Ronald Hutton and the Gods

I am led from reflections in recent post on the figure of the woman from the Otherworld on a horse emerging in different guises - here as Rhiannon, there as the ‘Queen of Elfland’, elsewhere in another guise - to consideration of an article by Ronald Hutton in a recent issue of the journal Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies in which he casts doubt on the interpretation of characters in medieval stories - in particular those collected in The Mabinogion – as survivals of pagan gods. For example, he questions the back construction of the Brythonic goddess *Rigantona on linguistic evidence alone from Rhiannon whose name has been seen as a plausible development from *Rigantona. In the process of doing this he also casts doubt on the sovereignty argument, which sees goddesses as conferring sovereignty on kings or tribal leaders, as “a back-projection from medieval texts” rather than anything that can be attested in Antiquity. Hutton also casts doubt on the connection of Mabon with the undisputed Brythonic god Maponos, and of Lleu with Lugh , and in the process casts doubt on the provenance of Lugus as a pan-celtic deity. Hutton has apparently undertaken this review as an historian attempting to bring a broader understanding to the subject than is often brought by those working within narrower single disciplines such as philology, archaeology or folklore studies.

One of the points Hutton makes is that, in some cases, many of the elements in these medieval stories are international folklore motifs rather than themes restricted to Celtic cultures and that the borrowing of a name might take place without the attribution of the borrowed identity being also transferred. So the transfer of, for example, an epithet of Lugh in Ireland to Lleu in a story composed in Wales, does not imply any meaningful transfer of the deity status of Lugh to a Welsh context. Such arguments, alongside those of denying pagan survivals on the basis of linguistic evidence alone, will no doubt be assessed in responses from other scholars within the fields cited by Hutton. He also hopes that the arguments will be considered by others interested in the subject. What of those who have sought to construct a religious practice centred on Brythonic deities? For them many of the characters in what Hutton calls “wonder tales, in which apparently human characters frequently possess magical abilities” are seen as gods. Experiencing them as such is often validated by, though not entirely dependent upon, the fact that scholars have confirmed this view.

Whether one chooses to regard the gods as inhabiting the human psyche and therefore able to emerge when needed, as figures that can form and reform across cultures adapting different identities, or as beings with their own lives who choose to enter human consciousness in different ways at different times or in different places; to those for whom the gods are real in any of these ways, the problems raised by Hutton will not be problems at all. Whatever scholarship may bring to bear on the history of religion, the lives and messages of the proponents of religion and the provenance of various religious practices, it cannot address the question of the existence or otherwise of a god or gods. Gods, by definition, just are.

The recognition of a goddess on horseback possessing Otherworld qualities in the story of Rhiannon is not in itself dependent on scholarly identification of a likely divine source for her name. The fact that similar, but independent, stories exist which are equally expressive, such as the Scottish Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, are better reinforcements of human responses to the mythical life of the deity. And the expression of the mythical pattern in the folklore of different cultures is a further reinforcement of this feeling rather than an argument against it. If there are other medieval tales of women on magical horses moving at uncanny paces, as cited by Hutton referring to work by Jessica Hemming, this will further reinforce that view. So data used by Hutton to prove a particular point about the lack of specific continuity within a particular culture, might be seen as validating the view he is trying to invalidate. How can this be so?

To answer this, we could take the approach of Hutton as an engagement on an axis between scepticism about the pagan origins of medieval characters and at the other end of the axis, say, the theories of Caitlin Matthews who provides a systematic set of correspondences between these characters and Brythonic deities and supposed religious practices. The scholars cited by Hutton are nowhere near this extreme end of the spectrum but do, in varying degrees, affirm the correspondence between pagan deities and medieval fictional characters. Brythonic pagans will of course draw succour from such views, but, I suggest, should not base their religious practices on them. If, instead, we think along an axis at right angles, or some other angle, off this continuum, and suggest that historical correspondence is not the point so much as the identification of the nature of deity, then the questions will b e different ones. Can the gods choose to reveal themselves by inhabiting stories? Does it matter (to them or us) if we actually call them gods? Can stories generate themselves as a vehicle for such a process and transform themselves over time? Such questions may seem fantastic in the context of the debate along the historical continuum axis. But if these matters are to be approached by those who think of themselves as adherents of a pagan religion, then they are questions that will be to the fore, informed by research and conclusions developed on the other axis – and indeed further other axes – but not ultimately determined by them.

Would one be deluded in asking such questions? That is something that can be asked of religious believers in any faith. The Welsh Quaker poet Waldo Williams asked it of himself, and concluded that no adherents of any religion had anything but their own experiences to rely on. ‘Belief’ can be a matter of communal or social choice, but this doesn’t necessarily entail experience of a deity. Those who do have such experiences will, perhaps, turn to scholarship to inform them of the history of such belief, and they may themselves undertake the sort of investigation of the sources of texts such as I have engaged upon in recent posts on the ‘Thomas’ legend (now brought together HERE.) . They may conclude as a result of such researches that certain texts are, or are not, linked to other texts or part of a systematic religious practice at a particular place and time. But this is a separate consideration to the one which may inform their appreciation of stories as expressions of particular aspects of deity.

Merlin, Fictional Characters and the Gods

In the current issue of PLANET magazine I review Stephen Knight’s book MERLIN Knowledge and Power Through the Ages  (Cornell University Press, £18.95). His approach is similar to that he brought to his earlier study of the Robin Hood legend. On the one hand he identifies his subject as a character with identifiable characteristics but on the other hand he emphasises the mythic rather than the personal nature of these characteristics. He has little time for what he calls the “re-formation of knowledge in the service of individual identity” , an approach which involves trying to prove that Robin Hood or Merlin were real historical characters living at a specified time in the past. Attempts have been made to do just that for both of these characters which have the air about them of those who argue for the literal truth of stories in the Bible or other religious tales. Wanting to believe that fragments of ancient rope found on Mount Ararat might be from Noah’s Ark is just one recent example of this tendency.

Saying this is not to say absolutely that there could not have been an historical person that fed into the legendary identity of Robin Hood, or a bardic Myrddin who became the Merlin of legend. It is to say that the really interesting thing about such characters is their legendary status rather than any possible actual historical existence. The same can be said of Taliesin, Arthur and many other legendary figures. What they became as their stories grew expanded beyond the confines of a particular age, let alone a particular life. In trying to show that Merlin figuratively represents Knowledge and its relation to the power structures of particular ages, Knight is able to present Merlin as embodying the relationship between Knowledge and Power in different historical periods. Sometimes he is able to instruct those in power, sometimes he is used by them and sometimes he is marginalised. Interestingly Knight sees such Knowledge in our own age as serving the interests of individuals rather than institutions.

How might such an analysis be extended to the deeper mythic significance of characters seen to have their origins not in remarkable individuals but deities from a distant past? Surely no-one would confuse these with real people? Perhaps not. But a similar process seems to operate when these deities continue their mythic lives in later ages in folk tales, poetry or fictional writing. What happens here is in some ways the reverse of the process described above. In at least one version of the way this works a goddess or god is reduced in status to that of a character in a story and may, in the story, be interacting with other characters whose status is uncertain or who do not have any significant life outside the story. Here, it is not so much that we want to find out who this character really was but who(s)he really is.  If a character in a story, a legend or other narrative embodies a mythic significance, and if the stories told about such characters speak to us directly at the mythic level, then should we be so literalistic as to worry about how they correspond to identified deities in the past and how much the redactors of the story did, or did not, understand this?  Linguistic evidence may provide us with such a link and we might regard this as a bonus. But given the paucity of information about such deities in the past; and given the fact that even as deities their character may have varied at different times in that past, shouldn’t we be thinking rather about how we can build a relationship with them in the present?

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter contains the line “Hard are gods for mortals to see”, and stories about them are never going to be definitive. But the story of Rhiannon riding out of Annwn in a love tryst is powerful enough for me to regard it as an evocative image of the Queen of Faery on her white horse even without the identified linguistic link back to the goddess Rigantona. Mabon Son of Modron can be identified as Maponos Son of Matrona, so the image of him being released from a dark dungeon into the light of day takes on a mythic dimension which enables a mythic interpretation of an otherwise random episode in the story of How Culhwch Won Olwen.

And here the link with legendary characters such as Robin Hood and Merlin can be made. The mythic lives of such figures enable them to be seen as operating at the level of social forces such as Knight’s interpretations suggest. But the mythic life can also operate at the level of religious symbolism. Arthur, who rescues Mabon, may or may not have been a Dark Age warrior. But here he is the bright Sun shining and banishing the darkness of Winter. The gods are not always so hard to see. But sometimes they may pretend to be real people!