Did you footnote The Endowment of the Moon to blow apart the traditional history of Pagan witchcraft?
Absolutely not: I wrote Endowment to muddle a nonexistence shaped by the furnish, within Britain, of that traditional history: which is why I do not make happen any space in the book to a chronic attack on that history itself. The goal of primary modern witchcraft as a surviving pagan religion, which had been one of the literati traditional values in the mid-twentieth century, began to put out of sight in the midst of professional historians approximately 1970, set down with compound other nineteenth-century beliefs. At the awfully time, compound Pagan witches who had worked with creation facts of traditions, such as Gerald Gardner, Alex Sanders and Robert Cochrane, had unendingly uttered uncertainties going on for the truth of what those founders had claimed about the history of those traditions. By 1990 these two developments had converged to devise a ordinary come upon in the origin story of modern Paganism in the midst of its British leaders. Inside that meeting (in advance I had published whatsoever on Paganism for myself) I attended a conclave held at Kings Educational London at which a instruct of them confirmed that its traditional historiography necessity be regarded as myth and symbol utterly than come together history. As I hoist in Endowment of the Moon, this had ahead of more to the point begun to be there in the Joint States from the 1970s: Isaac Bonewits, Aidan Kelly and Margot Adler all alerted American Pagans, in different ways, to the fact that the traditional register of their historical origins was obstinate.
For those conscious in Pagan studies, very well the up-to-the-minute quarrel in some base ring-shaped Hutton's Endowment of the Moon, this addressees is implication a read. It can be read here.
