Book Reviews

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

Ronald Hutton
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022. 245 pp., hardcover, $25.  

Discerning the relationship between paganism and Christianity over a thousand-year period in any geographical context is both complex and contentious. Examining presuppositions, clarifying categories, gathering evidence, mastering relevant critical literature, and crafting an effective argument—perchance with eloquence—require persistence, courage, and something akin to a sense of vocation. This is especially so when members of the intended audience feel they have a stake in the conclusions. The difficulty is further heightened when the tasks are undertaken, as many early modern writers had to put it, “in time of pestilence”— in this case, the academically inhospitable time of COVID-19.

All these factors conspired against the British historian Ronald Hutton in his seemingly simple project of tracing the origin and development of a handful of godlike female figures in medieval and modern European culture. Remarkable in the cohort of pandemic-age publications, Queens of the Wild speaks far beyond the circumstances of its composition and release. It addresses deep and perennial questions at the core of Western self-understanding.

Hutton is no stranger to scholarly controversy or the study of royals, both natural and supernatural. Long associated with the University of Bristol in the U.K., he has contributed significantly to research on the British Civil War, the Restoration, and the Stuart monarchs. Since the 1990s, he has gained recognition as an authority in a second specialty, much broader than but still including the seventeenth century: the academic study of ancient Britain and the full sweep of Western paganism from prehistory to the present day. This agenda, enhanced by his familiarity with cognate fields of archaeology and folklore studies, has brought Hutton increased exposure and even celebrity as a media personality, landing him guest appearances on BBC specials, such as Sacred Wonders of Britain and other platforms, such as Ancient Aliens. It has also revealed fault lines within the community of his contemporary pagan readers.

Hutton’s empathetic yet critical approach, dedicated to following evidence wherever it leads while advocating for appreciation of pagan paths in contemporary society, has sparked considerable self-examination and sometimes division among practitioners, especially reigning leaders of pagan networks. Queens of the Wild continues this pattern of old-school objectivity, interrogation of historiographical orthodoxies, and celebration of pagan wisdom.

Between the book’s first chapter, longer than any other in the volume, and the chapter-length epilogue, four chapters explore the history and meaning of intriguing superhuman female beings selected from the folklore and literature of European peoples, figures that blur the boundaries between pagan and Christian.

These are the sovereigns signaled by the book’s provocative title: Mother Earth, known by many names, including the Great Goddess; the Fairy Queen, associated with mysterious realms populated by elves and sprites; the Lady of the Night, variously identified as Diana, Herodias, and Holda, famous for her nocturnal voyages and benevolence with food and drink; and the Cailleach, the giant Old Woman or Hag of Gaelic legend, linked to fierce landscapes only slightly more forbidding than herself. According to Hutton, all four are transgressive, all exercise agency rarely exhibited in patriarchal systems, and all are products of medieval or modern milieus. In other words, the pagan goddesses in Christian Europe (at least this chosen quartet) turn out to be not so pagan after all—and not so Christian either.

Many readers, convinced by luminaries from Jacquetta Hawkes and Marija Gimbutas to Robert Graves and Carl Jung, will be especially surprised to learn that the myth of a single Great Goddess permeating global cultures before an Axial Age assertion of patriarchy owes its existence principally to medieval humanists, Victorian rural enthusiasts, and twentieth-century distorters of archeological data.  

Hutton’s unsensational prose and genteel style help even the truest of believers give his revisionism a fair hearing. The case for what critics might call debunking is laid out in the first chapter, where Hutton argues against “pagan survival,” the claim of an integral pagan tradition enduring through the Middles Ages, but documents the possibility of “pagan survivals,” elements of pre-Christian traditions persevering through channels such as popular service magic and any number of folk customs.

The epilogue, on Britain’s not-so-feminine Green Man, with fascinating asides on the curious foliate heads and unabashed sheela-na-gigs of medieval cathedral art, reiterates Hutton’s conclusion about the irrepressible creativity of the Western imagination, which fits only awkwardly into abstract categories of pagan or Christian. The structure of the book itself identifies this theme as his central idea: just over half of the text focuses on female archetypes. Mistitled, Queens of the Wild is a lucid invitation to explore the free interaction of pagan and Christian in the untamed Western mind.

Peter A. Huff, an academic administrator and professor of religious studies, is the author or editor of seven books. His article “The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.                            

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100 Places to See after You Die

Ken Jennings
New York: Scribner, 2023. 291 pp., hardcover, $27.99.

Ken Jennings, the charismatic Jeopardy! champion whose banter with Alex Trebek made him a celebrity (and who succeeded Trebek as one of the popular game show’s hosts), has parlayed his fame into publishing several successful books on subjects such as the history of humor and the subculture of cartophiles—those obsessed with maps. In his latest book, Jennings lends his jaunty tone and penchant for unique inquiries into an exploration of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country”: the afterlife.

Jennings’s 100 Places to See after You Die is a Lonely Planet guide to destinations that can only be visited after the end of one’s earthly incarnation. He offers tips on “When to Go” (aim for the Chinese realm of Diyu during the seventh month of the year for the Ghost Festival), “Where to Stay” (Dante’s Inferno offers a range of circles to fit each traveler’s tastes), and even “What to Pack” in the entry on ancient Egypt’s Duat.

While Jennings offers light but respectful descriptions of afterlives from religion and mythology, like the bardo as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Paradise Earth of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the real joy of this book is in his examinations of afterlives as described in books, film, television, and music. Since these strange worlds were often created as thought experiments or for entertainment, Jennings does not feel the need to hold his ironic tongue in check here.

It soon becomes clear that many of these postlife alternatives, even those from popular culture, often provoke some intriguing theological questions. Fans of the television sitcom series The Good Place will recall its examination of subjects like free will and the Trolley Problem, but what about the bureaucratic Judgment City of Albert Brooks’ brilliant 1991 comedy Defending Your Life, where it is revealed that the goal of each incarnation is to overcome fear?

References to Theosophy are few and oblique. Devachan and C.W. Leadbeater are mentioned, but only in an entry on the Summerland described in a series of books by the nineteenth-century spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis. The entry on the Black Lodge from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks delves into the concept of the Dweller on the Threshold and the creation of tulpas, but does not link these to the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton or H.P. Blavatsky.

Certainly the sections on popular media are the most fun. There’s an entry on Forever, a smart but little-viewed streaming series that was canceled after just eight episodes, as well as an entry on the strange Inferno Room at the end of the original Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. To make room for these, Jennings leaves out many varieties of the Christian heaven, perhaps out of fear of offending readers. (He does explore afterlives from Eastern Orthodoxy and Mormonism, the faith in which he was raised.)

Jennings’ comic asides and information boxes add an irreverent yet respectful touch to the subject matter, and he navigates the sometimes sensitive territories of religious beliefs with a light-hearted approach. If you’ve ever wondered why Clarence Odbody of It’s a Wonderful Life has been an Angel, Second Class for so long, or what lies beyond that Iowa cornfield in Field of Dreams—or even if all dogs really do go to heaven—you will enjoy this clever book.

Peter Orvetti

 

Peter Orvetti, a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C., is marketing communications coordinator for the TSA.

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The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity

Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023; xi + 227 pp., hardcover, $35.

One of the greatest twentieth-century puzzles in New Testament scholarship is a letter discovered at the Mar Saba monastery in present-day Israel by the biblical scholar Morton Smith in 1958.

It is a fragment of a letter from the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria to one Theodore, and it discusses a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. According to this letter, Theodore (whose own letter has not survived) has an alleged copy of this text, but believes it has been corrupted by insertions of the Carpocratians, a libertine sect of the era.

Clement claims that this secret, longer version of Mark—“a more spiritual gospel for the benefit of those being made perfect”—was still preserved in the church of Alexandria in his time, though it was “very well guarded, being read only by those being initiated into the great mysteries.”

Clement also writes that he has a copy of this Gospel and compares his version with passages sent to him by Theodore. Clement quotes a passage from this secret Gospel. It describes the resurrection of a “young man” like the Lazarus of the Gospel of John. One evening six days later, says this Gospel, “the young man comes to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Some people see sexual antics here, and so apparently did the Carpocratians, because their version of this Gospel adds the expression “naked man to naked man,” but this and other passages mentioned by Theodore “are not found” in the authentic Secret Gospel, writes Clement.

Smith introduced this text to the learned world at a biblical conference in 1960, arousing a tumult that has not settled to this day. Smith’s own view of this letter was straightforward: he considered it to be a genuine document by Clement and that it described an initiation involving “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Many other scholars scoffed at this suggestion with cruel vehemence. Smith himself, some claimed, had forged the letter as an elaborate practical joke, leaving hidden “clues” to his identity in his handiwork. To give one especially ridiculous example, at one point Clement writes, “true things mixed with fictions are effaced, so that, as it is said, even salt loses its saltiness.” Guess what? This supposedly points to Morton Smith as the forger, because—Morton Salt! Get it?

Many other such pieces of “evidence” range from the ludicrous to the insane, but over decades of scrutiny, certain facts were sifted out. To judge from the handwriting, the text, found written in the inside of a seventeenth-century Latin volume, probably dates from the eighteenth century, so it was not from the author’s own hand (but that is true of practically all texts from antiquity). Its literary style is completely like Clement’s—too much so, some contend, that very fact marking it as a forgery.

This new book on the Secret Gospel controversy takes the discussion further. It goes through the previous claims of forgery by Smith and refutes them in a way that would be difficult to counter. Nevertheless, say the authors, the letter is a forgery—only not by Smith, who published it in good faith. They contend that it was written between the fifth and seventh centuries by an unknown monk supposedly legitimating “same-sex pairings through the special relationship he had with one younger, ‘beloved’ male disciple.” As these authors indicate, the Greek Orthodox church did in that period have a rite of adelphopoiesis (“making brothers”), which joined two men in a quasi-sacramental bond of chaste friendship that some have likened to gay marriage. The authors contend that Secret Gospel was written to vindicate this kind of same-sex relationship, chaste or not. Indeed the Secret Gospel says that after his resurrection, “the young man, looking at him [Jesus], loved him, and he began to beg him to be with him.”

This book’s discussion of the Secret Gospel debate from 1960 to the present is clear-headed and enlightening. But Smith and Landau’s arguments for their own hypothesis are almost as absurd as the ones they refute, and in fact they put their idea forward only in the briefest and sketchiest terms at the end of the book. In the first place, they make no reference to any polemic about same-sex relationships among monks, either in the period they mention or at any other point, so we have no reason to believe that this was an issue to begin with.

Furthermore, anyone wanting to concoct Scriptural evidence for same-sex relationships would not have written this text: it is too oblique for that purpose. It does not even mention same-sex relationships, except in the reference to “naked man to naked man”—but the letter itself says that this detail is not authentic to the Secret Gospel. Moreover, someone engaging in this supposed polemic could just as well have used quotes about the beloved disciple from the Gospel of John, which was universally accepted as canonical.

As for the fact that the young man “loved” Jesus, the Greek word here is egapesen—from the familiar Greek word agape—which does not connote any erotic or amorous themes; indeed it is the word the ancient Greeks used when those elements were absent.

It makes sense that Smith and Landau would see this text in the light of same-sex relationships, since present times are preoccupied with them and find homoerotic connotations wherever they exist and in many places where they do not. But the absurdity of their own theory merely vindicates Smith, who at least did not resort to hilariously speculative overcomplications.

Why have so many scholars refused to take this letter of Clement at face value and contrive so many ridiculous theories to explain it away? Because it points to something much more disturbing to contemporary New Testament scholars than mere homosexuality, which in any event they understand. It is evidence of an early initiatic Christianity that has been almost completely lost to memory, and which scholars do not understand.

Indeed the fact that the young man comes “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” is evidence for this initiatic element, because that was the garment worn for initiation into the mysteries, as we see, for example, in Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Linen, being a vegetable rather than an animal product, was believed to be purer than wool.

The possibility of an authentic secret Gospel disturbs contemporary scholarship, because it would mean that everything they know of early Christianity is preliminary material only, “milk, and not . . . strong meat” (Hebrews 5:12). All memory of this initiatic Christianity would have been lost or more likely suppressed, although a few vague hints were permitted to survive in the New Testament, such as “we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7).

But “the mystery of the kingdom of God” did not survive in any apparent way, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the clownish attempts of New Testament scholars to explain what the “kingdom of God” actually is. This hidden wisdom was probably not identical with Gnosticism as known in the second century, although arguably it was close enough that it was swept away when the proto-catholic church in the second and third centuries purged itself of Gnostic elements.

Clement, then, living around the turn of the third century, would be a transitional figure: more than almost anyone else (even the Gnostics themselves), in his authenticated works he speaks of the “Gnostic” (gnostikos) and claims that the true Christian is also a true Gnostic. But as the Letter to Theodore indicates, he was committed to keeping this wisdom hidden: “One must never . . . concede that the Secret Gospel is from Mark, but even deny it with an oath. For not all true things are said to all people.”

We can speculate about this hidden wisdom, which Clement in this letter says “is veiled seven times.” But in the absence of better evidence, these will remain as speculations only. At any rate, Smith’s scholarly instincts—superior to those of his critics—were receptive to the possibility of this frustratingly lost Christianity.

This book will not shake your religious faith, if that is a concern to you. But it will do a rough job on your trust in New Testament scholarship.

Richard Smoley

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Old Age

Helen M. Luke
Parabola Books, New York, 1987; hardcover, 112 pages.

This is a beautiful little book with a title which does somewhat less than attract one to pick it up and read it. The subject of aging is one which is largely ignored by our present culture in the hope, apparently, that if no attention is given to it, it will not happen. This youth worship, which so permeates society, stops us from considering the wonderful opportunities we all have for reaping the benefits of our lives and preparing for an easy and even exciting transition beyond the physical.

Helen Luke, herself in her eighties, presents us with two alternatives: to grow old or to slip into disintegration. Her presentation of the growing process which should continue in all of us is very thought-provoking. While we obviously must give up some of the activities of youth and respect the aging processes of our physical vehicles, emotionally and mentally we have much to experience and evaluate no matter what our chronological years may be.

Interpretations given by the author to four passages from literary classics really demonstrate the endless possibilities for growth when an individual's prime seems to have passed. Odysseus' final inland journey after completing the Odyssey as foretold by Teiresias, Lear's speech to his daughter Cordelia near the end of King Lear, Prospero's freeing of Ariel and his farewell in the Tempest, and a selection by T. S. Eliot from "Little Gidding" are all used to demonstrate the insight which their authors saw as coming to characters who had not always acted admirably during their earlier lives.

The book and its stories provide the realization that in the end it is the release from our attachments, whether to people, things or power, which will provide the ultimate feeling of having learned something from this lifetime on earth.

One final point from this little collection of essays is the author's suggestion that it is not necessary to reach old age before considering this method of viewing life. The earlier we learn the value of detachment, the more meaningful the remainder of our lives can be and the simpler and more beautiful our transitions when the time arrives to put aside our physical bodies.

-Willamay Pym

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