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.