demand that such things should be looked for even if they remain elusive. In terms of the late prehistoric, Romano-British and early medieval eras, archaeology arguably is beginning to speak in far louder terms than the scarce written accounts of a rich multiplicity of beliefs, of regional and local places of importance, and of spiritual concerns embedded in the everyday.

The long view leads to an inevitable emphasis on “big” evidence, as massive Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments shadow the more mundane, everyday traces that are the more frequent legacy of the British Isles’ late Iron Age, Romano-British, pre-Christian and early medieval communities. But it also brings benefits, spotlighting repeating traditions in human ritual activity, such as the evidence (via paintings, carvings, burials and special deposits) that caves and fissures were used for special purposes from the Palaeolithic to Romano-British eras.

More thought-provoking is Hutton’s focus on the synergy between the emergence and spread of new technologies and material evidence for innovation and diversities in ritual behaviour and belief. A connection may exist, for example, between the circulation of iron objects in the three or four centuries before the arrival of the Romans and evidence for the ritual deposition of metal objects. Even in the early medieval era, sources attest to a powerful love of material objects, “as beautiful creations which almost possessed personalities of their own”. Bladed weapons were sometimes given names, were “ritually killed” and disposed of in wetlands, and perhaps even at old prehistoric sites. Metalworking and other creative processes may have been seen as potent activities, and the products powerful in their own right.

Another insight gained by looking longitudinally is the repeated reference made by communities to the monuments and special places of past eras, in the revisitation of natural places or purpose-built monuments, for special activity. The scope of Hutton’s appraisal brings into focus the constant renegotiation of the past through material remains. Rather than intense periods of “reuse”, what emerges is a rolling but ever-changing conception of the ancient physical legacies of past populations. Even when two and a half millennia of constant development, mutation and revision of monument types, monuments and monumental landscapes came to an end in some regions of Britain in late prehistory, certain populations continued to collect and curate Bronze Age objects and metalwork. Roman temples and Romano-British shrines point to a new phase of renegotiation of ancient prehistoric sites; in the early medieval era they were reused as places of burial. In these repeating processes lie the physical signatures of shifting conceptions of place and identity, as people created new stories, myths and traditions that connected them to the past.

“Pagan” is a contentious term that has come to have an active meaning in modern society in application to neo-pagan and New Age spiritualism. No one is better suited than Hutton – author of the landmark 1999 work The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft – to handling the sensitive divide between academic discourse on ancient religions and modern popular perceptions of the pagan past. He gives voice to academic and alternative discourses and invites cooperation via “a creative and benevolent partnership”.

In this rewarding book, Hutton asks us to recognise that the activities we see in the archaeological record “attest strongly” to ancient communities’ capacity to “conceive of worlds beyond the material and the immediate”. He acknowledges the tensions and uncertainties of the evidence, but also identifies the multiplicity of beliefs and practices that emerge in times of change. In taking the long view, he offers fresh perspectives on the creative energy of human populations in establishing new rites and traditions or reviving and adopting existing ones. What is firmly emphasised is that “the inhabitants of Britain, from the moment at which they began to reshape the landscape and erect impressive structures upon it, [have] never been truly static or conservative in their ritual behaviour”.

Along the way he unpicks many long-held assumptions, such as the view that Morris dances, Sheela-na-gigs and the Green Man are direct pagan inheritances. He not only exposes weaknesses in existing arguments but also offers a visceral experience of the remarkable and often enigmatic evidence for ancient beliefs, rituals and practices in the British Isles.