The Triumph of the Moon Quotes

“I am Pan, and the Earth is mine.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“…between 1840 and 1940 historians and archaeologists had turned Neolithic spirituality into a mirror-image of Christianity, emphasizing female instead of male, earth instead of sky, nature instead of civilization.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“[Algernon] Swinburne’s influence upon modern paganism can hardly be overestimated; he was much admired, and quoted by (to name but three figures who will feature prominently in its story) Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, and Gerald Gardner.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“Those of the masons themselves do suggest that the Charges were a development of the late medieval period—the oldest is the ‘Regius Poem’, from the end of the fourteenth century—and that they grew more elaborate throughout this period. They instruct the newcomer in rules of conduct, and in masonic tradition, and assume the existence of an assembly of initiates, and (from the ‘Regius Poem’ onward) have a standard cry of endorsement: ‘so mote it be’ (the standard Middle English for ‘so must it be’). None, however, implies any ritual action, of the sort found by the 1690s.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“The first is that in medieval British records the terms ‘art’, ‘craft’, and ‘mystery’ are used interchangeably for any trade or calling which required particular skills.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“What had in fact happened was that he [Evans] and the scholars who preceded or followed him had projected backwards upon prehistory the goddess who had emerged as pre-eminent in the minds of poets and novelists during the nineteenth century.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“The painter Edward Calvert, who worked from the 1820s to the 1870s and loved Greek subjects, erected an altar to Pan in his back garden.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“It may be argued instead that the characteristic language of a committed modern paganism has its direct origin in German Romanticism, the result of a fusion in late eighteenth-century Germany of three powerful forces: admiration for ancient Greece, nostalgia for a vanished past, and desire for an organic unity between people, culture, and nature.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“philosophes alike, the ancients were signposts to secularism’.34 It may be argued instead that the characteristic language of a committed modern paganism has its direct origin in German Romanticism, the result of a fusion in late eighteenth-century Germany of three powerful forces: admiration for ancient Greece, nostalgia for a vanished past, and desire for an organic unity between people, culture, and nature.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“The two biggest achievements of Blavatsky’s movement were probably to make the notions of a single divine world soul, of which all life is a part, and of reincarnation, both widely known and widely held in the modern European and American worlds.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

“The geographical emphasis is also important, because the unique significance of pagan witchcraft to history is that it was the first fully formed religion which England has given the world, and may, subject to definition, still be the only one.”
― Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft