Shaving Bunnies: Doing Your Research 101

Murray was not wrong that there were holdovers of pre-Christian religious practice in Europe; there’s a slew of recent scholarship about that, and I can give you a list of books. What she was wrong about was in taking the witch trial testimony at face value, and in believing that it was a *widespread, organized* phenomenon. There was no one “Old Religion” or “Witch Cult;” there were a whole bunch of small witch cults, and some single practitioners who had visionary experiences and who may or may not have been contacted or initiated by others.

I’m going to get all cranky here (big shock, I know). I’m well aware that Hutton rips into Murray, but you know…Pagans need to learn to read more than one scholar at a time. He is absolutely not the only guy out there writing about this stuff. Eva Pocs, Emma Wilby, Carlo Ginsburg, Claude Lecouteaux…they all have pretty impeccable academic credentials. Lecouteaux taught medieval history at the Sorbonne.

Shaving Bunnies: Doing Your Research 101 @patheos #pagan http://bit.ly/cHC0yW

Ginsburg is one of the scholars who discounts Murray’s research.

Yes, there were Pagan holdovers, but not in the way Murray describes. We know people were still celebrating Pagan rites clandestinely when Murray was writing, but that’s like saying your parents were putting presents in your stocking therefore Santa is not a myth.

Frankly, I like Murray’s work. It’s good mythos. It’s my own intuition that her work was the spur for the modern Witchcraft movement. It’s perfectly possible she made contemporary practitioners bold enough to reach out to others as well as inspire people to recreate her Witch cult.

Ginsburg is one of the people who has a nuanced view of her work; his position is more or less mine, that she wasn’t totally wrong about everything, but that she drew the wrong/too broad conclusions about a lot of things.

I think that people have gone from “Wicca is the Old Religion passed down unblemished from the Neolithic period!” to “Gardner made it all up out of whole cloth in 1950.” I think *neither* of those statements is true. But the truth is often complicated.

Murray, like Z Budapest, Scott Cunningham and Marija Gimbutas, is simply one of those controversial authors that require discernment on the part of the reader. They have valuable things to offer us, regardless of the reservations we may have about some of their work.

The truth is murky. I don’t think Gardner made it up out of whole cloth, but that’s just my intuition. However, modern Witchcraft made it’s public debut in the 50′s. Whatever it’s past, the movement gained momentum then and has changed since then. We will never have the full story on “Her Hidden Children”.

Even today, we can only see the public face of Paganism. I recently learned about a group in my area that I lived near and never knew about it. Just found out another group near me has a lending library.

I think there’s a big difference between accepting that the past is murky, and setting up bad scholarship as valid. That’s my personal preference. I prefer to know a book is flawed, and then find what is useful in it. I’m doing that with Graves right now.

Murray and Gimbutas are not in the same category as Cunningham and Budapest; the latter two were writing for a popular audience, and not as scholars. You can critique the scholarship of the first two, and there are reasons to do so, but they did have the educational background and made a case for what they were saying. Gimbutas in particular is someone whose methodology isn’t any worse than some other people writing in her area, she is just saying things that people are emotionally resistant to. There’s nothing inherently worse about using fairy tales and folk beliefs as a basis for interpretation, than using assumptions about how societies “always” work based on, say, Levi-Strauss’ ideas about women. Levi-Strauss is a well-known and “important” Structuralist, but in my opinion his theories are just as flawed as some of the other stuff we’ve been discussing.

In any case, my point was that there’s a lot of good scholarship out there, and it’s possible for real scholars doing good work to disagree on interpretations. That’s kind of the point of academic research, at least in the humanities.

And just as it’s important for anthropologists to know about Levi-Strauss, or for psychologists to know about Freud even though their ideas have mostly been rejected, it’s important for Pagans to know about Murray and Graves. Otherwise much of the shape of the Pagan religious movement over the last 80+ years won’t make sense. The difference between Pagans and academics…and I think this is a flaw…is that academics are ok with the idea that “we used to think this way, but someone made a case against it and now we think this” and are sometimes willing to revisit old notions (as in neo-Freudians and neo-Structuralists) whereas Pagans freak out about it.