Quotes from Ronald Hutton

It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such ... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter.

human beings traditionally have great trouble in coping with the concept of random chance. People tend on the whole to want to assign occurrences of remarkable good or bad luck to agency, either human or superhuman. It is important to emphasize, however, that malevolent humans have been only one kind of agent to whom such causation has been attributed: the others include deities, non-human spirits that inhabit the terrestrial world, or the spirits of dead human ancestors.

This was, however, no straightforward stone circle of the Cumbrian sort, but a collection of trilithons, chambers, altars and monoliths intended to represent the elements and the signs of the zodiac; as if Stonehenge had mated with a Neolithic passage grave and produced offspring.

All have validity in the present, and to call anyone wrong for using any one of them would be to reveal oneself as bereft of general knowledge and courtesy, as well as scholarship.

The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.

some American anthropologists, who were already warning before the end of the 1960s that the term 'witchcraft' was being used as a label for phenomena that differed radically between societies.

such exchanges should be carried on with caution.

imposition of European terms and concepts on studies of other societies and the offering of comparisons between those societies which the imposition of the terms concerned made easier.

She accused him of having adopted categories constructed by the British from the eighteenth century onwards, as cultural weapons to be deployed against other peoples; and questioned in general whether cultural particulars could be formed into general concepts and compared across time periods and continents.

Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.

He invited anthropologists to study research into the European trials, and termed their recent neglect of this 'even more disconcerting' than the loss of interest by historians of Europe in African parallels

especially with its ruling elites of colonial European administrators and settlers, early twentieth-century Africa had been as socially and culturally complex as sixteenth-century Europe.

the burgeoning of research that had occurred since, internationally, and taking ever more sophisticated forms, had passed them by completely.

historians have largely ignored the opportunity for a new dialogue, and anthropologists have largely ceased to offer it.

Of all the many novels set in the English Civil War that I have read, this was the one that described most perfectly the use of the different arms and the experience of the face of battle. It was also the one that made me care most about the characters.

Each was, depending on the person and the judgement of observers, either a romancer, a crank, an eccentric or a charlatan. It seems that such quirks of character may be the vital ingredient that enables a human being to push forward and succeed, with confidence and charisma, where the more scrupulous and level-headed would not venture.

Now that modern Western culture is itself starting to abandon rigid gender divisions and polarities, to challenge its customary sharp distinction between animal and human, and to admit to fluidity in the making and remaking of individual identity, it is beginning to perceive the same patterns in the creations of the Palaeolithic.

The first absolutely certain record which places it upon 25 December is the calendar of Philocalus, produced in 354 and apparently at Rome.

Religion is characterized as belief in the existence of spiritual beings or forces which are in some measure responsible for the cosmos, and in the need of human beings to form relationships with them in which they are accorded some respect. When a group of people operates it in the same way, it becomes 'a' religion

magic had nothing to do with witchcraft because the former was mostly the preserve of men, who sought to control demons, while the latter was mostly that of women, who were servants and allies to them.5 The self-image of such magicians, in the medieval and early modern periods, drew on the established ideals of the clerical, monastic and scholarly professions, representing themselves as part of the elite of pious and learned men.

In 1908 a French archaeologist declared that a Great Goddess concerned with death and fertility had been worshipped by all the Neolithic peoples of Europe and the Near East, and that her cult had been focused above all on images of her eyes and breasts. This enabled him to use any figure or symbol on a Neolithic site which could be interpreted as representing an eye or a breast as proof of that cult.

WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as 'someone who causes harm to others by mystical means'.

THIS BOOK HAS been over a quarter of a century in the making,

In Central and Southern Africa, the ability to detect witches was also believed in several places to be inherent in chiefs, as one of that concentration of semi-mystical qualities that gave them the right to lead. In