Author: Eds Dave Evans and Dave Green
Publisher: Hidden Publishing, 2009
Price: £14.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780955523755

In the introduction to this collection, Dave Evans reveals that its inception lay in his wonder that Ronald Hutton’s seminal hist­ory of modern pagan witchcraft was already 10 years old. In many ways, Triumph of the Moon has been so influential in academic and neo-pagan circles that for those of us whose interest in such matters burgeoned only in the years after its publication, it is difficult to conceive of an intell­ectual landscape in which it did not exist.

Thus, a volume celebrating Hutton’s achievement makes sense both as a tribute to the work itself and as a mark of how far the field has progressed since then. It’s an unashamedly academic assemblage, something evinced not only in terms of the depth of study but also its preoccupation with methodology. Since it seeks to further cement the idea of neo-paganism as a respectable area of scholarly research, this is inevitable.

Sadly, few papers here can match the lucidity and structural dexterity which allows Hutton himself to bridge the gulf between academic and popular history writing. Some occasionally succumb to the worst excesses of academic literature, such as an abstruse style which obscures more than it illuminates and a hyper-deflationary attitude as doctrinaire as any neo-pagan mythologising.

Yet on the whole the book is a successful and valuable contribut­ion to an emerging specialism, with essays drawn from a satisfyingly diverse, multi-disciplinary field which includes history, socio­logy, anthropology and folklore. Moreover, the contributors are not content merely to “celebrate” Triumph of the Moon, but pursue avenues it left open and broaden the territory in appropriate direct­ions. Some even tentatively take issue with Hutton’s own conclus­ions and such fertile debate is surely the greatest tribute they could pay his work.