So who really do we mean by the “British” in British Traditional Witchcraft?
The British Isles are complex. Currently there are numerous languages in various degrees of use: modern English; Scots (in the Germanic language family with roots in Old English); Gaelic and closely other related Q-Celtic language of Irish and Manx; and the P-Celtic languages of Welsh and Cornish. Go back 1,500 years and you can add spoken Latin, the lingua franca of post-Roman Britain, and church Latin to the mix.
In front of me, I have a copy of Oxford University’s Illustrated History of Great Britain—first published in 1984 and considered by many to be the definitive single stop for British history. Chapter 1 starts out with the Claudius led Roman invasion of 43AD. There are a couple of paragraphs that do allude to pre-Roman British history but then only in relation to what the Roman legions encountered upon arrival. The ‘original’ peoples of the British isles exist only as Pictish shadows of the pre-Roman period… and even then only really through Queen Boudica and her ruthless barbarian resistance.
For the past two to three hundred years or so, historians have perpetuated a particular narrative of British history. Everything that is British begins with the Roman conquest—the invaders and colonizers bringing Hellenic civilization to the far backwater of Europe. In no small part this view of the Roman Empire helped to reinforce the rectitude of its modern equivalent, the British Empire, with its civilizing paternal colonization.
This approach ignores something like 98% of the history of the isles!
In this longstanding mythology of Britain, the full historical arc begins with the indigenous people who were pushed aside by the western migration of the Celts. Then came the Romans and when they pulled out their military support in the early 5th century, they turned the lights off on their way off the islands and BOOM the Dark Ages descended. Then came along some German tribesmen from the continent invading eastern England—historians called them Anglo-Saxon. The Celts failing to push out the new aggressors were themselves pushed further to the west to Wales and Ireland. Then came along the Viking raiders, the Danelaw, and finally the definitive conquest of the Normans in 1066.
The only problem is that very little of this long standing narrative is accurate. Historians have had a strong tendency to view shifts in culture through the prism of which they are most familiar from their own immediate historical period: that of aggression, invasion, conquest, colonization and genocide. The problem is with the advent of genetics and other more precise scientific analysis, we realize that much of this long-held narrative is simply not consistent with the evidence now at hand.
The mitochondrial DNA, handed down the maternal line—of the British (and British expats) is the same as that of the earliest permanent settlers of the Isles during the cro-magnon period. These first peoples were quickly cut off from Europe by the final severing of the land bridge and the triumph of the North Sea.
The Celts were not band of migrant travelers from Central Europe that slowly spread across the content in a drive westward until they finally made it to Britain and Ireland. Instead archeologists are now drawing a picture of a spread of art and expression… of style… that did finally cross the channel and take hold in Britain. The insular peoples of the islands then put their own spin on it making it distinctly British.
It’s as if historians found it difficult to give credit to the ‘original’ residents with any advances in technology. Farming, they argued, came in with migrants from the more advanced continent. The complex agrarian divisions discovered at Flag Fen over the last several decades has demonstrated that island dwellers developed their own unique approach to mixed crop and livestock farming quite distinct from that employed elsewhere in Europe.
Then came the Romans to civilize the barbarians. The landscape they found was one of small ordered farms and livestock divisions. Society seems to have been ordered on family and then, likely secondarily, larger tribal units were starting to form with a learned or spiritual class of Druids.
Tacitus writes of the attraction of Roman amenities:
And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.
When the Roman legions left less than four centuries later, they did not take all their ‘civilizing’ structures and institutions with them. Instead there was a indigenous elite that styled themselves after their Roman counterparts. They left spoken or vernacular Latin as a common language across the previous Roman occupied territories. The early Christian Church still had footholds. The Dark Ages really weren’t that “dark”.
Then we’ve been taught, the Anglo-Saxons invaded during the early medieval period exploiting the vacuum left behind by the Roman departure. From the Arthurian tales we know that he heroically attempted to fight off their incursion. Bernard Cornwell writes of these adventures evocatively in his trilogy of Arthurian novels and it’s powerful reading, indeed. Unfortunately, there is little contemporary archeological evidence for such violent, chaotic disruption.
Well, what we know of those who would later be labelled Anglo-Saxon were deduced from grave goods and burial customs. These are characterized by particular styles of pottery and adornment. Burials with material culture that historians classed as Saxon were therefore those of Saxon interlopers. Part of this was based on the very limited historical textual material most written long after the period which they discussed and all with problematic agendas of their authors. What this interpretation ignored was that these “new” peoples who allegedly wiped out the previous peoples occupied the same spaces and continued much the same way of life as those before them. This is not characteristic of genocide and replacement.
With modern genetics and dental isotope analysis, we now know that though the Isles always had visitors and immigrants, there simply was no wholesale replacement. Classing a dead person’s culture or ethnicity simply based on the context of objects is extremely reductive and proves problematic. Think of a future archeologist analyzing a 21st century Chinese grave where the person was buried in Levi’s and the surrounding archeological strata contained coke bottles. Using the logic that has given us a influx of Anglo-Saxon invaders would interpret the grave occupant as an American invader. One can quickly see the circular nature and fallibility of this approach.
Then, of course, in 793 Viking raiders showed up at Lindesfarne and quickly realized what easy pickings were to be found on the British coast. This led to a injection of Norse yDNA into the mix with longer term settlements and the temporary rule of the Dane law.
Even the Norman conquest of 1066 was less conquest and more military solution to a highly politicized dispute over succession—most of it of the previous king Edward’s own making promising the crown to multiple parties.
So after all this rambling, how does this relate to the B in BTW? What does this quick recap of 12+ thousand years of British history have to do with witchcraft and our practice in particular? Well, Gardner’s view of B was not particularly well rounded. The history debunked above would have formed the basis of his understanding. Additionally, and to me critically, like most of his day he had a strong prejudice to all things German so Anglo-Saxon (read Germanic) influences were ignored in his development of Wica in favor of an at-times-strained reliance on Celtic influences. For example, these editorial impulses can be see in Gardner’s choice of the Theban alphabet, from the continental grimoire tradition and included in Agrippa’s De Occulta Philopshia of 1533, instead of the Northumbrian or “Anglo-Saxon” runes in his own backyard?
The other babies thrown out with that bathwater include the Norse/Scandinavian influence which are particularly pronounced in Shetland, Orkney and the western Isles. This compounds Gardner’s ignoring all things Saxon which in turn bring their own German influence to complement other Scandinavian influences. Importantly this intentional myopathy completely ignores the potent queerness of Scandinavian seiðr!
The United Rite
So why this long-winded gloss of misconceptions of British history? And does it really matter for our practice of witchcraft?
We have an opportunity to build on the radical re-envisioning of BTW that Eddie has left us and develop a rich and nuanced practice, a united rite, a re-queering of British Traditional Witchcraft.
Suggested Reading:
Britain B.C. and Britain A.D. by Francis Pryor
The Emergence of the English, Susan Oosthuizen