The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

«The fact that it claims to be a history and not the history is in itself significant, for this book represented the first systematic attempt by a professional historian to characterize and account for this aspect of modern Western culture. As such it is an exploratory and tentative work, intended as an initial mapping out of an area which still badly needs and deserves serious treatment by more scholars in a number of different disciplines, and indeed by more practitioners.» — Hutton declara el alcance de su libro.

«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. The English have always developed their own distinctive versions of other religious systems ever since their state acquired an identity, but this is arguably the first which has ever originated in it, and spread from there to many other parts of the world.» — la tesis que justifica el foco inglés.

«1871 by Sir Edward Tylor, who suggested that its essential component was a belief in the existence of spiritual beings and in the need of humans to form relationships with them.» — la definición de religión que Hutton adopta como base de trabajo.

«Two things may be said in favour of Tylor’s formula for the purposes of the present study. First, that no better one has ever been achieved, all alternatives having run up against equal or worse problems of universal application. Second, that while it certainly has problems when accorded to spiritual systems such as Buddhism, it fits very well the European traditions with which this book is concerned.» — por qué la adopta pese a sus problemas.

«For over a hundred years writers had commonly asserted that the Latin word paganus, from which it was derived, signified ‘rustic’; a result of the triumph of Christianity as the dominant, metropolitan, and urban faith, which left the old religions to make a last stand among the more backward populations of the countryside.» — la etimología recibida de «pagano», que Hutton pasa a discutir.

«Neither Davidson nor Evans carried out any research into Scottish sources themselves, and McPherson confined himself to observations made near the end of the nineteenth century.» — la base documental de quienes derivaban el Horseman's Word de un culto de fertilidad.

«Carter identified the crucial importance to the process of a different organization, the Miller’s Word, which had been formed during the eighteenth century in imitation of the much earlier and more prestigious Masons’ Word, the original Freemasonry.» — la explicación alternativa: el Miller's Word imitando al Masons' Word.

«Her significance here, and the one which has provided her widest public reputation, is that she appeared to become the first person to provide apparent supporting evidence, based upon systematic research, for the long-rehearsed theory that the victims of the early modern witch trials had been practitioners of a surviving pagan religion.» — lo que Hutton adjudica a Murray: haber PARECIDO aportar la evidencia.

«She forgot who had suggested it to her; obvious channels for it are the Folk-Lore Society, of which she was an enthusiastic member and which had been led by one notable proponent of the theory, Sir Lawrence Gomme, and the University of London, where she taught and where another one, Karl Pearson, had been a colleague.» — el origen de la idea, que la propia Murray no recordaba.

«A case-study of the way in which Murray could appropriate and redevelop an image in the book is provided by her treatment of a rockpainting at Cogul in north-eastern Spain. This she characterized as the only scene in Palaeolithic art ‘which can be identified as a religious ceremony performed by several persons’. To her, it was unmistakably a ‘dance of nine women around a standing male figure’ who ‘wears a garter on each leg» — la escena de Cogul, según la caracterizó Murray.

«The actual group of figures consists of three bulls, two ibex, nine deer, one pig, nine female humans, and three males. Two of the men are hunting stags. The women appear not to be dancing in a ring but standing in a row, five facing towards the onlooker and four facing away. The third man is placed in the centre of their line and is very stylized, his only features being the phallus which indicates his sex and the leggings which Murray interpreted as garters.» — lo que la escena contiene de verdad.

«her treatment of visual sources matched that of written texts» — el veredicto de Hutton: el mismo trato a las fuentes visuales que a las escritas.

«she became an almost literal godmother to modern pagan witchcraft by writing a supportive foreword to the first book devoted to it, Gerald Gardner» — Murray escribe el prólogo del primer libro dedicado a la brujería pagana moderna.

«It was also a somewhat peculiar comment upon a book which portrayed a religion based on a stark duotheism, in which a goddess was the senior partner; but here, just as before when dealing with witchcraft, she was ignoring those aspects of the source material which did not suit what she wished to believe.» — la lectura de Hutton sobre esa aprobación.

«The book was formally credited to Jack Bracelin, and written, in reality, by a wellknown author on Sufiism, Idries Shah; but as Gardner himself was the source of virtually all its information, it is effectively autobiographical.» — la biografía fundacional: firmada por uno, escrita por otro, y con Gardner de única fuente.

«The foundation story of modern pagan witchcraft was first published in 1960, in the biography of the person most prominently associated with its appearance, Gerald Brosseau Gardner» — dónde y cuándo se publica el relato fundacional.

«One was started by Francis King, who stated that he had heard that Gardner paid Crowley to write the rituals which the former then passed off as those of the New Forest Coven. King apparently told the American academic James Baker that he had received this information from Gerald Yorke.» — el rumor del pago, y por quién empieza.

«In a note which Yorke himself wrote on his copy of Gardner’s book, High Magic’s Aid, he recorded that all the rituals in the novel which had not been taken from The Key of Solomon had been given to Gardner by ‘the witch society’; an exactly opposite story to what which he allegedly reported to King.» — la nota de Yorke dice lo contrario de lo que se le atribuye.

«As Aidan Kelly has pointed out, the complete and standard body of modern witch rituals was still in the process of composition during the 1950s, and so Crowley cannot be called their author;45 but this does not do away with the possibility that he provided some first versions which formed the basis of them.» — Kelly acota la autoría de Crowley, y Hutton acota la acotación.

«All that can be said of this possibility is that the existing evidence is all negative. There is no mention of any such work in Crowley’s diary or in a subsequent important letter to him from Gardner» — el estado de la evidencia.

«In 1954 his book Witchcraft Today gave that religion a generic name, of ‘Wica’, adapted by the 1960s to its enduring form of ‘Wicca’, by which it will be known hereafter in this book. The word in Gardner’s spelling occurs only in Chambers’s Dictionary of Scots-English, where it means ‘wise’, and this volume may well have been his source for it.» — el nombre «Wica» y su fuente probable.

«The derivation, and thus fundamental significance, of the words wicca and wicce is lost in an etymological swamp studded with the arcane terms prefixed by asterisks which philologists coin to indicate putative archaic root-words.» — el pantano etimológico.

«Gardner himself blended the Scots word and Hugh Ross Williamson’s designation of pagan witchcraft as ‘the Craft of the Wise’, to declare that ‘Wica’ meant» — Gardner mezcla el escocés con la fórmula de Hugh Ross Williamson.

«The ghost of the old magician still hovered over Wicca, even Valiente’s ‘Charge’ knowing its touch in places; her words ‘for my law is love unto all beings’, for example, surely echoes Crowley’s famous phrase ‘love is the law, love under will’, and there are other such moments.» — la Charge de Valiente con eco de Crowley.

«His yet more famous dictum, the Law of Thelema—‘do what you will shall be the whole of the law’—was (with a significant qualification) the basis of the Wiccan Rede, the witch religion’s great statement of ethics: ‘Do what ye will an ye harm none.» — el Rede wiccano, con su cualificación.

«to his credit he was equally insistent that all Wiccan initiates should not merely copy the existing rituals and statements of belief but alter and add to them according to their own tastes and abilities, just as Valiente had done.» — Gardner manda alterar y añadir, no copiar.

«A major occasion of this occurred in 1958, when the Hertfordshire coven objected to the fact that whereas the main sabbats, at the quarter days, were celebrated on the actual dates, the festivals at the solstices and equinoxes were held at the nearest monthly meeting, which was pegged by the full moon, as a sign of their lesser status. They asked Gardner if they could accord them equal importance, and hold them on the calendar dates.» — el origen del calendario óctuple, en una petición de 1958.

«The subtitle of this book should really be ‘a history of modern pagan witchcraft in Britain, with some reference to it in Continental Europe, and North America’.» — Hutton acota el alcance real del libro: es una historia de la brujería pagana moderna en Gran Bretaña, con referencias laterales al continente y a Norteamérica.

«That a nation so often associated in stereotype with phlegmatic and restrained qualities should have produced such a spectacularly counter-cultural religion is one of the apparent enigmas which this work is designed to address.» — plantea como enigma de partida que una nación asociada al estereotipo flemático haya producido una religión espectacularmente contracultural.

«Probably the greatest disservice of this concentration is done to Australia, where pagan witchcraft has flourished ever since the 1950s and which is mentioned only in connection with two writers, who both live there but have written on England.» — declara el costo de su recorte geográfico: Australia, donde la brujería pagana florece desde los cincuenta, queda prácticamente fuera.

«My own book came down heavily against the claim of continuity and, indeed, the notion that modern paganisms had very much in common with those of the ancient world.» — recuerda que su libro anterior se pronunció en contra del reclamo de continuidad entre el paganismo antiguo y el moderno, y aun de que tuvieran mucho en común.

«That book presented the obvious puzzle of where, when, and why they had in fact arisen, if they had not survived continuously.» — de ahí sale la pregunta que este libro persigue: dónde, cuándo y por qué surgieron los paganismos modernos si no sobrevivieron de forma continua.

«One of the themes of that work was that late Victorian and Edwardian folklorists had been peculiarly determined to regard surviving seasonal customs as relics of ancient pagan religions even when, as later research revealed, this supposition was wildly wrong.» — señala que los folcloristas victorianos y eduardianos estaban empeñados en leer las costumbres estacionales como reliquias paganas incluso donde la investigación posterior mostró lo contrario.

«indeed, the central argument of the book remains that far from being an unusually exotic and bizarre response to specific problems of the late twentieth century, it represented a distillation of certain notions and needs which had been developing in Western Europe, and in England in particular, since the eighteenth.» — el argumento central que sostiene: la brujería pagana no es una respuesta exótica a los problemas del siglo XX sino la destilación de nociones y necesidades que venían formándose desde el XVIII.

«If it is the child of any single phenomenon, then it is the belated offspring of the Romantic Movement.» — si tuviera un solo padre, dice, sería el Movimiento Romántico, del que la considera hijo tardío.

«I am limited to a framework of assertions and narratives already provided by others, and my methodology consists now of checking, amending, refuting, endorsing, or extending, these; only in two chapters (13 and 14) do I return briefly to the first mode of operation.» — describe su propio método en los tramos donde depende de terceros: comprobar, enmendar, objetar, avalar o extender lo que otros ya narraron.

«The history concerned is that of a mystery religion, with initiates bound by oaths of secrecy to conceal their identities and activities from the outer world—including the academic world.» — la dificultad de fondo del objeto: una religión de misterio cuyos iniciados están atados por juramento a ocultar identidad y actividades, también ante el mundo académico.

«First, I have not given any of them their everyday or legal names unless those have already been published or they have specifically asked me to do so; and in the latter case I have used the exact version which they have provided to me.» — la primera de sus dos reservas de confidencialidad: no da el nombre civil de ningún iniciado salvo que ya se haya publicado o el propio lo pida.

«Second, I have avoided quoting directly from any ritual text, save in the briefest and most perfunctory fashion, and have preferred instead to provide an outline of the action and purpose of that particular ceremony.» — la segunda: se abstiene de citar textos rituales salvo del modo más breve, y prefiere resumir la acción y el propósito de la ceremonia.

«For ‘ritual’ I adopt Clifford Geertz’s lovely definition, of ‘consecrated action’; expanded to signify formal, dramatic, and unusually stylized action.» — adopta la definición de ritual de Clifford Geertz, acción consagrada, ampliada a acción formal, dramática e inusualmente estilizada.

«Purely because I am writing about Britain, I use the word in this extended form according to the custom of the people whose story I am telling, while remaining deeply uneasy about this usage myself.» — declara su incomodidad con el uso británico ampliado del término, que emplea solo por respeto a la costumbre de la gente cuya historia narra.

«Triumph has stood the test of time much better, and only revision of details is needed; but that has been carried out for every chapter, and it is hoped that this refreshment will serve to carry it through another two decades.» — en la revisión veinte años después sostiene que el libro resistió bien el paso del tiempo y que solo hizo falta revisar detalles, capítulo por capítulo.

«The book itself, however, contains not only a great deal more material but a large amount of additional research, some of which has substantially changed the opinions which I expressed in the chapter for Athlone.» — advierte que este libro no reproduce su capítulo para Athlone: trae investigación adicional que cambió de manera sustancial las opiniones que ahí había expresado.

«The whole of this work was read in manuscript, chapter by chapter, by two prominent members of the British Pagan community, of very different viewpoints and experiences: Mike Howard, editor of The Cauldron, and Frederick Lamond, author of Religion Without Beliefs.» — declara quién leyó el manuscrito completo: dos figuras destacadas del paganismo británico de posturas y experiencias muy distintas, Mike Howard y Frederick Lamond.

«The term itself derives from the Latin religio, signifying those duties and that reverence needed to keep the human world in a good relationship with the divine.» — Hutton parte de la etimología: religio nombraba los deberes y la reverencia necesarios para mantener en buena relación al mundo humano con lo divino.

«People who fulfilled those observances and held that attitude in exemplary fashion would earn the approving adjective pius, while the word superstitio signified an undesirable extension of them into an excessive fear of the supernatural.» — y con ella el par que la acompaña: pius calificaba a quien cumplía esas observancias de modo ejemplar, superstitio a su extensión indeseable hacia el temor excesivo de lo sobrenatural.

«The European cultural world has lost any general sense that the prosperity of humans depends upon the fulfilment of set actions designed to propitiate and please supernatural beings and to retain their goodwill towards the community.» — el cambio que le interesa: el mundo cultural europeo perdió el sentido general de que la prosperidad humana dependa de acciones fijas para propiciar a seres sobrenaturales.

«Superstition is a word now usually employed to describe a belief in things which are themselves superfluous or erroneous, not an excessive fear of something real.» — señala el desplazamiento del término superstición, que hoy nombra la creencia en algo superfluo o erróneo y ya no el temor excesivo de algo real.

«In particular, it has been pointed out that some systems generally called religions, such as Theravada Buddhism, do not require belief in supernatural entities.» — consigna la objeción que se le ha hecho a la fórmula de Tylor: sistemas llamados religiones, como el budismo theravada, no exigen creer en entidades sobrenaturales.

«Until recently there would have been no equivalent difficulty in defining the original meaning of the term ‘pagan’.» — advierte que hasta hace poco definir el sentido original de pagano no ofrecía dificultad equivalente.

«A few years later a French academic, Pierre Chuvin, challenged both derivations, arguing that the word pagani was applied to followers of the older religious traditions at a time when the latter still made up the majority of town-dwellers and when its earlier sense, of non-military, had died out.» — recoge la objeción de Pierre Chuvin a las dos derivaciones recibidas: pagani se aplicó a los seguidores de las tradiciones antiguas cuando estos aún eran mayoría entre los habitantes de las ciudades.

«He proposed instead that it simply denoted those who preferred the faith of the pagus, the local unit of government; that is, the rooted or old, religion.» — y la propuesta que Chuvin pone en su lugar: pagano denotaría a quien prefería la fe del pagus, la unidad local de gobierno, esto es la religión arraigada o vieja.

«His suggestion has so far met with apparent wide acceptance.» — Hutton mide la recepción de esa propuesta con cautela, diciendo que hasta ahora parece haber encontrado amplia aceptación.

«As the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, however, ‘heathen’ is the English version of the term used throughout the Germanic language group in the early Middle Ages to signify a follower of a non-Christian religion.» — sobre heathen se remite al Oxford English Dictionary: es la versión inglesa del término germánico altomedieval para el seguidor de una religión no cristiana.

«Experts have failed to discover any other likely linguistic origin for ‘heathen’, and the matter will probably remain a mystery.» — una búsqueda negativa suya: los expertos no han hallado otro origen lingüístico probable para heathen, y él conjetura que el asunto seguirá siendo un misterio.

«For the purposes of this book, the actual derivations of ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen’ are less important than the fact that both had come, by the nineteenth century, to have widely accepted associations with the countryside and the natural world; and had done so despite the lack of any clear justification for these.» — lo que de verdad importa para su argumento no son las derivaciones sino que en el siglo XIX ambos términos ya arrastraban asociación con el campo y lo natural, sin justificación clara.

«The period’s combination of imperialism and evangelism gave rise to a distinctive genre of literature: the memoir of missionary work among tribal societies.» — sitúa el género que dio a Europa su primera información sobre religiones tribales: la memoria de trabajo misionero, nacida del cruce de imperialismo y evangelismo.

«These books supplied European readers with their first information about the religious beliefs and practices of many traditional peoples, and naturally enough gave the most hostile possible impression of them, and the most glowing possible accounts of the consequences of the conversion of the peoples concerned to the Christian faith.» — y su sesgo estructural: esos libros daban la impresión más hostil posible de las creencias nativas y la más luminosa de los efectos de la conversión.

«To Ballantyne, all pagans, by definition, were prey to that ‘unrestrained influence’.» — sobre el novelista R. M. Ballantyne, cuya obra usa como muestra: para él todos los paganos estaban por definición presos de esa influencia sin freno.

«The sacrifice of adult humans forms a regular theme of the seven chapters after this; they are buried alive as foundation deposits, or because their chiefly powers are failing, strangled to accompany leaders into the next world, or simply offered up in temple forecourts as part of the routine business of native religion.» — Hutton inventaría el contenido de The Coral Island: el sacrificio de adultos aparece como tema regular a lo largo de siete capítulos seguidos.

«The result is amazing; in one instant the natives are bloodthirsty, cruel, treacherous, and debauched, and in the next they have become peaceful, kind, honourable, and modest.» — y describe el mecanismo narrativo de la conversión en Ballantyne, donde los nativos pasan en un instante de sanguinarios a pacíficos y modestos.

«To Ballantyne it was simply impossible to believe that devout Christians could ever torture and slaughter; the white men who sometimes feature in his stories (including this one) as doing evil are always those who have forgotten their religion and so allowed the demons to return.» — adjudica a Ballantyne la premisa que sostiene ese esquema: le resultaba imposible creer que un cristiano devoto pudiera torturar y matar.

«It is easy to smile now at the quintessentially Victorian mixture of piety, sadism, and melodrama in Ballantyne’s work, but The Coral Island, in particular, has retained its appeal all through the twentieth century.» — concede sin embargo la persistencia de la obra, que conservó su atractivo a lo largo de todo el siglo XX pese a su mezcla de piedad, sadismo y melodrama.

«There had always been a tendency to apply Old Testament language instinctually to prehistoric monuments, from the time that these first began to attract the interest of antiquarians in the seventeenth century.» — señala una inercia anterior a la antropología: aplicar por instinto el lenguaje del Antiguo Testamento a los monumentos prehistóricos desde el siglo XVII.

«What this work proved conclusively was that the earliest human artefacts were also the most primitive, and that in technological terms Europeans had evolved steadily from a level of culture comparable with the least developed of the tribal groups surviving in the contemporary world.» — lo que sí quedó asentado por la arqueología de Lubbock: que los artefactos humanos más antiguos son también los más primitivos y que los europeos evolucionaron desde un nivel comparable al de los grupos tribales sobrevivientes.

«The use of anthropological data to interpret archaeological remains is a good one, although it can rarely suggest more than possibilities.» — su reserva de método sobre el uso de datos antropológicos para interpretar restos arqueológicos: es bueno, pero rara vez puede sugerir más que posibilidades.

«Lubbock commented that ‘savages seem to take a melancholy pleasure in self-inflicted sufferings’,6 and suggested that prehistoric Europeans had existed in the same unhappy spiritual condition.» — atribuye a Lubbock el paso siguiente, que ya no es de método: proyectar sobre los europeos prehistóricos la misma condición espiritual desdichada que él veía en los salvajes.

«Victorians who were swallowing the idea that they were descended from apes had no trouble in accepting the concept that savages had been the next stage in human development, especially as the sequence turned the modern Western world into the end product of a triumphal story of increasing technological, cultural, and intellectual progress.» — explica por qué la secuencia convenció tan fácil: convertía al mundo occidental moderno en el producto final de una historia triunfal de progreso.

«canny enough to realize that some of the data had to be wrong, pointing out that the assertion that a large number of traditional peoples had no religion was made by people who habitually excluded from the category of religion anything that did not approximate to Christianity.» — acredita a Tylor una advertencia lúcida: que la afirmación de que muchos pueblos tradicionales no tenían religión venía de quienes excluían de esa categoría todo lo que no se pareciera al cristianismo.

«To be sure, Graeco-Roman authors had left two very different images of Druidry and the Gallo-British cultures in which it has been part, the product of prejudices as strongly marked as those of many nineteenth century stories concerning traditional peoples.» — recuerda que las fuentes grecorromanas dejaron dos imágenes muy distintas de la druidería, producto de prejuicios tan marcados como los de los relatos decimonónicos.

«yet in that period, on the whole, it was the notion of the Druids as sages which prevailed.» — y data el giro: en aquel período, en conjunto, todavía prevalecía la noción de los druidas como sabios.

«In 1843 the commissioners entrusted with the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament chose six subjects to be painted on the walls of the central corridor: ‘in three Britain appears sunk in ignorance, heathen superstition and slavery; in the other three she appears instructing the savage, abolishing barbarous rites and liberating the slave.’» — documenta la versión oficial de ese esquema en el programa pictórico de 1843 para el Palacio de Westminster, con Britania hundida en la superstición pagana en tres cuadros y civilizadora en los otros tres.

«This language of paganism, as a religion of gloom and gore, was preserved into the twentieth century, often with more instinctual and less self-conscious expression than in the nineteenth.» — Hutton fecha la persistencia del lenguaje que pinta al paganismo como religión de tinieblas y sangre, conservado en el siglo XX con expresión más instintiva que en el XIX.

«There was also, however, a second common and well-established language in which paganism was represented during the same century and a half: as a religion which had been associated with magnificent art, literature, and philosophy, and was deficient to Christianity only in its ethics and in its lesser component of divine revelation.» — y aísla el segundo lenguaje, igual de establecido: el paganismo como religión de arte, literatura y filosofía magníficos, deficiente frente al cristianismo solo en su ética y en su menor componente de revelación.

«It likewise was embedded in Christian culture from the beginning—in the New Testament, where Christ’s death is encompassed not by pagans but by his fellow Jews, and the chief pagan character is the confused but well-meaning Roman gentleman, Pontius Pilate.» — señala que ese segundo lenguaje estaba incrustado en la cultura cristiana desde el inicio, empezando por el Nuevo Testamento, donde el personaje pagano principal es Pilato.

«The Conoisseur magazine, in March 1756, could remark complacently that ‘While infidelity has expunged the Christian theology from our creed, taste has introduced the heathen mythology into our gardens.» — cita la revista The Conoisseur de 1756 como muestra de la comodidad con que el siglo alojaba la mitología pagana en los jardines mientras la teología cristiana salía del credo.

«Peter Gay, in one of the most important modern texts on the culture of the century, concluded of it that ‘Classical antiquity was anything but esoteric: it was inescapable.’» — se apoya en Peter Gay para medir el alcance de esa presencia: la antigüedad clásica no era esotérica sino ineludible.

«Cardinal Newman worried about how, when ‘wedded to the Lord’, he still yearned for ‘scenes of ancient heathen fame’.» — reúne los testimonios de la tensión victoriana, empezando por Newman, que desposado con el Señor seguía añorando escenas de fama pagana antigua.

«Gladstone told a social gathering that, of all places in world history, he would most like to travel back to ancient Athens, and then, realizing that he had forgotten Palestine and Christ, grew ashamed, and substituted a day with the latter.» — y el episodio de Gladstone, que al elegir la antigua Atenas como destino se avergonzó de haber olvidado Palestina y sustituyó su respuesta.

«Matthew Arnold thought that Hellenism and Hebraism were the two points between which the human spirit must for ever oscillate.» — recoge la fórmula de Matthew Arnold, para quien helenismo y hebraísmo eran los dos polos entre los que el espíritu humano debe oscilar para siempre.

«Frederick Temple suggested that providence had given Judaea, Rome, Greece, and Asia each a different role in the education of humanity, and that of Judaea was in the sphere of religion.» — documenta la salida conciliadora de Frederick Temple: una providencia que repartió papeles educativos entre Judea, Roma, Grecia y Asia, tocándole a Judea el de la religión.

«Gladstone determined ‘to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations’, and told the House of Commons that Greek mythology had prepared minds for some of Christ’s teachings.» — y la de Gladstone, empeñado en probar el vínculo íntimo entre las revelaciones hebrea y olímpica ante la Cámara de los Comunes.

«John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Jowett treated Plato as a form of Scripture, and Lord Macaulay and John Keble hailed works of Aeschylus and Euripides (respectively) as exemplary religious texts.» — el punto donde esa admiración cruza a lo religioso: Mill y Jowett tratando a Platón como una forma de Escritura.

«Nineteenthcentury liberal theologians discounted the miraculous and magical, and played down the apocalyptic, elements in the Gospels.» — vincula el ablandamiento de la figura de Cristo con la teología liberal decimonónica, que descontaba lo milagroso y lo mágico y atenuaba lo apocalíptico.

«It informed readers that the old Italian religion was ‘comparatively pure and austere’, but became corrupted by ‘hideous and brutal mysteries of foreign origin’.» — Hutton resume el esquema que la novelística victoriana difundió: una religión itálica antigua comparativamente pura y austera, corrompida después por misterios brutales de origen extranjero.

«Likewise, ‘it was when the gods of Greece had fallen into utter contempt, that devil-worship first reared itself ostentatiously by the side of their temples.’» — y su corolario: que el culto al demonio se habría alzado junto a los templos griegos justo cuando sus dioses cayeron en el desprecio.

«In Kingsley’s scheme the heroic tales were wholesome because they belonged to the stage at which, although polytheists, the Greeks still had a strong moral sense and worshipped no idols, ‘as far as I can find’.» — señala la condición que Kingsley le ponía a los relatos heroicos griegos para considerarlos sanos, y la reserva con que él mismo la enunciaba.

«He portrayed the Roman Empire as admirable in all ways except its spiritual uncertainty, which Christianity had amended with a message of simple hope and benevolence, capable of comforting even the most jaded and overcivilized.» — sobre Walter Pater: un Imperio Romano admirable en todo salvo en su incertidumbre espiritual, que el cristianismo habría enmendado.

«He suggested that traditional Roman paganism was lovable and beautiful but suitable only for a primitive and undemanding society.» — y su valoración del paganismo romano tradicional como adorable y bello pero apto solo para una sociedad primitiva y poco exigente.

«The result is a paganism devoid of coherence or moral purpose, driving the wise to Christianity or to scepticism, and enticing the masses to brutish self-indulgence.» — el saldo que esa literatura dejaba: un paganismo sin coherencia ni propósito moral, que empujaba a los sabios al cristianismo o al escepticismo.

«He then condemned it as a temptation to slide into sloth and amorality, ‘the unmixed sensualism to which the East was wholly given’.» — recoge la condena orientalista que acompañaba al esquema, con el Este entregado por entero al sensualismo sin mezcla.

«The penalty was, in effect, a functional and sociological one; and therein lay the difference in this language from that used to patrol religious behaviour until the eighteenth century, when the direct wrath of an offended deity would have been the sanction invoked instead.» — aísla el desplazamiento que le importa: la sanción pasó a ser funcional y sociológica, y ya no la ira directa de una deidad ofendida como hasta el siglo XVIII.

«Instead, the arguments used to safeguard the established religion were becoming utilitarian; namely, that its teaching and claim on communal allegiance represented an important bond within society, any loosening of which might destroy the stability of the whole social order, and» — de ahí que los argumentos para resguardar la religión establecida se volvieran utilitarios, apoyados en el vínculo social que su enseñanza representaba.

«The first of these depended on the notion that there had once existed a single great world spiritual system, based upon divine revelation, of which the main religions practised by civilized humanity during historical times all contained traces.» — identifica el primero de los lenguajes nuevos: la noción de un único gran sistema espiritual mundial, de origen revelado, del que las religiones históricas conservarían trazas.

«This automatically denied the claim of Christianity to any special relationship with divinity or any moral pre-eminence, reducing it to parity with ancient Greek and Egyptian paganism and the principal spiritual traditions of the Orient;» — y lo que ese esquema implicaba: negarle al cristianismo toda relación especial con lo divino y reducirlo a paridad con el paganismo antiguo y las tradiciones de Oriente.

«In 1836 it was given a distinctive twist, with the publication of a two-volume book called Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis.» — data su formulación más señalada en 1836, con los dos volúmenes de Anacalypsis.

«In Higgins’s scheme, the ancient knowledge had been hopelessly corrupted by the Christian churches, and needed now to be reconstructed.» — el programa que Godfrey Higgins derivaba de ahí: un saber antiguo corrompido sin remedio por las iglesias cristianas y que ahora había que reconstruir.

«She also, however, made the claim that she remained in regular communication with these Masters through psychic channels, the existence of which» — sobre Blavatsky, Hutton separa las dos capas de su obra y consigna la segunda: el reclamo de comunicarse regularmente con los Maestros por canales psíquicos.

«People call me, and I must admit I call myself, a heathen.» — en la carta que cita, la propia Blavatsky se declara pagana, y él la reproduce sin arbitrar el reclamo.

«During the 1880s the writings of her colleague, A. P. Sinnett, introduced the tenets of Buddhism to a mass Western audience for the first time.» — adjudica a A. P. Sinnett, colega de Blavatsky, haber presentado por primera vez los principios del budismo a un público occidental masivo en la década de 1880.

«Anna Kingsford, president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society during the same decade, reacted against the oriental emphasis of the parent body by encouraging researchers into Western hermetic traditions which gave a new prominence to the hitherto neglected Gnostic texts.» — y a Anna Kingsford el giro contrario dentro de la misma sociedad: alentar la investigación de las tradiciones herméticas occidentales y dar relieve a los textos gnósticos.

«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.» — su balance de la teosofía, con la reserva puesta dentro: probablemente sus dos mayores logros fueron difundir la noción de un alma divina única del mundo y la de la reencarnación.

«It was one that paid some genuine respect to paganism, but could only be termed pagan itself by those Christian reductionists who applied this word to all religious traditions other than those of Christ, Mohammed, and Moses.» — y la acotación que impide llamarla pagana: solo cabría el término desde el reduccionismo cristiano que lo aplica a toda tradición ajena a Cristo, Mahoma y Moisés.

«It aimed to abolish or universalize priesthood and it located the source of truth in the human being.» — sobre el tercer lenguaje, el ilustrado: apuntaba a abolir o universalizar el sacerdocio y situaba la fuente de la verdad en el ser humano.

«The texts most frequently cited by the philosophes, however, were Cicero and Lucretius, who were precisely those ancient writers who questioned most openly the existence of any deities and took a secular» — señala a quiénes citaban de verdad los philosophes, Cicerón y Lucrecio, precisamente los antiguos que más abiertamente cuestionaban la existencia de deidades.

«They classed the pagan religions of the ancient Near East with medieval Christianity, as cultures of error and despotism.» — y cómo clasificaban ese material: las religiones paganas del Cercano Oriente antiguo junto con el cristianismo medieval, como culturas de error y despotismo.

«David Hume, postulated a natural evolutionary development from polytheism to monotheism, and while he praised the former for its tolerance, he also considered it to have been vulgar and absurd.» — recoge el esquema evolutivo de Hume, del politeísmo al monoteísmo, con su doble filo: elogiaba la tolerancia del primero y a la vez lo tenía por vulgar y absurdo.

«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.» — la tesis que propone en su lugar: el lenguaje característico de un paganismo moderno comprometido tiene su origen directo en el Romanticismo alemán, fusión de admiración por Grecia, nostalgia y deseo de unidad orgánica.

«It was not Goethe, however, who was to be the exemplar of this attitude, but his contemporary Friedrich Schiller, in his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’, first published in the journal German Mercury in March 1788.» — y su ejemplar no es Goethe sino Schiller, con Los dioses de Grecia, publicado en marzo de 1788.

«Schiller’s target was not Christianity but science, which in his opinion reduced an earth rich in poetry to a compound of chemicals.» — acota contra quien lea el poema como anticristiano: el blanco de Schiller no era el cristianismo sino la ciencia, que a su juicio reducía la tierra a un compuesto de químicos.

«What impressed many readers, however, was that the pagan ancient world was treated as absolutely good, and the faith of Christ ignored.» — aunque señala qué fue lo que impresionó a los lectores: que el mundo pagano antiguo saliera tratado como absolutamente bueno y la fe de Cristo ignorada.

«Even the absurd parts of the Greek Mythology are less painfully absurd than those of any other; because, generally speaking, they are on the cheerful side as well as the gloomy.» — Hutton cita a Leigh Hunt contraponiendo las dos mitologías, con lo absurdo griego menos doloroso que el de cualquier otra por tener también su lado alegre.

«It is hardly surprising that, almost a year later, his friend Benjamin Haydon recorded him as saying that ‘he prefers infinitely the beauties of Pagan Mythology to the gloomy repentance of the Christians.’» — y el testimonio de Benjamin Haydon sobre Keats, que prefería infinitamente las bellezas de la mitología pagana al arrepentimiento sombrío de los cristianos.

«It is impossible now to tell how serious all this was; but even if it was largely in play, that is in itself (as will be made clear later) a hallmark of ‘genuine’ modern paganism, in which literal belief in deities is not an essential feature of religious practice.» — aquí enuncia una de sus tesis de fondo, con el límite dentro: aunque aquel juego pagano fuera en buena parte broma, eso mismo es marca del paganismo moderno genuino, donde creer literalmente en las deidades no es rasgo esencial.

«Keats’s own religion, however, remained undecided, and from late 1817 he began, like Goethe, to create one for himself around the notion of a single God.» — sobre la religión de Keats se abstiene de resolverla: quedó sin decidir, y desde fines de 1817 él empezó a fabricarse una en torno a un Dios único.

«He yearned for a world infused with and interpreted by this ‘improved’, Neoplatonic, paganism —‘a brighter Hellas’—but never lived long enough to decide how it might come about.» — y consigna que Keats no vivió lo bastante para decidir cómo podría llegar aquel paganismo neoplatónico mejorado que anhelaba.

«The result was ‘The Dead Pan’, which claimed that Christians made the best poets, because they were in touch with divine truth, and that the old deities had perished in the moment of the Crucifixion:» — la reacción victoriana en Elizabeth Barrett Browning, cuyo poema sostenía que los cristianos hacían los mejores poetas y que los dioses antiguos perecieron en el momento de la Crucifixión.

«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.» — un dato material del giro: el pintor Edward Calvert levantó un altar a Pan en el patio trasero de su casa.

«In ‘Laus Veneris’, Christianity was again portrayed as a sad and morbid faith, while the goddess Venus was made the representative of nature, joy, and vitality.» — sobre Swinburne: el cristianismo pintado otra vez como fe triste y morbosa, y Venus puesta a representar la naturaleza, la alegría y la vitalidad.

«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.» — su adjudicación de influencia, apenas acotada: la de Swinburne sobre el paganismo moderno difícilmente puede sobrestimarse, y lo citaron Crowley, Dion Fortune y Gardner.

«Swinburne himself, however, never settled the framework of a personal religion.» — y a la vez la abstención que la equilibra: el propio Swinburne nunca fijó el marco de una religión personal.

«In the end he was buried in a churchyard but in default of any instruction no service was read over the grave.» — el detalle que cierra ese punto: fue enterrado en un cementerio parroquial y, a falta de instrucción alguna, no se leyó servicio sobre su tumba.

«He explicitly denied that he had any ‘desire to replant pseudo-paganism on the modern soil’ and declared that Christianity had given the world the new virtues of faith, love, purity, obedience, and benevolence, representing a potential for moral progress.» — sobre Thomas Hardy consigna la negativa expresa del propio autor a replantar un pseudopaganismo en suelo moderno, y su elogio de las virtudes nuevas que el cristianismo dio al mundo.

«Edward Carpenter, called for a return of ‘cosmic consciousness’ to modern ‘Man’: ‘The meaning of the old religions will come back to him.» — Hutton sitúa a Edward Carpenter reclamando el retorno de la conciencia cósmica al hombre moderno.

«He announced in his first editorial that it would be ‘pagan in sentiment, pagan in conviction, pagan in outlook’, and herald a new age in which the long hostility between the sexes would end in the resumption of true partnership, and sexual union be recognized as ‘the flower of human life’.» — y la declaración editorial de una revista que se anunciaba pagana en sentimiento, convicción y perspectiva, con la unión sexual reconocida como la flor de la vida humana.

«If the term ‘pagan’ had acquired an exciting cachet, conservative critics were now using that of ‘neo-pagan’ to indicate disapproval of the libertarian attitudes embodied in the latter.» — registra el momento en que neopagano se vuelve etiqueta de reproche que los críticos conservadores usan contra esas actitudes libertarias.

«He extended his attack to the ‘New Paganism (or neo-Paganism)’ of fiction and light literature, complaining that it embodied a largely imaginary view of the ancient Greek and Romans as ‘continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state…above all things inebriate and lawless’.» — recoge la queja de W. F. Barry contra el nuevo paganismo de la literatura ligera, por presentar a griegos y romanos coronándose de flores y danzando irresponsablemente.

«The First World War put an end to most of them, producing a revulsion of taste in favour of a more sober and gritty modernity.» — data el corte: la Primera Guerra Mundial acabó con casi todo aquello y produjo un cambio de gusto a favor de una modernidad más sobria.

«The language of pagan revival diminished accordingly, but also adapted, as the Grecian background was exchanged for a more general association with the powers of nature.» — y su matiz: el lenguaje del renacer pagano disminuyó, pero también se adaptó, cambiando el fondo griego por una asociación más general con las potencias de la naturaleza.

«It was, obviously enough, one response to the Evangelical Revival and then to the more sustained phenomena of urbanization, industrialization, and rapid social change.» — propone la explicación funcional del fenómeno: una respuesta al Renacimiento evangélico y luego a la urbanización, la industrialización y el cambio social rápido.

«What is particularly significant about it is that it was also very much an English one; and why this should have been so demands some consideration.» — y marca lo que a su juicio pide explicación aparte: que el fenómeno fuera tan marcadamente inglés.

«The problem is more difficult to solve for the French, who were, as said above, as avid a group of classicists as the English—and indeed sometimes spoke of paganism with the same connotations.» — declara abiertamente dónde su explicación cojea: el caso francés es más difícil de resolver, siendo los franceses clasicistas tan ávidos como los ingleses.

«As a result, their assault upon established religion took the form more of outright blasphemy and flirtation, with Satanic imagery.» — y la diferencia que sí observa en Francia: el asalto a la religión establecida tomó más bien la forma de blasfemia franca y coqueteo con la imaginería satánica.

«It must be stressed again that these were languages, not fully formed and mutually exclusive ideological positions.» — insiste en el estatuto de sus cuatro categorías: son lenguajes, no posiciones ideológicas plenamente formadas ni mutuamente excluyentes.

«It was the fourth, without mixture, that was to become the language of late twentieth-century paganism, and two final examples may illustrate both its power and its limitations in the early» — y adjudica al cuarto, sin mezcla, haberse vuelto el lenguaje del paganismo de finales del siglo XX.

«If I had a religion—and I sometimes feel that I behave as if I were in search of one—I would be a pagan.» — cita la entrada de diario de 1944 del joven historiador Hugh Trevor-Roper, que dice que si tuviera una religión sería pagano.

«Nonetheless, such passages do show how fertile was the soil from which an active British paganism might regrow.» — y saca de ese material su conclusión, medida: pasajes así muestran lo fértil que era el suelo del que podía rebrotar un paganismo británico activo.

«None of them, however, recommended that she be accorded any actual worship, which is why none ever fell foul of the authorities; and the figure remained the preserve of intellectuals and poets.» — una acotación decisiva sobre la Madre Tierra premoderna: ninguno de aquellos autores recomendó rendirle culto efectivo, y por eso ninguno tuvo problemas con las autoridades.

«Carolyn Merchant has led a number of writers in emphasizing the development of a scholarly language which identified the author and reader as male adventurers occupied in exploring and exploiting a female natural world.» — acredita a Carolyn Merchant y a quienes la siguieron el haber señalado un lenguaje erudito que ponía a autor y lector como aventureros varones explotando un mundo natural femenino.

«None has hitherto made a study of its impact upon European images of the divine feminine.» — y una búsqueda negativa que deja abierta: nadie ha estudiado hasta ahora el impacto de eso sobre las imágenes europeas de lo divino femenino.

«Venus now appears not merely as patroness of love but related to the woodland or the sea.» — describe el desplazamiento romántico de los atributos: Venus deja de ser solo patrona del amor y queda ligada al bosque o al mar.

«Diana is no longer primarily a symbol of chastity or of hunting, but of the moon, the greenwood, and wild animals.» — y Diana deja de ser ante todo símbolo de castidad o de caza para serlo de la luna, la floresta y los animales salvajes.

«It is true that in the course of the medieval and early modern periods, writers from time to time conceived of a mighty female figure who acted as a mediator between the Christian God and mortal beings, and sometimes as his agent in running the terrestrial world.» — concede el antecedente medieval: de tiempo en tiempo hubo escritores que concibieron una gran figura femenina mediadora entre el Dios cristiano y los mortales.

«It may well be that the very absence of an actual cult of such a being in the ancient world made it easier for Christian thinkers to embrace her.» — y arriesga por qué se la pudo alojar: quizá la ausencia misma de un culto real a tal ser en el mundo antiguo se lo facilitó a los pensadores cristianos.

«It is important also in this contexr that the ancient Greeks spoke of the earth as being feminine in gender and the sky as being masculine (in sharp contrast, say, to the Egyptians).» — aporta el dato griego que importa al esquema: la tierra como femenina y el cielo como masculino, en agudo contraste con los egipcios.

«The pattern was clearly established by the 1810s, and shows prominently in the work of Keats and Shelley.» — y fecha el patrón nuevo, ya establecido en la década de 1810 y visible sobre todo en Keats y Shelley.

«One of the contesting theories in this exchange, articulated first in 1862 by the Swiss judge J. J. Bachofen, was that the earliest human societies had been woman-centred, altering to a patriarchal form before the beginning of history; what was true in the secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one.» — Hutton reconstruye la genealogía de la Gran Diosa académica y sitúa una de sus vigas: la tesis de J. J. Bachofen, de 1862, de que las primeras sociedades humanas fueron centradas en la mujer.

«When Sir Arthur Evans first discussed the Cretan equivalents, in 1895, he explicitly dismissed the Great Goddess theory, suggesting that they and the similar Balkan figures were symbolic concubines placed in male graves.» — y consigna que Evans, en 1895, había desechado explícitamente la teoría de la Gran Diosa, tomando aquellas figurillas por concubinas simbólicas puestas en tumbas masculinas.

«In 1901 Evans, now excavating Knossos, underwent a conversion to the idea that prehistoric Crete had venerated a single mighty goddess.» — para fechar después su cambio de postura: en 1901, ya excavando Cnosos, Evans se convirtió a la idea de una Creta prehistórica que veneró a una sola diosa poderosa.

«He henceforth interpreted all the images of apparent divine females at the site as aspects of this one deity, and male figures as portrayals of an equivalent single god, subordinate to her as her son and consort.» — y describir el efecto de esa conversión sobre la lectura del yacimiento, con toda figura femenina vuelta aspecto de una deidad única y los varones subordinados como hijo y consorte.

«In 1903 Sir Edmund Chambers, a civil servant who was also a respected scholar of the medieval stage, declared that prehistoric Europe had worshipped a Great Earth Mother in two aspects, creatrix and destroyer, who was later known by a plurality of names.» — agrega la pieza de 1903: Sir Edmund Chambers declarando que la Europa prehistórica había adorado a una Gran Madre Tierra en dos aspectos, creadora y destructora.

«Simultaneously, an influential Cambridge classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, stated her belief in the same figure, but with a threefold division of aspect.» — y la simultánea de Jane Ellen Harrison, que creía en la misma figura pero con división triple del aspecto.

«Her triad did echo genuinely ancient tradition, in that during the later Roman Empire some pagan thinkers had tended to group deities in threes.» — concede lo que la tríada de Harrison sí tenía de antiguo: en el Imperio Romano tardío algunos pensadores paganos tendían a agrupar deidades de tres en tres.

«His acceptance of it was cautious, extending only to the conclusion that in western Asia, at least, the earliest civilizations had believed in a single goddess, ‘the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature’, with a male son and consort representing the spirit of vegetation, who dies and returns.» — mide la cautela de Frazer, cuya aceptación llegaba solo hasta admitir que en Asia occidental las civilizaciones más antiguas creyeron en una diosa única.

«The cumulative effect of this weight of opinion was decisive; by the 1910s it was a staple theme of textbooks upon ancient Greek religion that the worship of the Olympian deities had been preceded by a prehistoric age in which the Great Goddess or Earth Mother had ruled supreme.» — resume el efecto acumulado de ese peso de opinión: hacia la década de 1910 era tema corriente de los manuales que a los olímpicos les precedió una edad de la Gran Diosa.

«Whether or not this was actually so is not a question necessary to the purposes of this book; it is sufficient to note that at the dawn of the twentieth century influential scholars had suddenly become very anxious to believe that it was.» — y aquí se abstiene expresamente de arbitrar: si eso fue así o no, no es pregunta necesaria para su libro, y le basta anotar que hubo eruditos influyentes ansiosos por creerlo.

«Throughout this, however, specialists in the emerging field of north-west European prehistory, and especially of Britain, reserved judgement.» — una reserva profesional que le importa consignar: los especialistas en la prehistoria del noroeste europeo reservaron su juicio a lo largo de todo ese proceso.

«It was true that some of the French tombs contained a carved female figure, which gave some grounds for arguing in favour of a goddess cult; but the decisive evidence was lacking, and archaeologists did not feel able to pronounce upon the matter without it.» — y por qué lo hicieron, en sus términos: había algún indicio en las tumbas francesas, pero faltaba la evidencia decisiva y sin ella los arqueólogos no se sentían capaces de pronunciarse.

«When Harold Massingham wrote a book about the Cotswolds in 1932 he took his information about their long barrows from Crawford’s famous survey, but with the single difference that whereas Crawford had never discussed the religious beliefs of the builders, Massingham repeatedly declared, with perfect confidence, that they had been based on Mother Earth.» — el contraste que documenta en 1932: Massingham tomó de Crawford los datos sobre los túmulos y le añadió, con perfecta confianza, la creencia en la Madre Tierra que Crawford nunca discutió.

«From the moment of its reported discovery, however, rumours also circulated quietly in some parts of the archaeological community to the effect that it was a fake, planted either by or upon Armstrong.» — y consigna el rumor que circuló desde el primer momento en parte de la comunidad arqueológica: que la pieza era falsa, plantada por Armstrong o a Armstrong.

«Such was the discretion of that community that not until 1986 did one of its members, Stuart Piggott, raise the matter in print.» — con el dato sobre la discreción del gremio: hasta 1986 ninguno de sus miembros llevó el asunto a letra impresa, y fue Stuart Piggott.

«As no method exists for dating chalk objects, Varndell added, the authenticity of these cannot be objectively tested; but not surprisingly, she concluded that the circumstantial evidence makes their status extremely dubious.» — Hutton recoge la conclusión de Varndell sobre la figurilla de Grimes Graves: al no existir método para datar objetos de creta, su autenticidad no puede probarse de modo objetivo.

«It looks as if the Grimes Graves ‘goddess’ was a fraud, which had success because it represented precisely what many were hoping to find at that moment.» — y arriesga su propia lectura con el verbo puesto en condicional: parece que fue un fraude que prosperó por representar exactamente lo que muchos esperaban encontrar entonces.

«The ‘conversion’ of Sir Arthur Evans, which had commenced this landslide, had been propelled by a similar piece of apparent objective evidence, this time genuine, but misunderstood.» — sobre la conversión de Evans dice que la impulsó una evidencia aparentemente objetiva, esta vez genuina pero mal entendida.

«Evans had got the chronology the wrong way round (the Cretan data is older), and the book on the Nippur excavations does not in fact decisively attribute the dedication of that temple to a goddess.» — y detalla el error: Evans tenía la cronología al revés, porque los datos cretenses son más antiguos, y el libro de Nippur no atribuye de modo decisivo aquel templo a una diosa.

«The actual, known, history of ancient Near Eastern religion had followed a precisely opposite course; the earliest records in each region show a wide plurality of deities, from whom more important figures gradually emerge, until eventually (by the time of Apuleius) some pagans were verging upon monotheism.» — opone a ese esquema el curso conocido de la religión del Cercano Oriente antiguo, que va de una amplia pluralidad de deidades a figuras dominantes y al final roza el monoteísmo.

«The orthodoxy which had emerged by the 1940s required a chronological pattern resembling a diamond, whereby an original feminist monotheism had disintegrated into a rampant polytheism, which in turn simplified once more to culminate in a patriarchal monotheism.» — describe la forma que la ortodoxia de los años cuarenta necesitaba: un patrón en rombo, de un monoteísmo feminista original a un politeísmo desbordado y de ahí a un monoteísmo patriarcal.

«In 1898 a medical doctor, John Arthur Goodchild, published The Light of the West, a treatise which suggested that the Great Mother Goddess had been the main divinity of the ancient Celtic peoples, and that Glastonbury had been one of her cult centres; he went on to propose that her worship be restored throughout Western civilization.» — sitúa en 1898 la propuesta devocional de John Arthur Goodchild, que hacía de la Gran Madre la divinidad principal de los antiguos celtas y proponía restaurar su culto.

«In 1927 another doctor, Robert Briffault, anticipated Renaud by two years, with the argument that most of the world’s peoples had once venerated a Mother Goddess who was believed to have engendered all life, was related to the phases of the moon, and was commonly associated with a young god who was her son and consort.» — y en 1927 la de Robert Briffault, con una Diosa Madre engendradora de toda vida, ligada a las fases de la luna y acompañada de un dios joven hijo y consorte.

«Massingham, in the book in which he had confidently attributed the Cotswold long barrows to her cult, added a portrait of her as remaining the enduring spirit of the English countryside, like a Sleeping Beauty awaiting a recall to life: ‘she is so very fast asleep that, if you could win a way through the rose-maze to her, you would think her dead.» — cita el retrato que Massingham le añadió, la diosa dormida como Bella Durmiente que sigue siendo el espíritu perdurable del campo inglés.

«It remained a parallel literary cliché to identify the feminine, including the divine feminine, with the moon or with the night sky in general, and, as in the case of the Earth Mother, there were writers vivid enough to keep the image invested with real vigour.» — señala el cliché literario paralelo, el de identificar lo femenino divino con la luna o con el cielo nocturno.

«The image of goddess as moon was in fact the only part of this cluster of symbols which underwent any significant development during the first half of the twentieth century, and not until 1948, with the publication of the first edition of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess.» — y acota que la imagen de la diosa como luna fue la única parte del racimo que tuvo desarrollo significativo en la primera mitad del siglo XX, hasta La diosa blanca de Graves en 1948.

«An especially important function of the Goddess, for Graves, was that she gave inspiration to poets; she was the Muse who operated through myths and dreams, in contrast with rational modes of thought which Graves identified with patriarchy, Christianity, and industrial modernity.» — sobre Graves consigna la función que él le daba a la Diosa: inspirar a los poetas como Musa que opera por mitos y sueños, contra los modos racionales que él identificaba con el patriarcado.

«The first is that Graves was determined that his readers should not treat it as a personal poetic reverie but as an authentic work of history, an accurate portrait of the Old Religion.» — y lo que Graves exigía de sus lectores: que no lo tomaran por ensoñación poética personal sino por obra auténtica de historia, retrato exacto de la Vieja Religión.

«That is because it leaves open, ultimately, the question of whether this deity, or any other exists, and such a benevolent agnosticism will pervade this book.» — declara aquí su propia posición, que gobierna el libro entero: deja abierta la cuestión de si esa deidad o cualquier otra existe.

«No historian is in a position to pronounce with professional confidence, as opposed to personal faith, upon either alternative.» — y la funda en el oficio: ningún historiador está en posición de pronunciarse con confianza profesional, por oposición a fe personal, sobre ninguna de las dos alternativas.

«Pan’s new popularity represented a dramatic alteration. At a few places in the backwoods of classical Greece he may have been ‘the great god’, and he had shrines in a few cities, but in general he was in the second or third rank of divinity.» — Hutton mide el ascenso de Pan contra su rango antiguo: en general estaba en el segundo o tercer escalón de la divinidad, pese a algún santuario.

«Merivale summed up his ancient reputation as that of ‘a comic-grotesque little country god, kept under control by the laughter of the more “civilized” Olympian’ deities.’3» — recoge el resumen de Patricia Merivale sobre su reputación antigua, un dios rural cómico y grotesco mantenido a raya por la risa de los olímpicos.

«It is true that medieval Christian writers occasionally gave him a larger and nobler role.» — concede lo que sí hubo antes: escritores cristianos medievales que ocasionalmente le dieron un papel mayor y más noble.

«Plutarch’s famous story of how a mysterious voice at Samothrace cried ‘the Great God Pan is dead’ was taken by the late Roman churchman Eusebius as evidence of the destruction of the pagan deities by the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.» — y el uso que Eusebio dio al relato de Plutarco sobre la voz que gritó que el gran dios Pan había muerto, leído como destrucción de las deidades paganas por Cristo.

«His appearances were, however, still rare, and he makes not a single one in any work written by a major English poet between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth century.» — una búsqueda negativa suya, precisa: Pan no aparece ni una sola vez en obra de poeta inglés mayor entre mediados del XVII y principios del XIX.

«His sudden re-emergence as a major god in the verses of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and the prose of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt, therefore represented a major revolution in taste.» — por eso califica de revolución del gusto su reaparición súbita en Wordsworth, Keats y Shelley y en la prosa de Leigh Hunt y William Hazlitt.

«These writers established him in the form in which he was to gain popularity for the following hundred years: as the personification and guardian of the English countryside, whose cult burgeoned with that of rural England in general.» — la forma en que quedó fijado y con la que ganaría cien años de popularidad: personificación y guardián del campo inglés.

«In most cases, it was the countryside as viewed by the city-dweller (usually a Londoner) on holiday.» — con la acotación social que suele omitirse: era el campo visto por el habitante de la ciudad, casi siempre un londinense de vacaciones.

«Between 1895 and 1914 Pan reached the apogee of his popularity, representing, in Patricia Merivale’s words, ‘the one fashionable subject upon which every minor poet thought that he could turn out a ditty’.» — fecha su apogeo entre 1895 y 1914, cuando fue, según Merivale, el único tema de moda sobre el que todo poeta menor creía poder hilar una copla.

«The familiarity of the image, and the ready way in which it could be trivialized, should not be allowed to obscure its power.» — y advierte contra el error de leer esa familiaridad como debilidad: la facilidad con que la imagen se trivializaba no debe ocultar su fuerza.

«He was pitted directly against the perceived ugliness, brutality, and unhealthiness of the new industrial and urban environment and the perceived aridity and philistinism of the new science.» — porque se le oponía directamente a la fealdad y la insalubridad del nuevo entorno industrial y a la aridez percibida de la nueva ciencia.

«There is a remarkable irony in using the least civilized of classical gods as the mouthpiece of social respectability and rational humanism; although not one of which Phillpotts seems to be aware.» — señala la ironía del caso Phillpotts, que usa al menos civilizado de los dioses clásicos como portavoz de la respetabilidad social, al parecer sin advertirlo.

«In the same book, Forster himself suggested that the god was the male deity of the ancient British, and ascribes a sudden eruption of irrational fury among a group of modern schoolboys to the anger of Pan.» — y el uso que el propio Forster le da en la misma novela que ridiculiza, haciendo de Pan la deidad masculina de los antiguos britanos.

«By 1819 Hazlitt could perceive that ‘our poetry has more of Pan than of Apollo’ and defend this with the aphorism ‘Pan is a God, Apollo is no more!’» — cierra el desplazamiento con Hazlitt, que ya en 1819 percibía más Pan que Apolo en la poesía inglesa.

«In 1915 Lord Dunsany had brought out a collection of short stories, three of which were devoted to the theme that urban civilization was doomed to perish, while Pan would live for ever.» — Hutton fecha en 1915 la colección de Lord Dunsany donde tres relatos sostienen que la civilización urbana está condenada mientras Pan vivirá para siempre.

«The vehicle was a novel, The Blessing of Pan, in which Pan himself never actually appears.» — y describe la vía indirecta de esa novela, en la que Pan mismo nunca llega a aparecer.

«The story concludes in gentle happiness, as the village settles down to a new existence of paganism, harmony with nature, and economic self-sufficiency, written off by the surrounding communities as eccentric and by the Church as another congregation lost to religious indifference.» — el desenlace que le interesa: la aldea se asienta en una nueva existencia de paganismo, armonía con la naturaleza y autosuficiencia, dada por perdida por la Iglesia.

«Her ostensible offence has been to remove a sacrificial offering left for him by her newly wed husband, his votary, but her real one is to have bullied a contented bachelor into a marriage in which she tries to reform his habits; here the god features as a homosexual icon in a much more subtle, and cruel, fashion.» — adjudica al relato una segunda capa: el dios funciona como icono homosexual de modo mucho más sutil y cruel de lo que la ofensa aparente sugiere.

«By this time, in Patricia Merivale’s view, Pan’s popularity was in any case on the wane.» — recoge la tesis de Patricia Merivale de que hacia entonces la popularidad de Pan estaba de todos modos declinando.

«She has suggested that the ‘public’ myth of the god was ended by the First World War, while a ‘private’ myth of him continued to be important to some writers.» — y su distinción, que él va a discutir: un mito público del dios terminado por la Primera Guerra y un mito privado que siguió importándole a algunos escritores.

«The war certainly precipitated a collapse in the taste for the sort of escapist pastoral poetry with classical Greek figures in which Pan had commonly appeared.» — concede la parte que da por buena: la guerra sí precipitó el derrumbe del gusto por la poesía pastoral escapista donde Pan solía aparecer.

«On the other hand, it must be obvious from the list of works cited above that in the 1920s he was still operating very powerfully as a figure in modern mythology, and as all the items on that list were published, it seems difficult to term that mythology a private one.» — pero objeta la etiqueta de privado, porque en los años veinte el dios seguía operando con fuerza y todas las obras de su lista se publicaron.

«It was really in the 1930s and 1940s that the god began a real departure from works of English literature, and this was because he was undergoing a metamorphosis which had overtaken the modern goddess-figure earlier.» — propone su propia datación de la salida: fue en los treinta y los cuarenta cuando el dios empezó a irse de la literatura inglesa, y por una metamorfosis.

«It will be traced in detail later in this book; for the time being it is sufficient to state that he was being cut loose from his classical roots and turned into an archetype.» — que él enuncia en corto y promete rastrear más adelante: a Pan lo estaban cortando de sus raíces clásicas y convirtiendo en arquetipo.

«Just as Diana, Artemis, Demeter, and Hertha had lost their individual identity and become aspects of a single universal female divinity of the green earth and night sky, so Pan became in the mid-twentieth century the most famous ancient aspect of a being characterized, with increasing frequency, simply as ‘the horned god’.» — y el paralelo con la diosa, que había pasado antes por lo mismo: Pan quedó como el aspecto antiguo más famoso de un ser llamado cada vez más simplemente el dios cornudo.

«The two deities formed a natural pair; indeed, between 1840 and 1940 writers regularly had treated them as a couple, some very different examples being Robert Barrett Browning (‘Pan and Luna’), Aleister Crowley (‘Pan to Artemis’), and Aldous Huxley (Cynthia).» — documenta que la pareja no la inventó el siglo XX: entre 1840 y 1940 los escritores trataron con regularidad a los dos como pareja, de Robert Barrett Browning a Crowley y Huxley.

«Those were precisely the domains that civilized humans had traditionally found most alien and frightening; they were those of the two pagan deities to whom modern minds, frightened, jaded, and constricted by aspects of civilized living, had turned.» — cierra el capítulo con la observación de fondo: esos dominios eran justo los que la humanidad civilizada halló más ajenos y temibles, y a sus dos deidades se volvieron las mentes modernas.

«For those scholars who wanted to think like Massingham, the barrier was apparently removed at last in 1939, when A. L. Armstrong claimed to have found the unequivocal proof of the worship of an Earth Goddess in the British Neolithic.» — data en 1939 el momento en que el obstáculo pareció caer, con A. L. Armstrong reclamando evidencia inequívoca del culto a una diosa de la tierra en el neolítico británico.

«One of the most remarkable aspects of eighteenth-century European culture was a widespread growth of secret societies, into which members were initiated upon an oath to observe confidentiality of proceedings, and which contained a strong ceremonial element.» — Hutton describe el fenómeno del que arranca este capítulo: el crecimiento de sociedades secretas en la Europa del XVIII, con juramento de confidencialidad y fuerte componente ceremonial.

«The source, and thereafter the main tradition, of these was Freemasonry.» — y les adjudica una sola fuente y tradición principal, la masonería.

«In the late twentieth century, however, those which have survived to the present have generously opened their archives and libraries to the inspection of scholars, and by the 1990s it at last became possible to piece together an objective history of them.» — explica por qué recién ahora puede narrarse: las órdenes sobrevivientes abrieron archivos a los estudiosos y hacia los noventa se volvió posible armar una historia objetiva.

«Stevenson has argued, plausibly, that what emerged in Scotland in the 1590s was a development of this tradition, but one so novel as to mark a fresh start: the establishment of a network of lodges permanently based in certain districts, keeping records, admitting members who were not working masons, initiating through a progressive scale of degrees, and concerned far more with the ethical ideas behind masonic lore than with the practice of the work itself.» — avala la tesis de David Stevenson, con el adverbio dentro: plausiblemente, lo que surgió en la Escocia de los años noventa del XVI fue tan novedoso que marca un comienzo nuevo.

«Schaw’s orders were directly responsible for the foundation of the first known masonic lodges of the modern sort, which were established around Edinburgh and St Andrews in 1600, and have kept continuous records ever since.» — y le atribuye a las órdenes de Schaw la fundación de las primeras logias masónicas del tipo moderno, hacia 1600 en Edimburgo y St Andrews.

«The reasons for the success of the venture are also patent, for it furnished local intellectuals with a safe space in which they could discuss any concepts except those relating to religion and politics, with colleagues bonded by an ideology of equality and brotherhood.» — propone la explicación funcional del éxito: daba a los intelectuales locales un espacio seguro para discutir cualquier concepto salvo los de religión y política.

«It also offered some framework of mystical symbolism in a nation whose Church had been more than normally denuded of this by the Reformation.» — y un segundo motivo: ofrecía simbolismo místico en una nación cuya Iglesia había quedado más despojada de lo normal por la Reforma.

«It is from 1696 that the first information survives of the content of ritual, and there is no way of telling whether this had developed over the century or had been established from the time of Schaw, or before.» — una abstención expresa sobre el ritual: el primer contenido conservado es de 1696, y no hay modo de saber si se desarrolló durante ese siglo o venía de Schaw o de antes.

«She has argued convincingly that the English gave ‘the Craft’ (as the system became commonly known among them) a preoccupation with constitutions, laws, and governance, and a cast of thought very clearly associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; indeed, one which placed the network of lodges firmly within that movement.» — recoge lo que a su juicio aportaron los ingleses al oficio: la preocupación por constituciones, leyes y gobierno, y un molde de pensamiento ligado a la Ilustración del XVIII.

«The second is that the same records do not enable us to determine whether or not any actual ceremony was used upon the initiation of new members into the various trade organizations.» — declara el límite de las fuentes gremiales: no permiten determinar si hubo o no ceremonia efectiva al iniciar nuevos miembros.

«None, however, implies any ritual action, of the sort found by the 1690s.» — y su hallazgo negativo sobre las Old Charges: ninguna implica acción ritual del tipo que sí se encuentra hacia 1690.

«It is also clear that the craft guilds became more and more concerned with secrecy and ceremonial formality during the late medieval and early modern centuries, a tendency which accelerated even as their actual economic power and importance waned.» — señala la tendencia que sí está clara: los gremios se ocuparon cada vez más del secreto y de la formalidad ceremonial mientras su poder económico menguaba.

«Freemasons were thus part of a very broad phenomenon, but distinguished by their greater component of ritual, grander historical claims, and higher moral purpose.» — su conclusión sobre el lugar de los masones: parte de un fenómeno muy amplio, distinguidos por más ritual, reclamos históricos más grandiosos y un propósito moral más alto.

«A third consideration is that Masonic ritual (commonly known in Britain as ‘Craft working’) grew much more elaborate between 1700 and 1740, with a slower growth for the rest of the century, and the lore attached to symbols grew proportionately richer.» — y su cronología del ritual, que crece mucho entre 1700 y 1740 y más lento el resto del siglo.

«By 1775 the whole catalogue of ritual included prayers and responses, anthems, blessings, homages to superiors, salutes, proclamations, invocations of virtue, and the consecration of the lodge with corn, wine, and oil.» — Hutton inventaría hasta dónde había llegado el catálogo ritual en 1775, con plegarias, himnos, salutaciones e invocaciones de virtud.

«He was admitted after a challenge with which a sword was held to his bare breast, affirmed his belief in a Supreme Being (to refute charges of atheism commonly levelled at the Craft), and received a first set of instructions.» — y el detalle que a su juicio explica una cláusula: el postulante afirmaba su creencia en un Ser Supremo para rebatir la acusación de ateísmo que solía hacérsele al oficio.

«The north was regarded as the place of darkness, and shunned, following a tradition given biblical authority in the Book of Jeremiah and embedded in English folk culture; hence the common reluctance to be buried on the north side of a churchyard or to put a northern door into a church.» — explica el norte masónico como lugar de tinieblas por una tradición de autoridad bíblica arraigada en la cultura popular inglesa, incluida la reticencia a enterrar del lado norte.

«There is a possibility that this was suggested by Joseph Glanvill’s very popular book Saducismus Triumphatus, which represents a group of Somerset witches as having the parting cry of ‘A boy! Merry meet, Merry part’.» — apunta con cautela una posible fuente del saludo masónico en el Saducismus Triumphatus de Joseph Glanvill, donde unas brujas de Somerset se despiden así.

«On the other hand, both the Glanvill expression and that of the Masons may have been rooted in a wider popular tradition of such calls.» — y de inmediato la relativiza: tanto la expresión de Glanvill como la de los masones pueden venir de una tradición popular más amplia de esas fórmulas.

«During the nineteenth century the fundamental signs of the Craft were settled as the pentagram (‘the symbol of the most sacred principles’), the hexagram (known interchangeably with it as the Seal of Solomon), the triangle (symbol of deity and commonly of the first degree), the square (symbol of the second degree), and the compasses (symbol of the third).» — fija cuándo se asentaron los signos fundamentales del oficio, ya en el siglo XIX: pentagrama, hexagrama, triángulo, escuadra y compás.

«The process was rarely depicted as one of discovery; rather, each new generation of Masons was instructed in the latest version of the package as if it were inherited complete through an oral tradition.» — señala el modo en que se transmitía, que es lo que le interesa del caso: rara vez como descubrimiento, sino instruyendo a cada generación en la versión más reciente como si viniera completa por tradición oral.

«The earlier stages of this development can be seen by comparing the Old Charges with the history given in sources from the early eighteenth century; the material in the former has been expanded in detail to present a claim of continuous initiation and instruction spanning four thousand years.» — y documenta la expansión del reclamo histórico, que en las fuentes del XVIII llega a una cadena continua de iniciación de cuatro mil años.

«The finishing touches were put in the 1920s, when (in keeping with a new contemporary vogue for anthropology) prehistoric tribal rites from which the Masonic system was claimed to have directly descended were ‘reconstructed’.» — data los últimos retoques en los años veinte del siglo XX, cuando se reconstruyeron ritos tribales prehistóricos de los que el sistema masónico decía descender.

«The most celebrated to appear there in the mid-eighteenth century, the Strict Observance, made an important innovation by claiming, as Blavatsky was to do later, to be directed by secret chiefs (the ‘Unknown Superiors’) who had preserved the ancient wisdom entire.» — sobre la Estricta Observancia consigna la innovación que después reaparece: decir que la dirigían jefes secretos que habían preservado entera la sabiduría antigua.

«There seems as yet to have been no thorough study of the place of Freemasonry in nineteenth-century British culture.» — una búsqueda negativa: al parecer no hay todavía estudio a fondo del lugar de la masonería en la cultura británica del XIX.

«These customs may have been much older, but there is no way of proving the possibility.» — y la abstención que la acompaña sobre las costumbres del oficio: pueden ser mucho más viejas, pero no hay modo de establecerlo.

«The last of real consequence to appear, at the opening of that century, was Co-Masonry, which broke with the tradition of its predecessors by admitting women.» — fecha la última orden de consecuencia real, la comasonería, que rompió con la tradición de sus predecesoras al admitir mujeres.

«the Oddfellows asserted that they had been founded by Roman soldiers, the Foresters included Alfred the Great and William Rufus among their earlier members, and the Druids named Noah as their founder.» — reúne los reclamos de antigüedad de las órdenes afiliadas, con soldados romanos, Alfredo el Grande y Noé entre los fundadores alegados.

«In the words of one of their foremost historians, Mark Carnes, ‘no idea was more commonplace, nor more palpably untrue, than the fraternalists’ claims of ancient and venerable origins’.» — Hutton se apoya en Mark Carnes para calificar esos reclamos: ninguna idea era más común ni más palpablemente falsa que la de los orígenes antiguos y venerables.

«In any case, the actual religious element in them was always superficial, their rituals being intended as acts of incorporation and sociability rather than of worship.» — y acota el peso religioso de esas órdenes: el elemento religioso en ellas fue siempre superficial, con ritos de incorporación y sociabilidad más que de culto.

«It was in Scotland, where Freemasonry apparently had begun, that it belatedly evolved into its most colourful and bizarre British form: the Society of the Horseman’s Word.» — sitúa en Escocia la forma británica más pintoresca de la masonería, la Society of the Horseman's Word.

«The result has exactly reversed the chain of historical causation suggested for the society by scholars earlier in the twentieth century.» — y anuncia el resultado de su recorrido: invierte exactamente la cadena de causación que los estudiosos de principios del siglo XX le habían supuesto a esa sociedad.

«The first was J. M. McPherson, writing in 1929, who suggested that it was the remnant of a pagan cult allied to, or descended from, that which was persecuted in the early modern witch trials.» — nombra al primero de ellos, J. M. McPherson, que en 1929 propuso que era el resto de un culto pagano emparentado con el perseguido en los procesos de brujería.

«Something very apparent about both Freemasonry and the affiliated orders is that the religious language which they used, and the tradition which it implied, was not a Christian one.» — una observación transversal suya: el lenguaje religioso de la masonería y sus órdenes afiliadas, y la tradición que implicaba, no era cristiano.

«Had they considered the quite large number of earlier records of the society,38 then a different conclusion would immediately have become apparent, as it did to another writer on Scottish rural life, Hamish Henderson, in 1962,39 and then to Ian Carter, who produced the first proper study of the world from which the Horseman’s Word had arisen, in 1979.» — objeta que aquellos autores no consultaran los registros anteriores, con los que llegaron a otra conclusión Hamish Henderson en 1962 y Ian Carter en 1979.

«Instead, it spiced up its reputation by holding meetings at night and by spreading the beliefs that its members acquired magical powers over mill machinery and paid for them by having to read the Bible backwards, three times over in three years.» — describe cómo el Miller's Word se fabricaba reputación, reuniéndose de noche y difundiendo que sus miembros pagaban sus poderes leyendo la Biblia al revés.

«By the nineteenth century the initiation ceremony had come to include a strong element of deliberate blasphemy or diabolism.» — data en el siglo XIX el momento en que la ceremonia de iniciación incorporó un fuerte elemento de blasfemia o diabolismo deliberados.

«It almost certainly derived from traditions of the pacts made by witches, a notorious feature of the trials which had ended only just over a century before, and would have been well known in the early nineteenth century, not merely from memory but from the published work of Sir Walter Scott and others.» — y le adjudica origen con cautela calibrada: casi con certeza deriva de las tradiciones sobre los pactos de las brujas, notorias en los procesos y conocidas por Walter Scott y otros.

«To train young men for it, regulate competition for jobs, and ensure that both services and rewards were maintained at a high level, the Horseman’s Word was developed in imitation of the Miller’s.» — propone la explicación laboral del Horseman's Word: se desarrolló a imitación del Miller's para entrenar jóvenes y regular la competencia por los puestos.

«Ian Carter has demonstrated the direct nature of the borrowing by the Horsemen from the Millers, including the acquisition of set phrases which made real sense only when spoken in a mill.» — acredita a Ian Carter haber mostrado lo directo del préstamo, incluidas frases hechas que solo tienen sentido dichas en un molino.

«Almost needless to say, by the end of the nineteenth century the Horseman’s Word declared itself to be the oldest secret society of the lot, founded by Cain, and despised the Freemasons and affiliated orders as newcomers and upstarts.» — y la ironía que cierra el punto: a fines del XIX el Horseman's Word se declaraba la sociedad secreta más antigua de todas, fundada por Caín.

«It permitted deliberate misbehaviour in a private and controlled setting, and the whiff of magic and diabolism which hung about its reputation combined with the secrecy of its membership and proceedings, to enable it to function as a very effective means of pressure upon employers.» — su lectura funcional de la sociedad: permitía la mala conducta deliberada en un marco privado y controlado, y el tufo de magia y diabolismo la volvía instrumento eficaz de presión sobre los patrones.

«The seventeenth-century intellectual Isaac Casaubon cited the case of one John Young, operating in Sussex in 1648, who was famed for making any horse tractable by ‘whispering in its ear’.» — aporta el antecedente inglés que documenta Isaac Casaubon: John Young, en el Sussex de 1648, famoso por volver dócil a cualquier caballo susurrándole al oído.

«The definitive characteristic of its members was the possession of the bone of a toad or frog, often supposedly obtained through an elaborate ritual—an initiation ceremony of sorts—which involved skinning and defleshing the animal and throwing its skeleton into a stream at night.» — Hutton describe el rasgo definitorio de los Toadmen: poseer el hueso de un sapo o una rana, obtenido por un ritual nocturno de descarnado y de arrojar el esqueleto a un arroyo.

«All our information on these consists of memories gathered in the mid-twentieth century.» — y declara de inmediato el límite de la evidencia: toda la información sobre ellos son recuerdos recogidos a mediados del siglo XX.

«It is not clear whether the Toadmen existed before the Horsemen arrived from Scotland, for how long they had been defined by their ownership of the bone, or indeed how far they represented an organization at all, as opposed to a category of individuals working within a common tradition.» — de ahí su triple abstención: no está claro si los Toadmen precedieron a los Horsemen, desde cuándo los definía el hueso, ni siquiera hasta qué punto fueron una organización.

«Mark Carnes has estimated that by the 1890s up to a fifth of the total population of adult males in the United States belonged to secret societies on the Masonic model.» — cita el cálculo de Mark Carnes de que hacia 1890 hasta un quinto de los varones adultos de Estados Unidos pertenecía a sociedades secretas de modelo masónico.

«No similar computation seems to have been made for Britain during the same period, but the proportion is unlikely to have been smaller.» — y marca el hueco: no parece haberse hecho cómputo semejante para Gran Bretaña, aunque la proporción difícilmente sería menor.

«All, it is now reasonably certain, had sprung from the original stock of Freemasons; it is most unlikely that any of them were aware of this.» — su conclusión sobre el origen común, con el grado de certeza declarado: es ya razonablemente seguro que todas brotaron del tronco masónico, y muy improbable que ninguna lo supiera.

«This concept of magic was still used throughout the twentieth century by historians and anthropologists, but has become as problematic, and controversial, as the definition of religion.» — sobre la magia advierte que la definición heredada quedó tan problemática y polémica como la de religión.

«They have also, however, resulted from a growing recognition, itself the result of the ever greater development of the discipline of anthropology, that all such definitions are themselves culturally specific, and that different peoples categorize these phenomena according to different strategies of concept and language.» — y por qué: la antropología reconoció que toda definición así es culturalmente específica y que cada pueblo categoriza esos fenómenos con estrategias distintas.

«Circles and cardinal points had been used in ancient and early medieval magic, but not with any special prominence, while the pentagram was widely known in the ancient world, but seemingly not with any special magical associations.» — una precisión sobre los útiles de la magia ritual: círculos y puntos cardinales se usaban en la magia antigua sin especial relieve, y el pentagrama era conocido pero al parecer sin asociación mágica particular.

«Judaism gave it an emphasis on working with angels and with the secret names of the single deity to whom all three faiths gave allegiance.» — reparte las aportaciones de las tres religiones del libro y le da al judaísmo el trabajo con ángeles y con los nombres secretos de la deidad única.

«Islam added astral magic, the attempted conjuration of the particular influences of heavenly bodies into solid objects, which were then infused with it, and to which the Arabic name of ‘talisman’ was given.» — al islam, la magia astral, la conjuración de las influencias de los cuerpos celestes en objetos sólidos que reciben el nombre árabe de talismán.

«The Christian contribution, which developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was largely geometrical: to make the cast and consecrated circle, with four cardinal points at east, south, west, and north, the standard setting for acts of magic, and the pentagram the best known symbol used in such acts,» — y al cristianismo de los siglos XII y XIII una aportación sobre todo geométrica: el círculo trazado y consagrado con sus cuatro puntos cardinales, y el pentagrama.

«However, after the sixteenth century the garbled names of Egyptian deities vanished, and the interest in planets as homes of classical deities waned, and neither played an important role in the development of modern magic.» — consigna qué se perdió por el camino: tras el siglo XVI desaparecen los nombres deformados de las deidades egipcias y decae el interés por los planetas como moradas de dioses clásicos.

«Where they differ markedly from those of academics is in their comparative lack of systematic source references; typical in this is one of the finest of these writers, Gerald Suster, who has described footnotes as ‘usually tiresome’ and felt obliged to offer his readers ‘a few words of apology and explanation’ when using them.» — señala en qué se distingue la literatura de los practicantes de la académica, con Gerald Suster llamando fastidiosas a las notas al pie y disculpándose por usarlas.

«Between 1750 and 1850 the practice of ceremonial magic was more or less in abeyance in Britain’s intellectual circles, for reasons which remain speculative.» — Hutton fecha un hueco y declara que no sabe su causa: entre 1750 y 1850 la magia ceremonial estuvo poco menos que en suspenso en los círculos intelectuales británicos, por razones que siguen siendo especulativas.

«There were exceptions, but they were few, the most notable being Francis Barrett, who operated at the junction where applied science, ritual magic, and practical occultisms such as astrology, intersect.» — y sitúa la excepción notable, Francis Barrett, en el cruce de la ciencia aplicada, la magia ritual y los ocultismos prácticos.

«These tracts provoked tremendous excitement, but the existence of the fraternity was never proved, just as the authorship of the works remains controversial.» — sobre los manifiestos rosacruces marca dos cosas sin resolver: la existencia de la fraternidad nunca se estableció y la autoría de los textos sigue en disputa.

«Barrett himself claimed to be a Rosicrucian on the title page of The Magus.» — y consigna que Barrett se declaró rosacruz en la portada misma de The Magus.

«The plot of that chapter depended on the idea that the Rosicrucians had not merely existed but survived into the nineteenth century, ‘respectable and virtuous’, ‘severe in the practice of moral precepts’, and ‘ardent in Christian faith’.» — señala de qué dependía la trama de Zanoni: de la idea de que los rosacruces no solo existieron sino que sobrevivieron al siglo XIX, respetables y ardientes en la fe cristiana.

«Not even Zanoni, however, was sufficient to spark off a revival of the practice of learned magic in Britain.» — y su límite: ni siquiera Zanoni bastó para encender un renacer de la práctica de la magia erudita en Gran Bretaña.

«The deeper social and religious reasons for the emergence of the French as the pioneers of modern ritual magic have not yet been adequately studied, but it is plain that the key figure in the process was Alphonse» — declara otra búsqueda negativa antes de nombrar a su figura clave: las razones sociales y religiosas de que fueran los franceses los pioneros no se han estudiado todavía de modo adecuado.

«Levi enunciated the principle that humanity had originally possessed semi-divine powers, which had been allowed to atrophy over the millennia and could be regained by concentrated study and practice.» — enuncia el principio que Lévi puso en circulación: una humanidad que poseía poderes semidivinos, atrofiados con los milenios y recuperables por estudio y práctica concentrados.

«In 1854 he apparently took this to its logical conclusion; hitherto the symbol had been used to ward off or banish spirits, but in that year Levi seems to have established the invoking pentagram as a staple feature of modern magic.» — y data en 1854 el paso decisivo, con el adverbio dentro: hasta entonces el símbolo servía para alejar espíritus, y ese año Lévi parece haber establecido el pentagrama de invocación como pieza fija de la magia moderna.

«but not only was he the first to combine them like this, but his combination became a consistent part of tradition thereafter.» — acota qué fue lo original en Lévi: no que inventara los elementos, sino que fue el primero en combinarlos así y que su combinación quedó como parte constante de la tradición.

«It would have been impossible, however, for him to have portrayed his body of work as the combination of research and creativity which it actually represented, to an audience habituated to the impressive claims to timeless wisdom and continuous tradition made by the secret societies.» — explica por qué Lévi no pudo presentar su obra como lo que era, mezcla de investigación y creación, ante un público habituado a los reclamos de sabiduría intemporal de las sociedades secretas.

«By the end of the century it had become a potent myth among European reactionaries that the French Revolution had been engineered by an international conspiracy of Freemasons, who were still working to destroy the traditional social, political, and religious order.» — reconstruye el mito reaccionario de fin de siglo, con la Revolución Francesa atribuida a una conspiración internacional de masones.

«They preserved it entire, while reversing the sympathies; the chain of wicked conspirators became a secret tradition of revolutionaries who stood for liberal and enlightened values and possessed a hidden knowledge fatal to orthodox Christianity.» — y el uso que los ocultistas le dieron: conservaron entera la cadena y le invirtieron las simpatías, volviendo a los conspiradores una tradición secreta de valores liberales con un saber oculto fatal para la ortodoxia.

«He also suggested that instead of descending directly to the modern secret societies, it had been almost wholly lost by the end of the Middle Ages, but could be recovered by the mixture of research and experimentation which his books represented.» — consigna la variante de Lévi frente a esa herencia: el saber no descendió a las sociedades secretas modernas sino que se perdió casi del todo al final de la Edad Media, y se recobra por investigación y experimentación.

«Convention demanded, however, that it claim some initiatory link with an older body devoted to the same aims, and this was supplied by one of the moving spirits, Kenneth H. R. Mackenzie, who claimed to have been initiated into one of the eighteenth-century German mystical societies which had themselves developed (in fact if not in theory) out of the older Freemasonry, the Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross.» — Hutton describe la convención que toda orden nueva debía cumplir y cómo la cumplió la Societas Rosicruciana: Kenneth H. R. Mackenzie declarando haber sido iniciado en una sociedad mística alemana del XVIII.

«Mackenzie’s story was that he had been received into this by one of its surviving members, a Count Apponyi (from a family which certainly existed), while travelling in the Austrian Empire.» — y el relato mismo, recibido por un conde Apponyi, de una familia que ciertamente existió, mientras viajaba por el Imperio austríaco.

«The professed aims of the group were wholly theoretical, ‘to search out the Great Secrets of Nature’,16 and it does not seem to have practised any ritual magic.» — acota lo que esa sociedad decía hacer y lo que al parecer no hacía: fines enteramente teóricos, y ninguna práctica de magia ritual.

«Mackenzie’s story may have been true; what is certain is that in 1861 he had visited, and been impressed by, Eliphas Levi.» — y separa lo dudoso de lo firme: el relato de Mackenzie pudo ser cierto, pero lo seguro es que en 1861 visitó a Eliphas Lévi y quedó impresionado.

«On the other hand, her admiration for the mystical traditions of the East gave her a relative lack of interest in those of Europe and the Mediterranean, and she always forbade her followers to practise ritual magic of the medieval and early modern European kind.» — sobre Blavatsky consigna la prohibición expresa: siempre vedó a sus seguidores practicar magia ritual del tipo europeo medieval y moderno temprano.

«The blow to her reputation in 1884, when her performances were investigated by a member of the Society for Psychical Research and declared to be impostures, combined with a rift among the London Theosophists to precipitate a schism.» — y fecha el golpe a su reputación en 1884, cuando un miembro de la Society for Psychical Research investigó sus fenómenos y los declaró imposturas.

«No more than the Societas Rosicruciana, however, did these new bodies encourage their members to practise operative magic.» — marca el límite compartido de esas asociaciones nuevas: tampoco ellas alentaban a sus miembros a practicar magia operativa.

«Mathers was as capable a researcher as Westcott, but had a far greater interest in the practical application of his studies.» — distingue a Mathers de Westcott por el interés, no por la capacidad: investigador igual de competente, pero con mucho mayor interés en la aplicación práctica.

«Any new secret society devoted to such pursuits had to possess two features in order to achieve any credibility at this period: a set of distinctive rituals handed down from the past, and an initiatory link with a respected older body.» — enuncia los dos requisitos de credibilidad de la época: un conjunto de rituales propios heredados del pasado y un enlace iniciático con un cuerpo más viejo y respetado.

«Even better was to come, however, for Westcott reported that the manuscript had contained, hidden in the same cipher, the address of one Anna Sprengel of Nuremberg, an adept of a mysterious society of German Rosicrucians descended from the ‘original’, medieval fraternity.» — narra el hallazgo que Westcott reportó dentro del manuscrito cifrado: la dirección de Anna Sprengel, adepta de una misteriosa sociedad de rosacruces alemanes.

«Almost needless to say, the literal truth of these events has been questioned almost since they occurred, and the real story will probably never be known.» — y su reserva sobre todo el episodio: la verdad literal de esos hechos se ha cuestionado casi desde que ocurrieron, y la historia real probablemente nunca se sabrá.

«A majority of experts, however, seem to believe that the cipher manuscript was a product of the 1870s or 1880s, rather than an earlier period.» — mide lo que sí puede decirse: la mayoría de los expertos parece creer que el manuscrito cifrado es de los años setenta u ochenta del XIX, no anterior.

«In 1891 Blavatsky died, and the next year Mathers declared that on a visit to Paris he had been contacted by the same secret chiefs, in her place, and been authorized by them to found an inner order to the Golden» — y data en 1892 el relevo del recurso a la autoridad oculta: muerta Blavatsky, Mathers declaró que en París lo habían contactado los mismos jefes secretos.

«Mathers himself was the sole leader of this, and it had one further significant distinction from the Golden Dawn proper: whereas the latter merely trained its members in mystical and magical systems, and in ceremonies intended to propound and illustrate that training, the higher order allowed them to engage in operative magic, invoking and working with deities and spirits.» — señala la diferencia sustantiva de la orden interior: la Golden Dawn entrenaba, y la superior permitía magia operativa, invocando y trabajando con deidades y espíritus.

«In 1897 Westcott felt obliged to resign because rumours of his occult activities were harming his career; Mathers was now left in total control of the inner and outer orders, with the invisible chiefs as his source of legitimization.» — Hutton fecha en 1897 la salida de Westcott, forzada porque los rumores sobre sus actividades ocultas dañaban su carrera, y el control total de Mathers sobre las dos órdenes.

«It needs to be emphasized how remarkable an organization Westcott and Mathers had constructed.» — y subraya lo notable de la construcción que Westcott y Mathers levantaron.

«In its attitude to religion and gender, however, it deliberately adopted the open-door policy of the Theosophical Society.» — en religión y género la orden adoptó deliberadamente la política de puertas abiertas de la Sociedad Teosófica.

«He emphasized the major role of women in occult researches, paying particular tribute to Blavatsky and Kingsford,25 and indeed the female members of the order became some of the most celebrated, including the actress Florence Farr, the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, the patroness of arts Annie Horniman, and others who were best known for their careers as ritual magicians, such as Moina Bergson who married Mathers.» — consigna el papel de las mujeres, con los nombres que lo sostienen: Florence Farr, Maud Gonne, Annie Horniman y Moina Bergson, casada con Mathers.

«The process of training represented by the five grades of the outer group was remarkably thorough and intense, furnishing a grounding in the main Hebrew, Greek, Graeco-Egyptian, medieval, and early modern esoteric traditions, and the accompanying ceremonies represented a blend of all of these.» — describe el entrenamiento de los cinco grados exteriores como notablemente exhaustivo e intenso, con base en las tradiciones esotéricas hebrea, griega, grecoegipcia, medieval y moderna temprana.

«They seem to have been almost wholly the work of Mathers, and he performed a parallel service in editing, translating, and publishing some of the main historic texts of ceremonial magic, a process which defined them for twentieth-century magicians.» — y adjudica esos rituales casi por entero a Mathers, que además editó, tradujo y publicó textos históricos de magia ceremonial, definiéndolos para los magos del siglo XX.

«The manuscripts left by the famous Elizabethan magician Dr Dee do not, in fact, contain any clear and obvious system of magic, and it was Mathers who integrated them to produce one for the Golden Dawn, which has become known as ‘Enochian’ after the apocryphal Book of Enoch which was one of Dee’s sources of inspiration.» — una adjudicación de autoría que importa: los manuscritos de Dee no contienen un sistema de magia claro, y fue Mathers quien los integró para producir el llamado enoquiano.

«Masonry also left its mark very clearly on the first-degree initiation rite, which reproduced the structure of blindfolding, binding, challenge, admission, presentation, and oathtaking, followed by the First Instruction.» — señala la huella masónica en el rito de primer grado, que reproduce la estructura de vendado, atadura, desafío, admisión, presentación y juramento.

«His most enduring contribution to this was to elaborate Levi’s concept of the invoking and banishing pentagram, associated with elemental spirits at each quarter of the circle, into a more elaborate eight-fold system with a different drawing of the figure to call or dismiss the spirits of each element.» — y la contribución más duradera de Mathers: elaborar el pentagrama de Lévi en un sistema óctuple con un trazo distinto para llamar o despedir a los espíritus de cada elemento.

«There was no fixed body of such equipment, let alone a standard set of interpretations accorded to it, and so the Golden Dawn assemblage was very much an original creation.» — una acotación sobre la originalidad del conjunto: no había cuerpo fijo de ese instrumental ni interpretaciones estándar, de modo que el ensamblaje de la Golden Dawn fue una creación original.

«The question must be answered firmly in the negative, but only in the sense that it was not a religious society at all, but a magical one;» — responde en firme a si la orden era una religión, y con el matiz que la respuesta exige: en negativo, pero solo en el sentido de que no era en absoluto una sociedad religiosa sino mágica.

«There was a great deal of Christian imagery in the rituals, and devout members of that faith, such as Woodward and the scholar Arthur Edward Waite, were prominent in the order.» — concede al mismo tiempo la abundante imaginería cristiana de los rituales y la prominencia de miembros devotos como Woodward y Arthur Edward Waite.

«It was far from obvious, in the performance of the Qabbalistic Cross, whether the kingdom, the power, and the glory belonged to God or were being promised to the human carrying out the ritual; this ambiguity no doubt made it acceptable to people with a wide range of beliefs.» — y señala la ambigüedad funcional de la Cruz Cabalística, donde no queda claro si el reino, el poder y la gloria son de Dios o se le prometen al oficiante.

«Now syncretization set in, for the initiate was informed that this divine figure should be identified not merely with Isis but with the Christian Bride of the Apocalypse, the Cabbalistic Queen of the Canticles, and the ‘Great Feminine Kerubic Angel’, the Hebrew Sandalphon.» — documenta el sincretismo en marcha: al iniciado se le decía que identificara a esa figura divina con Isis y a la vez con la Esposa del Apocalipsis y con Sandalfón.

«The Golden Dawn thus had a powerful image of female divinity built into its ideological core, even though she could be viewed as the harbinger of a greater male god, and was assimilated to various female figures already existing in Jewish, Christian and sub-Christian legend.» — Hutton adjudica a la Golden Dawn una imagen poderosa de divinidad femenina incrustada en su núcleo ideológico, con la reserva de que podía verse como heraldo de un dios masculino mayor.

«Cornelius Agrippa, in that most celebrated of sixteenth-century magical textbooks, De Occulta Philosophia (vol. III, p. 5–7), had asserted that the magician must serve the true God but also be able to work with ‘secondary divinities’, who were powerful enough to have their value.» — trae la autoridad renacentista del arreglo, Agripa, para quien el mago debe servir al Dios verdadero pero puede trabajar con divinidades secundarias.

«In 1901 Mathers declared that the order ‘teaches respect for the truths of all religions, as well as for the religious feelings and ideals of our neighbours’.» — cita la declaración de Mathers en 1901 de que la orden enseña respeto por las verdades de todas las religiones.

«The crucial point was that deities were not actually worshipped in its rituals; they were either used to represent certain desirable qualities, or invoked to assist the spiritual progress or practical wishes of a person or group, in general terms or at specific moments.» — y fija el punto crucial, que es de definición: las deidades no eran realmente adoradas en los rituales, sino usadas para representar cualidades o invocadas para asistir un progreso o un deseo.

«Mathers’s only prohibitions were that members should not use sexual arousal or intercourse as part of ritual, and should not call upon demons, signifying those spirits whom medieval and early modern Christians had identified specifically as devoted to evil.» — consigna las dos únicas prohibiciones de Mathers: nada de excitación o coito sexual en el ritual, y nada de llamar demonios.

«He himself was well acquainted with such entities, at least in theory, for among the texts which he had edited and translated was the Goetia.» — con la ironía anotada de que él conocía bien esas entidades, al menos en teoría, porque entre los textos que editó estaba la Goecia.

«In 1900 Mathers could inform the Golden Dawn that he recognized no superiors but ‘the Eternal Gods’: his language had become imbued with polytheism.» — mide el desplazamiento en el propio Mathers, que en 1900 dice no reconocer superiores salvo los Dioses Eternos, con el lenguaje ya impregnado de politeísmo.

«Crowley’s organization concentrated upon pagan imagery.» — distingue las herederas de la Golden Dawn por su imaginería, y adjudica a la organización de Crowley la concentración en lo pagano.

«Hitherto, across all the millennia of European and Near Eastern history, magical operations had been concerned with effecting specific results, or empowering the practitioner for specific ends.» — enuncia el contraste histórico que sostiene su tesis: durante milenios las operaciones mágicas buscaron resultados específicos o poder para fines específicos.

«For the most part magic was treated as a reactive process, like medicine, employed to deal with particular problems by using means which were believed to manipulate the natural world.» — y su carácter reactivo, tratado como la medicina, para atender problemas particulares manipulando el mundo natural.

«The distinctive hallmark of learned ritual magic was that it promised to give the operator control of, or partnership with, forces, which transcended the bounds of that world and placed superhuman powers at the disposal of the magician: demons, angels, or the hidden names of God.» — lo distintivo de la magia ritual erudita era prometerle al operador control o sociedad con fuerzas que trascienden ese mundo: demonios, ángeles o los nombres ocultos de Dios.

«This is true of even the most austere and sophisticated of all, the Book of Abramelin, which although alleged to be late medieval may in fact have been composed in the eighteenth century, the date of the single known manuscript.» — sobre el Libro de Abramelin consigna la duda de datación sin resolverla: se le atribuye origen medieval tardío pero pudo componerse en el XVIII, fecha del único manuscrito conocido.

«The alteration brought about by Levi, and continued by Mathers, Westcott, and their successors, was to mix this tradition integrally with a different one, of mystical union with the divine.» — el cambio que adjudica a Lévi y continúan Mathers y Westcott: mezclar integralmente esa tradición con otra distinta, la de la unión mística con lo divino.

«This mixture had occurred at times in magical texts ever since the ancient world, but had been a rarity: now it was made standard.» — y la medida exacta de la novedad: la mezcla se había dado a veces desde el mundo antiguo, pero era rara, y ahora se volvió norma.

«It was to this blend that Levi, with his genius for devising handy labels, gave the term haute magie, ‘high magic’.» — el nombre que Lévi le dio a esa mezcla con su talento para las etiquetas, haute magie.

«The two most important sources of the mysticism with which this magic was informed were the Corpus Hermeticum and the cabbala, which approached the same end from entirely different directions and cultural traditions.» — y las dos fuentes principales de esa mística, el Corpus Hermeticum y la cábala, que llegan al mismo fin desde direcciones y tradiciones culturales enteramente distintas.

«Witches were often referred to in the abstract, a group of beings who existed in the same theoretical sphere as fairies, pixies, and gnomes, even though (as in the case of these other entities) belief in their existence could be firm and demonstrably ‘real’ occurrences were attributed to them.» — Hutton distingue el uso abstracto del término bruja, aplicado a un grupo de seres que existían en la misma esfera teórica que las hadas y los gnomos, aunque se les atribuyeran sucesos reales.

«Actual individuals, however, were put into this category. Some were suspected by one other person or a few other people of having ‘illwished’ or ‘overlooked’ them and so caused misfortune; a situation which almost always arose out of tensions between neighbours and disappeared if those tensions were resolved.» — y el uso concreto, que casi siempre nacía de tensiones entre vecinos y desaparecía si esas tensiones se resolvían.

«In no case were any of them proved to have engaged in magical practices, and the belief that they had done so were product of rumour.» — una búsqueda negativa central para su argumento: en ningún caso se estableció que esas personas practicaran magia, y la creencia era producto del rumor.

«One distinctive part of it was represented by people who offered no actual services but gloried in a reputation for the ability to work magic if they wished.» — describe a un tipo particular: quienes no ofrecían servicio alguno y se ufanaban de la reputación de poder hacer magia si querían.

«Some were content to enjoy the enhanced respect and the awe in which they were held as a result, while others went further, to levy a tribute of gifts and payments from neighbours whom they frightened with threats of bewitchment.» — y el escalón siguiente, cobrar tributo en regalos y pagos a vecinos asustados con amenazas de embrujo.

«Such an operator was known throughout England as a ‘wise-woman’ or ‘wise-man’, with ‘wizard’ a common alternative for the latter.» — consigna el nombre que la gente usaba en toda Inglaterra para esos operadores, wise-woman o wise-man, con wizard como alternativa común.

«Since Tudor times, educated people who did not resort to magic themselves, and who disapproved of it either as spiritually dangerous or as fraudulent, had often employed the term ‘white witch’ for people who offered benevolent magical services, but this formulation was very rare, if found at all, in the vocabulary of ordinary people, to whom (as said) the word ‘witch’ almost always signified somebody who worked magic for disreputable, and usually destructive, purposes.» — y corrige un anacronismo de vocabulario: bruja blanca era término de la gente educada que desaprobaba la magia, muy raro o inexistente entre la gente común, para quien bruja casi siempre nombraba lo destructivo.

«It needs to be emphasized that such individuals disposed of knowledge which to a degree was the general property of their society.» — subraya que el saber de esos individuos era en cierta medida propiedad general de su sociedad.

«He himself collected and analysed a sample of forty-one male practitioners for whom relatively detailed information survives, and found that they were overwhelmingly drawn from two closely related economic groups: tradesmen and artisans.» — cita el muestreo de Owen Davies sobre cuarenta y un practicantes varones documentados, extraídos de modo abrumador de dos grupos económicos vecinos, comerciantes y artesanos.

«The upper ranks (above those of small retailer and farmer) were not represented, as these by definition did not engage in trades or crafts; but agricultural labourers, and the huge mass of the poorest members of society, were likewise almost wholly missing.» — y quiénes faltan en esa muestra por los dos extremos: los rangos altos y también los jornaleros agrícolas y la enorme masa de los más pobres.

«One was that clients were overwhelmingly drawn from the middle and lower ranks of the social hierarchy and did not like to go for help to their inferiors.» — propone dos explicaciones de ese perfil, la primera social: la clientela venía de los rangos medios y bajos y no gustaba de pedir ayuda a sus inferiores.

«The other (which will be considered further below) was that literacy and learning were perceived as integral accomplishments for most types of cunning craft.» — y la segunda, que desarrollará después: la alfabetización y el estudio se percibían como destrezas integrales del oficio.

«The gentry generally disliked him but left him alone, while most ordinary people in his locality deeply admired him.» — sobre uno de esos practicantes anota la asimetría de recepción: la gentry en general lo detestaba pero lo dejaba en paz, y la gente común de su comarca lo admiraba profundamente.

«He did not offer to combat witches, and therefore could be taken for one himself.» — y la trampa de esa posición: quien no ofrecía combatir brujas podía ser tomado por bruja él mismo.

«On public occasions he appeared in the dress of a Regency swell, ‘a scarlet coat, a long white waistcoat and a full-starched shirt frill, crimson knee-breeches and white stockings’.» — Hutton reconstruye la escenografía del oficio a partir del vestuario, con un cunning man apareciendo en público con casaca escarlata, calzón carmesí y medias blancas.

«She practised astrology, sold a medicinal compound of treacle, laid curses or removed them on request, provided love-charms, and prayed for fair winds at the entreaty of sailors’ wives;» — y el repertorio de servicios de una practicante: astrología, un compuesto medicinal, echar o quitar maldiciones, amuletos de amor y plegarias por viento favorable.

«in 1816 the little port of Whitby alone had eight resident wise-women or diviners.» — aporta la medida de densidad del fenómeno: en 1816 solo el puertecito de Whitby tenía ocho adivinas o mujeres sabias residentes.

«By contrast, another Devonian, old Marianne Vooden, who lived at Bratton in the 1890s, could be called ‘indescribably dirty’, and yet was a healer of impeccable benevolence and generosity.» — señala que la apariencia no predecía la conducta, con Marianne Vooden indescriptiblemente sucia y a la vez sanadora de benevolencia impecable.

«She must have known that she was a living stereotype, and that doubtless aided her considerable reputation for efficacy.» — y su lectura del papel: aquella mujer debía saber que era un estereotipo viviente, y eso sin duda ayudaba a su considerable reputación de eficacia.

«Owen Davies has put it crisply: ‘The evidence points to the fact that an illiterate cunning person was unlikely to go very far.’» — recoge la fórmula concisa de Owen Davies de que un cunning person analfabeto difícilmente llegaba lejos.

«The outward sign of their accomplishment was that they possessed books, an immediate distinction in a society in which, even by the mid-nineteenth century, it was exceptional for an ordinary household to own any except the Bible.» — y el signo externo de esa capacidad, poseer libros, distinción inmediata en una sociedad donde a mediados del XIX era excepcional que una casa común tuviera alguno fuera de la Biblia.

«The popular mind did not merely associate cunning people with the printed or written word, but the figures regarded as their natural enemies, and targets, the witches.» — una simetría que le interesa: la mente popular asociaba con la palabra escrita no solo a los cunning folk sino también a sus enemigos naturales, las brujas.

«The neighbours insisted that her books were burned as soon as she was carried from her home, rather than taken with her or sold or given away: none dared to see what they actually contained.» — el episodio de los vecinos que insistieron en quemar los libros de una sospechosa apenas la sacaron de su casa, sin que nadie osara ver qué contenían.

«In a still semi-literate society, the written word was credited as intrinsically potent.» — en una sociedad aún semialfabetizada, dice, a la palabra escrita se le acreditaba potencia intrínseca.

«It was commonly believed that each cunning person was empowered by the possession of one particular volume, from which he or she had learned the essence of the craft and which had an arcane energy of its own; this was told even of those who owned whole libraries.» — documenta la creencia en el volumen único que daba poder a cada practicante, sostenida incluso de quienes tenían bibliotecas enteras.

«The notion was especially common in Wales, where a language barrier compounded illiteracy, but was found across Britain.» — con su distribución: especialmente común en Gales, donde la barrera de lengua agravaba el analfabetismo, pero presente en toda Gran Bretaña.

«The result is remarkably consistent; they consist of a range of works on astrology, herbalism, medicine, and charms, with a few concerning ritual magic.» — y su conclusión sobre el contenido real de esas bibliotecas, notablemente consistente: astrología, herbolaria, medicina y ensalmos, con unas pocas obras de magia ritual.

«Significantly, the finest occult library attributed to any cunning people was amassed by a family which lived in a district as remote as any that nineteenth-century England and Wales could contain.» — Hutton observa que la mejor biblioteca oculta atribuida a unos cunning folk la juntó una familia de un distrito tan remoto como cualquiera de la Inglaterra y el Gales decimonónicos.

«Had they resided in a region with easier access to libraries and bookshops, it is possible that they would not have needed to purchase and retain so many volumes.» — y arriesga la explicación con el condicional puesto: de haber vivido con acceso más fácil a librerías, quizá no habrían necesitado comprar y guardar tantos volúmenes.

«The magician then needed to conjure the spirits in the name of ‘God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and Jesus Christ the son of the Living God’ (a theological overkill) to perform the necessary work.» — describe la mezcla teológica de un conjuro de recuperación de bienes, donde los espíritus se convocan en nombre del Dios todopoderoso y de Jesucristo.

«The greatest source of supply was the capital, represented most prominently until the 1840s by John Denley (whose part in the story of ‘high magic’ has been mentioned) and thereafter by George Bumstead.» — sitúa a la capital como la mayor fuente de suministro de libros, con John Denley hasta los años cuarenta y después George Bumstead.

«London also provides the only evidence for anything like occult schools in the period, containing as it did the nation’s most famous magicians and astrologers.» — y consigna que Londres da la única evidencia de algo parecido a escuelas ocultas en el período.

«he claimed to have been trained himself by the two most famous metropolitan occultists of his time, Frances Barrett, author of The Magus, and Ebenezer Sibley.» — recoge el reclamo de un practicante de haber sido formado por los dos ocultistas metropolitanos más famosos de su tiempo, Barrett y Ebenezer Sibley.

«What turned him into a national figure was the work of a London writer, Arthur Morrison, who took a holiday at Hadleigh three decades after Murrell’s death, met his son, and was told tales of his achievements.» — explica cómo se fabricó una figura nacional: un escritor londinense, Arthur Morrison, veraneó en Hadleigh tres décadas después de la muerte de Murrell y recogió de su hijo los relatos.

«The dyn hysbys admitted frankly that he doubted the reality of spirits, and had never succeeded in making any appear, but now begged the Londoner to teach him how to do so, in exchange for payment.» — y aporta la confesión que desarma el retrato: el dyn hysbys admitía francamente que dudaba de la realidad de los espíritus y que nunca había logrado hacer aparecer ninguno.

«Whether the editor replied or not is unrecorded, but certainly Harries’s local reputation was subsequently enhanced still further by the belief that he had been trained by the great ‘Raphael’ himself.» — con el desenlace irónico, que su reputación local salió reforzada por la creencia de que lo había entrenado el gran Raphael.

«The letter was from the young Henry Harries, written in his farmhouse at Pantcoy and offering to ‘prostrate’ himself at the ‘venerable feet’ of the great man; like virtually all readers of the almanac, Harries did not realize that the original ‘Raphael’ was long dead.» — y el dato que la deshace: como casi todos los lectores del almanaque, Harries no sabía que el Raphael original llevaba mucho tiempo muerto.

«All this evidence suggests that before the arrival of the new-style ceremonial magic from Paris, leading to the formation of closed societies dedicated to the spiritual development of the practitioners and the discovery of the inner workings of the universe, any distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ magic in Britain is meaningless.» — la tesis que saca de todo ese material: antes de la llegada de la magia ceremonial nueva desde París, cualquier distinción entre alta y baja magia en Gran Bretaña carece de sentido.

«The evidence as its stands therefore tends towards the conclusion that the theoretical and ideological components of the cunning craft and of charming were not closed or self-contained traditions.» — y la formulación cauta de la misma conclusión: la evidencia tal como está tiende a que los componentes teóricos e ideológicos del oficio y del ensalmo no eran tradiciones cerradas ni autocontenidas.

«They were not concerned with bone-setting, the malfunction of internal organs, cancers, or infectious diseases.» — delimita lo que los charmers no trataban: huesos rotos, mal funcionamiento de órganos internos, cánceres ni enfermedades infecciosas.

«Overwhelmingly, they specialized in curing growths or rashes of skin, promoting the healing of wounds, and staunching bleeding, internal or external.» — y en qué se especializaban de modo abrumador: bultos o erupciones de la piel, cicatrización de heridas y contención de hemorragias.

«The essence of the treatment was thus a rapport between the afflicted person and the healer, fostered by the reputation and bedside manner of the latter.» — su lectura del mecanismo: la esencia del tratamiento era una relación entre el afligido y el sanador, alimentada por la reputación y el trato de este último.

«They tip rather more towards the latter in the case of wild animal charmers, like the relatively recent examples of the Cornish rat-catcher who called his victims from their burrows by whistling, or the Devon men who confined adders within a circle drawn on the ground or willed them to death without touching them.» — pasa a los casos que se inclinan más a lo insólito, como el cazador de ratas de Cornualles que las llamaba de sus madrigueras silbando.

«If these are not wholly fictional, then the ‘reasonable’ explanation is a form of hypnosis, comparable to that used by some modern stage performers; but to suggest this would itself be a statement of faith.» — y aquí marca el límite de su propio recurso explicativo: proponer la hipnosis sería en sí mismo una declaración de fe.

«None of these devices, however, can account for the reputations of Wrightson, the Lincolnshire cunning man ‘Fiddler’ Fynes, and a wise-women at Leicester, who were all said at times to exhibit a genuine clairvoyance, detecting thieves, missing persons, and lost or stolen goods by using an unaided visionary power.» — consigna lo que ninguno de esos recursos alcanza a cubrir, las reputaciones de clarividencia genuina de Wrightson, Fynes y una mujer sabia de Leicester.

«It was only a short step from this sort of spell to the use of straightforward image-magic; of fashioning a form (usually of wax) to represent the witch who was harming the client and burning or sticking pins in that.» — describe el paso a la magia de imagen, moldeando una figura de cera para representar a la bruja dañina y quemarla o clavarle alfileres.

«This was apparently much rarer, but it certainly happened.» — y consigna con cuánta frecuencia se pasaba de ahí a maldecir por encargo: al parecer mucho más raro, pero ciertamente ocurría.

«The essential problem with them was that they could have no effect upon an illness which sprang, in reality, from a physical cause.» — señala el problema de fondo de esos procedimientos: no podían tener efecto sobre una enfermedad que en realidad naciera de una causa física.

«Their procedures could therefore be tragically ineffective; and even a supremo like Cunning Murrell had his crashing failures, leaving clients resentful and confused.» — de ahí que pudieran ser trágicamente ineficaces, y que hasta un maestro como Cunning Murrell tuviera fracasos estrepitosos.

«It is not clear, and never will be, whether the fame of clairvoyants such as Wrightson and Fynes was based upon a particularly adroit practice of such ruses.» — y su abstención expresa sobre los clarividentes: no está claro, y nunca lo estará, si la fama de Wrightson y Fynes se basaba en una práctica diestra de esas argucias.

«The answer seems to be an almost complete negative, for all the vast body of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evidence shows them operating as solitary practitioners, apart from the very occasional husband-and-wife team (like the couple at Scarborough) or pair of brothers (like the Harries, to be considered below).» — responde en negativo a si esos practicantes formaban grupos: toda la vasta evidencia de los siglos XVIII y XIX los muestra operando en solitario, salvo alguna pareja de esposos o de hermanos.

«They had, after all, no common system of training or way of functioning, and their fame rested upon individual prowess, rather than group identity or communal solidarity.» — con la razón que da: no tenían sistema común de formación ni de funcionamiento, y su fama descansaba en la destreza individual.

«Some confusion has, however, been caused in this respect by the habit of folklore-collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of referring to all popular magical practices as ‘witchcraft’ and to cunning folk as ‘white witches’.» — atribuye buena parte de la confusión posterior al hábito de los folcloristas de llamar brujería a toda práctica mágica popular y brujas blancas a los cunning folk.

«The individuals suspected of working malicious magic, by contrast, seem to have been predominantly female, and when abstract stereotypes of such people are considered, that predominance becomes overwhelming.» — señala el sesgo de género de la sospecha: los individuos sospechosos de magia maliciosa parecen haber sido predominantemente mujeres, y en los estereotipos abstractos ese predominio se vuelve abrumador.

«In practice, individuals who claimed to be cunning folk could sometimes be suspected of being witches instead, or of slipping between the roles (as had been the case for hundreds of years); but in theory the categories were distinct.» — y la distinción que se sostenía en teoría aunque en la práctica se cruzara: quien decía ser cunning folk podía ser sospechado de bruja o deslizarse entre los papeles.

«By contrast, as scholars of the subject have always discerned, English witches were viewed most often as isolated individuals, working alone.» — el punto que lo separa del modelo del aquelarre: los estudiosos siempre han visto que a las brujas inglesas se las tenía por individuos aislados, trabajando solas.

«This fear of the physical volumes brings home a point that also affected the cunning folk: that books of magical lore were thought not merely to contain information but to possess power of their own, which could affect those who opened them.» — y lo que ese miedo dice de la creencia: los libros de saber mágico no solo contenían información, se les suponía poder propio capaz de afectar a quien los abriera.

«She concluded from this that any element of doubt, distraction, or lack of genuine need on the part of the patient was fatal to the process, which is why it could not be subjected to scientific testing.» — Hutton recoge la conclusión de Theo Brown de que cualquier duda o distracción del paciente arruinaba el proceso, razón por la que no podía someterse a examen científico.

«They were also said to gather more irregularly at rocking stones, and the parallel of this tradition to fairy stories is emphasized by the detail that they were supposed to fly there on ragwort stems.» — Hutton subraya el parentesco de la tradición córnica de aquelarres con los cuentos de hadas, con brujas que llegaban volando en tallos de hierba cana.

«The really significant thing about the apparent Cornish exception to the English rule is that only in administrative terms could Cornwall be unproblematically described as being in England at all.» — y relativiza la excepción córnica señalando que solo en términos administrativos podía describirse a Cornualles sin problema como parte de Inglaterra.

«Marie Trevelyan reported many Welsh folk beliefs about witch revels, at prehistoric and Roman monuments, on rocky islets, and (above all) on mountain peaks, and it would be tempting to link her evidence to that from Penwith and Scotland, and talk about a Celtic tradition of sociable witches.» — expone la tentación que él mismo se resiste: enlazar los datos galeses de Marie Trevelyan con los de Penwith y Escocia y hablar de una tradición celta de brujas sociables.

«none of the other rich sources for Welsh folklore contains such information, the closest being an opinion recorded in Monmouthshire that witches flew by night in sets of three, whooping, one on a ladder, one on a grindstone, and one on a hurdle.» — y por qué no lo hace: ninguna de las otras fuentes ricas del folclore galés contiene esa información.

«The suspicion must be present, though not proved, that having come late to the field she spiced up an otherwise repetitive body of data with colourful transplants from other nations; or that she was deceived by somebody else.» — formula su sospecha con el límite dentro: cabe pensar, aunque no está establecido, que Trevelyan condimentó un cuerpo repetitivo de datos con trasplantes de otras naciones, o que alguien la engañó.

«In the whole of England there is nothing to compare with the well-established and consensual tradition of witch gatherings found at the tip of Cornwall.» — y su búsqueda negativa sobre Inglaterra entera: no hay nada comparable a la tradición asentada y consensuada de reuniones de brujas de la punta de Cornualles.

«It is not recorded until the twentieth century, and reads like a piece of pure fiction based upon Continental traditions; the very word ‘Sabbath’ or ‘Sabbat’, used by French and German demonologists to denote witches’ gatherings, is not found in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English folklore.» — una negativa filológica de peso: la palabra sabbat, que usaban los demonólogos franceses y alemanes, no aparece en el folclore inglés de los siglos XVIII y XIX.

«Indeed, to be an anti-social, isolated, figure was itself one of the traits which marked a person out as a probable witch in local opinion.» — señala que ser una figura aislada y antisocial era en sí uno de los rasgos que marcaban a alguien como probable bruja en la opinión local.

«The very word ‘coven’, generally used in twentieth-century England to indicate a group of witches, is unknown in the earlier material.» — otra negativa léxica decisiva: la palabra coven, usada en la Inglaterra del siglo XX para un grupo de brujas, es desconocida en el material anterior.

«it is not English at all, but Scottish; indeed, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, it was not even in popular use in Scotland, but derives from one sensational and very atypical case of alleged witchcraft, the confession of Isobel Gowdie in 1662.» — y su procedencia según el Oxford English Dictionary: ni siquiera es inglesa sino escocesa, y deriva de un caso sensacional y muy atípico, la confesión de Isobel Gowdie en 1662.

«His answer is a firm negative: ‘few historical insights are to be gained from seeking an archaic or shamanic lineage for cunning folk’, as they always operated within the social boundaries and belief systems of their times.» — recoge la respuesta en firme de Owen Davies a la búsqueda de un linaje arcaico o chamánico para los cunning folk, que siempre operaron dentro de los límites sociales de su tiempo.

«Even Stainton, however, did not regard himself as representing a different religion.» — y su propia conclusión sobre el más díscolo de esos practicantes: ni siquiera Stainton se consideraba representante de una religión distinta.

«In most cases, to be sure, they are using the trappings and symbols of Christianity with little regard to what churchmen would have regarded as its essence; the Bible, for example, is regularly treated as a magical object in itself, with intrinsic benevolent power, rather than as a vehicle for a theological message.» — describe cómo usaban lo cristiano: con poca atención a lo que un clérigo habría tenido por su esencia, y con la Biblia tratada como objeto mágico de poder intrínseco.

«There is no known case of a cunning person or charmer calling upon a pagan deity.» — y la búsqueda negativa que cierra el punto: no se conoce caso alguno de un cunning person o un charmer invocando a una deidad pagana.

«It is possible that pre-Christian mythology lies behind the tradition, but no eighteenth- or nineteenth-century record of popular belief charges witches with worshipping pagan deities.» — Hutton deja abierta la posibilidad de un trasfondo precristiano en la tradición del familiar, pero consigna que ningún registro de creencia popular de los siglos XVIII o XIX acusa a las brujas de adorar deidades paganas.

«The clearest case of a dynasty of such people is the Harries family of Cwrt y Cadno, and here the ability or application effectively lasted for just two generations.» — sobre las dinastías del oficio, el caso más claro es la familia Harries, y aun ahí la capacidad duró apenas dos generaciones.

«Both Cunning Murrell and John Wrightson tried desperately to train a son to follow them, with no success; the latter eventually left his books to a nephew, who made a serious attempt to be worthy of them, but ended up completely discredited.» — documenta los intentos fallidos de Cunning Murrell y John Wrightson por formar a un hijo, y el sobrino que heredó los libros y terminó por completo desacreditado.

«It seems that the overwhelming majority of cunning folk were the only people in their families to practise this craft.» — de donde saca la regla: la mayoría abrumadora de los cunning folk fue la única persona de su familia en ejercer el oficio.

«a farmer’s wife who cured shingles in nineteenth-century Montgomeryshire said that her ability derived from an ancestor who had eaten eagle’s flesh, and would continue for nine generations after his time.» — recoge las genealogías de don que la gente se atribuía, como la esposa de granjero cuyo poder venía de un antepasado que comió carne de águila y duraría nueve generaciones.

«It seems that this belief is mostly recorded in the twentieth century, and it may have been strengthened by the influence of Sir John Rhys’s famous book on folklore, which recorded it as obtaining in the Isle of Man.» — y anota que esa creencia se registra sobre todo en el siglo XX, quizá reforzada por el famoso libro de folclore de Sir John Rhys.

«The power of witches was also believed at times to descend through kin, but this was largely a side-effect of the simple phenomenon that certain families who had a bad local reputation in general were rumoured to dabble in witch-craft as well as other sorts of anti-social behaviour.» — explica la herencia del poder de las brujas como efecto lateral de otra cosa: familias de mala reputación local a las que se rumoreaba también brujería entre otras conductas antisociales.

«Those in the Gwaun, by contrast, regularly attended the Baptist chapel at Caersalem with every sign of devotion; but their neighbours still insisted that they dealt in witchcraft.» — con el caso que muestra que la devoción no bastaba: los del Gwaun asistían con toda muestra de fervor a la capilla bautista y aun así los vecinos insistían en que trataban con la brujería.

«Usually this was considered to occur by a transference of spiritual force, such as by breathing into the mouth of the recipient, although it could also do so in the tangible form of custody of the animal familiars, or of a book of magic.» — describe cómo se creía que pasaba el poder: por transferencia de fuerza espiritual, respirando en la boca del receptor, o en forma tangible con los familiares o un libro de magia.

«The only account of anything resembling an initiation ritual involving English witches in the period consists of a cautionary tale from Crosby in the Humberside marshes of Lincolnshire.» — y acota lo que hay: el único relato de algo parecido a un rito de iniciación de brujas inglesas del período es un cuento aleccionador de Crosby, en Lincolnshire.

«Charmers usually regarded their healing power as a gift, to be used for the good of humanity, and therefore thought it wrong to demand payment;» — distingue la ética de los charmers, que veían su poder curativo como un don para bien de la humanidad y por eso tenían por malo exigir pago.

«The other is that patients usually gave a present to the healer by way of gratitude, and these rewards in kind (such as food and drink) could be a significant supplement to income.» — con el matiz que lo hace vivible: los pacientes solían dar un regalo en agradecimiento, y esas recompensas en especie podían ser un suplemento significativo.

«With cunning folk, exactly the opposite situation was true; in general, they charged fees for their services as any other craftspeople» — y el contraste con los cunning folk, que en general cobraban honorarios como cualquier otro artesano.

«Henry Harries usually asked £1 for a charm or spell, but moderated this for poorer people.» — aporta las tarifas concretas, con Henry Harries pidiendo una libra por un ensalmo y moderándola con los más pobres.

«It was said of a later Yorkshire wise-woman, who died in the early 1870s, that ‘Every drawer in her house was crammed with rich and costly dresses and shawls; and the cupboards contained over three dozen silver or silver-gilt tea and coffee pots, with a vast number of silver cups and silver spoons.’» — Hutton documenta la riqueza que el oficio podía dar, con la sabia de Yorkshire cuyos cajones estaban repletos de vestidos costosos y de piezas de plata.

«William Thomas was said to make an average £300 a year at Exeter at the opening of the twentieth century, but that was because he was a noted herbalist as well as a wise-man.» — y matiza el caso mejor pagado: William Thomas ganaba unas trescientas libras al año, pero porque era herbolario notable además de wise-man.

«In general, the cunning folk do not seem to have prospered more than other small traders and craftspeople who were good at their work, and those who did best were often precisely the people who combined magic with an equally successful practice of their regular occupation.» — su conclusión general, contra la imagen del enriquecimiento: los cunning folk no parecen haber prosperado más que otros pequeños comerciantes y artesanos competentes.

«It is clear that there were many better roads to riches than through cunning craft, and that the material rewards of the latter merely helped to maintain most of those who practised it in a more comfortable occupation of their existing station in life; or conversely, to prevent them from sliding into poverty in old age.» — y el papel real de esas ganancias: mantener a quienes lo ejercían con más holgura en su posición existente, o evitar que resbalaran a la pobreza en la vejez.

«Davies has shown that for most of the rest of the eighteenth century the statute remained more or less a dead letter, as educated opinion generally presumed that growing education would eventually take care of the problem in any case, without need of a legal campaign.» — sobre la ley, sigue a Davies al señalar que durante casi todo el resto del siglo XVIII el estatuto quedó poco menos que en letra muerta.

«In Owen Davies’s reconstruction of events, a change in attitudes occurred at the opening of the nineteenth century, as members of the social elite came to perceive that a faith in magic seemed to be as prevalent among the populace as it had been a hundred years before, even while a growing political turbulence among commoners gave their rulers a new interest in the idea of education and civility as stabilizing forces.» — y data el cambio de actitud a principios del XIX, cuando la élite percibió que la fe en la magia seguía tan extendida como cien años antes.

«If enforced wholesale, it would have wiped out cunning folk and charmers, and indeed it did make their existence significantly more difficult.» — mide el efecto real de la ley con la reserva puesta: aplicada al por mayor habría barrido a cunning folk y charmers, y de hecho sí les hizo la existencia bastante más difícil.

«On the other hand, those same new police forces effectively wiped out the mobbing of suspected witches.» — y el efecto contrario de la misma policía nueva, que acabó de hecho con los linchamientos de sospechosas de brujería.

«Davies has been able to find no case of a witch-mobbing after the death of poor ‘Dummy’ at Sible Hedingham in 1863,140 though individual attacks on suspects continued long into the twentieth century.» — con la búsqueda negativa de Davies: ningún caso de turba contra una bruja después de la muerte del pobre Dummy en Sible Hedingham en 1863.

«The decline persisted until both the relevant Acts were repealed in 1951.» — sitúa el final del marco legal en 1951, cuando se derogaron las dos leyes pertinentes.

«A closer examination of prosecutions strongly suggests that they represented not a constant menace to cunning people, but an accident which befell a small proportion of them who were either unusually unlucky or behaved with marked folly or mendacity.» — su lectura de las causas judiciales: no una amenaza constante sino un accidente que caía sobre una pequeña proporción de practicantes especialmente desafortunados o imprudentes.

«Most of it, however, is comprised of practitioners who were denounced to magistrates or police by dissatisfied customers.» — y quiénes componían el grueso de esa proporción: practicantes denunciados ante magistrados o policía por clientes insatisfechos.

«When this whole catalogue is put together, it still gives the impression that it included only a tiny percentage of the people involved in providing magical services, even at the apparent peak of prosecutions in the second half of the nineteenth century.» — el saldo del catálogo entero, que sigue dando la impresión de cubrir apenas un porcentaje ínfimo de quienes prestaban servicios mágicos.

«His own conclusion is that the campaign against cunning craft was ineffective, and admitted to be so even by those who encouraged it.» — recoge la conclusión de Davies de que la campaña contra el oficio fue ineficaz, y admitida como tal incluso por quienes la alentaban.

«To succeed, it needed the support of local communities, and this was never given; until the early decades of the twentieth century, ordinary people valued magic too much.» — con la razón que él suscribe: le faltó el apoyo de las comunidades locales, porque hasta las primeras décadas del XX la gente común valoraba demasiado la magia.

«It might be more objectively correct to say that it changed character, as some of its traditional functions atrophied and others developed.» — Hutton prefiere decir que la magia popular cambió de carácter, con unas funciones tradicionales atrofiadas y otras desarrolladas, antes que decir que desapareció.

«The availability of better policing and insurance services removed the need to appeal to magic to trace lost or stolen goods.» — y da la causa material: mejores servicios de policía y de seguros quitaron la necesidad de recurrir a la magia para rastrear objetos perdidos o robados.

«On the other hand, astrology has persisted with considerable vigour and has been incorporated into the very structure of mass-distribution newspapers, and lesser forms of divination, such as card-readings, are still common.» — señala lo que en cambio persistió con vigor considerable, la astrología, incorporada a la estructura misma de los diarios de circulación masiva.

«Owen Davies suggests that it can only be answered in the affirmative as far as such modern witches overlap with the old cunning folk in some techniques of magical healing and of conjuration.» — recoge la respuesta de Owen Davies sobre la continuidad con la brujería moderna, afirmativa solo en la medida en que ambas se traslapan en algunas técnicas de curación y conjuro.

«Moreover, he emphasizes that historic cunning folk were ‘essentially Christian’, and that makes another obvious contrast with pagan witches today, reflected in the spells and charms they use.» — y el contraste que Davies subraya: los cunning folk históricos eran esencialmente cristianos, lo que los separa de las brujas paganas de hoy.

«Jim Baker, likewise, finds no sign of paganism or shamanism in cunning craft and concludes, with specific reference to that craft, that ‘modern Wicca is not a survival of an ancient tradition, but rather the modern syncretization of a number of old and new elements that never co-existed, much less were united, before.’» — cita la conclusión de Jim Baker, que no halla señal de paganismo ni chamanismo en el oficio y sostiene que la wicca moderna es una sincretización de elementos viejos y nuevos que nunca coexistieron.

«It has little relevance to that witchcraft as a religion, or even as a body of shared ritual: for the latter, learned ceremonial magic is much more obviously important.» — su propio saldo sobre la magia popular: tiene poca relevancia para la brujería como religión, y para eso la magia ceremonial erudita importa mucho más.

«This does however raise the question of why it was that so many English scholars between 1870 and 1970 were disposed to view the countryside as a timeless place in which immemorial practices were continued from a blind sense of tradition, and in particular, practices that were held to be authentic traces of ancient pagan religion.» — plantea la pregunta que abre el capítulo de folclore: por qué tantos eruditos ingleses entre 1870 y 1970 estaban dispuestos a ver el campo como un lugar intemporal lleno de rastros paganos.

«She found the answer in the example set by the flagship science of mid-Victorian England, the newly emerged one of geology.» — y la respuesta que toma de Gillian Bennett, el ejemplo de la ciencia insignia de la Inglaterra victoriana media, la geología.

«Applied to the development of human culture, the geological model suggested that the minds of all humans worked in essentially the same way, but had developed at different rates, according to culture and class, along the same linear track.» — con el modelo que de ahí salía: mentes humanas funcionando todas igual pero desarrolladas a distinta velocidad según cultura y clase, sobre una misma vía lineal.

«The first is to note that the framework concerned was also an outgrowth of German Romanticism, with its quest for a unifying national identity which generated a new interest in rural culture as a promising huntingground for a ‘definitive’ Germanity.» — le añade a Bennett una primera pieza: ese marco era también brote del Romanticismo alemán y de su búsqueda de una germanidad definitiva en la cultura rural.

«As the agricultural customs which he recorded were inevitably concerned, overwhelmingly, with the produce of humans, livestock, and fields, he tended to overemphasize ancient European religions as concerned with fertility rites, and made a leap beyond the evidence to assert that they had been focused upon the concept of animating spirits of vegetation.» — y explica el sesgo de Mannhardt por su material: al recoger costumbres agrícolas sobreacentuó los ritos de fertilidad y saltó más allá de la evidencia al postular espíritus de la vegetación.

«Tylor’s evangelical roots were never displayed more clearly than in his adoption of the theory of survivals itself, for although its scholarly application may have taken shape in Germany, in its crude form it had been a tactic developed by sixteenth-century Protestant polemicists to discredit Roman Catholic modes of worship.» — adjudica a Tylor una raíz evangélica visible en la teoría de las supervivencias, que en forma cruda había sido táctica de los polemistas protestantes del XVI contra el culto católico.

«On the one hand, there is no doubt that during his undergraduate years he became a confirmed atheist or agnostic, and that one of the purposes of The Golden Bough was to discredit Christianity.» — y sobre Frazer consigna lo que no le parece dudoso: que se hizo ateo o agnóstico en sus años de estudiante y que uno de los propósitos de La rama dorada era desacreditar al cristianismo.

«when he suggested that both the Jewish Purim festival and the Christian story of the Crucifixion were derived from the sacrifice of men representing this nature-god.» — Hutton reconstruye la insinuación más audaz de Frazer, la de que tanto el Purim judío como el relato cristiano de la Crucifixión derivaban del sacrificio de hombres que representaban al dios de la naturaleza.

«Characteristically, however, he immediately covered himself by adding that a Christian would see the preceding victims, instead, as part of the preparation for the redemption of humanity by a true Son of God.» — y señala de inmediato la maniobra característica del autor: cubrirse añadiendo que un cristiano vería en esas víctimas la preparación de la redención por un verdadero Hijo de Dios.

«He went on to add that this was altered by ‘the spread of the Oriental religions’ which inculcated the ‘selfish and immoral doctrine’ that individual communion with the divine and personal salvation should be the main preoccupations of humanity.» — recoge la acusación de Frazer a las religiones orientales por inculcar la doctrina egoísta e inmoral de que la comunión individual y la salvación personal fueran la preocupación principal.

«What Sir James had done here was very audacious; he had taken the ancient charge that the original Roman culture had been polluted and enfeebled by Eastern cults and manners» — y describe lo que Frazer hacía con esa carga antigua: reutilizar el reproche de que la cultura romana había sido contaminada y debilitada por cultos y modales orientales.

«All that could rescue it, for devout British Christians reading this paragraph, was the assumption that Frazer was referring to the ‘corrupt’ Church of the Middle Ages, which had been purified by the Reformation.» — acota lo único que podía salvar el pasaje para un cristiano británico devoto, suponer que Frazer hablaba de la Iglesia corrupta de la Edad Media purificada por la Reforma.

«On the other hand, it is possible that some of them, coming across the passage in a discussion of ancient pagan cults, would not have grasped its point at all, as the author so studiously avoided mentioning Christianity by name.» — y la otra posibilidad, que muchos lectores no captaran el punto porque el autor evitaba con esmero nombrar al cristianismo.

«Throughout his long career as a Cambridge academic, he continued to attend Anglican Church services, apparently because he thought it good social form to do so.» — consigna la conducta pública de Frazer, que siguió asistiendo a los oficios anglicanos, al parecer porque lo tenía por buena forma social.

«Moreover, the 1900s saw the high point of his covert sniping at Christianity, and in the next decade he drew back from it.» — y data el repliegue: los años novecientos fueron el punto alto de sus andanadas encubiertas, y en la década siguiente se retiró de ellas.

«In the third edition of the Bough, put into sequence between 1911 and 1915, he retracted his speculation that Jesus had been killed as a divine king, and praised his ‘beautiful spirit’.» — con el gesto concreto: en la tercera edición retiró la especulación de que Jesús hubiera sido muerto como rey divino y elogió su bello espíritu.

«The effect was not so much to demolish the claims of Christianity as to dilute and weaken them by setting them in a more general context of ancient religion.» — su lectura del efecto real de esa obra: no tanto derribar los reclamos del cristianismo como diluirlos y debilitarlos poniéndolos en un contexto más general de religión antigua.

«In fairness to both men, it must be pointed out that not only were their attitudes typical of the intellectual culture of their place and time, but that they took care to emphasize that humanity represented a single family, of which barbarism and savagery were the childhood.» — y su nota de equidad hacia Tylor y Frazer: sus actitudes eran típicas de su cultura y ambos cuidaron subrayar que la humanidad es una sola familia.

«By contrast, the opposed contemporary discourse which postulated the existence of a golden age of wisdom in the remote past, represented by a single state or people (such as Atlantis), had a more dangerous potential for racism and authoritarianism.» — por contraste, marca el discurso opuesto de una edad dorada de sabiduría en un pasado remoto como de potencial más peligroso para el racismo y el autoritarismo.

«It is equally clear, however, that the emotional purpose which had driven Frazer (and Tylor) was not shared by most of this huge readership.» — y separa el propósito del autor del uso de sus lectores: el impulso emocional que movía a Frazer no lo compartía la mayoría de aquel público enorme.

«The shift of emotion involved can be attributed to a single and simple process; that in 1810 about 80 per cent of English people lived in the countryside, and by 1910 about 80 per cent lived in towns.» — atribuye el desplazamiento emocional a un proceso simple: en 1810 vivía en el campo cerca del ochenta por ciento de los ingleses, y en 1910 esa proporción vivía en ciudades.

«It was a remarkable revolution in perception, for hitherto rustics had usually been portrayed by leaders of literary taste as the principal reservoir of ignorance, blind superstition, brutal manners, and political reaction, within which towns formed islands of liberalism, education, progress, and refinement.» — y califica de revolución notable en la percepción el vuelco de valores, con los rústicos que antes eran depósito de ignorancia y las ciudades que antes eran islas de progreso.

«It was already a central aspect of the work of Washington Irving in the 1810s and 1820s.» — Hutton fecha en Washington Irving, ya en los años diez y veinte del XIX, un aspecto central del mito de la Inglaterra alegre.

«In 1858 George Eliot could refer to them perceptively as ‘a little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret’.» — cita el diagnóstico agudo de George Eliot en 1858 sobre esas evocaciones, un poco de torismo a hurtadillas que se regodea en la nostalgia.

«By the later Victorian age, however, they had been taken over wholesale by socialists, and especially those who felt that working people needed to be redeemed from the perceived squalor and vulgarity of the new urbanized and commercialized mass culture.» — y el traspaso que documenta: hacia el victorianismo tardío los socialistas habían adoptado esos temas al por mayor.

«Sir Hubert Parry, inaugurating the Folk Song Society in 1898, said that such songs embodied ‘the quiet reticence of our country folk, courageous and content’, in contrast to ‘the boundless regions of sham’ represented by the new commercialized popular music.» — con Hubert Parry inaugurando la Folk Song Society en 1898 y oponiendo la reticencia serena de la gente del campo a las regiones sin límite de la impostura comercial.

«In 1993 Gillian Bennett bemoaned the fact that until the 1960s British folklorists had been concerned with ‘a world of dreams and shadows’, ‘popularizing an image of Britain, and particularly England, as a rural haven’.» — recoge la queja de Gillian Bennett de que hasta los sesenta los folcloristas británicos se ocuparon de un mundo de sueños y sombras.

«Joseph Jacobs, who looked, aghast, at the work of his colleagues and declared that the concept of ‘the folk’ was ‘a fraud, a delusion, a myth’, merely ‘a name for our ignorance’.» — y rescata la voz disidente de Joseph Jacobs, para quien el concepto de folk era un fraude, una ilusión, un mito, mero nombre de nuestra ignorancia.

«Most of the individuals who collected folklore in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain were not starry-eyed Londoners but people rooted in the localities about which they wrote, and integrated into them.» — corrige una imagen fácil de aquellos coleccionistas: la mayoría no eran londinenses embelesados sino gente arraigada e integrada en las localidades sobre las que escribía.

«It is important not to overstate the shortcomings of the ‘rural myth’ or to underestimate the utility of the work which it helped to inspire.» — advierte contra el exceso opuesto: no hay que sobredimensionar los defectos del mito rural ni subestimar la utilidad del trabajo que inspiró.

«The problem is, rather, one of interpretation; that the meaning of what these collectors and authors recorded was determined according to a complex of emotions and preconceptions which now appear very questionable.» — y sitúa el problema donde a su juicio está: en la interpretación, determinada por un complejo de emociones y prejuicios que hoy parecen muy cuestionables.

«Sidney Hartland got the ball rolling in the first issue of the society’s periodical, in 1890, by interpreting the legend of Lady Godiva as an example of a pagan fertility rite later converted into an occasion for Christian civic pride.» — data el arranque de la serie en 1890, con Sidney Hartland leyendo la leyenda de Lady Godiva como rito pagano de fertilidad reconvertido.

«The following year Sir Lawrence Gomme endorsed this opinion, pointing out that most folk tales and fairy stories did not have an obvious religious content and arguing from that (more dubiously) that they therefore had to be pre-Christian.» — y objeta el paso siguiente de Gomme, que de la falta de contenido religioso en los cuentos populares dedujo, de modo más dudoso, que tenían que ser precristianos.

«In 1892 he repeated this theory, and made a further extrapolation from it, without actual research—that English commoners remained essentially pagan until the seventeenth century, when they were finally converted to Christianity by ‘Puritan’ evangelism.» — con la extrapolación mayor, hecha sin investigación real: que los plebeyos ingleses siguieron siendo esencialmente paganos hasta el siglo XVII.

«In 1896 his successor as president of the society, Edward Clodd, produced a complementary view of the same theme by asserting that many medieval churches had been built on or near former pagan shrines, providing ‘unbroken evidence of the pagan foundation which, itself resting upon barbaric bedrock, upholds the structures of classical and Christian faiths’.» — y la aportación complementaria de Edward Clodd en 1896, con iglesias medievales levantadas sobre santuarios paganos como evidencia ininterrumpida.

«He extended the message of continuity from the physical buildings to the activities within them, by claiming that many Catholic rituals had been developed from those of the older religions: as evidence for this he drew directly upon the invectives of early modern Protestants, cited above, and in particular upon those of Thomas Hobbes.» — señalando de dónde sacaba Clodd la evidencia de que los ritos católicos venían de religiones más viejas: directamente de las invectivas de los protestantes modernos tempranos, y de Hobbes.

«There were certainly gods venerated in the ancient world who were believed to die and return, but they were few and localized.» — Hutton contrasta el esquema con el dato: sí hubo dioses antiguos que morían y volvían, pero eran pocos y localizados.

«Only under the Roman Empire did one of these (that of Attys) develop into a widespread mystery religion, and this attracted a relatively tiny number of adherents; it may, indeed, have been influenced, or even inspired, by Christianity.» — y solo uno, el de Atis, creció bajo el Imperio en religión de misterio extendida, con un número relativamente ínfimo de adherentes y quizá influida por el cristianismo.

«It is likewise a fact that some English parish churches are associated with pre-Christian ritual monuments, Knowlton, Rudston, and Taplow being the outstanding examples.» — concede lo que sí es un hecho: que algunas iglesias parroquiales inglesas están asociadas a monumentos rituales precristianos, con Knowlton, Rudston y Taplow como ejemplos destacados.

«At the present day, however, the question of whether most stood upon ancient holy places is still open and likely to remain so: specifically, only a very small minority of churches examined by archaeologists have proved to reveal any sign of pre-Christian activity on the site, but it is not demonstrable that pagan worship would necessarily have left the sort of traces which archaeology can detect.» — y deja el resto abierto con las dos mitades del argumento: solo una minoría muy pequeña de las iglesias examinadas dio señal de actividad precristiana, aunque tampoco puede establecerse que el culto pagano dejara huellas detectables.

«What must be said is that the confident statements of writers such as Clodd and Johnson have not been borne out by investigation.» — su formulación exacta de lo que sí puede decirse: las afirmaciones confiadas de autores como Clodd y Johnson no han quedado respaldadas por la investigación.

«It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such as the fires of Beltane and Midsummer Eve, and the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter.» — concede también, y lo llama absolutamente correcto, que algunas costumbres populares británicas descienden directamente de rituales paganos, como los fuegos de Beltane.

«The majority, however, are either of doubtful ancient provenance or (more often) developed in the Middle Ages or later.» — con la proporción puesta: la mayoría, en cambio, es de procedencia antigua dudosa o, más a menudo, se desarrolló en la Edad Media o después.

«Moreover, the kind of paganism which the folklorists were seeking was not the familiar kind, of the Greek and Roman classics, of Olympian deities, pillared temples, and Homeric hymns.» — y precisa qué paganismo buscaban los folcloristas, que no era el familiar de los clásicos grecolatinos ni el de los templos con columnas.

«It was, rather, a world of throbbing drums, fertility rites, ritual dances, painted bodies, and deities who represented primary cosmological forces.» — sino un mundo de tambores palpitantes, ritos de fertilidad, danzas rituales, cuerpos pintados y deidades que representaban fuerzas cosmológicas primarias.

«This was Edmund Leach, back in 1961, who suggested that the popularity of the Bough derived from the fact that, before Freud, Frazer ‘was already suggesting the existence of a Dionysian, sex-inspired, primitive undercurrent sapping at the roots of conventional Victorian society’.» — recoge la explicación de Edmund Leach de 1961: que Frazer ya sugería antes de Freud una corriente primitiva de inspiración sexual socavando las raíces de la sociedad victoriana.

«This does, I believe, get to the heart of the matter, but to concentrate upon The Golden Bough while making such a point is at once to flatter and to blame Frazer unduly.» — y la matiza en las dos direcciones: la tesis va al fondo del asunto, pero concentrarse en La rama dorada es a la vez halagar y culpar indebidamente a Frazer.

«The empirical evidence, therefore, is not sufficient explanation for the excitement and dogmatic certainty with which the concepts of pagan origins and of essential continuity were argued.» — su conclusión sobre la evidencia empírica, que no basta para explicar la excitación y la certeza dogmática con que se argumentaron los orígenes paganos y la continuidad.

«She was careful to declare her disapproval of paganism: ‘the “beastly devices of the heathen” weary and disgust me.’» — sobre Jane Harrison consigna su declarada desaprobación del paganismo, que decía que los procedimientos bestiales de los gentiles la cansaban y la disgustaban.

«She admitted that ‘ritual seizes me: a ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me’.» — junto a la admisión que la contradice en la práctica, la de que el ritual la atrapaba como ningún sermón, himno, cuadro ni poema.

«somebody who knew the world of British occultism well, A. E. Waite, accused her of making use of ‘cultist fictions’.» — y recoge la objeción que le hizo A. E. Waite, buen conocedor del ocultismo británico, de que ella usaba ficciones de secta.

«The guilt and self-hatred which were often also experienced by the more sensitive of them could, however, make those forces seem potentially redemptive, a means of restoring humanity and truth to a civilization cankered by hypocrisy and injustice.» — Hutton propone el mecanismo emocional del período: la culpa y el autodesprecio hacían que esas fuerzas oscuras parecieran potencialmente redentoras frente a una civilización carcomida por la hipocresía.

«Tylor, who was of all of them the most confident and optimistic exponent of the notion of human progress, could still write that ‘It is our happiness to live in one of those eventful periods of intellectual and moral history, when the oft-closed gates of discovery and reform stand open at their widest.» — cita a Tylor en su momento más optimista, con las puertas del descubrimiento y la reforma abiertas de par en par.

«Frazer felt that their end could be imminent: ‘We appear to be standing on a volcano which may at any moment break out in smoke and fire to spread ruin» — y a Frazer temiendo el final inminente, de pie sobre un volcán que en cualquier momento podía romper en humo y fuego.

«Harrison, as said, was far more inclined to recognize defects in modernity and to yearn for aspects of the savage antique world of which she and her colleagues were dreaming.» — distingue a Harrison del grupo por su inclinación mucho mayor a reconocer defectos en la modernidad y a añorar el mundo antiguo y salvaje que soñaban.

«All of them were discovering, imagining, and constructing images of a culture which was the antithesis of the civilization to which they belonged, which had preceded it, and upon which it rested; and which, like the bestial nature of humanity, could also be said to be built into it, with a potential to break forth again.» — y enuncia lo que a su juicio hacían todos ellos: descubrir, imaginar y construir imágenes de una cultura que era la antítesis de la suya y que sin embargo la sostenía.

«When collecting data upon popular beliefs and customs, none of them attempted more than the most rudimentary investigation of their earlier history, and none made any study of how they might have developed over a span of time; the presumption that rural life was essentially unchanging rendered such an exercise apparently superfluous.» — señala el defecto de método común: al recoger creencias y costumbres nadie intentó más que una investigación rudimentaria de su historia previa ni estudió cómo pudieron cambiar.

«Frazer turned this attitude into a general social principle: in his inaugural lecture as professor at Liverpool he informed his audience that most of humanity was ‘dull-witted’, so that ‘disguise it as we may, the government of mankind is always and everywhere aristocratic.» — recoge el principio social que Frazer derivó de esa actitud, con un gobierno de la humanidad siempre y en todas partes aristocrático.

«In 1933 R. R. Marett, himself an academic anthropologist of considerable reputation, informed the English Folk Dance and Song Society that it was a shame that the ‘serious purpose’ of most folk ritual had been reduced to mere frivolity by its modern practitioners.» — y la reprimenda de R. R. Marett en 1933 a la sociedad de danza, por haber reducido a mera frivolidad el propósito serio del ritual popular.

«Once the corpus was put together and standardized, it could be declared inviolable: as late as 1961, another leading figure of the Folk-Lore Society, Violet Alford, could deplore the continuing development and commercialization of seasonal rituals, and call for them to be frozen in their ‘traditional’ form.» — documenta hasta dónde llegaba esa custodia: en 1961 Violet Alford pedía congelar los rituales estacionales en su forma tradicional.

«If the actual performers of customs were not acting sufficiently according to the models of the folklorists, then they could at times be reproved.» — y el reproche a los propios ejecutantes cuando no actuaban según el modelo de los folcloristas.

«It is not surprising that by the mid-twentieth century the bossy lady scholar, obsessed with pagan survivals, had become a minor stock character in English fiction, notable incarnations being the comic Anna Bünz in Ngaio Marsh’s Off With His Head (1935) and the tragic Rose Lorimer in Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1967).» — anota el saldo cultural, con la erudita mandona obsesionada con las supervivencias paganas convertida en personaje tipo de la ficción inglesa.

«It is known now that the character of Father Christmas was a literary figure who appeared in the 1610s,64 but to Alice, Lady Gomme, writing in 1929, he was obviously a former pagan god.» — opone a esas lecturas los resultados de la investigación: el Padre Navidad es una figura literaria aparecida en los años diez del XVII, y para Alice Gomme en 1929 era obviamente un antiguo dios pagano.

«Research has revealed that the Padstow Hobby Horse Dance represents an amalgam of different traditions put together since the late eighteenth century,66 but to Mary Macleod Banks in 1938 it was obviously descended from a ritual of sacred marriage between earth and sky.» — y el caso del caballito de Padstow, amalgama de tradiciones reunidas desde fines del XVIII, que para Mary Macleod Banks en 1938 descendía obviamente de un rito de matrimonio sagrado.

«The medieval foliate heads carved in churches and cathedrals are now known to have had nothing to do with the foliage-covered figure which danced in nineteenth-century May Day processions,68 but to Lady Raglan, in 1939, they were clearly representations of Frazer’s ancient spirit of vegetation, which she named ‘The Green Man’.» — con el más consecuente de todos: las cabezas foliadas medievales, hoy sin relación con la figura cubierta de follaje de las procesiones del XIX, que Lady Raglan bautizó en 1939 como el Hombre Verde.

«The greatest success of the early folklorists, however, was with the general public, whether defined as the masses, or as writers of the popular novels, screenplays, and radio dramas from which so many people gain, or reinforce, their notions of history.» — y señala dónde tuvieron los primeros folcloristas su mayor éxito, con el público general y con quienes escriben las novelas, guiones y radioteatros de los que mucha gente toma sus nociones de historia.

«He was both rural in origin and working class, being brought up in a village and later making his living in a factory; yet when he published his collections, he romanticized country life as much as any other writer of the time.» — con el caso que corre en sentido contrario, un coleccionista de origen rural y clase obrera que romantizó la vida del campo tanto como cualquiera.

«It is possible that Sharp’s own political ideals, which tended strongly towards a mystical socialism based upon collectivism,79 influenced this process.» — Hutton apunta con cautela que los ideales políticos de Cecil Sharp, cercanos a un socialismo místico y colectivista, pudieron influir en el proceso.

«It has equally little resemblance to the functional pantheons of deities and religious hierarchies revealed by research into the religions of ancient kingdoms and city states.» — y contrasta esa imagen del paganismo con lo que la investigación sí encontró: panteones funcionales y jerarquías religiosas de reinos y ciudades estado antiguos.

«The second is that this was no simple matter of an intellectual elite imposing its ideas upon the rest of society.» — acota que no fue el caso simple de una élite intelectual imponiendo sus ideas al resto de la sociedad.

«Once installed, that framework became a free-standing entity, to which successive researchers merely added elaborations; a classic intellectual paradigm.» — describe cómo se comporta ese marco una vez instalado: entidad independiente a la que los investigadores sucesivos solo añadían elaboraciones, un paradigma intelectual clásico.

«It may be suggested here that Sharp augmented it with the specific notion of the closed village community, within which distinctive customs were passed down unchanging from the remote past, invisible to the outside» — y atribuye a Sharp la aportación de la comunidad aldeana cerrada, con costumbres transmitidas sin cambio desde el pasado remoto.

«Since Anglo-Saxon times, however, a different employment of the terms was made, to indicate any practice of magic and any practitioner of it.» — sobre el vocabulario de brujería consigna el desplazamiento anglosajón: los términos pasaron a indicar cualquier práctica de magia y a cualquier practicante.

«Nobody should be in a position, therefore, to condemn anybody else for using any one of them now, and the present book does not adopt any one of them for its own, noting instead the use made by the people whom it is considering in any particular context.» — y declara la posición de su propio libro: no adopta ninguno de esos cuatro sentidos como propio, y anota en cambio el uso que hace la gente que estudia en cada contexto.

«One of the most remarkable shifts of opinion in world history was that which occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the majority of Europe’s social, political, and intellectual elites moved from believing that humans could do damage by uncanny, non-physical means to believing that they could not.» — señala como uno de los desplazamientos de opinión más notables de la historia el paso, en los siglos XVII y XVIII, de creer que se podía dañar por medios no físicos a creer que no.

«The practical result was the repeal, in state after state, of the laws against witchcraft which between 1428 and 1782 resulted in 40–60,000 executions (the true figure probably lying more in the lower half of that range).» — con la cifra que da para los procesos, y con su propia reserva dentro: entre cuarenta y sesenta mil ejecuciones, y probablemente la cifra verdadera en la mitad baja de ese rango.

«Statutes against the practice of magic were still enacted, such as those considered in the last chapter; but these were of a radically different nature, treating that practice as fraud or superstition rather than as effective action.» — y la naturaleza distinta de los estatutos posteriores, que trataban la práctica de la magia como fraude o superstición y no como acción eficaz.

«For the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the first to address the matter, there was no difficulty at all; led most obviously by Voltaire, they were only too happy to use the tragedy to condemn those aspects of former European society which they were most anxious to eradicate: obscurantist Churches supported by credulous statesmen and a superstitious and ignorant populace.» — describe el uso que los philosophes dieron a la tragedia, con Voltaire al frente, para condenar iglesias oscurantistas y estadistas crédulos.

«This asserted that the early modern persecution of presumed witches had been consciously fomented by late medieval theologians.» — y la tesis de Soldan, que sostenía que la persecución moderna temprana la fomentaron conscientemente los teólogos del final de la Edad Media.

«Before Soldan wrote, George Bancroft’s History of the United States had already used the witch trials to condemn New England Puritanism.» — anota que antes de Soldan la historia de Bancroft ya había usado los procesos para condenar al puritanismo de Nueva Inglaterra.

«As part of his polemic against religious bigotry as the European world’s worst force for backwardness, delusion, and oppression, he proclaimed that the witch trials had been the natural result of dogmatic theology and their decline the equally direct consequence of the development of modern science.» — y la fórmula polémica que de ahí salía: procesos como resultado natural de la teología dogmática y decadencia como consecuencia igual de directa de la ciencia moderna.

«The situation was different in England, where society was so much more secular in tone than those of either most Continental countries or of the United States, that its writers lacked the sectarian or anti-clerical passions which propelled those abroad. As a result, research into English witch trials began much later; indeed, it was commenced by the American scholars cited above.» — Hutton explica por qué la investigación sobre los procesos ingleses empezó mucho más tarde: una sociedad de tono mucho más secular donde faltaban las pasiones sectarias o anticlericales que movían a los de fuera.

«Not all the scholars named above supported it with the same fervour and set of emphases, for it represented a spectrum of attitudes ranging from White at one extreme to Kittredge at the other.» — y matiza que aquellos estudiosos no sostenían el esquema con el mismo fervor, sino que formaban un espectro de actitudes de White a Kittredge.

«To Charles Mackay, in 1841, the early modern ‘Witch Mania was the result of ‘a cruel and absurd delusion’.» — cita a Charles Mackay llamando a la manía moderna temprana un delirio cruel y absurdo.

«Another four years saw the appearance of W. E. H. Lecky’s celebrated eulogy to the triumph of reason and science, in which the execution of presumed witches was declared to have been ‘the result of a single superstition, which the spirit of Rationalism had destroyed’.» — y el elogio célebre de Lecky al triunfo de la razón, con las ejecuciones declaradas resultado de una sola superstición.

«It would be wrong to conclude that writers like these were engaging in a crude celebration of victory over a dead and defeated foe; rather,» — advierte contra leer a esos autores como quien celebra burdamente una victoria sobre un enemigo muerto.

«the fervour with which they expressed their views derived partly from a real fear that the grip of science and reason might still be a fragile one.» — porque su fervor venía en parte de un temor real a que el dominio de la ciencia y la razón siguiera siendo frágil.

«To Edward Tylor, the father of anthropology, a faith in magic was ‘one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind’, and he saw in the contemporary popularity of spiritualism a guise in which it was once again winning a mass following.» — recoge a Tylor llamando a la fe en la magia uno de los delirios más perniciosos que hayan afligido a la humanidad, y viendo en el espiritismo su regreso.

«What marked off this English rationalism from its German, and even more from its American, equivalent, was that it did not lay the blame for the delusion upon the elite, and in particular upon churchmen, but upon the whole of a past society.» — y aísla lo que distinguía al racionalismo inglés del alemán y el estadounidense: no culpaba del delirio a la élite ni a los clérigos, sino a toda una sociedad pasada.

«When The Times produced a leading article commenting upon the mobbing of ‘Dummy’ in 1863, it came close to concluding that the poor old fortune-teller had deserved his terrible end because of the craft in which he had engaged.» — documenta hasta dónde llegaba eso, con The Times casi concluyendo en 1863 que el pobre adivino linchado había merecido su final por el oficio que ejercía.

«The argument here was still a rationalist one, but of opposite import; that in a society which believed in magic, presumed witches could blackmail victims with the threat of using their powers, or even drive them into illness or mental collapse by making them suppose that they» — y describe el argumento, todavía racionalista pero de sentido opuesto, de que en una sociedad crédula las presuntas brujas podían chantajear o enfermar a sus víctimas.

«Sir Walter Scott always spread his colours as a true apostle of the Age of Reason, even though one attracted to romantic subjects.» — sobre Walter Scott anota que siempre desplegó sus colores como apóstol de la Edad de la Razón, aun atraído por temas románticos.

«In his (short) commentary, he suggested that early modern witchcraft had been the degenerate remnant of the former native pagan religion.» — presenta la tesis de Jarcke, para quien la brujería moderna temprana había sido el resto degenerado de la antigua religión pagana nativa.

«Mone countered this by suggesting that the pernicious secret religion concerned was actually a foreign importation, a degenerate version of the classical mystery cults of Hecate and Dionysos introduced by Greek slaves and kept up by the most debauched members of society.» — y la réplica de Mone, que la hacía importación extranjera, versión degenerada de los cultos de Hécate y Dioniso traída por esclavos griegos.

«Neither, however, supported the notion that those prosecuted as witches were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion,» — una precisión que le importa mucho: ni Tartarotti-Serbati ni Grimm apoyaron la idea de que los procesados fueran practicantes de una religión pagana superviviente.

«although both were later misquoted as doing so.» — aunque a los dos se les citó después mal, como si lo hubieran hecho.

«It was not supported by any actual evidence, Jarcke and Mone having projected their theories without seeking to substantiate them,» — y el vacío probatorio de la tesis contraria: Jarcke y Mone proyectaron sus teorías sin buscar sustentarlas.

«He was a zealot and evangelist; in the words of one observer of his college lectures, ‘like a priest in his pulpit, Michelet preaches from his chair’.» — Hutton retrata a Michelet por el testimonio de quien lo oyó, predicando desde su cátedra como un sacerdote desde el púlpito.

«Not for nothing did he describe the writing of history as ‘a violent moral chemistry, in which my individual passions turn into generalities’.» — y por su propia definición del oficio, una química moral violenta en la que sus pasiones individuales se vuelven generalidades.

«As the book went on sale, he noted in his journal: ‘I have assumed a new position which my best friends have not as yet clearly adopted, that of proclaiming the provisional death of Christianity.’» — cita la anotación de Michelet en su diario al salir el libro, proclamando la muerte provisional del cristianismo.

«To Michelet, the witch was an archetypal figure, representing spiritual freedom, and the rights of women and the working classes.» — y lo que la bruja significaba para él: figura arquetípica de la libertad espiritual y de los derechos de las mujeres y las clases trabajadoras.

«He reversed the picture drawn by Jarcke and Mone, and portrayed witchcraft as a surviving pagan religion which had kept the spirit of liberty alive all through the ‘thousand long, dreary, terrible years’ of the Middle Ages, and went further than any writer before or since, to proclaim that the Renaissance had been produced when the wisdom preserved by the witches broke surface again to infuse members of the cultural elite.» — describe la inversión que operó sobre Jarcke y Mone, y hasta dónde la llevó: el Renacimiento producido cuando la sabiduría guardada por las brujas afloró de nuevo.

«Michelet believed that women were especially suited to such knowledge and therefore had provided the priestesses of the witch religion.» — consigna su tesis sobre las sacerdotisas, con las mujeres especialmente aptas para ese saber.

«It was an egalitarian peasant assembly, the peasant being ‘invariably a leveller at heart’, and the witch was a natural rebel, her ceremonies being gatherings at which all prayed for the freedom of the serfs.» — y el aquelarre como asamblea campesina igualitaria donde todos rezaban por la libertad de los siervos.

«Michelet cheerfully accepted the suggestion of the two Catholic polemicists, that the deity worshipped by the witches had been a pagan god of fertility, ‘Pan or Priapus’.» — anota con qué alegría Michelet aceptó de los dos polemistas católicos que la deidad de las brujas hubiera sido un dios pagano de la fertilidad.

«With equal lack of concern he also accepted the notion that this image had been conflated with that of the Christian Devil, which made a positive appeal to Michelet as that of a fellow rebel: ‘Is not Satan the outlaw of outlaws? and he gives his followers the joy and wild liberty of all free things of Nature, the rude» — y también, sin más reparo, la fusión de esa imagen con la del Diablo cristiano, que a él le atraía como compañero de rebeldía.

«He endorsed also the assertion of Jarcke and Mone that the religion had become increasingly debauched and degenerate with time; the difference being that in his own inimitable fashion, he blamed this upon the infiltration of it by the nobility, whom he regarded as the source of all social evil and vice.» — señala que Michelet suscribió incluso la degeneración progresiva del culto, con la diferencia de culpar de ella a la infiltración de la nobleza.

«La Sorcière was greeted with silence from French literary critics, apparently because they recognized that it was not really history.» — y la recepción que tuvo el libro, con silencio de la crítica literaria francesa, al parecer porque reconocía que aquello no era realmente historia.

«Nor did it have an impact upon the radical political culture of the nation, probably because French liberals of the time knew all too well that the peasantry, far from being natural revolutionaries, were the greatest reservoir of conservatism and Catholicism.» — más el motivo político de su falta de impacto: los liberales franceses sabían muy bien que el campesinado era el mayor depósito de conservadurismo y catolicismo.

«On the whole, the theory that the people persecuted as witches had been pagans made little impression upon late nineteenth-century Continental Europeans.» — su balance del alcance continental: en conjunto, la teoría de que los perseguidos por brujería habían sido paganos hizo poca mella en la Europa de fines del XIX.

«Later, however, Freud changed his mind and subscribed to the theory of delusion; by 1923 he had decided that the confessions of alleged witches were the result of neuroses.» — con el caso de Freud, que cambió de opinión y hacia 1923 tenía las confesiones de las presuntas brujas por resultado de neurosis.

«He admitted that he had been impressed by fortune-tellers who had seemed to know things about his own past which could apparently be gained only by uncanny powers, but added that further investigation would certainly reveal a ‘rational and natural’ explanation.» — Hutton recoge la admisión de Leland de haber quedado impresionado por adivinos que parecían saber cosas de su pasado, y su reserva de que una investigación revelaría explicación racional y natural.

«He shared the Frenchman’s scientific rationalism, declaring that ‘We know that there is no truth in anything supernatural’,46 and that ‘superstition’ arose from primitive fear and illusion, which science would ‘put all to shame’.» — y su racionalismo declarado, con la afirmación de que no hay verdad en nada sobrenatural.

«Like Michelet as well, however, he possessed a strong sense of the beauty, mystery, and sanctity of the natural world, and he felt that folk ‘superstitions’, although erroneous in scientific terms, often recognized» — señalando a la vez el otro lado de Leland, con un fuerte sentido de la belleza y la santidad del mundo natural.

«He already attached importance to the early modern witch trials, seeing them in classic liberal-rationalist fashion as the obvious disproof of the Roman Catholic Church’s claim to infallibility, which could be used to undermine faith in all its dogmas.» — consigna el uso liberal y racionalista que ya le daba a los procesos, como refutación obvia del reclamo de infalibilidad de la Iglesia de Roma.

«He conceded that a lot of the stories and spells were soaked in Catholic piety, but dismissed this by declaring (without argument) that the Church’s rituals and saints were often themselves of pagan origin, and so could be counted as ancient survivals.» — objeta cómo despachaba la piedad católica que empapaba los conjuros: declarando sin argumento que los ritos y santos de la Iglesia eran a menudo de origen pagano.

«He also recognized that the popular attitude to the figures commonly known in English as witches was usually both hostile and defensive, much of the lore being concerned with breaking or averting the evil magic which they were supposed to work, but asserted (likewise without providing evidence) that this was a prejudice instilled by medieval churchmen.» — y cómo trataba la hostilidad popular hacia las brujas, afirmando, igualmente sin aportar evidencia, que era un prejuicio inculcado por los clérigos medievales.

«He was also careful to point out that although the whole world of popular magic was known to some of his informants as ‘the old religion’, it did not really add up to a religious system.» — le acredita en cambio una cautela: Leland cuidó de señalar que aunque sus informantes llamaran a aquello la vieja religión, no llegaba a ser un sistema religioso.

«He argued, with some plausibility, that it did embody a coherent and distinctive cosmology, of a world teeming with spirits with whom humans could work, and that this had descended from ancient times; the more contentious part» — y le concede plausibilidad a una parte de su tesis, la de una cosmología coherente de un mundo lleno de espíritus con los que los humanos podían trabajar.

«Leland glossed this trove of lore with the preoccupation of many of the leading folklorists of his time, by emphasizing at every possible point that much of it had descended directly from ancient pagan religion.» — mientras aísla la glosa que Leland le sobrepuso, la preocupación de los folcloristas de su tiempo por subrayar la descendencia directa del paganismo antiguo.

«The title, nonetheless, translated the regional name in such a way as to give an impression of enduring belief, handed down from the ancient Etruscans and Romans.» — y una trampa del título, que traducía el nombre regional de modo que diera impresión de creencia perdurable desde etruscos y romanos.

«On reading the contents it is plain that he was speaking literally; that his material came from the region called the Tuscan Romagna.» — cuando al leer el contenido queda claro que hablaba literalmente de la región llamada Romaña toscana.

«For all this, he was careful not to press too far the claim of stregeria (cunning craft) to represent a religion in itself; he described it as ‘something more than a sorcery, and something less than a faith’58 which seems to be a fair and a sensitive characterization.» — califica de justa y sensible la caracterización que el propio Leland dio del oficio, algo más que hechicería y algo menos que una fe.

«He went on to say that he repeatedly urged Maddalena to obtain a copy of it for him, and that on New Year’s Day 1897 she handed over the manuscript which he now printed for the first time.» — y narra el relato de procedencia del manuscrito: Leland urgiendo repetidamente a Maddalena a conseguirle una copia, y ella entregándoselo el día de Año Nuevo de 1897.

«He expressed the opinion that this work had come down directly from the Middle Ages, and embodied much older beliefs.» — Hutton expone la datación que Leland dio a su texto, bajado directamente de la Edad Media y con creencias mucho más antiguas dentro.

«He got rid of the fact that Aradia was apparently a figure from Christian and not pagan mythology by suggesting that she was not the New Testament queen, but an ancient Semitic goddess of the same name; no evidence was provided for this derivation, nor for how a Semitic goddess had been transplanted to Italy, nor even for the former existence of this deity.» — y objeta cómo despachó el problema de Aradia, figura de la mitología cristiana y no pagana, sin aportar evidencia de la diosa semítica que le supuso ni de su trasplante a Italia.

«Leland completely forsook any notion that there might be a distinction between stregeria and the sort of malevolent witches who were reputed in folklore to hold meetings and cast evil spells, subsuming both within the identity of an Old Religion dedicated to Diana.» — señala que Leland abandonó por completo la distinción entre la stregeria y las brujas malignas del folclore, subsumiéndolas en una Vieja Religión dedicada a Diana.

«His evidence for this was cited as a recent novel, ‘several papers published in divers magazines’ (he did not explain if these were also works of fiction), and ‘my own personal knowledge’ (upon which he did not elucidate).» — y detalla la evidencia que ofrecía de que ese culto persistía: una novela reciente, unos papeles de revistas varias y su propio conocimiento personal, sin aclarar ninguno de los tres.

«The great problem with this is that no other folklorist or historian has turned up evidence for the genuine existence of the rebel pagan witch society which the Vangel represents.» — el problema mayor, dicho como búsqueda negativa: ningún otro folclorista ni historiador ha dado con evidencia de la existencia genuina de esa sociedad rebelde de brujas paganas.

«He continued to say that he ‘was not without hope that research may yet reveal in the writings of some longforgotten heretic or mystic of the dark ages the parallel of many passages in this text, if not the whole of it’.» — recoge la esperanza que el propio Leland dejó por escrito, la de que la investigación revelara en algún hereje olvidado el paralelo de muchos pasajes del texto.

«Their origin point is in the popular traditions of night-flying retinues of spirits, led by a superhuman female, who was known by many local names, but most commonly to churchmen—and eventually in popular tradition—as Diana and Herodias.» — sitúa el punto de origen real de ese material en las tradiciones populares de séquitos nocturnos de espíritus guiados por una hembra sobrehumana llamada Diana o Herodías.

«The clerics who made the records, however, long regarded them neither as heresy nor paganism, but as silly superstition, usually to be punished with light penances.» — y consigna cómo lo trataban los clérigos que lo registraron: ni herejía ni paganismo, sino superstición tonta, castigada por lo común con penitencias leves.

«Historians have concluded that this version of the night-roaming lady and her attendants was as much a fantasy as the previous one, though it began as an elite myth and not a popular one: there is no evidence that groups of people met to adore the Devil, and plan evil, in late medieval and early modern Europe, with or without including figures like Diana and Herodias.» — con la conclusión de los historiadores, que él suscribe: no hay evidencia de que grupos de personas se reunieran a adorar al Diablo en la Europa medieval tardía y moderna temprana.

«It is certainly true that she was his main collector of material and that he trusted her absolutely, writing to his niece and later biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, that ‘Her memory seems to be inexhaustible and when anything is wanting she consults some other witch and always gets it.’» — concede lo que sí es cierto sobre Maddalena, que fue su principal recolectora de material y que Leland confiaba en ella absolutamente.

«He could and did make careful and exact notes, but when he put his results before the public he liked to give them the seal of his own personality and to allow his fancy to play about the stories and poems he was publishing.» — y cita el retrato de método que otros hicieron de Leland: tomaba notas cuidadosas y exactas, pero al publicar le gustaba sellarlas con su personalidad y dejar jugar a su fantasía.

«If Leland was indeed guilty, as charged in this respect, it would not, however, have been a unique pattern for his time.» — acota que si Leland fue culpable de eso, no habría sido un patrón único en su tiempo.

«In 1900, the year after the appearance of Aradia, Alexander Carmichael published a collection of Hebridean folklore entitled Carmina Gadelica, which probably remains the single most popular work of Scottish folklore.» — con el caso paralelo de Carmina Gadelica en 1900, y el de Macpherson componiendo Ossian cien años antes a partir de fragmentos de una épica gaélica genuina.

«He also invested his edition of the latter with a strong polemical purpose about which he was characteristically candid—to protest against what he saw as the unhealthy benevolence towards the Middle Ages expressed by ‘all historians’ at that time.» — declara el propósito polémico con que Leland cargó su edición, protestar contra la benevolencia hacia la Edad Media que veía en todos los historiadores.

«It seemed logical to him that a resistance movement such as that of Aradia’s witches should have existed, and in the Vangel he seemed to possess hard evidence that it had.» — y por qué el texto le venía bien: le parecía lógico que hubiera existido un movimiento de resistencia como el de las brujas de Aradia, y en el Vangel parecía tener evidencia dura.

«It is quite possible that the truth lies in some combination of them.» — y deja abierta la combinación: es muy posible que la verdad esté en alguna mezcla de las hipótesis.

«One was Sabina Magliocco, who did not think that an actual witch religion lay behind Aradia, but suggested that it was possible that he or Maddalena had collected a nineteenth-century version of the medieval legend of Diana and Herodias.» — recoge la de Sabina Magliocco, que no ve una religión de brujas real detrás de Aradia pero admite que pudiera ser una versión decimonónica de la leyenda medieval de Diana y Herodías.

«The second was Marion Gibson, who inspected Leland’s papers and noted that he had left among them an English equivalent to Aradia, a manuscript purporting to be the grimoire of a medieval or early modern Yorkshire cunning woman, but written by Leland himself and incorporating information on magic from sources derived from both periods.» — y el hallazgo de Marion Gibson entre los papeles de Leland: un equivalente inglés de Aradia, grimorio atribuido a una cunning woman de Yorkshire pero escrito por él mismo.

«She also noted that he wrote poems in which he strongly identified with witches, and that the manuscript of Aradia in his archive is in his handwriting: she added that the Italian in which it is written has errors that would not be made by a native speaker.» — con los indicios que ella suma: poemas donde Leland se identifica con las brujas, el manuscrito de Aradia de su puño y letra, y un italiano con errores impropios de un hablante nativo.

«All this increases suspicion of it, but Gibson ultimately left the question of authenticity open.» — y su desenlace, que Hutton respeta: todo eso aumenta la sospecha, pero Gibson dejó abierta la cuestión de la autenticidad.

«Juliette Wood, an expert in folklore, who concluded that Aradia was not copied from a stable written text, a ‘Gospel’, but from various pieces of genuine Italian folklore on which Leland or Maddalena had imposed the alien structure of a specific witch cult.» — la conclusión de la folclorista Juliette Wood, que ve piezas de folclore italiano genuino sobre las que Leland o Maddalena impusieron la estructura ajena de un culto específico.

«seems to represent, with both editions of the present book, a current scholarly consensus that Aradia does not describe a genuine Italian witch religion» — y el consenso que él dice que eso representa, incluidas las dos ediciones de su propio libro: que Aradia no describe una religión de brujas italiana genuina.

«So much space has been devoted to Aradia because it was to be one of the most important texts of modern pagan witchcraft, but it needs to be stressed again that it was published by an expatriate American, thoroughly unrepresentative of most of his nation’s writers» — explica por qué le dedica tanto espacio, por ser uno de los textos más importantes de la brujería pagana moderna, y subraya que su autor era un expatriado nada representativo de los escritores de su país.

«The timing of this piece strongly suggests the influence of La Sorcière, and its portrait of a medieval witch religion was every bit as supportive as that of Michelet; here, it was made to represent the ancient pagan veneration of the benevolent power of life and the beauties of nature, driven underground by the life-hating forces of the medieval Church.» — sobre un artículo inglés temprano señala que su cronología sugiere con fuerza la influencia de La Sorcière.

«The author actually rewrote at least one genuine medieval text, the Lanercost Chronicle, to support the case.» — y el método con que se sostenía: su autor reescribió al menos un texto medieval genuino, la Crónica de Lanercost.

«In 1892 its president, George Lawrence Gomme, informed the world that in his opinion the people persecuted as witches had represented a secret society of initiates, through whom elements of prehistoric religion were passed down to the early modern period from the ‘conquered pre-Aryan peoples of Europe’.» — consigna la tesis que Gomme lanzó en 1892, con los perseguidos como sociedad secreta de iniciados que transmitía religión prehistórica desde los pueblos prearios conquistados.

«To Pearson, likewise, the medieval witch was a young and beautiful priestess, serving the Goddess and sometimes also the latter’s consort and junior partner, the god of the natural world, in a religion which celebrated and encouraged the fertility of the land.» — y la de Karl Pearson, con la bruja medieval como sacerdotisa joven y bella al servicio de la Diosa y de su consorte menor.

«It seems to have been Pearson who came up with the idea that Joan of Arc had been one of the last of these traditional pagan holy women and leaders of the common people.» — le atribuye a Pearson la ocurrencia de que Juana de Arco fuera una de las últimas de esas santas paganas tradicionales.

«The difference between his vision and that of Michelet and Gage was that he declared that the worship of the Goddess had been primitive, cruel, and orgiastic, and that the witch religion had been a yet more degraded version of it.» — y marca en qué se apartaba de Michelet y Gage: Pearson declaraba que el culto de la Diosa había sido primitivo, cruel y orgiástico, y la religión de las brujas una versión aún más degradada.

«To support his theories, Pearson provided a mixture of modern folklore from the German-speaking lands and details culled selectively from early modern trial records.» — describe con qué sostenía sus tesis: una mezcla de folclore moderno de tierras de lengua alemana y detalles espigados selectivamente de actas de procesos.

«He attempted to instil in English youngsters an understanding of, and pride in, the land with which he was himself becoming properly acquainted, to strengthen their patriotism.» — Hutton lee los cuentos de Kipling por su propósito declarado, infundir en los jóvenes ingleses entendimiento y orgullo de la tierra para fortalecer su patriotismo.

«Their essential theme is that the land and the people are one, their association constantly renewed over thousands of years so that the very landscape is a history book.» — y aísla su tema esencial, que la tierra y la gente son una sola cosa, con el paisaje mismo vuelto libro de historia.

«It is true that the deities of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and of the Anglo-Saxons are shown as malevolent spirits empowered by the needless belief of their worshippers, who are, respectively, cruel orientals and barbarians, and that Christianity is shown as providing a merciful deliverance from them.» — concede lo que corre en sentido contrario en esos relatos: dioses del Cercano Oriente antiguo y anglosajones como espíritus malévolos, y el cristianismo como liberación misericordiosa.

«His main story from the Roman period concerns the fourth-century emperor Magnus Maximus, who was actually a Christian.» — señala la manipulación que a él le interesa: el emperador Magno Máximo, protagonista de su relato romano, era en realidad cristiano.

«Kipling, however, makes both him and his followers—who are the heroes of the tale, holding the line on a vulnerable Roman North-West Frontier— pagan.» — y Kipling lo vuelve pagano a él y a sus seguidores, que son los héroes del cuento.

«Kipling consistently conveys the notion that the land is, and should be, an enchanted place.» — su conclusión sobre el conjunto: Kipling transmite de modo consistente la noción de que la tierra es, y debe ser, un lugar encantado.

«Like many writers of his time, Kipling associated primitive matriarchs with cruelty and superstition, regarding their rule as one feature of the primitive nature of their age, but he still credited them with dignity and wrote about them with respect.» — consigna cómo trató la matriarquía prehistórica, asociándola como muchos de su tiempo a crueldad y superstición pero acreditándole dignidad y escribiendo de ella con respeto.

«Over this same span of years, however, Kipling’s own faith was growing more, rather than less, steady and orthodox.» — y el dato que corta la lectura fácil: en esos mismos años la propia fe de Kipling se volvía más firme y ortodoxa, no menos.

«One of the most poignant moments of the book comes in the chapter ‘Mr Badger’, where it is revealed that the Wild Wood has grown out of the ruins of a city, with the comment that in the end it is the natural world which must always triumph, and that of urban humanity which must pass.» — sobre Grahame señala el momento más conmovedor de su obra, con el Bosque Salvaje crecido sobre las ruinas de una ciudad y el mundo natural triunfando siempre al final.

«Nobody reading these lines would gain any inkling that the Vale, like most of the English countryside, was undergoing the fastest and most dramatic change in its history, with widespread mechanization, depopulation, and fragmentation of community; Grahame’s gaze simply screened all of this off.» — y lo que esa mirada dejaba fuera: el valle atravesaba el cambio más rápido y dramático de su historia, con mecanización, despoblación y fragmentación de la comunidad.

«Ironically, it was his wife, born Elspeth Thomas, who was initially the more actively ‘pagan’ of the two and tried to practise the nature-worship that he was preaching.» — con la ironía documentada de que fue su esposa, Elspeth Thomas, la más activamente pagana de los dos, y quien intentó practicar el culto a la naturaleza que él predicaba.

«He was certainly troubled by the more overtly pagan tendencies in the Golden Dawn, and in 1901 he wrote a paper arguing that the order was founded firmly upon Christian principles.» — sobre Yeats consigna que le inquietaban las tendencias más abiertamente paganas de la Golden Dawn, y que en 1901 escribió un ensayo argumentando que la orden se fundaba en principios cristianos.

«On examining the literary works of Yeats it is apparent that Christ is, in fact, rarely mentioned.» — y el contraste con su obra literaria, donde Cristo apenas se menciona.

«Just as in the case of Rider Haggard, Yeats’s cosmology allowed for a belief in the existence of lesser deities as well as a supreme one; and for him pagan divinities were bound up with the cause of Irish nationalism to which he devoted much energy in the 1890s.» — señala que la cosmología de Yeats, como la de Rider Haggard, admitía deidades menores junto a una suprema, y que las paganas iban ligadas al nacionalismo irlandés.

«In 1888 Yeats made a collection of Irish folklore which he introduced with the assertion that Irish peasants, because of their preservation from the Industrial Revolution, had retained a rapport with the spirit world which had elsewhere disappeared.» — con la afirmación con que presentó su colección de folclore irlandés en 1888: campesinos que por haberse librado de la Revolución Industrial conservaban un trato con el mundo de los espíritus.

«One was (of course) that folk customs represented surviving portions of ancient religion, offering an alternative system of spirituality to set beside the Christian.» — Hutton identifica los dos temas de época que Yeats hizo suyos, y el primero es que las costumbres populares son porciones supervivientes de religión antigua.

«The other familiar theme of the time which he articulated in turn was that ‘women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom’.» — y el segundo, que las mujeres llegan más fácilmente que los hombres a esa sabiduría que los pueblos antiguos tienen por la única.

«mid-1890s he planned a mystical order to be based in a castle on an island in an Irish lake, ‘where we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace’.» — documenta el proyecto de mediados de los noventa, una orden mística en un castillo de una isla de un lago irlandés con misterios como los de Eleusis y Samotracia.

«He ploughed through contemporary works of scholarship to find correspondences between Irish and Graeco-Roman deities, and in late 1897 he formed a group in London to pursue the work for the new order through guided meditations and other visionary experiences.» — y el método que Yeats empleó, buscar en la erudición contemporánea correspondencias entre deidades irlandesas y grecorromanas antes de formar un grupo de meditaciones guiadas.

«Most, if not all, were drawn from the Golden Dawn, and they included Florence Farr; in addition, he exchanged letters with Moina and Samuel Mathers, George Russell, Maud Gonne, and ‘Fiona Macleod’, to draw upon their ideas.» — con la procedencia de esos colaboradores, casi todos de la Golden Dawn, y la correspondencia con los Mathers, Russell, Maud Gonne y Fiona Macleod.

«The result was that we obtained in vision long lists of symbolic forms that correspond to the cardinal points, and the old gods and heroes took their places gradually in a symbolic fabric that had for its centre the four talismans of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Sword, the Stone, the Spear, and the Cauldron, which related themselves in my mind with the suits of the Tarot.» — cita el resultado en palabras del propio Yeats, con los cuatro talismanes de los Tuatha de Danaan puestos en relación con los palos del Tarot.

«Yeats’s own aim was to fuse Christian and pre-Christian traditions as equivalent fulfilments of the same human needs: ‘Because the Rose, the flower sacred to the Virgin Mary, and the flower that Apuleius’s adventurer ate, when he was changed out of the ass’s shape and received into the fellowship of Isis, is the western Flower of Life, I have imagined it growing upon the Tree of Life.’» — y su propósito declarado, fundir tradiciones cristianas y precristianas como cumplimientos equivalentes de las mismas necesidades humanas.

«By January 1902 Yeats had completed the initiation rituals for his order, into the grades of the cauldron, stone, sword, and spear successively.» — fecha en enero de 1902 el momento en que Yeats terminó los rituales de iniciación de su orden, en los grados del caldero, la piedra, la espada y la lanza.

«At that point, however, the whole supporting framework of his life collapsed, as he suffered disillusion with the Golden Dawn, Maud Gonne, and the Irish nationalist cause.» — y el derrumbe inmediato del andamiaje que la sostenía, con su desilusión de la Golden Dawn, de Maud Gonne y de la causa nacionalista.

«Looking back from the 1920s, he could say that ‘I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories.’» — recoge el balance que Yeats hizo desde los años veinte, el de haber hecho una religión nueva, casi una iglesia infalible de tradición poética.

«Like Yeats he both foresaw a revival of the veneration of the pagan Irish deities and credited them with genuine existence.» — sobre George Russell consigna que, como Yeats, preveía un renacer de la veneración de las deidades irlandesas y les acreditaba existencia genuina.

«The Father (also called the Lord and King) had created the natural world, and yet the earth itself was a part of the Great Mother, the ‘Mighty Mother of Us All’, and radiant with her divine power.» — describe la cosmología doble de Russell, con un Padre creador del mundo natural y una tierra que es parte de la Gran Madre y radiante de su poder divino.

«It is sprinkled with Christian references, but, through his heroine Ursula, Lawrence seems to be arriving at a religious essentialism, with a syncretism of different traditions, classic of his age: ‘The outward form was a matter of indifference to her. Yet she had some fundamental religion. It was as if she worshipped God as a mystery, never seeking to define what He was.’» — sobre Lawrence señala el esencialismo religioso al que parece llegar por su heroína, con un sincretismo de tradiciones clásico de su época.

«There is in all this no special predilection for paganism; indeed, whenever the term ‘heathen’ is used in the novel, it is dismissive, signifying an absence of religion.» — y una precisión que corta la lectura pagana de esa novela: no hay ahí predilección especial por el paganismo, y el término heathen se usa siempre de modo despectivo.

«Instead, as has been mentioned earlier, he recognized an inherent power in women, linked to the natural world, and feared it.» — lo que sí le reconoce a Lawrence: haber reconocido en las mujeres un poder inherente ligado al mundo natural, y haberle temido.

«All this, however, demonstrates that the text suited his political purpose; it does nothing to prove that he created or amended it as a polemical tool.» — Hutton fija con precisión hasta dónde llega ese argumento: el texto convenía al propósito político de Leland, y eso no basta para adjudicarle su creación ni su enmienda como herramienta polémica.

«It portrays Christ as surviving his crucifixion and recovering to turn his back upon his old life, followers, and message.» — Hutton lee el relato tardío de Lawrence donde Cristo sobrevive a su crucifixión y da la espalda a su vida antigua, a sus seguidores y a su mensaje.

«He finds sanctuary, and happiness, in a temple of the great goddess, Isis, where he personifies the resurrected Osiris and makes sacred love with the priestess; once again, The Golden Bough had proved to be a plank across the chasm separating paganism and Christianity, by implying an equation between Jesus and dying and returning gods.» — y señala el puente que lo hace posible: La rama dorada implicando una equivalencia entre Jesús y los dioses que mueren y vuelven.

«Announcing that the true text had been corrupted and disfigured by Hebrew and Christian copyists, and that his had hitherto escaped notice because of the ‘terrific prejudice’ of scholars, he proceeded to use his instincts to ‘restore’ it.» — describe el método con que Lawrence restauró el Apocalipsis, declarando corrompido el texto por copistas hebreos y cristianos y usando sus instintos para rehacerlo.

«By this, prehistoric people have ‘not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the powers of the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature’.» — recoge el esquema póstumo de Lawrence sobre la religión antigua, con gente prehistórica que aún no inventaba dioses y vivía por el misterio de las potencias del universo.

«Lawrence, however, went on to assert that this philosophy was known only to the elite of the time:» — y el vuelco elitista que le sigue: esa filosofía solo la conocía la élite de entonces.

«In this fashion he paid back the common people of Britain, for what he believed to be their consistent failure to understand him or his ideas.» — su lectura del gesto: así le devolvía Lawrence a la gente común de Gran Bretaña lo que él tenía por su constante incapacidad de entenderlo.

«To Lawrence, also, the creation of heroes automatically demanded villains, and the loving, carefree, nature-venerating Etruscans had to be pitted against an opposite.» — y la mecánica de su mitología: crear héroes le exigía villanos, y a los etruscos amorosos había que oponerles un contrario.

«In particular, he turned the Romans into a caricature of all that he hated most in modern British culture; a society of philistines devoted to conquest, repression, regimentation, and commercial success.» — con el resultado, unos romanos vueltos caricatura de todo lo que más odiaba en la cultura británica moderna.

«These six individuals were, of course, literary figures and cannot be taken as ‘representative’ of their society even if three of them wrote deliberately for a mass market; by definition, they were remarkable people.» — acota el alcance de todo el capítulo: seis figuras literarias que por definición eran gente notable y no pueden tomarse por representativas de su sociedad.

«What has been shown here is that a struggle to adapt or reject Christianity, by mixing in or substituting concepts associated with ancient paganism, was one feature of the literary culture of the time.» — y lo que sí queda mostrado: que la pugna por adaptar o rechazar el cristianismo mezclando conceptos del paganismo antiguo fue un rasgo de la cultura literaria de la época.

«It is necessary now to look at other parts of society to see whether the same forces were at work; and here we are reliant on chance survivals of evidence produced by remarkable circumstances.» — declara además de qué depende lo que sigue, de supervivencias azarosas de evidencia producida por circunstancias notables.

«He learned that until the 1830s a procession in honour of Pan had taken place at Painswick each spring, starting at the church and ending in some woods to the north.» — documenta el caso de Painswick, donde un vicario supo que hasta los años treinta del XIX había habido cada primavera una procesión en honor de Pan.

«Seddon, however, did not know this, and decided firmly that it derived from the Greek aig aitis, ‘goat-lover’, and was the call to Pan used by the original revellers in a pagan ceremony from which the custom had descended.» — y su etimología, que Hutton consigna como decisión suya y no como dato: Seddon resolvió con firmeza que el grito venía del griego y era la llamada a Pan de los celebrantes originales.

«Nobody seems to have criticized Seddon for his revival, nor was he condemned by his superiors.» — con el detalle de recepción que le interesa: nadie parece haber criticado a Seddon por su restauración, ni lo condenaron sus superiores.

«It is hard to say how eccentric a figure Seddon was.» — y su abstención sobre lo que ese caso representa: es difícil decir cuán excéntrica era esa figura.

«Hargrave set out to ‘inoculate’ boys with a sense of kinship with nature—vital in his view to redeem them from the evils of urban living—by employing a remarkable range of rites, chants, signs, and songs garnered from native American, African, Polynesian, and Inuit cultures.» — Hutton describe el programa de John Hargrave, que inoculaba a los muchachos un sentido de parentesco con la naturaleza con ritos y cantos tomados de culturas nativas americanas, africanas, polinesias e inuit.

«He himself, however, denied that this was ‘heathen’, for he insisted that tribal peoples worshipped the same deity as Christians, under many names.» — y la defensa del propio Hargrave frente a la acusación de paganismo, que los pueblos tribales adoraban a la misma deidad que los cristianos bajo muchos nombres.

«Hargrave’s formal handbook for his Kin, in 1927, denied that it attempted to define or prescribe any religion for its members; instead it included religious actions—rituals—and left it to individuals to decide what they meant.» — consigna lo que su manual de 1927 declaraba: que no intentaba definir ni prescribir religión alguna, sino incluir acciones rituales y dejar a cada quien decidir qué significaban.

«The circle never considered itself to be pagan, but Ackland herself ‘unbaptized’ her own nephew as part of the process of admitting him; she considered it necessary to relieve him of a specifically Christian identity.» — documenta el caso límite del círculo de Ackland, que nunca se tuvo por pagano y donde ella misma desbautizó a su sobrino para relevarlo de una identidad cristiana.

«He has become interested in telepathy and fulminates against both Protestants and Catholics for having executed witches, whom he regards as magically gifted people.» — sigue el desplazamiento de Ernest Westlake, que se interesa por la telepatía y fustiga a protestantes y católicos por haber ejecutado brujas, a las que tiene por gente con dones mágicos.

«For a failure to recognize this, he faulted even Quakerism and found a converse merit in paganism: ‘I trust you will not despise the old gods—all gods even of the lowest savages are true in a measure.’» — y su fórmula sobre los dioses antiguos, que ninguno debe despreciarse porque todos, aun los de los salvajes más bajos, son verdaderos en alguna medida.

«He decided that the English equivalent to Dionysos was the leaf-clad figure in May Day processions, the Jack-in-the-Green, and thought of taking this as his personal title in the order.» — recoge la equivalencia inglesa que Westlake fijó para Dioniso, la figura cubierta de hojas de las procesiones de mayo.

«In 1921 he decided that the ‘Trinity of Woodcraft’ consisted of Pan, Artemis, and Dionysos, and also suggested that Aphrodite be revered at times, with the reflection that unless alcohol and sexuality were honoured responsibility and treated as sacred, they would manifest themselves in drunkenness and prostitution.» — y su Trinidad del Woodcraft de 1921, Pan, Artemisa y Dioniso, con Afrodita venerada a ratos para que el alcohol y la sexualidad no se manifestaran en borrachera y prostitución.

«He coined the aphorism ‘one must be a good pagan before one can be a good Christian’.» — cita el aforismo que acuñó, el de que hay que ser buen pagano antes de poder ser buen cristiano.

«He added his belief that after resurrection Jesus had become dissolved into Nature, and so by recognizing inherent divinity in the latter humans were actually becoming better Christians.» — y su creencia complementaria, la de un Jesús disuelto en la Naturaleza tras la resurrección.

«Byngham had absorbed to the full Ernest Westlake’s belief that the joyous and nature-related aspects of ancient Greek religion could bring benefit to the modern world, but whereas Westlake had been inspired by them, Byngham could be described as intoxicated;» — distingue a Byngham de Westlake por el grado: donde el segundo se inspiraba en la religión griega, del primero podría decirse que estaba embriagado.

«Unlike Westlake, he saw nothing in Christianity that deserved saving.» — y por el contenido: a diferencia de Westlake, Byngham no veía en el cristianismo nada que valiera la pena salvar.

«This meant that some—perhaps a large proportion—of its members were not just Christians but personally devout Christians.» — señala la primera restricción estructural del movimiento, que buena parte de sus miembros no solo eran cristianos sino cristianos personalmente devotos.

«The second was that it was a movement primarily dedicated to the training of youth, and so anybody who attempted to introduce socially heterodox ideas into it had to reckon with anxious parents, and with co-workers who answered to the latter.» — y la segunda, que al dedicarse a la formación de la juventud tenía que contar con padres inquietos y con colegas que les respondían.

«Already, in 1919–20, Ernest Westlake’s utopian schemes had precipitated many resignations, and he had received heavy criticism from Quaker members to whom Dionysos was an aspect of the Devil.» — con el precedente que lo mide: ya en 1919 los esquemas utópicos de Westlake habían precipitado muchas renuncias y críticas de los miembros cuáqueros.

«Unabashed, at the Wayfarers’ camp in 1926 he proposed a place for nudity in religious ritual.» — Hutton documenta la escalada de Byngham, que en el campamento de 1926 propuso un lugar para el desnudo en el ritual religioso.

«Aubrey Westlake, as effective head of the Woodcraft Chivalry, intervened in the continuing controversy over religion among members, by publishing writings of his father on the need for the Dionysiac spirit and staying faithful to the family tradition by prefacing them with his own views: that true and good living was based upon a balance between the primitive vigour of Pan and Artemis and the civilized virtues of Christ and Apollo.» — y la intervención de Aubrey Westlake, que mantuvo la tradición familiar sosteniendo un equilibrio entre el vigor primitivo de Pan y Artemisa y las virtudes civilizadas de Cristo y Apolo.

«The two most potent sources were, rather, Masonic and quasi-Masonic tradition—from which came banners, ensigns, and ritual insignia—and native America, from which the adult section in particular took ceremonial names, the Sunrise Call of the Zuni as one cry for waking up, and the use of tipis.» — corrige la genealogía del ceremonial del movimiento: sus dos fuentes más potentes fueron la tradición masónica y cuasimasónica y la América nativa.

«A compromise was formally accepted, which had been drafted by a sub-committee set up for the purpose; to extol the sanctity of nature and criticize the ‘inessential’ and repressive aspects of Christianity, but still to hold up Christian ethics» — describe el compromiso que se aceptó formalmente, ensalzar la santidad de la naturaleza y criticar lo represivo del cristianismo pero sostener su ética.

«The nature of compromises, such as that over religion, is to leave extremists on both sides unhappy, and this is what occurred.» — y lo que ocurrió con él, lo propio de todo compromiso, dejar descontentos a los extremistas de ambos lados.

«One furious Christian member in 1928 dubbed the organization ‘the Order of Witchcraft Devilry’, and in the following year the Society of Friends formally withdrew its recommendation.» — con el saldo concreto de 1928 y 1929: un miembro cristiano furioso llamando a la orden la Orden de la Brujería Diabólica y la Sociedad de Amigos retirando su recomendación.

«These gestures, however, were postscripts, for the tensions of the past ten years had created an attrition of radicals as well as of conservatives from the order.» — señala que esos gestos fueron posdatas, porque diez años de tensión habían desgastado por igual a radicales y a conservadores.

«After that year, writes its historian Derek Edgell, it was a ‘pale shadow’ of what it had been in the 1920s.» — recoge el juicio de su historiador Derek Edgell de que después de aquel año el movimiento fue una pálida sombra de lo que había sido.

«Perhaps most impressive of all, it had survived, and still survives to the present, as a remarkable association of people characterized by ideals of kindness to humanity and kinship with nature; but it arguably has no further relevance for a historian» — y su propio corte, honesto sobre el límite de su interés: la asociación sobrevive hasta hoy con ideales de bondad y parentesco con la naturaleza, pero podría decirse que ya no tiene relevancia para un historiador.

«What has been shown in this chapter is that a variety of people in early twentieth-century England had come to regard a revival of paganism—in some measure—as a desirable phenomenon.» — resume lo mostrado en el capítulo: gente diversa de la Inglaterra de principios del XX había llegado a ver como deseable un renacer del paganismo en alguna medida.

«Most wanted such a revival to act as a supplement to Christianity or even to refresh the latter.» — con la proporción puesta, porque la mayoría quería ese renacer como suplemento del cristianismo o incluso para refrescarlo.

«On the other hand, there were some, like Dion Byngham, who wanted paganism to be restored in its own right.» — y la minoría que quería restaurar el paganismo por derecho propio, como Dion Byngham.

«It was out of this second impulse that modern pagan witchcraft was to arise.» — de ese segundo impulso, dice, es de donde iba a surgir la brujería pagana moderna.

«It may be suggested that the crucial relationship here for Crowley was with Mathers, who acted as his patron and protector in the order until the two men became estranged in 1903.» — sobre Crowley propone que su relación decisiva fue con Mathers, su patrón y protector en la orden hasta el distanciamiento de 1903.

«In an important sense, Crowley was the true heir of the greatest of Victorian ritual magicians.» — y lo formula como adjudicación de linaje: en un sentido importante, Crowley fue el verdadero heredero del mayor de los magos rituales victorianos.

«His only truly remarkable distinction lay in the field of magic, and that was not one which earned much interest or respect in his society.» — con la ironía que él subraya: su única distinción verdaderamente notable estaba en la magia, campo que no despertaba mucho interés ni respeto en su sociedad.

«The largest is that Crowley was not very interested in religion itself, and as shall be illustrated, his attitudes to it were complex.» — Hutton empieza por acotar lo que suele darse por sentado: Crowley no estaba muy interesado en la religión misma, y sus actitudes hacia ella eran complejas.

«By contrast, the single authority cited by him in the field of religion is Frazer, who is called ‘the only man worthy of our notice’ in it, while The Golden Bough is ‘invaluable’.» — y consigna a la única autoridad que citaba en ese terreno, Frazer, llamado el único hombre digno de atención.

«It is also true that at times a reader is left wondering whether Crowley himself was aware of some of the ironies embodied in his work: for example, his novel Moonchild (1929) makes a passionate appeal for love as the greatest force in the universe, and for the essential unity of being, while indulging in a series of vicious caricatures of former colleagues in the Golden Dawn, the most savage and unjust being reserved for his old patron Mathers.» — señala las ironías que el propio Crowley quizá no advertía, con una novela que apela apasionadamente al amor mientras caricaturiza con saña a sus antiguos colegas.

«In Crowley’s case, however, sexual symbolism was propelled by a libido of more than usual vigour.» — sobre el simbolismo sexual de su obra apunta que lo impulsaba una libido de vigor más que habitual.

«In 1911 he proclaimed that all religions were more or less bankrupt, and that it was time to start again by doubting the lot,» — cita su proclama de 1911 de que todas las religiones estaban más o menos en quiebra y era hora de empezar de nuevo dudando de todas.

«In other words, religion is a joke.’» — y la boutade de 1929 con que remata su propia definición, que la religión es una broma.

«It is immaterial whether they exist or not.’» — recoge la posición que deja fuera de juego la pregunta por los dioses, la de que es indiferente si existen o no.

«Liber Oz (1941) states the matter more crisply in its preface: ‘There is no god, but man.’» — y la formulación más seca, de 1941, de que no hay dios sino el hombre.

«The famous one, in 1929, is ‘the art or science of causing change in conformity with will’.» — consigna su definición famosa de la magia, el arte o ciencia de causar cambio en conformidad con la voluntad.

«He emphasized that magick and science progress together, and elsewhere described magick as a branch of physics.» — junto con lo que él subrayaba, que la magia y la ciencia progresan juntas y que la magia es una rama de la física.

«It is equally true, and less famous, that to the end of his life he sent ‘Antichristmas cards’ every December (the recipients listed conscientiously in his diaries), and that he wished his female partners, his Scarlet Women, to be ‘principally, an anti-Christian social force’.» — documenta lo menos famoso y no menos constante, las tarjetas de anticristmas que enviaba cada diciembre hasta el final de su vida.

«Notoriously, in his main book upon magick, in 1929, he recommended blood sacrifice as a particularly efficacious means of magical working, and especially that of a young male child; he claimed that ‘Frater Perdurabo’ (his own magical name) had performed this act an average 150 times per year between 1912 and 1928.» — y el pasaje notorio de 1929 donde recomendaba el sacrificio de sangre, con el reclamo de haberlo practicado unas ciento cincuenta veces al año entre 1912 y 1928.

«In order to be a Satanist, it is necessary to believe—literally or symbolically—in Satan, and Crowley did not.» — acota por qué eso no lo hace satanista: para serlo hace falta creer, literal o simbólicamente, en Satán, y Crowley no creía.

«He did commit blood sacrifice on occasion—the best recorded is his slitting of the throats of a pair of pigeons as part of a major ritual in Algeria in 190923—but did not make it a regular, let alone an intrinsic, part of his system.» — y separa el reclamo del hecho: sí cometió sacrificio de sangre en ocasiones, con el caso mejor documentado en Argelia en 1909, pero no lo hizo parte regular ni intrínseca de su sistema.

«He went on to say that he hated Christianity ‘as Socialists hate soap’, but he related better to Christian heroes such as Livingstone and Gordon than to the sort of mediocrities who attacked their faith in his own time.» — recoge su declaración de odio al cristianismo junto con el matiz que él mismo le ponía, que se entendía mejor con héroes cristianos como Livingstone y Gordon que con los mediocres que atacaban esa fe.

«In the same work Crowley reaffirms his specific rejection of modern Christianity as the religion of ‘the Bourgeois, whose character is based on fear and falsehood’;27 once again, one suspects that his parents are in the target.» — Hutton consigna el rechazo específico de Crowley al cristianismo moderno como religión del burgués, cuyo carácter descansa en el miedo y la falsedad.

«In these he included Buddhism and some Hinduism but asserted that Christianity introduced ‘the poison in its foulest and most virulent form’.» — y el alcance de su condena a las religiones que llama del cadáver, con el cristianismo introduciendo el veneno en su forma más virulenta.

«He addressed the Statue of Liberty in 1915 with an appeal to ‘the one true God of whom the Sun himself is but a shadow’.» — junto a los pasajes que apuntan al lado contrario, como su apelación en 1915 al único Dios verdadero del que el Sol mismo es apenas una sombra.

«And yet— in the same, very late, sequence of letters in which he declared that, he also totally rejected monism, a belief in the essential unity of the universe, saying that ‘I hate this doctrine so rabidly that I can hardly trust myself to represent it fairly!’» — y la contradicción que no armoniza: en las mismas cartas tardías rechazaba por completo el monismo, con un odio que confesaba casi incontenible.

«The Olympians were not in fact, Crowley’s favourite pagan pantheon, for he followed long-established Western tradition in regarding Egypt as the home of magic, and accorded his deities a special place of honour.» — señala cuál era su panteón pagano preferido, y que no era el olímpico: siguiendo la tradición occidental tenía a Egipto por casa de la magia.

«In 1928 he asserted that all ‘true’ deities were ‘derived’ from this Trinity; but while saying it he depersonalized them into cosmological forces, so that Nuit represented infinite space, Hadit the atom, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit the unity of all things.» — describe la operación de 1928, donde deriva de esa tríada a todas las deidades verdaderas mientras las despersonaliza en fuerzas cosmológicas.

«He never, however, defined what he meant either by paganism or by a purer form of it.» — y una abstención que le atribuye como falta: Crowley nunca definió qué entendía por paganismo ni por una forma más pura de él.

«The eclecticism of the rites may, however, be indicated by the fact that the deities chose to speak not in Greek or Latin but in Enochian, the magical language» — aporta el detalle que mide el eclecticismo de aquellos ritos, con deidades que hablaban en enoquiano y no en griego ni en latín.

«In his autohagiography, Crowley defined his task as ‘to bring oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form’.» — cita cómo Crowley definió su tarea en su autohagiografía, traer sabiduría oriental a Europa y restaurar el paganismo en forma más pura.

«The instruction on the nature of the gods given at the seventh degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis, as said, emphasized the single nature of true godhead, and it also declared local and tribal deities to be unimportant; but it did add that the universal, and more admirable, forces with which the divine had been associated were fire, Moon, Mountain, Ancestor, Yoni (female genitalia), Snake, Lion, Egg, Eagle, Tree, Stars, and (above all) Phallus.» — y el listado de fuerzas admirables de la instrucción del séptimo grado, con el falo por encima de todas.

«He also provided a vital link in the evolving modem conception of the triple goddess, between Jane Harrison and Robert Graves.» — le adjudica un eslabón decisivo en la concepción moderna de la diosa triple, entre Jane Harrison y Robert Graves.

«It came in 1929, in Moonchild where he explained that the nature of the moon was threefold:» — con la formulación de 1929 donde explica la naturaleza triple de la luna.

«He also redeemed the inverted (one point down) pentagram, which Levi had declared to be the sign of Satan and which the Golden Dawn had therefore vehemently avoided, by using it simply to signify the descent of spirit into matter.» — y su rehabilitación del pentagrama invertido, que Lévi había declarado signo de Satán, usándolo simplemente para el descenso del espíritu a la materia.

«He went on later in the same course of instruction to say that ‘My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of a human…» — Hutton cita la convicción tardía de Crowley de que existen seres de inteligencia y poder de calidad muy superior a cuanto podamos concebir de lo humano.

«He did not, however, make any more attempt now than before to declare a firm belief in what they were, from where they came, and how they functioned.» — y marca lo que no hizo entonces ni antes: intentar declarar una creencia firme sobre qué eran, de dónde venían y cómo funcionaban.

«Crowley’s greatest, and least tangible, bequest to later paganism and magic(k) was to be his reputation.» — su balance del legado: el mayor y menos tangible aporte de Crowley al paganismo y la magia posteriores iba a ser su reputación.

«One striking contast between their views—which may or may not be associated—is that he never had any time for the myth of Atlantis, while a belief in its literal truth became a central prop of her world picture.» — sobre Dion Fortune señala un contraste llamativo con Crowley, que nunca dio crédito al mito de la Atlántida mientras para ella la creencia literal fue puntal central.

«Given this background and training, it is hardly surprising that the Dion Fortune of the period 1914–30 seems a devout mystical Christian.» — y su lectura del período: dado ese trasfondo, la Dion Fortune de 1914 a 1930 parece una cristiana mística devota.

«Neither then nor later did she have a good word to say for clergymen, always portraying them as sanctimonious fools.» — con la constante que atraviesa toda su obra, que nunca tuvo una buena palabra para los clérigos, siempre retratados como necios santurrones.

«She never expressed allegiance to any formal church, and she found serious fault with modern Christianity, for its loss of mystical content, while rejecting traditional doctrines such as that of heaven and hell.» — acota las dos cosas a la vez: nunca declaró lealtad a iglesia formal alguna y hallaba falla seria en el cristianismo moderno por su pérdida de contenido místico.

«she declared that ‘the Master Jesus is the Master of Masters for the West’,» — y las declaraciones que fijan su cristocentrismo de entonces, con el Maestro Jesús como Maestro de Maestros para Occidente.

«It is true that by the late 1920s she was starting to recognize some merit in ancient Egyptian religion, but only as a preparation for the higher truth of Christianity.» — concede el desplazamiento incipiente de los años veinte tardíos, cuando empieza a reconocer mérito en la religión del Egipto antiguo, pero solo como preparación de una verdad superior.

«She added that Indian doctrines might have done Britain some good in the 1880s, but that the new hostility of Indians towards British rule invited a corresponding British repudiation of their ideas.» — y consigna el argumento político con que descartaba las doctrinas indias, ligándolo a la nueva hostilidad de los indios hacia el dominio británico.

«A third figure who may have been the most important in this context is Charles Seymour, a recruit to the Inner Light from Freemasonry who became Fortune’s main magical partner between 1934 and 1937.» — presenta a Charles Seymour, reclutado desde la masonería, como quizá la figura más importante en ese giro y su principal compañero mágico entre 1934 y 1937.

«One was D. H. Lawrence, whose book The Rainbow she admired so much that her own novels The Winged Bull and The Goat-Foot God contain clear tributes to it.» — anota además su deuda con Lawrence, cuya novela El arcoíris admiraba tanto que dos libros suyos le rinden tributo claro.

«The reference to ‘the race’ quoted above is also characteristic of her work, and one aspect of a general fear of contamination by other nations, races, or classes which runs through her books at this time and, although hardly rare in the inter-war years, is still strong enough in her to count as a personality quirk.» — y no le disimula lo incómodo: un temor general a la contaminación por otras naciones, razas o clases recorre sus libros de esos años.

«This, however, wore thinner in subsequent years, so that a theme of her writings became the assertion that traditions of wisdom are racial, and so those of the East were unsuitable for those of the West.» — con la tesis en que ese temor cuajó, la de que las tradiciones de sabiduría son raciales y las de Oriente inadecuadas para Occidente.

«In Seymour’s view, these religions were not merely a stage in the ascent towards Christianity but contained timeless truths which the latter lacked—above all an experience of the divine as manifest in nature, and through beauty and joy.» — Hutton resume la tesis de Seymour, que las religiones antiguas no eran una etapa en el ascenso al cristianismo sino que contenían verdades intemporales que a este le faltaban.

«He was using, in fact, a powerful form of what was earlier called the ‘fourth’ modern language of paganism.» — y la clasifica dentro de su propio esquema, como forma potente del cuarto lenguaje moderno del paganismo.

«In an essay in 1932 she defined magic as ‘a highly developed, highly stylized, form of mystical religion, with an elaborate philosophical basis’.» — fecha en 1932 la definición de magia de Fortune, forma altamente desarrollada y estilizada de religión mística con base filosófica elaborada.

«During 1934, in a book on Glastonbury, she had at last declared that both pagan and Christian mysteries had their place, and complemented each other, but still identified herself with the latter.» — y en 1934 el punto donde ya declara que los misterios paganos y los cristianos tienen ambos su lugar y se complementan, aunque ella siga identificándose con los segundos.

«Furthermore, she was starting to attack the faith of Christ itself, as something that had once been ‘mighty potent’ in its original, lost form, but which had been hopelessly distorted by ‘those two crusty old bachelors, Paul and Augustine’.» — documenta el paso siguiente, cuando empieza a atacar la fe de Cristo misma como algo potente en su forma original perdida y distorsionado sin remedio por Pablo y Agustín.

«The figure of the wise pagan magician in the story bears a distinct resemblance to Seymour; and Fortune used the tale to provide a second definition of magic: ‘the practical application of a knowledge of the little-understood powers of the human mind’.» — señala el parecido del mago pagano sabio de su relato con Seymour, y recoge la segunda definición de magia que ahí da.

«Christianity was still allotted its place as one of the ‘Paths to the Light’, but one which had become overemphasized, to the serious detriment of humans, so that a revived paganism was needed to restore a healthy balance; this was precisely the language of Seymour (and, before him, of» — con la fórmula del equilibrio, un cristianismo sobreacentuado y un paganismo revivido necesario para restaurar la salud, que él identifica como el lenguaje mismo de Seymour.

«One was that medieval churches overlay pagan temples and medieval saints were ‘really the Old Gods with a coat of whitewash’; so a pagan revival involved abandoning neither familiar holy places nor familiar heavenly figures.» — y las dos ideas que le permitían el tránsito sin ruptura, la primera que las iglesias medievales cubren templos paganos y los santos son los Viejos Dioses con una capa de cal.

«The other was of the essential unity of divinity; in Fortune’s formulation, ‘All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator.» — la segunda, la unidad esencial de lo divino en su formulación célebre de que todos los dioses son un dios y todas las diosas una diosa.

«In Moon Magic the balance has tilted still further; the text declares that the One God is the source of all nature, but that Isis is Nature, and then proceeds to treat her effectively as the only deity.» — mide el desplazamiento en su última novela, donde el Dios Único es fuente de toda la naturaleza pero Isis es la Naturaleza y termina tratada como única deidad.

«Once again it is stated that Christianity has left humanity out of balance, but now it is specifically the divine feminine, ‘the moon-forces’, which are required to set things right.» — y el cambio en el argumento del desequilibrio, ahora ya específicamente femenino, con las fuerzas lunares requeridas para poner las cosas en su sitio.

«The greatest of these remained for her that of female/male, and it is notable that the power of this increases in her books even while her heroines grow ever more powerful—until her last one is hardly human at all—and her heroes get steadily weaker.» — apunta una tensión creciente en su obra: el poder de la polaridad femenino y masculino aumenta mientras sus heroínas se vuelven más poderosas y sus héroes más débiles.

«The precise impact of each development will probably never be known,77 but the results are very clear.» — declara el límite de lo que puede establecerse sobre el último giro, cuyo impacto preciso probablemente nunca se sabrá aunque los resultados sean muy claros.

«Instead, she poured her creative energies into letters to members of her society, which retained a more pronounced Christian tone, and in the most elaborate visualization, which she prescribed to help the defeat of Germany, the Master Jesus was firmly back at the top, supported by Arthur, Merlin, and the Virgin Mary.» — con el resultado concreto, una visualización de guerra donde el Maestro Jesús vuelve firmemente arriba, apoyado por Arturo, Merlín y la Virgen María.

«It has been rumoured among British occultists that she visited him in the 1930s to ask how to invoke Mercury,» — y recoge, marcándolo como rumor entre ocultistas británicos, que Fortune visitó a Crowley en los años treinta para preguntarle cómo invocar a Mercurio.

«The diary does, however, record these letters, and bear out Grant’s general point of a sudden intense interest in the» — Hutton contrasta el rumor con el registro: el diario de Crowley no consigna esas visitas pero sí las cartas, y respalda el punto general de un interés súbito e intenso.

«It seems certain that had she not died so soon after the end of the war, then this material would have been developed into more books; and indeed she left a number of unpublished manuscripts containing material from the war years, upon such matters as esoteric medicine and cabbalistic symbolism, which have remained in the custody of the (now) Society of the Inner Light.» — consigna lo que quedó inédito y bajo custodia de la Sociedad de la Luz Interior, con material de los años de guerra sobre medicina esotérica y simbolismo cabalístico.

«Although the course of events which I have suggested above still seems to stand up, with a more Christian period in the 1920s, a more pagan one at the time of her greatest flowering of work in the late 1930s, and a more Christian and abstractly esoteric one after 1939, she was clearly a complex thinker, whose career defies any simple formulations.» — y cierra sobre Fortune sin cerrarla: su esquema de tres períodos sigue en pie, pero fue una pensadora compleja cuya trayectoria desafía toda formulación simple.

«His impact upon modern pagan witchcraft, however, derives mostly from a single prose work of non-fiction, The White Goddess (1948).» — sitúa el impacto de Graves sobre la brujería pagana moderna casi todo en una sola obra de no ficción, La diosa blanca de 1948.

«It truly began, however, while Graves was living in a village in South Devon during World War Two, cut off by the hostilities from his beloved expatriate home in Majorca and needing to write novels instead of poems to bring in more money.» — y las condiciones materiales en que nació: Graves aislado en un pueblo de Devon por la guerra, cortado de Mallorca y obligado a escribir novelas en vez de poemas para ganar dinero.

«In August 1943, a month after finishing The Golden Fleece, he felt himself bursting with a sense of revelation, which found expression in January 1944, when in three weeks of feverish writing he produced a survey of myth and history built around the figure of the Goddess, called The Roebuck in the Thicket.» — fecha con precisión el arrebato: en agosto de 1943 se sintió estallar de revelación y en enero de 1944 escribió en tres semanas febriles el primer borrador.

«Having completed it, he laid it aside, partly because he felt frightened of it himself, partly because he needed to write another commercially viable work to maintain a steady income, and partly because he wanted to settle accounts with Jesus Christ before proceeding further.» — con las tres razones por las que lo dejó a un lado, incluida la de que le daba miedo a él mismo y la de querer ajustar cuentas con Jesucristo antes de seguir.

«Graves allows very little credit to the human imagination; instead he is determined to interpret apparently fantastic episodes in terms of real events, and to him virtually all myth which concerns human action is distorted history.» — aísla el rasgo de método que recorre a Graves: concede muy poco crédito a la imaginación humana y trata casi todo el mito de acción humana como historia distorsionada.

«Moses is portrayed as a man equipped with a superb knowledge of the workings of nature, which he manipulates with constant fraud and trickery in order to deceive, coerce, impress, and destroy the simpler human beings around him.» — con el Moisés que de ahí sale, hombre de saber soberbio sobre la naturaleza que la manipula con fraude constante para engañar y coaccionar.

«The priestesses who dominate religion are just as adept as Moses at lying, deceiving, and engineering miracles to retain power over their followers, while oracles shape their answers in response to force, bribery, and self-interest.» — y unas sacerdotisas igual de diestras que Moisés en mentir e ingeniar milagros para retener poder sobre sus seguidores.

«Achievements such as the feeding of the five thousand and the turning of water into wine are declared to be misunderstandings caused by a literal reading of statements and actions of Jesus which were in fact allegorical.» — señala cómo despacha los milagros, declarándolos malentendidos por lectura literal de dichos y actos de Jesús que eran alegóricos.

«The picture is complicated, however, by the fact that Graves still wishes to believe in the supernatural.» — y la complicación que no deja fuera: Graves sigue queriendo creer en lo sobrenatural.

«Graves in fact, both endorses a view of Jesus as an admirable figure, of exceptional spirituality, integrity, and nobility, and leaves open the possibility that his resurrection in a heavenly form might have been a genuine event.» — de modo que a la vez avala una imagen de Jesús como figura admirable y deja abierta la posibilidad de que su resurrección en forma celeste fuera un hecho genuino.

«This is linked to the poet’s view of divinity; that deities are real beings, but they are only empowered by the faith of believers.» — enuncia la concepción de la divinidad que sostiene todo eso: deidades reales pero apoderadas solo por la fe de los creyentes.

«One of the central arguments of The White Goddess is that once people start to believe in her in large numbers again, her reign will recommence in earnest.» — y el argumento central que de ahí saca La diosa blanca, que en cuanto la gente vuelva a creer en ella en gran número su reinado recomenzará de veras.

«He never, however, cites the material taken from each source, and explains how it all fits together.» — con la objeción de método que le hace: nunca cita el material tomado de cada fuente ni explica cómo encaja todo.

«Two decades later, in King Jesus, he was more equivocal, declaring that the question whether one ‘is a better solution to the eternal problems of the relations of men and women than the other must remain open’.» — Hutton anota la ambivalencia de Graves veinte años después, con la pregunta de si un sistema es mejor solución que el otro dejada expresamente abierta.

«In the same novel he goes on to make a significant adaptation to Frazer’s image of the divine king, sacrificed as representative of the dying and returning god all over ancient Europe and the Mediterranean basin, by assuming that he must have been sacrificed to the Goddess, ‘decked with the green branches, crowned with whitethorn, flogged and ill-treated in a manner shameful to record, and finally roasted alive; while his companions dressed in bull-hides dance around the pyre.» — y la adaptación que hace de Frazer: un rey divino sacrificado ya no al dios que muere y vuelve, sino a la Diosa.

«This theme—that a man can gain immortality by being first tortured and then killed in the service of the Goddess—is a recurrent one of Graves’s work.» — señala el tema recurrente que de ahí sale, el de un hombre que gana la inmortalidad siendo primero torturado y luego muerto al servicio de la Diosa.

«The short answer is that he was an intense masochist, who depended» — y su explicación breve, biográfica y sin rodeos: Graves era un masoquista intenso.

«She was a pronounced feminist and pushed him into a decisive loss of faith in Christianity by declaring that any religion with a male deity must be ‘rot’.» — documenta el papel de Laura Riding, feminista pronunciada que lo empujó a una pérdida decisiva de fe al declarar podredumbre cualquier religión de deidad masculina.

«To somebody of Graves’s personality, what was true for him had to be true for everybody else; this absolute moral certainty was one of the enduring bequests made to him by his mother.» — aísla el rasgo de carácter que a su juicio lo gobierna todo: para Graves, lo que era verdad para él tenía que serlo para todos los demás.

«Graves, by contrast, found that third, waning-moon personification the most fascinating and alluring of all, as it represented the divine feminine who gives pain and death in order to give reward and new life.» — explica qué hacía tan fascinante para él la tercera personificación, la de la luna menguante, lo divino femenino que da dolor y muerte para dar recompensa y vida nueva.

«Repeatedly he saw her as the sow who eats her own litter of piglets, and this image of the destructive sow-goddess was one which he imposed on the historical evidence, most tellingly upon the Welsh figure of Ceridwen.» — y una imposición concreta sobre la evidencia histórica: la diosa cerda que devora su propia camada, aplicada sobre todo a la figura galesa de Ceridwen.

«Nobody associated her with a sow form until Graves twisted an interpretation of her name by Canon MacCulloch (itself now rejected by philologists) to give her one and so assimilate her to his notion of the dark, or destructive, aspect of goddess.» — con la búsqueda negativa que la desarma: nadie la asoció con forma de cerda hasta que Graves torció una etimología de MacCulloch, ella misma ya rechazada por los filólogos.

«Not that Graves thought any better of earlier verse, dismissing all that of classical Greece and Rome and ‘nine-tenths of what passes as English poetry’, including most of its most famous practitioners.» — consigna la magnitud de sus descartes, con toda la poesía clásica griega y romana y nueve décimas partes de lo que pasa por poesía inglesa desechadas.

«He dismissed any criticisms of his theory of the career of Christ in King Jesus as those of ‘prose men’ who did not understand poetic thinking.» — con el uso polémico que le daba, despachando las críticas a su Jesús como cosa de hombres de prosa que no entienden el pensamiento poético.

«He apparently applied this tactic to those around him as well; another friend once burst out ‘that Graves did not perceive people, but rather invented them—and afterwards came to believe in his own inventions’.» — recoge la observación de un amigo suyo de que Graves no percibía a la gente sino que la inventaba y luego creía en sus propias invenciones.

«All this may sound like a more personal analysis than has hitherto been found necessary in this book; a study ad hominem rather than simply of literary work.» — se detiene a justificar el tono personal de ese análisis, más ad hominem que el resto del libro.

«The reason for the precision of the portrait is simply that it is one of a real woman, a friend of his family called Irene Gay, who was staying with them while he was writing that part of the book, and with whom the poet was a little in love.» — y da la razón de la precisión del retrato de la Diosa Triple: es el de una mujer real, Irene Gay, que se alojaba con la familia mientras él escribía esa parte.

«The distinction of Margaret Murray, however, lies both in the wide range of fields in which she worked and the huge volume of her publications, and in her ardent feminism, which caused her to campaign actively for female suffrage, and to speak bitterly about the prejudices against women within academe.» — Hutton sitúa la distinción de Margaret Murray en la amplitud de sus campos, el volumen de sus publicaciones y su feminismo ardiente, que la llevó a militar por el sufragio femenino.

«Like them, she owed many of her earlier ideas to a mentor, who had helped to launch her career and whom she revered and followed uncritically; in her case this was Sir Flinders Petrie, in that of Harrison, Dugald MacColl, and in that of Weston, Alfred Nutt.» — y la agrupa con Harrison y Weston por un rasgo común, deber muchas de sus ideas tempranas a un mentor al que reverenciaban y seguían de modo acrítico.

«All three also produced work which aroused great controversy, and defended it virtually as an article of faith.» — las tres, dice, produjeron obra que despertó gran controversia y la defendieron poco menos que como artículo de fe.

«The core of her academic career lay in Egyptology, but she came to write on a wide variety of topics linked to the theme of ancient religion.» — recuerda que el núcleo de su carrera académica estaba en la egiptología, y que sobre religión antigua escribió de temas muy variados.

«Her ideas were first aired, however, to the Folk-Lore Society, and published in its journal in 1917 and 1920, encouraged by the immediate praise of worthies of the society such as Charlotte Gomme, who commented that they made» — fecha la primera aireación de sus ideas en la Folk-Lore Society y su publicación en la revista de esta en 1917 y 1920, alentada por el elogio inmediato de figuras de la sociedad.

«This was an accurate perception, for Murray was a lifelong admirer of Frazer.» — y consigna el vínculo que explica esa acogida, el de una admiradora de Frazer de toda la vida.

«The groundwork was therefore well laid for the presentation of her book to Oxford University Press, which accepted it easily after receiving a supportive report from the respected anthropologist Henry Balfour.» — describe cómo quedó allanado el camino a Oxford University Press, que aceptó el libro con facilidad tras un informe favorable del antropólogo Henry Balfour.

«She took up Pearson’s suggestion that Joan of Arc had been a member of the religion, and added one of Joan’s contemporaries, Gilles de Rais, as another prominent member of ‘the ancient religion’.» — señala que Murray recogió de Pearson la idea de Juana de Arco como miembro de la religión y le añadió a Gilles de Rais.

«When advancing theories which she sensed to be potentially controversial, Murray usually became hectoring, characterizing scholars who had made different interpretations of the evidence as possessed of ‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, and ‘unscientific attitudes’.» — y describe su modo de discutir cuando presentía controversia, calificando de sesgados y acientíficos a los estudiosos que interpretaban la evidencia de otro modo.

«In reality, her portrait of the religion was constructed by choosing vivid details of alleged witch practices provided in sources scattered across a great extent of space and time, and declaring them to be normative: the full plan of the four» — objeta la construcción misma del retrato: detalles vívidos elegidos en fuentes dispersas por un vasto espacio y tiempo, y declarados normativos.

«This tactic was later to be heavily, and understandably, criticized107 but in fairness to her, it was simply an extension of that long employed by respected anthropologists and folklorists:» — con una nota de equidad hacia ella: esa táctica fue después muy criticada, pero era extensión de la que llevaban tiempo empleando antropólogos y folcloristas respetados.

«The approach was no longer analytical, but celebratory, the ‘Old Religion’ (Murray having picked up Leland’s phrase) being characterized as a joyous and life-affirming one, contrasted with the gloom of Christianity;» — y marca el cambio de registro del segundo libro, ya no analítico sino celebratorio, con la Vieja Religión gozosa contrapuesta a la tristeza del cristianismo.

«She still accepted that it included blood sacrifice, but insisted that this was in a degenerative form produced by Christian persecution.» — con el modo en que ella salvaba el sacrificio de sangre, aceptándolo pero atribuyéndolo a una degeneración producida por la persecución cristiana.

«The latter, although strictly speaking attested by name (and that doubtfully) from one site in Paris, was declared by her to have been ‘one of the greatest gods, perhaps even the supreme deity, of Gaul’» — objeta la promoción de una deidad atestiguada por su nombre en un solo sitio de París, y dudosamente, a uno de los mayores dioses y acaso deidad suprema de la Galia.

«it asserted the doctrine that the horned god of the greenwood had been the oldest male deity known to humans, and traced his worship across Europe and the Near East, from the Old Stone Age to the seventeenth century.» — y resume la doctrina del segundo libro: el dios cornudo de la floresta como la deidad masculina más antigua conocida, rastreada del Paleolítico al siglo XVII.

«inspiration for the theory propounded five years later by her colleague in the Folk-Lore Society, Lady Raglan, that the foliate heads found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century churches were images of Frazer’s vegetation god, ‘The Green Man’.» — Hutton conecta a Murray con la tesis que Lady Raglan lanzó cinco años después, la de las cabezas foliadas como imágenes del dios de la vegetación de Frazer.

«This linkage of church carvings with paganism was arguably to be the most influential idea which Murray produced outside Egyptology, and it persisted among folklorists, historians, and archaeologists alike until the 1980s.» — y adjudica a ese enlace entre tallas de iglesia y paganismo la idea más influyente que Murray produjo fuera de la egiptología, vigente entre folcloristas y arqueólogos hasta los ochenta.

«It needs to be stressed that all this work was generated by Margaret Murray during what were effectively holiday periods from her own discipline, the study of ancient Egypt—and the reckless abandon with which she treated material may well attest to this spirit.» — subraya en qué condiciones se produjo toda esa obra, en lo que eran de hecho vacaciones de su propia disciplina, y liga a eso el abandono temerario con que trataba el material.

«Her much more voluminous contributions to Egyptology itself, although idiosyncratic at moments, were sober and well researched, and are still worthy of respect.» — y le reconoce sin reservas lo otro: sus contribuciones a la egiptología, mucho más voluminosas, fueron sobrias y bien investigadas, y siguen mereciendo respeto.

«Between 1917 and 1921 she had appeared to provide sound documentary support for the theory that medieval and early modem witchcraft had been a pagan religion.» — resume lo que ella pareció aportar entre 1917 y 1921, apoyo documental sólido a la tesis de la brujería como religión pagana.

«In the period 1931–4 she had extended this work to furnish some evidence for the belief that this religion had represented an enduring component in ancient European paganism—perhaps the most important—which could be traced from the palaeolithic to the early modern period, and retained the allegiance of most of the population until the end of the Middle Ages.» — y lo que añadió entre 1931 y 1934, evidencia de que esa religión habría sido un componente perdurable del paganismo europeo desde el paleolítico.

«The use of source material which underpinned them was too blatantly flawed, and this was made immediately apparent by expert reviewers of The Witch Cult.» — con su objeción de fondo: el uso del material fuente era demasiado descaradamente defectuoso, y así lo hicieron ver de inmediato los reseñistas expertos.

«One was W. R. Halliday, to whom the book was sent by the journal of Murray’s own Folk-Lore Society and who relentlessly laid bare the way in which she had ripped quotations free from their historical context.» — nombra a W. R. Halliday, que expuso sin tregua el modo en que ella arrancaba las citas de su contexto histórico.

«The latter left no room for doubt on his part that those tried were not pagans, though Ewen took the confessions recorded in them far too literally and suggested that the people who made them represented a genuine Satanist cult.» — y a Ewen, cuyas actas no dejaban lugar a duda de que los procesados no eran paganos, aunque él leyera las confesiones demasiado al pie de la letra.

«In her autobiography she declared that she had long given up reading reviews of her own books, and that opponents of her theories about the witch trials had been motivated primarily by Christian prejudice.» — consigna la respuesta de Murray en su autobiografía: hacía tiempo que no leía reseñas y atribuía a prejuicio cristiano la motivación de sus críticos.

«She added airily that critics of them were always ignorant of the original sources, of which she possessed an unsurpassed knowledge.» — y el argumento con que los descartaba, que siempre ignoraban las fuentes originales, de las que ella tenía un conocimiento insuperado.

«She stated her own ideas there as if they were proven and accepted fact, and they remained in its successive reprintings until the 1960s.» — señala dónde quedaron esas ideas presentadas como hecho probado y aceptado, en sucesivas reimpresiones hasta los años sesenta.

«Halliday’s withering review may well explain the silence concerning it in the Folk-Lore Society for the rest of the 1920s.» — y apunta con cautela que la reseña demoledora de Halliday bien puede explicar el silencio sobre el libro en la propia Folk-Lore Society durante el resto de los veinte.

«It is true that in an interview given to a Sunday newspaper she dismissed witchcraft as ‘superstition and superstitious fear’, empowered only by credulity, yet in her autobiography she professed a belief in clairvoyance.» — expone la tensión sin armonizarla: en una entrevista despachó la brujería como superstición y miedo supersticioso, y en su autobiografía profesó creer en la clarividencia.

«So they may have been, but there is a letter extant in which another friend of hers, with even more disquiet, quoted a conversation in which she discussed her technique of putting curses on victims with every sign of conviction.» — y la carta conservada de otra amiga, todavía más inquieta, que cita una conversación donde Murray hablaba con toda señal de convicción de su técnica para echar maldiciones.

«She then gave an interview to a newspaper in Birmingham, the nearest big city, in which she claimed that Walton had been sacrificed by ‘people who still believe in a religion practised in Britain before Christianity, whom we call devil worshippers’.» — con la declaración que dio a un diario de Birmingham sobre el caso Walton, atribuyendo el crimen a gente que aún cree en una religión practicada en Britania antes del cristianismo.

«She accepted that much of the witchcraft portrayed in the book was at least ‘descended’ from ancient rites and was a ‘sincere expression’ of a ‘feeling towards God’ represented ‘perhaps more decorously, although not more sincerely’ by Christianity.» — sobre el prólogo de Murray al primer libro dedicado al paganismo contemporáneo, Hutton consigna hasta dónde llegaba su aval: que buena parte de esa brujería descendía al menos de ritos antiguos y era expresión sincera de un sentimiento hacia Dios.

«He fully understood that what he was propounding might not actually be true; but in poetic terms that did not matter, for he could declare that ‘literal truth is comparatively unimportant, as an artist can tell the truth by a condensation and dramatization of the facts’.» — y la doctrina que le permitía sostener su tesis sin someterla a examen: la verdad literal es comparativamente sin importancia, porque un artista dice la verdad condensando y dramatizando los hechos.

«His memoirs, however, are resolutely unheroic, and the one episode which begins to approximate to drama, an anticipated attack on his plantation by headhunters, is rapidly deflated as the report turns out to be a false alarm, and Gardner’s posturing with a rifle is turned into a joke against himself.» — Hutton lee las memorias de Gardner por su tono, resueltamente poco heroico, con el único episodio que roza el drama desinflado en falsa alarma y vuelto broma contra sí mismo.

«In 1946, related Gardner, he visited Aleister Crowley and was initiated into the latter’s Ordo Templi Orientis, though he thought Crowley ‘a charming charlatan’.» — consigna lo que el propio Gardner relató sobre 1946, haber visitado a Crowley y sido iniciado en su Ordo Templi Orientis, teniéndolo por un charlatán encantador.

«No academic historian has ever taken seriously Gardner’s claim to have discovered a genuine survival of ancient religion, and it was dismissed at the time in the review given to it by the journal of the Folk-Lore Society.» — y marca la posición del gremio: ningún historiador académico ha tomado en serio el reclamo de Gardner de haber hallado una supervivencia genuina de religión antigua.

«These considerations would at least make Gardner’s witchcraft worthy of study as a part of modern history, but until now the only significant research into its origins has been carried out within the modern Pagan community.» — señalando a la vez el hueco: hasta ahora la única investigación significativa sobre sus orígenes se hizo dentro de la propia comunidad pagana moderna.

«It should be said that there is nothing inherently implausible in Gardner’s claim to have been initiated into an existing religion.» — y concede en firme lo que sí puede concederse: no hay nada inherentemente inverosímil en el reclamo de Gardner de haber sido iniciado en una religión ya existente.

«It is striking also that he describes a coven composed partly of Rosicrucians and led by a wealthy lady, instead of announcing that he had discovered a group of witches hidden in a rural working-class community, presided over by a more conventional cunning woman.» — con el argumento que le da peso, que Gardner describa un aquelarre en parte rosacruz y encabezado por una dama adinerada, y no el grupo rural que habría sido más vendible.

«Nor did Gardner include in the biography some of the more dubious claims which he made for himself in daily life, such as his possession of two specific university degrees, including a PhD which entitled him» — y otro a favor: que no metiera en la biografía algunos de los reclamos más dudosos que hacía en la vida diaria, como sus dos títulos universitarios.

«In view of the cultural patterns outlined above, it is precisely from this more educated esoteric milieu that one would expect a modern pagan revival to commence.» — de ahí su expectativa de fondo, que un renacer pagano moderno empezara justamente en ese medio esotérico más educado.

«A more precise parallel is with Kenneth Mackenzie and Dion Fortune’s mentor Theodore Moriarty, both of whom claimed university degrees which they did not possess;» — aporta los paralelos que sitúan el defecto en su gremio y no solo en él: Kenneth Mackenzie y Theodore Moriarty también reclamaban títulos que no tenían.

«Alan Richardson has made the comment that among magicians ‘doctorates appear like invoked spirits’.» — con la fórmula de Alan Richardson de que entre los magos los doctorados aparecen como espíritus invocados.

«In the biography, however, Gardner never gives an account of a university career and does not even leave any room for one.» — y su búsqueda negativa sobre la biografía: Gardner nunca da cuenta de una carrera universitaria y ni siquiera deja hueco para ella.

«Gardner added one more detail to his portrait of her; that when France fell in 1940 and the invasion of Britain seemed imminent, ‘Old Dorothy called up covens right and left; although by witch law they should not be known to each other’.» — recoge el detalle que Gardner añadió sobre Dorothy Clutterbuck, que al caer Francia convocó aquelarres a diestra y siniestra pese a que la ley de las brujas lo prohibía.

«The result was ‘Operation Cone of Power’, in which a Great Circle was cast at night in the New Forest and a cone of magical energy raised and directed against Hitler, as one had according to tradition been sent against the Spanish Armada and Napoleon.» — y el relato de la Operación Cono de Poder, con un cono de energía mágica dirigido contra Hitler como según la tradición se había enviado contra la Armada y contra Napoleón.

«At this point it is necessary to digress, to consider a claim made by Amado Crowley, a writer who has presented himself as one of Aleister’s illegitimate sons, that the whole story was stolen by Gardner from an actual ritual held by Aleister himself in Ashdown Forest, Sussex.» — abre entonces el reclamo rival de Amado Crowley, que dice que Gardner robó el relato de un ritual efectivamente celebrado por Aleister en el bosque de Ashdown.

«They are now in the archive of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the United States, but complete copies were made by Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, and are now in his deposit in the Warburg Institute, London.» — Hutton declara dónde están los diarios de Crowley y de dónde salen las copias que usa, las de Gerald Yorke depositadas en el Instituto Warburg.

«I have been able to check these against extracts from the originals and found them to be accurate;11 and the information within them conforms with all else that is certainly known of Crowley’s life during this period, including the data obtainable from his published work and surviving correspondence and working papers.» — y cómo las verificó, cotejándolas contra extractos de los originales y contra la obra publicada, la correspondencia y los papeles de trabajo.

«There is absolutely no trace in the diaries of ‘Operation Mistletoe’ or the relationship with mi5 which led up to it.» — con la búsqueda negativa que de ahí resulta: no hay absolutamente ningún rastro en los diarios de la Operación Muérdago ni de la relación con el MI5 que la habría precedido.

«Crowley did have the idea for a union of magicians to beat the Nazis, but he did nothing subsequently to form one.» — concede lo que sí hubo, la idea de una unión de magos para vencer a los nazis, y lo que no siguió, que Crowley no hizo nada después por formarla.

«More disturbing, there is no trace in these diaries of any of the events remembered by Amado Crowley in his memoirs; indeed, no trace of Amado Crowley himself.» — y una segunda negativa, que él llama más inquietante: en esos diarios no hay rastro de los sucesos que Amado Crowley recuerda, ni del propio Amado Crowley.

«Nor, for that matter, do the diaries record the personal relationship which Cecil Williamson claims to have enjoyed with the old magus; the ‘Cecil’ who features often in them as a friend was Robert Cecil.» — ni de la relación personal que Cecil Williamson dice haber tenido con el viejo mago, porque el Cecil que ahí aparece era Robert Cecil.

«Until these discrepancies are resolved, it seems more likely that the story of the event in Ashdown Forest was inspired by that in the New Forest, and that Williamson copied Amado Crowley’s account.» — de ahí su conclusión provisional, con el condicional puesto: parece más probable que el relato de Ashdown se inspirara en el del New Forest y que Williamson copiara a Amado Crowley.

«To describe the setting as ‘the New Forest’ is in fact slightly misleading, as Highcliffe is a few miles south of the forest proper and its true socio-cultural context is as a part of that genteel conurbation which stretches along the south coast of England between Poole and Lymington, with a healthy climate and picturesque hinterland which has made it especially attractive to people in retirement.» — corrige el marco geográfico: llamar New Forest al escenario es algo engañoso, porque Highcliffe queda unas millas al sur del bosque propiamente dicho.

«Both were exceptionally committed Tories, Dorothy being even more dedicated to the party than her husband; each year she presented awards to the members who had enrolled the greatest number of newcomers.» — y describe a los Clutterbuck como tories excepcionalmente comprometidos, con Dorothy aún más entregada al partido que su marido.

«All this means that if Gardner was correct then Dorothy Clutterbuck lived one of the most incredible double lives in human history; a pillar of conservatism and respectability who was also the leader of one witch coven and capable of summoning up others.» — para plantear lo que eso implica si Gardner tenía razón: Dorothy Clutterbuck habría llevado una de las dobles vidas más increíbles de la historia humana.

«There is absolutely no incompatibility between modern pagan witchcraft and Conservative politics—as will be shown—but it is unusual to find modern pagan witches who are quite so prominent—and ostentatious—in supporting conventional social and political values.» — aclarando de inmediato que no hay incompatibilidad alguna entre la brujería pagana moderna y la política conservadora.

«The impression of disjuncture is increased by the fact that, according to Gardner, in September 1939, when she was still in her period of mourning and seclusion following the shock of Rupert’s death, she was allowing her home to be used for Gardner’s initiation, followed by a celebration at which everybody danced and made merry till dawn.» — y señalando el desajuste que sí le pesa, que en septiembre de 1939 ella siguiera de luto y recluida por la muerte de Rupert y a la vez prestara su casa para la iniciación.

«The large memorial cross which she raised to Rupert over his grave in the same yard, into which her own ashes were put in turn, bears a long and impassioned affirmation of faith in salvation through Christ, made by Dorothy herself as his wife.» — aporta la evidencia material que corre en contra: la cruz que ella levantó sobre la tumba de Rupert lleva una afirmación larga y apasionada de fe en la salvación por Cristo, hecha por ella misma.

«What is needed to resolve the puzzle is some kind of candid personal record left by her and equivalent to Crowley’s diaries.» — declara qué haría falta para resolver el enigma, algún registro personal cándido dejado por ella y equivalente a los diarios de Crowley.

«Such a record does exist; but is it candid?» — y deja la pregunta abierta al encontrarlo: tal registro existe, pero la duda es si es cándido.

«It looks like a combination of folk Christianity and veneration of nature of a sort familiar by now from the earlier chapters of this book, a long way short of the witchcraft described by Gardner.» — Hutton lee esos cuadernos de Clutterbuck y los describe como cristianismo popular y veneración de la naturaleza, muy lejos de la brujería que describe Gardner.

«Ian Stevenson, the resident historian of Highcliffe, grew up there when Dorothy Clutterbuck and Gerald Gardner were inhabitants, and confirms what the Christchurch Times strongly suggests: that their social worlds did not overlap.» — y aporta el testimonio de Ian Stevenson, historiador local que creció ahí, para sostener que los mundos sociales de ella y de Gardner no se traslapaban.

«She was a well-known figure at the centre of the community’s life, while his friends visited from outside it and he was regarded in Highcliffe as an exotic, mysterious, and rather sinister figure.» — con la asimetría concreta: ella figura central de la vida de la comunidad, y él visto en Highcliffe como una figura exótica, misteriosa y más bien siniestra.

«There were no known connections between her and the Rosicrucians at Christchurch; both were keen on dramatic productions, but she had her own separate troupe, the Mill House Players.» — y una búsqueda negativa más: no se conocen conexiones entre ella y los rosacruces de Christchurch, y en teatro ella tenía compañía aparte.

«The less honourable is that a man of his undoubted mischievous sense of humour could have gained private delight from the thought that people would imagine this pillar of conventional Anglican Tory society summoning up covens and leading naked dances in the New Forest.» — propone entonces dos motivos compatibles para que Gardner la nombrara, y el menos honroso es el placer privado de un hombre de humor travieso.

«She lived near Christchurch, and Doreen Valiente, who met her in 1952, found her ‘an elegant, graceful lady with dark hair’.» — recoge la descripción que Doreen Valiente dio de la otra mujer del relato al conocerla en 1952, una dama elegante y grácil de pelo oscuro.

«The theatre itself was the creation of an actor called George Alexander Sullivan, who was partnered in the venture with Mabel Besant-Scott, daughter of the famous theosophist and socialist Annie Besant.» — reconstruye el origen del Rosicrucian Theatre, creación del actor George Alexander Sullivan asociado con Mabel Besant-Scott, hija de Annie Besant.

«They opened the theatre to fulfil Sullivan’s dream of educating the public in mysticism through drama, but the public was not sufficiently interested and the plays lasted for only one season, from June to September 1938, when Gardner claimed to have discovered and joined the group.» — y su corta vida, con una sola temporada de funciones de junio a septiembre de 1938, cuando Gardner dijo haber descubierto y frecuentado al grupo.

«Between 1939 and 1944 Gardner is largely invisible in the recorded public life of the area, although shown as resident at Highcliffe in Kelly’s Directory.» — consigna un hueco documental: entre 1939 y 1944 Gardner es en gran medida invisible en la vida pública registrada de la zona.

«The latter had told him that during the late 1930s or early 1940s he had been friendly with a group of witches operating as a coven in the New Forest.» — presenta el testimonio de Louis Wilkinson, que decía haber tratado a fines de los treinta o principios de los cuarenta a un grupo de brujas del New Forest.

«This is therefore an important piece of evidence that should be treated with respect, but is unfortunately not conclusive.» — y lo califica con la reserva puesta: es una pieza de evidencia importante, que merece respeto y que por desgracia no es concluyente.

«The first is the airy imprecision of Wilkinson’s memory; he was talking in 1953 about events which had occurred only just over a decade before, and yet spoke vaguely of the ‘late 1930s or early 1940s’.» — con la primera de sus tres dificultades, la imprecisión vaporosa de la memoria de Wilkinson, que en 1953 hablaba de hechos de apenas una década antes.

«The second is that his account looks like a somewhat garbled and sensationalized version of Gardner’s.» — la segunda, que su relato parece una versión algo confusa y sensacionalizada del de Gardner.

«The third is that, as has already been apparent in the case of ‘Operation Mistletoe’, even first-hand or eye-witness testimony is not always reliable, and there is a real risk that Wilkinson had picked up Gardner’s story about the coven and retold it as his own, with some distortions produced in transmission to him or by his own imagination.» — y la tercera, que ni siquiera el testimonio de primera mano es siempre fiable, con el riesgo real de que Wilkinson recogiera el relato de Gardner y lo recontara como propio.

«In 1988, however, a writer in a publication of the modern Ordo Templi Orientis suggested that Gardner and Crowley knew each other for more than ten years before the latter’s death:» — Hutton expone el reclamo de 1988 de que Gardner y Crowley se conocieran más de diez años antes de la muerte de este último.

«Fortunately the matter can be cleared up by sound primary evidence: Crowley’s diary, which makes it clear beyond all reasonable» — y adjudica la cuestión a evidencia primaria, el diario de Crowley, del que dice que la aclara más allá de toda duda razonable.

«Gardner and Crowther were telling the truth; but the former’s memory was a year out of place.» — con la conclusión que reparte crédito y error: Gardner y Crowther decían la verdad, pero la memoria del primero estaba corrida un año.

«for Crowley’s diary shows that Yorke himself was not in Hastings at the time of Gardner’s visits,» — y lo confronta con el diario, que muestra que Yorke no estaba en Hastings cuando Gardner visitó a Crowley.

«There is certainly a lot of Crowley’s work in the earliest known versions of the witch rituals, which may well be the source of the whole rumour that he wrote them; but it appears in chunks, copied or slightly adapted from his earlier publications, and interspersed with other material which is not in Crowley’s style at all.» — concede sin rodeos que hay mucho material de Crowley en las versiones más tempranas conocidas de los rituales, y que ahí puede estar el origen del rumor entero.

«I have, however, been assured by the Research Librarian of that university that there is no record of such a document, or any others connected with Gardner, existing in the collection either now or in the past.» — y consigna otra negativa comprobada por él mismo: la bibliotecaria de investigación de esa universidad le aseguró que no consta ese documento ni otros ligados a Gardner en la colección.

«Crowley’s diary makes fairly plain that Gardner was much more interested in him than he was in Gardner.» — lee el diario también por la asimetría del interés, que deja bastante claro que Gardner se interesaba mucho más por Crowley que Crowley por Gardner.

«the latter declared that he would not himself enter the witch religion because ‘he refused to be bossed around by any damn woman’ and could not understand the lack of financial profit in it.48 Ten years later one of Gardner’s initiates into witchcraft, Patricia Crowther, claimed that she had met Crowley in 1945 or 1946 and that although he knew a lot about witches he personally rejected their tradition, as ‘he wasn’t the type to be bossed about as by a woman’» — recoge la explicación que Crowley habría dado para no entrar en la religión de las brujas, que no iba a dejarse mandar por ninguna mujer.

«First, it is notable that the subject of witchcraft is not mentioned in either Crowley’s diary entries on Gardner’s visits, nor in the surviving items of the correspondence which resulted.» — y una negativa que le importa mucho: la brujería no se menciona ni en las entradas del diario sobre las visitas de Gardner ni en la correspondencia conservada.

«What, however, of Patricia Crowther’s independent and first-hand endorsement of it? This problem was removed in 2003, when she courageously put on record that she had never met Crowley but had claimed earlier to have done so to please her husband Arnold, who wanted to include her in the historic event; and her account of it was based on the testimony of Arnold and Gardner.» — documenta la retractación de Patricia Crowther en 2003, que puso por escrito que nunca conoció a Crowley y que lo había dicho para complacer a su marido.

«There is no better evidence to support the grander version of the story told by E. W. Liddell.» — y declara que no hay mejor evidencia para la versión más grandiosa del relato, la de E. W. Liddell.

«Furthermore, E. W. Liddell was not the originator of the statement that Crowley was initiated into a coven; it was told to Gerald Yorke as early as December 1953, in an interview with a member of Gardner’s own witch group who seems, from the magical name which she used, to have been Doreen Valiente.» — sitúa el origen del relato de la iniciación de Crowley antes de Liddell, en una entrevista de diciembre de 1953 con una miembro del grupo de Gardner que, por su nombre mágico, parece haber sido Doreen Valiente.

«She provided the story to explain why it was that obvious quotations from Crowley’s work appeared in the witch rituals, and added the detail that the famous magician had left witchcraft because he ‘would not be ruled by women’.» — y para qué lo daba ella: para explicar por qué aparecen citas obvias de la obra de Crowley en los rituales de las brujas.

«There seem to be three different stories here: that Crowley heard of the witch religion from Gardner and said that it was not for him; that Crowley was offered initiation into it as a young man; and that he actually was initiated into it.» — termina separando lo que suele mezclarse: ahí hay tres relatos distintos, que Crowley oyó de la religión y dijo que no era para él, que le ofrecieron la iniciación de joven, y que efectivamente fue iniciado.

«None of this proves that Dorothy Clutterbuck was not a witch, in Gardner’s sense of the word; indeed, it would be impossible to do so, for every piece of evidence to the contrary could be interpreted as yet another ploy upon her part to conceal her identity as one.» — aquí su abstención más explícita del capítulo: nada de esto descarta que Dorothy Clutterbuck fuera bruja en el sentido de Gardner, y sería imposible hacerlo.

«Aidan Kelly has noted this and used it to challenge the information relayed by Liddell, who has responded by pointing out that none of Crowley’s works mention his humiliation by the famous mystic Georgei Gurdjieff, who berated him and threw him out of Gurdjieff’s community at Fontainbleu in 1925, as related in a well-known book by James Webb.» — Hutton registra la objeción de Aidan Kelly a la información de Liddell y la réplica del propio Liddell, que señala que las obras de Crowley tampoco mencionan su humillación por Gurdjieff.

«What seems significant is not that there is no apparent reference to the witch religion in Crowley’s published works, but none in his unpublished works—which are numerous—either.» — y precisa dónde está el peso de la búsqueda negativa: no en que falte referencia a la religión de las brujas en la obra publicada de Crowley, sino en que también falte en la inédita, que es numerosa.

«He did not himself publish any direct reference to his bisexuality, which actually brought him within risk of criminal prosecution, but it is plain enough from his poetry, his close friendships, and his records of rituals.» — con el argumento de control: Crowley no publicó referencia directa a su bisexualidad y aun así esta se ve con claridad en su poesía y en sus registros de rituales.

«He was careful to conceal from the public his savage anti-Semitism, but it breaks out repeatedly in his private writings, especially his diaries.» — y otro más: ocultó al público su antisemitismo feroz, que en cambio irrumpe repetidamente en sus escritos privados.

«It does seem hard to believe that he was initiated into a coven and then ejected from it without harking back to the incident in the most bitter terms; instead his pronouncements on witchcraft are few and clinical.» — de ahí su conclusión, dicha en primera persona y como dificultad de creencia: cuesta creer que lo iniciaran en un aquelarre y lo expulsaran sin que él volviera al episodio en los términos más amargos.

«In his autohagiography he noted his acquaintance with ‘a sort of secret cult’ at Pembroke College, Cambridge, when he was at the university in the 1890s, run by one of the fellows, ‘a clergyman called Heriz Smith’.» — consigna lo único comparable que Crowley sí menciona, una especie de culto secreto en Pembroke College dirigido por un clérigo llamado Heriz Smith.

«This matters, because, of all the actual magical or religious groups referred to by Crowley in any of his writings, it is the only one which bears even that much similarity to modern pagan witchcraft.» — y por qué le importa: de todos los grupos mágicos o religiosos que Crowley cita en sus escritos, es el único que guarda siquiera esa semejanza con la brujería pagana moderna.

«Writing to John Symonds in 1950, by which time he was fully committed to witchcraft, Gardner said that his attempts to ‘start an order’ had been foiled first by illness, which had caused him to leave the country on a convalescent holiday, and then by a discovery that the people whom he had expected to join (probably the names furnished by Crowley) were either serving abroad with the armed forces or lived too far away to work with him.» — recoge la explicación que Gardner dio en 1950 del fracaso de su intento de iniciar una orden, primero por enfermedad y después porque los candidatos servían fuera o vivían demasiado lejos.

«At the time of completing it, Gardner still regarded himself primarily as an OTO grandee, for he published it under his initiatory name (misspelled ‘Scrire’) and printed the order’s initials and his degree (again given somewhat inaccurately, in Golden Dawn not OTO form) underneath it.» — y el dato que fija dónde se ubicaba él entonces: publicó su novela bajo su nombre iniciático y con las iniciales de la orden y su grado impresos debajo.

«The only remaining clues to the origins of Gardner’s witchcraft lie in his own writings.» — declara con qué material queda para lo que sigue: las únicas pistas restantes sobre los orígenes de la brujería de Gardner están en sus propios escritos.

«The situation thus revealed seems to admit of three explanations: either Gardner had temporarily lost interest in witchcraft and was striving to make the OTO his vehicle instead; or he was involved in both alongside each other; or he had not yet conceived the idea of ‘reviving’ the ancient witch religion and, looking for a magical group to install in the ‘witch’s cottage’, he had turned to the famous Crowley for inspiration and taken up the latter’s order.» — y abre expresamente las tres explicaciones posibles de la situación, sin elegir entre ellas, incluida la de que aún no hubiera concebido la idea de revivir la religión de las brujas.

«It is, in fact, a rationalist and sceptical work.» — y la caracteriza como obra racionalista y escéptica.

«The whole plot is based upon the premise that the cult of the goddess Aphrodite owes its origin to the appearance of a human woman who deludes the Cypriots into taking her for a divinity.» — con la premisa que la sostiene, un culto a Afrodita originado en la aparición de una mujer humana que engaña a los chipriotas para que la tomen por divinidad.

«This calls into question whether the ‘witch’s cottage’ which Gardner’s Ancient Crafts company installed in the wood in Hertfordshire around that time might not initially have been intended to function as an esoteric Christian chapel rather than the home of a magical group or coven.» — Hutton pone en duda algo que suele darse por hecho: que la cabaña de la bruja instalada en Hertfordshire se destinara desde el inicio a un grupo mágico y no a una capilla cristiana esotérica.

«This is exactly what he allegedly told his niece Miriam, daughter of the brother in Tennessee, when he showed her the cottage in late 1946.» — señalando que eso es lo que Gardner habría dicho a su sobrina Miriam al enseñársela a fines de 1946.

«Alternatively, it is possible that he still had not yet developed the witchcraft for which he was to become famous, and whatever he had been doing in the New Forest, it was not that.» — y deja abierta la alternativa: que aún no hubiera desarrollado la brujería por la que iba a ser famoso, y que lo hecho en el New Forest no fuera eso.

«His next publication signalled the beginning of that final step, being the novel High Magic’s Aid; and with this we are in a different stage of his life, for (as said) it represents his first, fictionalized, announcement of the rituals of the witch religion.» — fecha el comienzo del paso final en High Magic's Aid, primer anuncio ficcionalizado de los rituales de la religión de las brujas.

«The powerful dynamism of sexual polarity which features in Dion Fortune’s novels is given a new twist: the magus works robed but in partnership with a nude woman, in order to perfect his ability to operate magic without temptations of the flesh.» — describe el giro que le da a la polaridad sexual de las novelas de Dion Fortune, con el mago trabajando vestido junto a una mujer desnuda.

«Murray’s emphasis upon the joyous and life-affirming character of the witch religion is powerfully expressed, and developed into a mystical sense of unity with the» — y el rasgo que viene de Murray, el carácter gozoso y afirmador de la vida de la religión, desarrollado en un sentido místico de unidad.

«The setting of the story is the central Middle Ages, at which time, according to the Murray thesis, that religion was most highly developed.» — con la ambientación que corresponde a esa tesis, la plena Edad Media, cuando según Murray la religión estaba más desarrollada.

«He also ascribes to the witches a ritual based upon the seventeenth-century myth of the Black Mass (in which a naked woman is used as the altar), as reinterpreted by Crowley:» — y el rito que Gardner atribuye a las brujas, basado en el mito seiscentista de la Misa Negra y reinterpretado por Crowley.

«This preoccupation with the magical and religious power of nude female beauty was by no means peculiar to Gardner; indeed, it was a minor theme of early twentieth-century English literature.» — acota que la preocupación por el poder mágico y religioso de la belleza femenina desnuda no era en absoluto peculiar de Gardner, sino tema menor de la literatura inglesa de principios del XX.

«It seems a reliable source as it was not meant for public consumption, and, as stated above, Gardner and Yorke were introduced by Crowley in May 1947.» — valora la carta a Yorke como fuente fiable porque no estaba destinada al público, y sitúa la presentación de ambos por Crowley en mayo de 1947.

«It does produce a puzzle over Gardner’s claim in the biography that it was in 1946 that he was given permission by the coven to publicize their beliefs, and wrote the novel.» — y el enigma cronológico que eso deja: el reclamo de la biografía de que fue en 1946 cuando el aquelarre le permitió publicar sus creencias.

«It is clear that the puzzles surrounding Gardner’s relationship with witchcraft cannot be solved by an analysis of his publications alone.» — declara con claridad el límite del método hasta ahí: los enigmas de la relación de Gardner con la brujería no se resuelven analizando solo sus publicaciones.

«The most important and enduring literary work towards which he contributed was, however, one that was intended never to be published: the collection of instructions and rituals which represented the sacred text of his witch religion and to which he gave the evocative name of the Book of Shadows.» — y nombra la obra literaria más importante y duradera a la que contribuyó, la que nunca debía publicarse, el Libro de las Sombras.

«His greatest service to scholarship was his recognition of the peculiar importance of one manuscript, entitled by Gardner ‘Ye Bok of ye Art Magical’, which he identified beyond reasonable doubt as the precursor of the 1953 Book of Shadows, and therefore the earliest known version of the witch liturgy.» — acredita a Aidan Kelly el mayor servicio a la erudición en esto, reconocer la importancia peculiar del manuscrito que Gardner tituló Ye Bok of ye Art Magical.

«It is, as Aidan Kelly recognized, an elaborate and complex one, created by binding large sheets of paper into a handsome leather cover, taken from a book whose contents had been removed.» — Hutton describe la hechura material del manuscrito, hojas grandes encuadernadas en una hermosa tapa de cuero tomada de un libro al que le habían quitado el contenido.

«Another of Kelly’s major insights was that the entries were made over a significant period of time, with two to four pages initially left blank between each so that they could be filled later with further material; and such a filling occurred through most of the book.» — y recoge otro hallazgo de Kelly, que las entradas se hicieron a lo largo de un período significativo, dejando páginas en blanco entre ellas para rellenarlas después.

«It was, however, much more than that, at least for a significant period; it was intended to be a grimoire in its own right, designed to resemble a medieval or early modern one.» — señala qué era además de cuaderno: durante un período significativo se pretendió que fuera un grimorio por derecho propio, con aire de medieval o moderno temprano.

«My personal opinion is that the text does not provide any conclusive evidence for the question of whether Gardner composed those entries which have no known provenance or copied them from a pre-existing source; in other words, whether he was initiated into an existing religion or created one himself.» — y aquí da su opinión personal declarada como tal: el texto no aporta evidencia concluyente sobre si Gardner compuso esas entradas o las copió de una fuente preexistente.

«First, at times he corrected details of the rituals in ‘Ye Bok’ and wrote comments upon them, both actions compatible with a copyist.» — expone los tres argumentos a favor de la copia, empezando por las correcciones y comentarios que hizo a los rituales, compatibles con un copista.

«Second, some texts have apparent slashes in them which may be a calligrapher’s convention to indicate breaks in an original document.» — el segundo, unas barras aparentes que podrían ser convención de calígrafo para marcar cortes de un documento original.

«Third, the rituals associated with witchcraft are written with stylized abbreviations not found in the others.» — y el tercero, que los rituales asociados a la brujería llevan abreviaturas estilizadas que no aparecen en los otros.

«All these arguments, however, are vulnerable to criticism.» — para añadir de inmediato que los tres argumentos son vulnerables a la crítica.

«The principal working tool, however, is made the black-handled knife, and this is another major innovation as the supremacy of this instrument is found neither in the Golden Dawn and Crowley traditions nor in the Key of Solomon.» — aísla una innovación mayor, la supremacía del cuchillo de mango negro, que no está ni en la tradición de la Golden Dawn y Crowley ni en la Clave de Salomón.

«The outlines of the first two rituals are very clearly Masonic; but that is true (as should be plain by now) of most initiation rituals in English secret societies since the eighteenth century.» — concede que las líneas de los dos primeros rituales son clarísimamente masónicas, y que eso vale para casi todo rito de iniciación de las sociedades secretas inglesas desde el XVIII.

«The problem with the Key, as Mathers discovered, is that it is not a standard text, but a framework for ritual within which various copyists in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries added or mutated details.» — explica el problema de la Clave de Salomón, que no es texto estándar sino marco ritual al que los copistas de los siglos XVI a XVIII añadieron y mutaron detalles.

«There is no evidence that Gardner consulted any of these manuscripts, but he was an avid reader of modern works on the occult,» — y una búsqueda negativa con su salvedad: no hay evidencia de que Gardner consultara esos manuscritos, aunque era lector ávido de obras modernas sobre ocultismo.

«The origins of the term are not known; perhaps the simplest and most likely source is that proposed by James Baker: the Old French verb attame, meaning ‘to cut’.» — sobre el origen del término athame se abstiene y da la conjetura más simple, la de James Baker, el verbo del francés antiguo attame.

«None of this, however, accounts for why this knife becomes ‘the true Witch’s weapon’.» — y marca lo que ninguna de esas etimologías explica, por qué ese cuchillo se vuelve el arma verdadera de la bruja.

«One very striking way in which the witch rituals in ‘Ye Bok’ redeveloped Masonic tradition was provided by their version of the old Masons’ ceremonial embrace, the five Points of Fellowship.» — describe la transformación que los rituales operan sobre el abrazo ceremonial masónico de los cinco Puntos de Compañerismo.

«The consecration of the wine was probably modelled upon the sixth-degree initiation of the OTO itself, in which a man dipped the point of a holy lance in a cup of wine held by a woman; save that Gardner’s rite reversed the poles, and had the man hold the cup for the woman’s athame.» — Hutton propone el modelo probable de la consagración del vino en la iniciación de sexto grado de la propia OTO, con la salvedad de que el rito de Gardner invirtió los polos.

«In its symbolism, the witch religion publicized by Gerald Gardner carried forward that resacralization of sexuality and the human body which had been a feature of the magic(k) of Crowley and of the writings of D. H. Lawrence and Havelock Ellis (among others).» — y sitúa el simbolismo de esa religión en una línea que ya venía, la resacralización de la sexualidad y del cuerpo humano de Crowley, Lawrence y Havelock Ellis.

«The eroticism encoded in the rites was intensified by the tradition that all participants worked naked, something that was a feature of the witches’ sabbats imagined by early modern writers (as part of the general transgression of moral codes imputed to them) and has a long and worldwide association with ritual magic; but hitherto was very rare in the history of religion.» — acota lo que la desnudez ritual sí tenía de antecedente y lo que tenía de novedad: rasgo de los aquelarres imaginados por los autores modernos tempranos y asociado a la magia ritual, pero hasta entonces muy raro en la historia de la religión.

«should be nude under their robes, ‘as nothing mundane is worn in magic’, and in her writings portrayed powerfully how this custom could increase greatly the creative sexual tension between her female and male protagonists.83 Gardner’s rituals got rid of the robes.» — con el contraste puntual: Dion Fortune quería a sus practicantes desnudos bajo las túnicas, y los rituales de Gardner se deshicieron de las túnicas.

«In High Magic’s Aid, however, a different version of the preparation is given; in place of the rite of the pentagram, the witch uses an eleven-line chant commencing:» — señala que en la novela la preparación del círculo va con un canto de once líneas en lugar del rito del pentagrama.

«It was constructed by cobbling together two equally mysterious (or meaningless) chants found in different twentieth-century sources.» — y su procedencia, remendada uniendo dos cantos igualmente misteriosos hallados en fuentes distintas del siglo XX.

«The first two lines are taken from an article published in 1926 by Crowley’s erstwhile friend J. F. C. Fuller, who used them to preface a four-line incantation which he claimed to be ‘a sorcerer’s cry in the Middle Ages’; he did not cite any source for it and none has since been discovered.» — las dos primeras líneas de un artículo de 1926 de J. F. C. Fuller, que las presentó como grito de hechicero medieval sin citar fuente y sin que se haya hallado ninguna después.

«This time the source is very clear; a thirteenth-century play called Le Miracle de Théophile, composed by one Ruteboeuf.» — y el resto de una obra de 1931, remontable a una pieza del siglo XIII de Ruteboeuf.

«The invocation was used by one character, an evil sorcerer called Salatin, to conjure up the Devil.» — donde la invocación la usaba un hechicero malvado llamado Salatín para conjurar al Diablo.

«Neither piece is in any known language, and both seem to have been pieces of gibberish intended to produce a suitably mystifying effect.» — con su dictamen sobre las dos piezas: ninguna está en lengua conocida, y ambas parecen galimatías destinados a producir efecto mistificador.

«Before late 1948, therefore, Gardner had put together a book of rituals which a group could work.» — fija la fecha de referencia de lo reunido: antes de fines de 1948 Gardner tenía armado un libro de rituales que un grupo podía trabajar.

«All that can be suggested without better evidence is that either the latter were not to his taste, or the time-scale involved is even more truncated and ‘Ye Bok’ was composed in 1948 after he had given up on the idea of resurrecting the OTO and decided to propagate the witch religion instead.» — y declara lo único que puede sugerirse sin mejor evidencia, incluida la posibilidad de un calendario aún más comprimido.

«One inspired decision, almost certainly his own, was to give the set of rituals which was being collected the romantic name of ‘Book of Shadows’, to replace the traditional and functional ‘grimoire’.» — adjudica a él, casi con certeza, una decisión inspirada, la de llamar Libro de las Sombras al conjunto en lugar del funcional grimorio.

«On the other hand, there is also some that is original, such as other parts of the invocations, and the very heavy emphasis on the use of ritual flagellation; what appeared in the initiation ceremonies as an ordeal features here as an essential purificatory operation.» — aísla lo que sí es original en esos textos, incluido el énfasis muy fuerte en la flagelación ritual, que aquí ya no es ordalía sino operación purificatoria esencial.

«As Aidan Kelly noticed, in the seasonal ceremonies, for the first time, appears the assumption that those working them will be a coven led by a high priestess and high priest.» — recoge otra observación de Kelly, que en las ceremonias estacionales aparece por primera vez el supuesto de un aquelarre encabezado por suma sacerdotisa y sumo sacerdote.

«In the seasonal ceremonies, by contrast, the two divine figures are highly developed and essential to the action, producing a ‘duotheism’, a cosmology based on a single pair of deities, which was another strikingly original feature of this religion.» — y nombra el otro rasgo notablemente original, el duoteísmo, una cosmología construida sobre una sola pareja de deidades.

«His first novel, A Goddess Arrives (1940), bears out the assertion in the biography that it was written before his discovery of the witch religion.» — sobre su primera novela consigna que sostiene lo dicho en la biografía, que se escribió antes de su descubrimiento de la religión de las brujas.

«The single strikingly original addition is a line referring to ancient Spartan practices of ritual flagellation, used here to justify the prominence of the scourge in the rituals.» — Hutton aísla la única adición llamativamente original de ese rito, la línea sobre la flagelación ritual espartana, usada ahí para justificar el relieve del flagelo.

«Kelly has suggested that the rites can be boiled down to a set of practices designed to induce sexual excitement by scourging, and that this was Gardner’s distinctive personal contribution to, and main emotional investment in, what was otherwise a pastiche of borrowings from other texts.» — expone la tesis de Aidan Kelly, que reduce los ritos a prácticas para inducir excitación sexual por flagelación y las tiene por la aportación personal distintiva de Gardner.

«Kelly is absolutely correct to emphasize the prominence of the binding and flogging, which is the principal practical link between all the initiatory and seasonal rituals.» — y le concede la parte que le da por buena: Kelly tiene toda la razón en subrayar el relieve de la atadura y el azote, que es el nexo práctico entre todos los rituales.

«Gardner’s novels, however, are not works of flagellant fiction.» — pero objeta con un dato de la obra: las novelas de Gardner no son ficción flagelante.

«Nor are the operations involved in the rituals standard acts of sadomasochism.» — y con otro sobre los ritos mismos, que las operaciones no son actos estándar de sadomasoquismo.

«What they define instead is a highly idiosyncratic and thoroughly unusual way of attaining an ecstatic trance, which is explained in detail in two of the sections added to the later Book of Shadows.» — proponiendo en su lugar lo que a su juicio definen, un modo idiosincrásico y muy inusual de alcanzar un trance extático.

«The cords are used to apply a gentle restriction of the blood circulation to produce dizziness, and the scourge is wielded very lightly and steadily to induce a rhythmical tingling sensation.» — con la mecánica descrita: cuerdas que restringen suavemente la circulación para producir mareo y un flagelo manejado muy ligero y parejo para inducir un hormigueo rítmico.

«By uniting paganism with the figure of the witch, in the Leland and Murray tradition, it automatically pre-empted any easy reconciliation of the result with Christianity or with conventional social mores; it was full-blown counter-cultural religion of the sort after which people such as Dion Byngham had hankered.» — señala el efecto estructural de unir paganismo y figura de la bruja en la línea de Leland y Murray, que impedía de antemano toda reconciliación fácil con el cristianismo.

«The ceremonies also embodied a concept of the fate of the soul—group reincarnation for believers—which had not featured as central to any Western religion until then, nor possibly to any religion at all.» — y el rasgo del destino del alma que le parece sin precedente, la reencarnación en grupo, no central hasta entonces en ninguna religión occidental ni quizá en ninguna.

«Unlike all of these, they were conducted by groups led by a high priestess and a high priest, whose relationship mirrored that of the two deities.» — con la diferencia organizativa frente a todas las anteriores, grupos encabezados por una suma sacerdotisa y un sumo sacerdote cuya relación espejea la de las dos deidades.

«Freemasonry, following long-established Christian tradition, shunned the north as the place of darkness; Gardner’s ceremonies not only recognized the north as a place of divinity and elemental power, as Mathers and Crowley had done, but treated it as the quarter of greatest sanctity.» — y la inversión del norte, que la masonería rehuía como lugar de tinieblas y que estas ceremonias tratan como el cuadrante de mayor santidad.

«It challenged another in its resacralization of the human body and sexuality, the devices noted earlier being enhanced by the attribution to sexual intercourse of the name ‘the Great Rite’ and the direction that it should be performed at the end of each seasonal festival, preferably in actuality or in symbolic form (such as the dipping of the athame in the cup) if this was not desirable; though Doreen Valiente has recorded» — describe el Gran Rito y su prescripción al cierre de cada festival estacional, en acto o en forma simbólica.

«that among Gardner’s witches sexual acts never took place in the consecrated circle, but afterwards and in private between members.» — consignando de inmediato lo que Doreen Valiente dejó registrado, que entre las brujas de Gardner los actos sexuales nunca ocurrían en el círculo consagrado sino después y en privado.

«Like all the magical or quasimagical societies which had flourished since the seventeenth century, this one concealed innovation under a language of continuity or restitution; except that it went one better than the lot, by claiming to descend from the Palaeolithic in the manner suggested by Margaret Murray.» — y el rasgo que comparte con toda sociedad mágica desde el XVII, ocultar la innovación bajo un lenguaje de continuidad, salvo que esta las superó a todas remontándose al Paleolítico.

«The dubious nature of the history represented in it was obvious to Doreen Valiente: it assumes that witches were systematically tortured and then burned in early modern England, as in parts of Continental Europe, and neither was true.» — recoge que la falsedad histórica del preámbulo le resultaba obvia a Doreen Valiente, porque en la Inglaterra moderna temprana ni se torturaba sistemáticamente ni se quemaba.

«On the one hand, he took for granted the existence of the New Forest coven and proposed a list of members for it; I regard its existence as unconfirmed, and if it did exist then the only member whose presence in it I would take as certain is Edith Woodford-Grimes.» — y separa su posición de la de Heselton en dos puntos, el primero que él tiene por no confirmada la existencia del aquelarre del New Forest.

«On the other, he suggested that it was virtually certain that Gardner composed the witch rituals in ‘Ye Bok of Art Magical’ to suit his own tastes, and that also I regard as unproven.» — y el segundo, en la dirección contraria: tiene por no probada la casi certeza de Kelly de que Gardner compusiera los rituales a su propio gusto.

«Where I do accord with Aidan Kelly completely is in his central insight that the rituals concerned do not seem to have been given to Gardner en bloc by an existing tradition, but were amended and augmented by him fairly steadily over a period of some years; and with that, as shown, Philip Heselton agrees.» — para declarar en qué sí concuerda del todo con Kelly, en que los rituales no parecen haberle llegado en bloque desde una tradición existente sino haber sido enmendados y aumentados por él durante años.

«It must be stressed that this is still possible, although for reasons which must now be plain from the discussions provided above, there are serious doubts.» — Hutton mantiene abierta la primera lectura, que sigue siendo posible aunque haya dudas serias.

«The second is that Gardner’s account is correct, but with Edith Woodford-Grimes substituted for Dorothy Clutterbuck as leader and moving spirit in the New Forest coven.» — y enuncia la segunda, que el relato de Gardner sea correcto con Edith Woodford-Grimes en lugar de Dorothy Clutterbuck como líder del aquelarre.

«This amendment would eliminate most of the problems in the first version, and indeed the only major one remaining would be the development of the rituals, as analysed above.» — con lo que esa enmienda resolvería y lo que no, porque quedaría en pie el problema del desarrollo de los rituales.

«Gardner initially passed off the whole body to Doreen Valiente as those of the old witch religion.» — documenta que Gardner presentó a Doreen Valiente todo el cuerpo de rituales como los de la vieja religión de las brujas.

«When she spotted that many passages in them derived from other sources, such as Crowley, he answered that the ceremonies of the New Forest coven had been ‘fragmentary’ by the time that he discovered it, and so he was obliged to flesh them out with borrowings from other texts in order to make them viable for revival.» — y la respuesta que le dio cuando ella detectó los préstamos de Crowley: que las ceremonias del aquelarre del New Forest estaban ya fragmentarias y hubo que rellenarlas.

«According to this, Gerald Gardner retired to England in 1936 bursting with energy and determined to find a new, fulfilling, and prominent role for himself in his new, leisured circumstances.» — traza entonces la tercera lectura, con un Gardner que se retira a Inglaterra en 1936 rebosante de energía y decidido a hallarse un papel prominente.

«From 1946 onward he determinedly sought a leading role in ritual magic, acquiring the perfect setting for a working group near London and then approaching England’s leading ritual magician for advice and authorization.» — y su serie de intentos desde 1946, buscando papel dirigente en la magia ritual y acudiendo al mago ritual más destacado de Inglaterra por consejo y autorización.

«Having obtained both, he attempted to revive the OTO in England as a vehicle for his plans, and having failed to do so, turned at once to reviving the ancient religion of pagan witchcraft, as described by Margaret Murray but in a form suited to his own tastes and experience, instead.» — hasta el giro final: fracasado el intento de revivir la OTO, volverse de inmediato a revivir la religión de la brujería pagana descrita por Murray, pero en forma adecuada a su gusto.

«What seems to be established beyond doubt is the central role of Gerald Gardner in developing and propagating the religion, if not in conceiving it (with or without the contributions of others).» — fija lo que él tiene por establecido más allá de toda duda, el papel central de Gardner en desarrollar y propagar la religión, aunque no necesariamente en concebirla.

«All agreed that he was charming, generous, kindly, capable of inspiring great affection, and sometimes curiously naïve and easily hurt.» — y recoge en qué coincidían todos los testimonios sobre su persona, encantador, generoso, bondadoso y a veces curiosamente ingenuo.

«On the other hand, all also agreed that he could be devious, and capable of trickery and dissimulation.» — junto con la otra mitad en que también coincidían todos, que podía ser tortuoso y capaz de artimañas y disimulo.

«He must have thought it possible that he would die at any moment, and this alone would account for the urgency which he brought to the task of ensuring that his religion would survive.» — propone una explicación de su prisa: debía de creer posible morir en cualquier momento, y solo eso explicaría la urgencia por asegurar la supervivencia de su religión.

«In the apt phrase of Frederic Lamond, who joined his principal coven in 1957, he was ‘an old man in a hurry’.» — con la frase certera de Frederic Lamond, un viejo con prisa.

«He announced his religion to the press when only the basic format of its ceremonies and beliefs had been established; Wicca was a tradition that hit the ground running.» — y la consecuencia que le adjudica: anunció su religión a la prensa cuando apenas estaba fijado el formato básico de sus ceremonias y creencias.

«He stated candidly that he found the counter-spells in books, so that he would have been using some of the actual material from the traditional cunning craft.» — Hutton anota lo que Cecil Williamson admitía con franqueza, que sacaba los contraconjuros de los libros, con lo que usaba material del oficio tradicional.

«From the start, such publicity was to prove a two-edged weapon.» — y su tesis sobre la publicidad, que desde el inicio iba a resultar arma de doble filo.

«What journalists took away, however, they also gave, for among the readers of the piece in Illustrated was Doreen Valiente, then thirty years old and possessed of a keen interest in witchcraft and magic.» — con lo que dio a cambio, porque entre los lectores de aquel reportaje estaba Doreen Valiente, entonces de treinta años.

«The two men clearly parted upon bad terms, Gardner subsequently writing Williamson out of his account of his own life, while the latter lost little opportunity to disparage his former partner and diminish his reputation after his death, and also condemned Wicca itself as false witchcraft.» — documenta la ruptura entre Gardner y Williamson, que quedó borrado del relato de Gardner mientras él desacreditaba a su antiguo socio y condenaba a la wicca como brujería falsa.

«The book set out to establish Wicca as a viable religion in its own right, with a lineage reaching back deep into the past and a set of characteristics that were entirely its own and not an imitation or derivation of any other.» — resume el propósito del libro de Gardner, establecer a la wicca como religión viable por derecho propio, con linaje hondo y rasgos enteramente suyos.

«He claimed that he had first encountered its members through ‘spiritualist and other societies’, and was determined to record its characteristics, as an anthropologist, before it died out.» — y la posición de autor que adoptaba, la de un antropólogo decidido a registrar esos rasgos antes de que la religión se extinguiera.

«The problem of its concealed transmission to the present was confronted by representing it as largely a familybased tradition, inculcated into members from a very early age together with oaths of absolute secrecy.» — con la solución que dio al problema de la transmisión oculta, representarla como tradición sobre todo familiar inculcada desde muy temprana edad con juramentos de secreto absoluto.

«This process was called here for the first time in print by the evocative and lovely name of ‘Drawing down the Moon’, a term taken from ancient Greece.» — fecha el primer uso impreso del nombre evocador de Bajar la Luna, tomado de la Grecia antigua.

«In Wicca it had been blended with the modern association of goddess, woman, and moon, to signify the union of human and divine feminine.» — y lo que la wicca le mezcló, la asociación moderna de diosa, mujer y luna, para significar la unión de lo femenino humano y lo divino.

«The former motif is an old one from Welsh and Irish mythology, well known in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions, while the latter was a ritual suggested by Murray as performed at the witches’s sabbat of February Eve, or Candlemas.» — señala la doble procedencia del material de ese rito, un motivo viejo de la mitología galesa e irlandesa y un ritual que Murray suponía celebrado en el sabbat de febrero.

«It told how the goddess of the witches descended into the realm of death, ruled by its god, to understand why the latter caused all things to fade and perish.» — recoge el mito del descenso de la diosa al reino de la muerte para entender por qué su dios hace que todo se marchite.

«Its fundamental premise—that of Levi and the other nineteenth-century ‘high magicians’—was that apparently supernatural abilities such as clairvoyance and prophecy are latent within human beings and can be brought out by training and practice.» — aísla la premisa fundamental de esa magia, la de Lévi y los altos magos del XIX, que las facultades aparentemente sobrenaturales son latentes y se sacan con entrenamiento.

«Witchcraft Today therefore both embodied and justified the continuing eclectic evolution of the ceremonies of Wicca, to which the presence of Doreen Valiente now contributed a powerful creative infusion.» — y el papel que le adjudica a Valiente desde ese punto, una potente infusión creativa en la evolución ecléctica de las ceremonias.

«He played up especially to the belief that the public would respond best to Wicca if it were represented by young, attractive, and charming women.» — no le disimula a Gardner el cálculo: apostaba a que el público respondería mejor a la wicca si la representaban mujeres jóvenes, atractivas y encantadoras.

«As soon as Valiente was initiated, he employed her in similar fashion, representing her to Gerald Yorke as a daughter of one of the traditional pagan witch families about whom he had told the world.» — con el uso concreto que hizo de Valiente, presentándosela a Gerald Yorke como hija de una de las familias paganas tradicionales de las que había hablado al mundo.

«From the start, Gardner not merely encouraged but propelled her to improve rituals; at her first midwinter as an initiated witch, that of 1953, he informed her after lunch that she had to write an invocation for use in the Yule ceremony to be held that evening.» — y el modo en que la empujó a producir, pidiéndole después del almuerzo una invocación para la ceremonia de esa misma noche.

«Her greatest single contribution to Wicca, however, lay in her revision of ‘Leviter veslis’, the words spoken by the invoked goddess which had first been recorded in ‘Ye Bok of ye Art Magical’.» — Hutton sitúa la mayor contribución individual de Valiente a la wicca en su revisión del texto que dice la diosa invocada.

«He invited her to rewrite it, and this she did, keeping the material taken from Leland as more ‘traditional’, and replacing most of the Crowley with words of her own, first in verse and then (following the wishes of her coven) in prose.» — y describe el criterio con que la hizo, conservando lo tomado de Leland por más tradicional y reemplazando casi todo lo de Crowley con palabras propias.

«The result begins with the summons of Leland’s Aradia, to humans to assemble and adore her with secret and joyful rites, receiving freedom, ecstatic joy, and the secrets of magic in return: ‘for behold I am the Mother of all living, and my love is poured out upon the earth’.» — con el resultado, que arranca de la Aradia de Leland convocando a los humanos a reunirse y adorarla con ritos secretos y gozosos.

«She commands a religion of love and pleasure, with a balancing of qualities such as reverence and mirth, and tells worshippers that the true knowledge of her lies within themselves.» — y la doctrina que enuncia, una religión de amor y placer con equilibrio de cualidades y el verdadero conocimiento de la diosa dentro de uno mismo.

«His description of the dead man as a charming charlatan, quoted earlier, at least avoided the tone of pious horror in which Crowley was normally described in print, but still counts as one of the few ungracious acts which Gardner ever committed.» — califica el retrato de Crowley como charlatán encantador de uno de los pocos actos poco gentiles que Gardner haya cometido.

«Much of this emanated from Gardner, but to his credit he was equally insistent that all Wiccan initiates should not merely copy the existing rituals and statements of belief but alter and add to them according to their own tastes and abilities, just as Valiente had done.» — y le acredita lo contrario en otro punto: insistía por igual en que ningún iniciado se limitara a copiar los rituales, sino que los alterara y ampliara según su gusto y capacidad.

«Gardner’s own last Book of Shadows, kept in the Isle of Man after his death and recently added to the Toronto Collection, contains invocations and a wedding ceremony found, in my knowledge, nowhere else.» — consigna qué contiene el último Libro de las Sombras de Gardner, con invocaciones y una ceremonia de boda que, según su propio conocimiento, no aparecen en ningún otro sitio.

«In May 1955, the original platform from which the religion had been announced, The Sunday Pictorial, decided to attract readers by reviving a campaign against modern witchcraft as devil-worship.» — fecha en mayo de 1955 el momento en que el periódico que lanzó la religión revivió una campaña contra la brujería moderna como adoración del diablo.

«Its star witness was a Birmingham woman claiming to have been a former high priestess who seems (to judge both from her tales and from police reactions) to have been deranged.» — con su valoración de la testigo estrella, que a juzgar por sus relatos y por la reacción policial parece haber estado trastornada.

«Valiente and the older members believed that Wicca should make itself as invisible to the mass media as possible, and argue its case through books, over the content of which it had complete control.» — expone la posición de Valiente y los miembros mayores, que la wicca debía volverse lo más invisible posible a los medios masivos y argumentar por libros.

«The tactic advocated by him and Dayonis was to find sympathetic journalists working for mass-circulation newspapers and put their own case through them.» — y la táctica contraria de Bracelin y Dayonis, buscar periodistas simpatizantes de la prensa masiva para exponer su caso.

«Gardner’s policy was to combine both approaches: to work on a book and to talk to the press, and the latter policy drove Valiente’s faction to desperation in 1957.» — con la política de Gardner, combinar ambas, que llevó a la facción de Valiente a la desesperación en 1957.

«Gardner, taking this as mutiny, replied from Castletown with a set of ‘traditional’ ‘Laws of the Craft’ which he held to bind Wiccans instead.» — documenta la réplica de Gardner a las trece reglas propuestas, un conjunto de Leyes del Oficio que él tenía por tradicionales.

«They were written in archaisms which seemed to Valiente to be very clearly artificial, and she suspected them of having been invented for the occasion.» — y la sospecha de Valiente sobre ellas, escritas en arcaísmos que le parecían muy claramente artificiales e inventados para la ocasión.

«It broke, spectacularly, the promise of a fair hearing, for his objective account of the ritual and the interview with Dayonis was larded (probably as an editorial decision) with the now conventional condemnations of all witchcraft as ‘repulsive’ and ‘barbaric’.» — narra cómo el reportaje pactado rompió espectacularmente la promesa de un trato justo, aderezado con las condenas convencionales de toda brujería.

«To the present writer, the most striking aspect of the newspaper reports is the degree of dedication shown by the Wiccans concerned.» — y declara lo que a él, como autor, más le impresiona de esos reportajes: el grado de dedicación que mostraban los wiccanos implicados.

«Upon exposure in January 1959, they were all entirely unrepentant, and prepared for what was, effectively, martyrdom.» — con lo que hicieron al quedar expuestos en enero de 1959, sin arrepentimiento alguno y dispuestos a lo que era de hecho un martirio.

«All night the witches, fifteen strong, had leaped a bonfire and danced about the circle: ‘I wanted to roll over and over like a young animal’.» — Hutton reconstruye el ambiente de la ceremonia de los Rollright Stones con el testimonio de una participante, quince brujas saltando la hoguera y danzando toda la noche.

«who was one of the coven at the time, remembers that he found Gardner himself a kind, friendly, and unassuming old gentleman, and an excellent raconteur with an eye for the absurdities of humanity and a childlike enjoyment of life.» — y el retrato que Frederic Lamond conserva de Gardner, un anciano bondadoso y sin pretensiones, excelente narrador con ojo para lo absurdo de la humanidad.

«He inspired love, but entirely lacked the charisma normally associated with religious leaders.» — con el juicio que a él le importa: Gardner inspiraba cariño pero carecía por completo del carisma que suele asociarse a los líderes religiosos.

«Instead, Lamond felt a power reaching out from the experience of the rituals and magical workings themselves, and from the deities to whom they were dedicated; especially the goddess.» — y de dónde venía en cambio la fuerza que Lamond sentía, de la experiencia misma de los rituales y de las deidades a que estaban dedicados, sobre todo la diosa.

«By this hit-and-miss process, there emerged between 1957 and 1963 a set of remarkable high priestesses independent of both successors to the former Hertfordshire coven.» — señala el resultado de ese proceso de aciertos y errores, un conjunto notable de sumas sacerdotisas surgido entre 1957 y 1963.

«as high priestess of the Hertfordshire coven wrote to him reproachfully in 1962 that he scattered new Wiccan groups across the landscape in the hope that they would turn out well, without real monitoring or support of the results.» — recoge el reproche que una de ellas le hizo por carta en 1962, que sembraba grupos nuevos por el paisaje con la esperanza de que salieran bien, sin seguimiento ni apoyo real.

«None of these details was germane to Greene’s attack on him, and their very irrelevance induces some— though not complete—belief in their truth.» — y una regla de valoración de fuentes que aplica ahí: unos detalles ajenos al ataque que los rodea, cuya irrelevancia misma induce a creerlos, aunque no del todo.

«What these letters also convey, however, is the determination of all the women concerned to carry on their work, and their love and respect for the old man at Castletown.» — lo que además transmiten esas cartas, la determinación de aquellas mujeres de seguir con su trabajo y su cariño y respeto por el viejo de Castletown.

«In his will, preserved at Somerset House, he remembered Jack Bracelin and Dora’s sister, but divided the bulk of his estate between Dayonis’s successor in Hertfordshire, Patricia Crowther, Monique Wilson, and Doreen Valiente.» — consigna lo que dice el testamento de Gardner, conservado en Somerset House, con el grueso de su patrimonio repartido entre cuatro mujeres del oficio.

«Nonetheless, the specific form which condemnation took does demand comment, for it was articulated within a structure which was as much a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Wicca itself.» — y anuncia el argumento del capítulo siguiente: la forma que tomó la condena se articuló en una estructura tan producto de los siglos XIX y XX como la wicca misma.

«In 1908 he was ordained into the Church of England, but his career there was ruined the next year because of a charge of pederasty.» — Hutton fecha en 1908 la ordenación anglicana de Montague Summers y en el año siguiente la ruina de esa carrera por una acusación de pederastia.

«It is possible that at some point thereafter he received illicit orders within it, but he never appeared upon any official list of its clergy.» — y consigna la reserva sobre sus órdenes católicas, que pudo recibirlas de modo ilícito pero que nunca figuró en lista oficial alguna del clero.

«In three works published between 1926 and 1928 he reacted to Margaret Murray by embracing her idea that early modern witches» — describe su respuesta a Margaret Murray, abrazando su idea de que las brujas modernas tempranas formaban una organización.

«To him, however, the witch religion was not paganism but Satanism, a parody and perversion of Christianity dedicated to evil as Christians were to good.» — con la diferencia que lo separa de ella: para Summers esa religión no era paganismo sino satanismo, parodia y perversión del cristianismo consagrada al mal.

«His views made no impact upon academic experts (to whom their faults were and are obvious), but they had greater success with the general public;» — y la asimetría de su recepción, sin impacto en los expertos académicos, a quienes sus fallas eran y son obvias, y con mayor éxito ante el público general.

«To those who ignored her advice and yet retained a commitment to Christianity, the temptation to place their work in the context of a supernatural battle between good and evil was often irresistible.» — señala la tentación que su esquema abría a quienes conservaban un compromiso cristiano, situar el trabajo en una batalla sobrenatural entre el bien y el mal.

«He wrote articles for The Occult Review taking note of the undoubted propensity of some cunning folk to accept money for laying curses, and declaring that ‘this must be done in the Devil’s name’.» — documenta la lectura de un autor que tomaba la propensión real de algunos cunning folk a cobrar por maldecir y la volvía obra en nombre del Diablo.

«by suggesting that the witches accused in the early modern trials had been Satanists, and added a theory that they had accomplished their evil deeds by projecting their bodies onto the astral plane.» — y la teoría añadida de que aquellas brujas cumplían sus fechorías proyectando sus cuerpos al plano astral.

«which articulated a theory that Druidry had been the ancient faith of the British Isles, a wise and benevolent religion anticipating that of Christ, and that witches had perverted its power to the service of the Evil One, to harm and dominate fellow humans.» — recoge el esquema que hacía de la druidería la fe antigua de las islas británicas, sabia y benévola, cuya potencia las brujas habrían pervertido al servicio del Maligno.

«Members of the world of early twentieth-century British occultism who rejected Christianity could be just as concerned with the dangers from malevolent magical forces.» — y precisa que no era cosa solo de cristianos: quienes en el ocultismo británico rechazaban el cristianismo podían inquietarse igual por las fuerzas mágicas malévolas.

«He regarded their sabbats as having been real events in history, and claimed in old age to have once ridden upon a London bus with a ghostly assemblage of them, all bound for one.» — con el caso de Austin Spare, que tenía los sabbats por sucesos reales de la historia y decía en su vejez haber viajado en un autobús londinense con una asamblea fantasmal de brujas.

«It was but a short step from them to the notion that such groups actually existed in contemporary Britain.» — y el paso corto que quedaba de ahí a suponer que tales grupos existían en la Gran Bretaña contemporánea.

«During the 1890s the country was swept by assertions, given very prominent publicity, that Satanists were at work there, and growing rapidly in power and numbers.» — documenta el pánico francés de la década de 1890, con afirmaciones muy publicitadas de que los satanistas trabajaban ahí y crecían en poder y número.

«Upon investigation, the tales turned out to be baseless, and the key witness a self-promoting prankster; but their exposure was not made apparent to all of those who had read the original allegations; and the concept of the Black Mass entered the modern consciousness— both in France and far outside it—as the most striking single image of Satanism at work.» — Hutton consigna el desenlace del pánico francés y su resto: los relatos resultaron infundados y el testigo clave un bromista, pero el desmentido no llegó a todos los que leyeron las acusaciones.

«The catalyst to it was probably a book by the American Theda Kenyon, which has been mentioned before: Witches Still Live (1929).» — sitúa el catalizador británico, con la reserva puesta, probablemente en un libro de la estadounidense Theda Kenyon de 1929.

«It linked Margaret Murray’s witch religion, cunning craft, Satanism, and tribal animist beliefs under the labels of ‘witchcraft’ and ‘the Black Art’, to declare that ‘more than half of the people on earth today were dominated by the evil ‘Power’ which lay behind these phenomena.» — y lo que ese libro amalgamaba bajo una sola etiqueta, la religión de brujas de Murray, el oficio popular, el satanismo y las creencias animistas tribales.

«The same theme was taken up, and localized in England, by Elliott O’Donnell, a writer of ghost stories who was also possessed by a passionate enmity towards spiritualism, which he regarded as false religion and a trafficking with dangerous entities.» — sigue el mismo tema localizado en Inglaterra por Elliott O'Donnell, autor de cuentos de fantasmas y enemigo apasionado del espiritismo.

«It is impossible to say how accurate O’Donnell’s sources of information were, as he always wrote in the style of a sensational novelist.» — con su reserva sobre esas fuentes: es imposible decir cuán exactas eran, porque siempre escribía al estilo de un novelista sensacionalista.

«Most of what he reported was clearly hearsay, although he included—honestly or not—a few declared firsthand experiences.» — y la proporción que sí puede señalarse, que casi todo lo reportado era claramente de oídas.

«A major motif of the book was racism—readers were warned against the contamination of Britain by the foul practices of Africans, Orientals, and Southern Europeans.» — aísla el motivo racista mayor del libro, con lectores advertidos contra la contaminación de Gran Bretaña por prácticas de africanos, orientales y europeos del sur.

«It seems hard to take seriously his insistence that the long-extirpated cult of thuggi had been revived and brought from India to London, where its practitioners were regularly murdering sacrificial victims without the police ever noticing; nor that ‘the Black Magic Cult’ was engaging in vampirism.» — y marca lo que a él le cuesta tomar en serio, un culto de thugs revivido y trasladado a Londres que asesinaba víctimas sin que la policía lo notara.

«It is strange that contemporaries of his with much longer and broader experience of international occultism, such as Crowley, Fortune, Gardner, or Brodie-Innes, should never have noticed anything as lurid as this going on.» — con el argumento de silencio que le opone: es extraño que contemporáneos de experiencia mucho más larga en el ocultismo internacional nunca notaran nada tan escabroso.

«It is also interesting to note in passing that in none of these alleged catalogues of cults and societies was there anything resembling Wicca.» — y una búsqueda negativa que le interesa de paso: en ninguno de esos catálogos de cultos había nada que se pareciera a la wicca.

«Fabian was deploying his professional reputation most unscrupulously—for his actual examples did not suffice to support his sweeping assertions—to ensure the continued persecution of a form of sexuality against which he had a vehement personal animosity.» — objeta el uso que el excomisario Fabian hizo de su reputación profesional, sin escrúpulos y sin ejemplos que bastaran para sostener sus afirmaciones tajantes.

«The rest of the chapter was strikingly at variance with the rest of the two books, for it contained not a single actual case.» — señalando lo que separa ese capítulo del resto de sus libros, que no contenía un solo caso real.

«He noted that no evidence had been found upon which any prosecution could be based, and attributed this to the fact that the woman had been ‘willed’ to forget everything that had been done to her.» — y cómo explicaba la falta de evidencia, atribuyéndola a que a la mujer se la había hecho olvidar por voluntad ajena todo lo que le hicieron.

«It remains an open question whether Fabian’s amazing distortion of it was produced by an actual group of London Satanists, by the prurient imagination of an unknown informant, or by his own.» — deja abierta expresamente la pregunta por su fuente, si la distorsión del rito de Abramelin la produjo un grupo real, un informante desconocido o él mismo.

«He was, in fact, as narrow-minded a bigot in matters of spirituality as he was in those of sexuality, and glossed both with the prestige of his former professional standing.» — con su dictamen sobre el personaje, tan cerrado en materia de espiritualidad como en la de sexualidad, y glosando ambas con el prestigio de su antiguo rango.

«Both had inherited fortunes based upon the drink trade—the former in wine, the latter in beer—and then lost them, although, whereas Crowley simply spent his, Wheatley was ruined by the Great Depression.» — Hutton alinea los paralelos entre Crowley y Wheatley, empezando por fortunas heredadas del comercio de bebidas que ambos perdieron.

«Both combined a strong political conservatism with an ethic of sexual libertinism.» — y por combinar los dos un fuerte conservadurismo político con una ética de libertinaje sexual.

«This was, in fact, the principal distinction between Crowley and Wheatley; that whereas the former made magic(k) his life’s work and had only reasonable talent as a writer, the latter saw the world primarily as a source of ideas for his novels, and was a brilliant author of popular fiction.» — con la distinción principal que sí traza: Crowley hizo de la magia su obra de vida y era escritor de talento apenas razonable, y Wheatley veía el mundo sobre todo como cantera de ideas para novelas.

«On the other hand, the confidence with which he wrote of these matters somehow vested him with the authority of an expert in them, not merely as a genre of fiction but in ‘real’ life.» — y el efecto de esa confianza al escribir, que lo revestía de la autoridad de un experto no solo en el género sino en la vida real.

«It seems very likely that Crowley’s gift, mentioned above, first propelled him towards an interest in ritual magic, but once he had begun research for a novel which treated the subject, his most valuable informant was Rollo Ahmed, who fed him the sort of sensational material which was to appear in Ahmed’s own work.» — propone con el adverbio dentro que el regalo de Crowley probablemente lo impulsó hacia la magia ritual, y nombra a su informante más valioso, Rollo Ahmed.

«The partnership between the two men was of great mutual benefit, for Ahmed gave Wheatley information, and Wheatley got Ahmed his publishing contract for The Black Art, the ‘non-fictional’ accompaniment to The Devil Rides Out.» — describe el beneficio mutuo de esa sociedad, con Ahmed dándole información y Wheatley consiguiéndole el contrato editorial.

«It declared that the former’s joyous Old Religion had been abandoned by ‘decent’ people during the sixteenth century as Europe became more thoroughly Christianized, and left to society’s baser elements, which perverted it into Satanism and so justified its suppression and the execution of its adherents.» — resume la doctrina histórica que esos libros difundían, una Vieja Religión gozosa abandonada por la gente decente en el XVI y pervertida en satanismo por los elementos más bajos.

«His commitment to democracy was limited, his belief being that each person should have one vote, but that those of wealth and social standing should have extra, to deprive the masses of decisive power.» — consigna el límite que Wheatley le ponía a la democracia, un voto por persona más votos extra para los de riqueza y posición.

«He openly admired the fascist regimes of the Continent, and to the end of his days praised not merely Franco but Mussolini, as having done a splendid job ‘of cleaning up’ their countries.» — y su admiración abierta por los regímenes fascistas del continente, con elogios hasta el final para Franco y Mussolini.

«He never accepted any responsibility on the part of the rich to assist the poor, and bitterly resented having to pay income tax, complaints against which are scattered through his fictional works.» — señala que nunca aceptó responsabilidad alguna de los ricos hacia los pobres y que resentía amargamente pagar impuestos.

«His theology instead embodied his instinctual view of the universe, as a battleground for two mighty, independent, and opposed forces of good and evil.» — describe la teología que sostenía sus tramas, el universo como campo de batalla de dos fuerzas poderosas, independientes y opuestas.

«Thus Wheatley could utilize Christian language and symbolism without accepting its beliefsystem, for it did not matter to him that its claims were literally false, because its intentions were good and it acted in practice as a force for stability and order in the modern world, especially in the great fight against Communism.» — y cómo eso le permitía usar lenguaje y símbolos cristianos sin aceptar su sistema de creencias, porque le daba igual que sus afirmaciones fueran literalmente falsas.

«His detestation of Russians, however, only increased with time, until by the late 1940s (with the fall of Eastern Europe to Communism) he regarded all Slavs as inherently treacherous and debased human beings.» — documenta el endurecimiento de su odio a los rusos, hasta tener a todos los eslavos por seres inherentemente traicioneros y degradados.

«Through all his books Wheatley preached that sexual intercourse, both inside and outside marriage, was a healthy and desirable activity for both sexes.» — y el otro costado de su prédica, con el coito dentro y fuera del matrimonio presentado como actividad sana y deseable para ambos sexos.

«There seems little doubt that the ebullient eroticism of passages in most of his novels contributed greatly to their popularity.» — con su lectura del efecto comercial, que el erotismo desbordante de sus novelas contribuyó mucho a su popularidad.

«Reading such scenes, it is worth emphasizing not merely that Wheatley was a wildly popular author but that he was a respectable one, his devotees including King George VI.» — Hutton subraya que Wheatley no solo era autor de éxito desbordante sino respetable, con el rey Jorge VI entre sus devotos.

«His attitude to sexuality was an exact parallel to his attitude to economics: that the world should be a free market with no barriers to a talented, ruthless, and enterprising male.» — y traza el paralelo entre su ética sexual y su economía, un mundo de mercado libre sin barreras para el varón talentoso, despiadado y emprendedor.

«Wheatley’s portrait of Satanism was of a highly organized international conspiracy to subvert the Western world, in alliance with Communism, modern music and art, and ‘progressive’ education.» — describe su retrato del satanismo como conspiración internacional altamente organizada, aliada al comunismo, la música y el arte modernos y la educación progresista.

«Wheatley also, however, incorporated into it the degree system of the Golden Dawn, as laid out for him in Crowley’s book, and associated Satanism with witches in general, tribal animist religions, cunning craft, and ancient paganism, as if they were all parts of the same spiritual system, dedicated to the Devil.» — y la amalgama que le añadía, con el sistema de grados de la Golden Dawn y las brujas, el animismo tribal, el oficio popular y el paganismo antiguo puestos como partes de un mismo sistema.

«As Wicca became publicized in the 1950s, he simply added features of it to his portrait of that system, and his 1971 history of witchcraft warned people away from modern covens on the grounds that members would become ‘pawns of the Power of Darkness’.» — con lo que hizo al publicitarse la wicca en los cincuenta, sumarle sus rasgos a ese retrato y advertir a la gente contra los aquelarres modernos.

«Although this was wholly in the modern tradition of romantic fiction, it also reflected his personal beliefs, for he fully credited the potency of premonition, hypnotism, faith-healing, and telepathy, believing them to be scientific techniques as yet imperfectly understood.» — y una precisión sobre sus creencias personales, que acreditaba la potencia de la premonición, el hipnotismo, la curación por la fe y la telepatía como técnicas científicas mal entendidas.

«The onslaught which developed in the 1950s, however, was novel in its intensity, and in the broadness of its targets.» — sitúa lo que hubo de nuevo en la embestida de los años cincuenta, su intensidad y la amplitud de sus blancos.

«Journalists working for those newspapers went to considerable lengths to gain condemnations of witchcraft and magic from the established Church, but it is noteworthy that the response was very muted;» — y consigna un resultado que le parece digno de nota: los periodistas se esforzaron por obtener condenas de la Iglesia establecida y la respuesta fue muy apagada.

«one bishop (of Exeter) obliged, but otherwise the only fulminations were provided by a few scattered parish clergy—repeatedly quoted—who had an existing animosity against spiritualism.» — con el detalle preciso, un obispo que accedió y por lo demás solo unos clérigos parroquiales dispersos y repetidamente citados.

«These were discerned by one of England’s most prominent occultists, Madeline Montalban, who suggested in the November 1956 issue of Prediction magazine that by focusing upon images of devil-worship, journalists would instruct the public in them and so produce the very phenomenon against which they claimed to be warning.» — recoge la advertencia de la ocultista Madeline Montalban en 1956, que al enfocarse en imágenes de adoración diabólica los periodistas instruirían al público y producirían el fenómeno mismo.

«This seems, to a limited extent, to be what actually occurred.» — y su valoración, medida: eso parece ser, en medida limitada, lo que efectivamente ocurrió.

«One feature of Satanism which the scare-stories emphasized was the desecration of Christian images and monuments, and the series of articles by Hawkins in the summer of 1955 was followed directly by a series of attacks upon graveyard memorials, the most vulnerable kind of such monument.» — con la secuencia documentada, una serie de artículos seguida directamente por ataques a monumentos funerarios.

«None of those responsible for these acts was ever apprehended or confessed to them, and so it remains entirely unclear as to whether they were the work of groups of magicians working Satanic rituals (as the press commonly suggested), or of people having destructive nights of fun within a symbolic framework suggested by the press itself;» — declarando qué queda sin aclarar: nadie fue detenido ni confesó, así que no está claro si eran magos en ritual satánico o gente divirtiéndose en un marco simbólico sugerido por la prensa.

«My own late childhood and adolescence was spent in the Chigwell area of Essex, referred to above, and I can state categorically that by the mid-1960s it had become a tradition for the roughest of the local lads to amuse themselves by counterfeiting devil-worship in order to shock and frighten respectable neighbours;» — y aporta su propio testimonio de adolescencia en Essex, donde para mediados de los sesenta era ya tradición que los muchachos más bravos fingieran adoración diabólica para asustar a los vecinos.

«Meanwhile, not a scrap of decisive evidence has emerged since to confirm the presence of actual working groups of Satanists in Britain during the first six decades of the twentieth century.» — con la búsqueda negativa que cierra el punto: no ha aparecido desde entonces ni un ápice de evidencia decisiva de grupos satanistas operando en Gran Bretaña en las seis primeras décadas del siglo XX.

«In interview after interview, Gerald Gardner drove home the point that his sort of witchcraft was not merely a symbolic system of honouring the natural world and venerating certain deities; it was an effective system of magical operation.» — y el lado que la propia wicca aportaba, con Gardner insistiendo entrevista tras entrevista en que su brujería era un sistema eficaz de operación mágica.

«It attends them, indeed, right up to the present; in a book published in 1987, a prolific and long-established writer upon occult subjects, Colin Wilson, reasserted both the efficacy of magic and the reality of the spirit world, with the suggestion that modern society might be improved by an acknowledgement of both.» — Hutton sigue esa expectativa hasta el presente, con Colin Wilson reafirmando en 1987 la eficacia de la magia y la realidad del mundo de los espíritus.

«The glaring question which he then ignored was whether, in that case, they had deserved their fate.» — y le devuelve la pregunta que Wilson dejó de lado, si en ese caso los ejecutados en los procesos de 1590 habrían merecido su suerte.

«These encounters are absolutely typical of many that I have had over the years. They have convinced me that there is a significant minority of people within British society (and doubtless in many—probably all— others) who regularly see, hear, or feel phenomena which most others do not perceive to be present, but which are very real to them.» — declara a qué lo han llevado sus propios encuentros: a convencerse de que hay una minoría significativa de la sociedad británica que ve, oye o siente fenómenos que los demás no perciben.

«The latter seems to be most common among women, though by no means exclusive to them, and is often passed down through families.» — con la distribución que observa, más común entre mujeres aunque en modo alguno exclusiva de ellas, y a menudo transmitida en familias.

«Let no readers of these paragraphs feel that their personal belief systems are being challenged; the experiences concerned may be the product of chemicals in the brain, or» — y una salvaguarda expresa al lector, que ningún sistema personal de creencias queda desafiado por esos párrafos.

«The only limitation that I myself would place upon interpretation of them is that the empirical evidence causes me to reject the notions that they are caused by mere overactive imaginations, or by general mental imbalance.» — fijando el único límite que él pone a la interpretación, rechazar que se deban a imaginación desbordada o a desequilibrio mental general.

«Sir Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, argued vehemently against a literal belief in such entities; but he did not deny that humans often appeared to see or hear them.» — recuerda que Walter Scott argumentó con vehemencia contra la creencia literal en esas entidades sin negar que los humanos parecieran verlas u oírlas.

«He suggested instead that an improved understanding of the natural world would eventually yield a scientifically viable explanation for such phenomena.» — y la salida que Scott proponía, que un mejor entendimiento del mundo natural acabaría dando una explicación científicamente viable.

«Almost two hundred years have passed since his time, and yet that explanation has not been achieved; instead, the tendency has been to ignore or deride such experiences, leaving those who undergo them to come to terms with them within private frames of reference, and greater or lesser degrees of ease and comfort according to their circumstances.» — con el balance a dos siglos: esa explicación no se ha logrado, y la tendencia ha sido ignorar o burlar tales experiencias.

«Since the mid-twentieth century, two different models of hostility to pagan witchcraft have operated within British culture, blending with each other at the edges.» — distingue dos modelos de hostilidad a la brujería pagana operando en la cultura británica desde mediados del siglo XX.

«In one, there are no supernatural or uncanny forces involved at all, and what is at stake is the presumed existence of Satanist groups which indulge in practices which threaten the moral or physical safety of the wider society about them and so should be exposed and suppressed upon purely rational and objective grounds.» — el primero sin fuerza sobrenatural alguna, con grupos satanistas que amenazan la seguridad moral o física y deben ser expuestos por razones puramente racionales.

«The other model adopts all the physical structure of the first but accepts in addition the notion that the devil-worshippers concerned are in reality working in contact with effective supernatural powers.» — y el segundo, que adopta toda la estructura del primero y le añade que esos adoradores del diablo trabajan en contacto con poderes sobrenaturales efectivos.

«When I have informed such people of my research, far and away the most frequent question which they ask of modern witches is not ‘From what social and economic groups are they drawn?’ or ‘What motivates them to take up such a spirituality?’ or ‘How does their religion compare and contrast with others?’ or even ‘What do they believe?’ It is, again and again, ‘Do their spells really work?’» — aporta el dato que él mismo ha recogido una y otra vez, que la pregunta más frecuente sobre las brujas modernas no es qué creen sino si sus hechizos funcionan de verdad.

«The most important single argument of this book, however, is that this witchcraft was the result of a particular combination of major cultural trends which had developed in that society since 1800; and that during the twentieth century most of these trends were still in force.» — enuncia el argumento individual más importante de todo el libro, que esa brujería resultó de una combinación particular de tendencias culturales mayores desarrolladas desde 1800.

«It was her most imaginative and least plausible work, and won no acceptance in the world of professional scholarship; but it was presumably believed by at least some of the general public.» — sobre el último libro de Murray dice que fue su obra más imaginativa y menos plausible, sin aceptación en el mundo académico y presumiblemente creída por parte del público.

«journalists had become so habituated to the Murray thesis that they treated Robbins’s views as a sensational, and dubious, piece of revisionism.» — y consigna la inversión de la carga: los periodistas estaban tan habituados a la tesis de Murray que trataron las críticas de Robbins como revisionismo sensacional y dudoso.

«Shah claimed that Murray’s witch religion, and the Wicca derived from it, had originated not in native paganism but as a secret society which had spread from Moorish Spain in the early Middle Ages and was itself rooted in the Berber culture of North Africa.» — Hutton recoge la variante de Idries Shah, que hacía de esa religión no un paganismo nativo sino una sociedad secreta llegada de la España mora y arraigada en la cultura bereber.

«He was clearly unaware of the literary provenance of both items, and no linguist has endorsed his idea; but it is still sometimes repeated among Wiccans.» — y una objeción de procedencia: aquel autor ignoraba el origen literario de las dos piezas y ningún lingüista ha avalado su idea, que aun así a veces se repite entre wiccanos.

«There are two very odd things about this anecdote.» — califica de muy extrañas dos cosas de una anécdota clave, y ahí empieza a desarmarla.

«One is that Webb, a confident and self-assertive scholar, does not record this startling piece of information in any of his own writings, including his magnum opus, Architecture in Britain: The Middle Ages (1956).» — la primera, que el erudito citado no registre ese dato asombroso en ninguno de sus propios escritos, ni siquiera en su obra mayor.

«The other, and more fundamental, is that as any historian of the Reformation knows, all medieval altars standing in English churches were, without exception, smashed up and removed in the reign of the Protestant king Edward VI.» — y la segunda, más fundamental, que como sabe cualquier historiador de la Reforma todos los altares medievales de las iglesias inglesas fueron destruidos sin excepción bajo Eduardo VI.

«He suggested that the latter was later Christianized as SS Michael and Andrew, enabling him to identify all medieval churches with those dedications as former pagan shrines to the sun.» — expone la operación de Lethbridge, que cristianizando a su deidad solar podía identificar como antiguos santuarios paganos todas las iglesias medievales con esas advocaciones.

«It is possible that the distortion was the result of the Protestant Reformation, bitterly hostile to anchorites and anchoresses, as it was to monks and friars.» — y ofrece su propia alternativa con el condicional puesto, que la distorsión sea resultado de la Reforma protestante, hostil a anacoretas como a monjes y frailes.

«Lethbridge took up this identification, as if it were proven fact, and gave considerable prominence to Black Annis as one of the most striking English personifications of the Great Goddess in her crone aspect.» — señalando que Lethbridge tomó esa identificación como si fuera hecho probado y le dio gran relieve a Black Annis.

«All these writers were either working outside academe or—in Lethbridge’s case—in self-imposed exile from it.» — y ubica a todos esos autores fuera de la academia, o en el caso de Lethbridge en exilio autoimpuesto de ella.

«In 1962 a Canadian scholar, Elliott Rose, complained that ‘the Murrayites seem to hold…an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels.» — recoge la queja de Elliott Rose en 1962, que los murrayanos parecían ejercer un dominio casi indisputado en los niveles intelectuales altos.

«In England there was no really significant scholarly publication upon the early modem witch trials in the twentieth century until Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay in 1967; and in the gap Margaret Murray’s ideas found several powerful supporters.» — y explica el hueco que lo permitía, la falta de publicación erudita realmente significativa sobre los procesos ingleses hasta el ensayo de Trevor-Roper en 1967.

«The endorsement of them by Sir George Clark and Trevor Davies has been mentioned earlier, and the former’s textbook was one of the most heavily used by schools and universities during the 1950s and 1960s.» — con el peso institucional que la tesis alcanzó, en el manual de Sir George Clark, de los más usados en escuelas y universidades en los cincuenta y sesenta.

«Even in America, however, absolute scepticism regarding that thesis was rocked at the end of the 1960s as word spread of the work of a young Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg.» — fecha a fines de los sesenta el remezón que el trabajo de Carlo Ginzburg produjo incluso en el escepticismo estadounidense.

«Jeffrey Burton Russell declared that ‘no firmer bit of evidence has ever been presented that witchcraft existed’, and included this statement in a book which broke ranks with the sceptical tradition to argue that Murray’s witch cult had been a sect of lapsed Christians who had combined heresy with memories of ancient fertility rites.» — y las lecturas que ese trabajo suscitó, con Jeffrey Burton Russell declarando que nunca se había presentado evidencia más firme de que la brujería existió.

«Erik Midelfort stated more cautiously that the benandanti ‘remain to date the only authentic witch cult in early modern Europe’.» — junto a la formulación más cauta de Erik Midelfort, que dejaba a los benandanti como el único culto de brujas auténtico de la Europa moderna temprana.

«Carlo Ginzburg himself indignantly disowned these views, with the categorical statement that his work left the existence of ‘real’ early modern witch organizations an open question.» — y el desmentido del propio Ginzburg, que rechazó con indignación esas lecturas y declaró de modo categórico que su obra dejaba la cuestión abierta.

«In his preface of 1983, Ginzburg asserted unequivocally that there had been a ‘kernel of truth’ in the Murray thesis.» — Hutton consigna que en su prefacio de 1983 Ginzburg afirmó sin equívocos que había habido un núcleo de verdad en la tesis de Murray.

«It may, however, be suggested that he had not even proved the first point, because dreams do not self-evidently constitute rituals, and shared dream-imagery does not self-evidently amount to a ‘cult’.» — y le opone su objeción, formulada como sugerencia: ni siquiera el primer punto quedaría establecido, porque los sueños no constituyen de suyo rituales ni una imaginería onírica compartida equivale a un culto.

«Ginzburg’s assumption was that what was being dreamed about in the sixteenth century had in fact been acted out in religious ceremonies, themselves descended from pagan times, at an earlier date.» — aísla el supuesto que sostiene el argumento, que lo soñado en el siglo XVI se había representado antes en ceremonias religiosas descendientes de tiempos paganos.

«It was wholly in harmony with the methods of The Golden Bough that Ginzburg found a belief recorded in early modern Friuli, and a similar one in Livonia at about the same time, and concluded it to be ‘obvious’ that both were the sole survivors of a ‘single agrarian cult’ which was once found across the whole expanse of Europe between.» — y sitúa el método en su linaje: es enteramente armónico con La rama dorada hallar una creencia en Friuli y otra parecida en Livonia y concluir que ambas son restos de un único culto agrario.

«It must be restated that Carlo Ginzburg’s early work represented an important and enduring contribution to the study of history; but this single aspect of it—his claim to have vindicated part of the Murray thesis—rests upon imperfect foundations.» — reitera el reconocimiento antes de la objeción: la obra temprana de Ginzburg fue una contribución importante y duradera, y solo ese aspecto descansa en cimientos imperfectos.

«In the short term it had the effect of shaking scepticism regarding the thesis among some of those who had formerly rejected it.» — con su efecto de corto plazo, sacudir el escepticismo sobre la tesis entre algunos de quienes antes la rechazaban.

«The development of this notion was the subject of the second chapter of the present work, which noted that the apparent discovery of a figurine of a goddess in 1939 at Grimes Graves, Norfolk, provided the objective evidence—previously lacking— for the veneration of such a deity in Britain.» — recuerda el papel que la figurilla de Grimes Graves jugó en 1939, aportando la evidencia objetiva que antes faltaba para la veneración de esa deidad en Britania.

«In 1940 and 1945, respectively, they published textbooks in which they suggested that the megalith builders of Western Europe had been converted to the religion of the Great Goddess of fertility, by missionaries moving through the Mediterranean from the old centre of her cult in the Balkans and Levant.» — y el esquema que los Hawkes publicaron en 1940 y 1945, con constructores de megalitos convertidos por misioneros de la Gran Diosa venidos del Levante.

«By 1951 she had developed a view of the Neolithic which she was to elaborate far into the 1960s—essentially that of Jane Harrison and Harold Massingham, with some input (explicitly acknowledged) from Robert Graves.» — describe la visión del neolítico que Jacquetta Hawkes desarrolló desde 1951, esencialmente la de Jane Harrison y Massingham con aporte explícito de Graves.

«Like theirs, her New Stone Agers were woman-centred, peaceful, creative, and living in harmony with Nature, worshipped as a single goddess.» — con sus habitantes centrados en la mujer, pacíficos, creativos y en armonía con la Naturaleza adorada como diosa única.

«Hawkes’s personal contribution to this vision was to identify the invaders with the Indo-Europeans, and to make the Beaker People their Western manifestation.» — y la contribución personal de ella, identificar a los invasores con los indoeuropeos y hacer del pueblo de los vasos campaniformes su manifestación occidental.

«One of these was the one which had most clearly united and propelled previous exponents of the notion of a universal prehistoric goddess; a hatred and fear of modern industrial and urban civilization.» — señala el motor que también aquí opera, el odio y el miedo a la civilización industrial y urbana moderna.

«Hawkes was a cleansing of the soul; notwithstanding which, she herself lived in London’s plushest suburb—Hampstead—throughout her most productive literary period.» — con la ironía biográfica que anota: pese a ello, ella vivió en el suburbio más elegante de Londres durante su período más productivo.

«The quantity of actual archaeological and historical information conveyed here is minimal; what this passage is mostly about is Jacquetta Hawkes herself.» — y su lectura de la prosa de esos libros, donde la información arqueológica e histórica es mínima y el asunto es sobre todo la propia autora.

«Whether or not there ever was an Age of the Goddess in Neolithic Europe, there certainly was one among European intellectuals between 1951 and 1963.» — cierra el punto con una fórmula que separa lo que no puede saber de lo que sí: hubo o no una Edad de la Diosa en el neolítico europeo, pero ciertamente la hubo entre los intelectuales europeos entre 1951 y 1963.

«During the mid-1950s three giants of British archaeology, Gordon Childe, O. G. S. Crawford, and Glyn Daniel, declared their belief in the veneration of a single female deity by New Stone Age cultures from the Atlantic littoral to the Near East.» — con los tres nombres que lo sostienen, Gordon Childe, O. G. S. Crawford y Glyn Daniel declarando su creencia a mediados de los cincuenta.

«Childe was the most tentative, and Crawford the most enthusiastic, being converted to the notion in 1953 and subsequently devoting a large and euphoric book to it.» — y la gradación entre ellos, Childe el más tentativo y Crawford el más entusiasta, convertido en 1953 y autor de un libro grande y eufórico sobre el asunto.

«It seems to have been Gertrude Levy, a theorist concerning the development of religion, who first cautiously suggested that a (selective) argument from statuary and shapes of temples might be used to support the suggestion that the Great Goddess was worshipped there.» — Hutton atribuye a Gertrude Levy la primera sugerencia, y cauta, de usar un argumento selectivo de estatuaria y formas de templo para sostener el culto a la Gran Diosa.

«Jung, in view of his famous theory of archetypes, was surprisingly offhand when dealing with that of the goddess.» — señala lo inesperado en Jung, que pese a su teoría de los arquetipos trató el de la diosa de modo sorprendentemente displicente.

«Declaring that the essential archetype was that of the mother, he saw the deity as merely one derivation from it, and not of immediate concern to psychologists because the modern world rarely worshipped goddesses;» — con la razón que Jung daba, que el arquetipo esencial era el de la madre y la deidad solo una derivación sin interés inmediato para el psicólogo.

«It was left to his devoted disciple Erich Neumann to argue in 1963 that the evidence for the universal goddess indicated that the archetype of the Great Mother had been a constant ‘inward image at work in the human psyche’.» — y quién sí desarrolló el argumento, su discípulo Erich Neumann, que en 1963 hizo de la Gran Madre una imagen interior constante en la psique humana.

«in turn inspired Jacquetta Hawkes to declare that indepth psychology had proved that such an image was natural to human beings, and so provided the final evidence of its importance in prehistory.» — con el circuito que se cierra: eso inspiró a Jacquetta Hawkes a declarar que la psicología profunda daba la evidencia final de la importancia de esa imagen en la prehistoria.

«Belief in the Neolithic Goddess had achieved the kind of apogee that comes before a fall.» — y su diagnóstico del momento, un apogeo de los que preceden a una caída.

«In 1962 a young archaeologist, Peter Ucko, published an essay questioning the interpretation of the Near Eastern figurines as images of a single female deity, and so rocked the foundations of the whole structure of theory.» — fecha en 1962 el ensayo de Peter Ucko que cuestionó la interpretación de las figurillas del Cercano Oriente y sacudió los cimientos del edificio teórico.

«Even Piggott had briefly been carried away by the rush in the 1950s to accept that it venerated a goddess, but after Ucko’s work he felt able to attack the whole idea.» — con el efecto sobre Stuart Piggott, arrastrado brevemente por la ola de los cincuenta y capaz después de atacar la idea entera.

«who uncoupled the chain of reasoning which had supported the notion of the goddess at the other end, by challenging the idea that the Western European megaliths could definitely be associated with such a cult.» — y el otro extremo de la cadena, desenganchado al cuestionarse que los megalitos de Europa occidental pudieran asociarse con certeza a ese culto.

«The effect upon professional prehistorians was to make most return, quietly and without controversy, to that careful agnosticism as to the nature of ancient religion which most had preserved until the 1940s.» — señala el efecto en el gremio: la mayoría volvió en silencio y sin polémica al agnosticismo cuidadoso sobre la religión antigua que había sostenido hasta los cuarenta.

«had been no disproof of the veneration of a Great Goddess, only a demonstration that the evidence concerned admitted of alternative explanations.» — y precisa exactamente qué se había logrado y qué no, porque no hubo refutación del culto a una Gran Diosa sino una muestra de que esa evidencia admite explicaciones alternativas.

«Margaret Murray sent Ucko a furious letter, informing him that he had no right to speak about the Goddess, because he was, first, young, and, second, a man;» — documenta la reacción de Margaret Murray, que escribió a Ucko para decirle que no tenía derecho a hablar de la Diosa por ser joven y por ser hombre.

«Jacquetta Hawkes referred to his work irritably in a condemnation of the whole of the so-called ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s, but was later content to declare that as the worship of the goddess had not actually been disproved, she continued to believe in it as a personal opinion.» — y la de Jacquetta Hawkes, que acabó contentándose con decir que, no habiendo quedado refutado el culto, seguía creyendo en él como opinión personal.

«must be emphasized is that the change of view occurred within an increasingly professional world of academic prehistory but had still not reached many members of the general public even by the 1990s.» — subraya el desfase que le interesa: el cambio de postura ocurrió en un mundo académico cada vez más profesional y aún no había llegado a mucho público ni en los noventa.

«He did not reject the arguments against it: he was simply unaware of them and assumed that he was stating the scholarly orthodoxy.» — con la precisión sobre uno de esos autores, que no rechazaba los argumentos en contra sino que los ignoraba y creía estar exponiendo la ortodoxia erudita.

«One was a rationalism which caused him to reject any magical explanations of phenomena and to manipulate his data determinedly to find a ‘real’, ‘scientific’ motivation for popular actions and beliefs.» — sobre el folclorista George Ewart Evans aísla su primer prejuicio, un racionalismo que lo llevaba a manipular sus datos hasta hallar una motivación científica de las creencias populares.

«Another prejudice was atheism, to which he had turned when rejecting his Welsh Baptist upbringing, and which caused him to mete out the same treatment of suppression or reinterpretation when he encountered Christian elements in popular culture.» — y el segundo, un ateísmo que le hacía suprimir o reinterpretar del mismo modo los elementos cristianos de la cultura popular.

«He did write a great deal about the past, but relied for this upon an application to his material of the ideas of Margaret Murray, Tom Lethbridge, Sir James Frazer, and Robert Graves; for Graves, indeed, he acquired an admiration close to hero-worship, and corresponded with him for many years.» — Hutton nombra las fuentes de las que Evans dependía para el pasado, Murray, Lethbridge, Frazer y Graves, por quien llegó a sentir una admiración cercana al culto al héroe.

«In order to do so credibly, however, such groups would either have to approximate to the Gardnerian model of what pagan witches ought to be like, or else to challenge that model as fraudulent or inadequate.» — enuncia la disyuntiva estructural que la wicca impuso a cualquier grupo posterior, o aproximarse al modelo gardneriano o impugnarlo como fraudulento o insuficiente.

«The reality of Gardner’s claim to have discovered an existing religion is only one of two large problems which confront a historian concerned with the origins of modern pagan witchcraft.» — y separa los dos grandes problemas del historiador, uno la realidad del reclamo de Gardner de haber hallado una religión existente.

«The other, closely related, is whether any other groups of pagan witches existed at the time when he was forming his own.» — y el otro, estrechamente ligado, si existían otros grupos de brujas paganas cuando él formaba el suyo.

«It was central to his portrayal of this process that he was believed to be reviving an old and secret faith that had almost died out; built into that portrayal, therefore, was the suggestion that other adherents of that faith might have survived in the manner of the New Forest coven, and could surface now that Gardner had initiated the process of emergence.» — señalando lo que el propio retrato de Gardner implicaba, que otros adherentes de esa fe pudieran haber sobrevivido y salir a la luz una vez iniciado el proceso.

«It remains an open question, moreover, how many of the consumers of the ‘neo-pagan’ literature which burgeoned from the 1890s internalized or even acted out its ideas; how many admirers of the classics and of Romantic verse followed Shelley and Calvert in building altars to Pan.» — deja abierta otra pregunta cuantitativa: cuántos consumidores de aquella literatura neopagana interiorizaron o llegaron a actuar sus ideas.

«The simple problem is that Gardner’s pagan witchcraft was not merely the first to surface but remains the first to be securely documented.» — y formula el problema en su forma más simple: la brujería pagana de Gardner no solo fue la primera en salir a la luz sino que sigue siendo la primera documentada con solidez.

«It is entirely possible that members of other witch groups which pre-dated 1950 deliberately avoided the creation of any written record of their activities, and avoided detection by any except the more discreet of their relatives, friends, and neighbours.» — concediendo de inmediato la alternativa: es enteramente posible que otros grupos anteriores a 1950 evitaran adrede todo registro escrito.

«It is also true, however, that the terms in which Gardner announced the existence of Wicca (following a grand cultural tradition which by then included Freemasonry, the Oddfellows and similar orders, the Rosicrucians and the magical societies) made it impossible for about thirty years—and to some extent to the present—for anybody to gain credibility for a coven unless it likewise claimed to be part of an ancient and enduring line.» — y el efecto que la propia forma del anuncio de Gardner tuvo, hacer imposible durante unos treinta años que un aquelarre ganara credibilidad sin reclamar linaje antiguo.

«From the late 1980s onwards, as shall be discussed, academics in Britain and America have confronted claims of ritual abuse and sacrifice of children by networks of Satanists, and after careful investigation have concluded that there is no evidence that such networks exist, nor that such rites have taken place.» — aporta el paralelo metodológico del pánico satánico, donde tras investigación cuidadosa los académicos concluyeron que no hay evidencia de esas redes ni de esos ritos.

«It has been noted that none of the magical or pagan groups listed and denounced by O’Donnell and Seabrook as active in the 1930s included anything like Wicca; but then those surveys were confined to London and its immediate hinterland,» — acota el alcance de las listas de O'Donnell y Seabrook donde no figuraba nada parecido a la wicca, porque se ceñían a Londres y su entorno inmediato.

«The Illustrated Police News on 28 April 1939 printed the ‘confession’ of a female artist aged twentytwo, who claimed to have attended the revels of a devil-worshipping coven in a Sussex wood, led by a prominent Londoner and an older woman and including feasting, nude dancing, and copulation.» — recoge la confesión publicada en 1939 por una artista de veintidós años sobre un aquelarre adorador del diablo en un bosque de Sussex.

«All this may well be an account of an actual group; but it does sound rather like one of the most famous episodes in Dennis Wheatley’s novel, The Devil Rides Out, which had been published four years before.» — y su reserva sobre ella: bien puede ser el relato de un grupo real, pero suena bastante a uno de los episodios más famosos de una novela de Wheatley publicada cuatro años antes.

«It commented that a Sussex group, inspired by books, had developed a pretty Candlemas ritual which they worked upon the South Downs.» — consigna la nota sobre un grupo de Sussex que, inspirado en libros, había desarrollado un bonito ritual de Candelaria.

«Most of the piece consisted of an interview with Cecil Williamson, and it is not certain whether the information concerned was obtained from him, rather than directly from group members; the last two items of it, however, seem remarkably circumstantial.» — con la incertidumbre de fuente que la acompaña, sin saber si la información venía de Cecil Williamson o directamente de los miembros.

«Most of the evidence relating to non-Gardnerian pagan witchcraft before 1960, however, derives wholly from retrospective testimony, and this must form most of the subject-matter of the present chapter.» — Hutton declara de qué está hecha casi toda la evidencia sobre la brujería pagana no gardneriana anterior a 1960, de testimonio retrospectivo.

«A subsequent editor, Leonora James, was inspired by them to conduct some research of her own into areas with which they dealt; but in the course of the 1980s she totally lost faith in Liddell’s veracity.» — documenta la trayectoria de la recepción de Liddell, con una editora que investigó por su cuenta y en el curso de los ochenta perdió del todo la fe en su veracidad.

«Doreen Valiente was also initially receptive to his material, but grew more sceptical of it.» — y la de Doreen Valiente, receptiva al principio a ese material y cada vez más escéptica.

«His defence has been limited and measured; he has declared many of Liddell’s claims to ‘seem too fantastic to be true’, while insisting that most remain without disproof and should be treated with respect until or unless such refutation is provided.» — recoge la defensa medida de otro estudioso, que declara fantásticos muchos de esos reclamos e insiste en que la mayoría sigue sin refutación y merece respeto mientras no la haya.

«The American academic scholar James W. Baker swiftly considered it and dismissed it as a hoax.» — junto con el dictamen contrario de James W. Baker, que lo consideró rápidamente y lo despachó como un embuste.

«This has permitted him to disclaim personal responsibility for the provenance, and truth, of much of the material, but it is generally presented as a seamless whole and as given fact, without any distinction as to the origins of each piece of data.» — señala el efecto de que Liddell hable por boca de Ancianos, que le permite declinar la responsabilidad personal por la procedencia y la verdad de buena parte del material.

«The result is that an original simple claim has grown into a complex and not entirely coherent body of alternative history.» — con el resultado que él describe: un reclamo simple original crecido hasta un cuerpo complejo y no del todo coherente de historia alternativa.

«There was the English, which was male-led, and had two degrees of initiation, although in another place it is said that it had no degrees but three ‘rites’.» — y las incoherencias internas que enumera, empezando por una variante inglesa con dos grados de iniciación que en otro lugar no tiene grados sino tres ritos.

«In a personal communication Liddell has added the important information that none of these derived from a surviving ancient paganism, but represented a new religion which first emerged in fifteenth-century France and resulted from popular disenchantment with late medieval Catholicism.» — consigna la información que Liddell le añadió en comunicación personal, que ninguna de esas variantes venía de un paganismo antiguo superviviente sino de la Francia del siglo XV.

«decisively and explicitly with the Murray thesis and aligns itself more with Jeffrey Burton Russell’s view of the witch religion as a Christian heresy—or even represents a softer form of that propounded by Montague Summers.» — y dónde deja eso a ese esquema, alineado más con Jeffrey Burton Russell que con Murray, o incluso como forma suave de lo propuesto por Montague Summers.

«It seems at first sight to sit uneasily with the assertion made at the opening of the ‘Lugh’ communications, that the Pickingills were hereditary priests of the pagan Old Religion from the eleventh century.» — marca la tensión con lo afirmado al abrir las comunicaciones, que los Pickingill eran sacerdotes hereditarios de la Vieja Religión desde el siglo XI.

«In another place, however, it states that sexual induction ‘all but disappeared’ during the eighteenth century, leaving the Magister to pass the power to candidates of both sexes.» — y otra contradicción en la misma serie, con una inducción sexual que casi desaparece en el XVIII.

«In the next decade, Liddell informed readers that ‘the true Hereditary tradition’ consisted of rural witches passing down knowledge through families and never joining covens.» — junto a la declaración de la década siguiente, que la verdadera tradición hereditaria eran brujas rurales que transmitían el saber en familia y nunca entraban en aquelarres.

«In 1984 the data took a leap, when Liddell told readers that Pickingill had drawn heavily upon the rites developed by a coven of Cambridge academics in the 1810s and founded by the occultist Francis Barrett.» — fecha en 1984 el salto de los datos, cuando Liddell dijo que Pickingill se apoyó mucho en los ritos de un aquelarre de académicos de Cambridge fundado por Francis Barrett.

«They included most of the apparatus of later Wicca, including ritual nudity, nature worship, female leadership, priority to a goddess, the fivefold kiss, Drawing down the Moon, a Charge of the Goddess, the Legend of the Goddess, initiation through three degrees and between opposite sexes, and the use of magical cords.» — con el inventario de lo que esos ritos ya incluían, prácticamente todo el aparato posterior de la wicca.

«In 1974 (when Liddell was writing for a Gardnerian editor), Gardner was ‘the spiritual heir of Pickingill’, continuing the public revival of ‘the Old Religion’ commenced by the latter.» — y rastrea cómo cambió el juicio de Liddell sobre Gardner, de heredero espiritual de Pickingill en 1974 a autor de una travesura pérfida diez años después.

«During the 1980s it was announced that the New Forest coven used rites altered by the Fellowship of Crotona, that Gardner had only received the second ‘rite’ from the Hertfordshire one, and that he had received the third from another East Anglian coven, led by a Magister known to Liddell.» — Hutton sigue las sucesivas correcciones de los años ochenta sobre qué rito recibió Gardner y de qué aquelarre.

«A year later his readers learned that Crowley and Gardner had deliberately introduced metal working tools, formerly forbidden, to render ‘the ancient guardians’ powerless.» — y el añadido del año siguiente, que Crowley y Gardner introdujeron adrede herramientas de metal antes prohibidas para dejar impotentes a los antiguos guardianes.

«This by no means exhausts the contributions alleged by Liddell as having been made by George Pickingill to modern magic and witchcraft.» — advierte que esa lista no agota las contribuciones que Liddell le atribuye a Pickingill en la magia y la brujería modernas.

«He is said to have been contacted in the 1850s by the Freemasons who subsequently founded the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, and heavily influenced the rituals and teachings of that body.» — con la que lo conecta a los masones que después fundaron la Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia y a los rituales de ese cuerpo.

«Liddell has added the information that he gave talks at country houses, which were attended by (among others) Moina Mathers, wife of the dominant figure in the Golden Dawn, and also in Masonic temples; he ‘astonished the middle-class intelligentsia for decades’.» — y la que lo hace conferenciar en casas de campo ante Moina Mathers y en templos masónicos, asombrando durante décadas a la intelectualidad de clase media.

«None of the former has emerged; indeed, at no point in the many years since Liddell first published his claims have any of the ‘Elders’ and ‘Brethren’ whose views he is supposed to articulate been discovered by anybody else.» — opone a todo eso su búsqueda negativa mayor: en los muchos años transcurridos nadie más ha dado con ninguno de los Ancianos y Hermanos cuyas opiniones él dice articular.

«The situation regarding documentary evidence is no better.» — y otra igual de seca sobre el papel: la situación de la evidencia documental no es mejor.

«It was remarked in Chapter 11 that Liddell did claim to have heard of a photograph which proved the link between Pickingill and the London ritual magicians, but that this was subsequently reported to have disappeared.» — con el caso de la fotografía que probaría el vínculo entre Pickingill y los magos londinenses, de la que después se dijo que había desaparecido.

«Liddell’s account of history does in fact give an immense scope for documentation.» — señala que el relato de Liddell da de suyo un margen inmenso para documentación.

«In none of these sources is there even a whisper of the widespread systems of ‘cunning lodges’ or covens described by Liddell.» — y en ninguna de esas fuentes hay ni un susurro de los extendidos sistemas de logias del oficio o aquelarres que él describe.

«Nor, of all the educated and literate people who are supposed to have visited or entertained Pickingill, did a single one, anywhere in the world, leave any known reference to him, either in praise or condemnation.» — ni una sola referencia a Pickingill, ni en elogio ni en condena, dejada por alguna de las personas educadas y letradas que supuestamente lo visitaron.