Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, An Investigation by Ronald Hutton (review)

Abstract

these people negotiated skepticism about their abilities within a larger cultural context in which they might become victims of witchcraft accusations. Readers interested in this journal’s even more capacious category of “ritual” will find almost all the articles useful to some degree, bringing mainly anthropological methodologies to bear on the issue of doubt surrounding both abstract religious beliefs and concrete ritualized practices. A chapter by Eszter Spät on “religious crossover” in presentday Iraq could well have significant “crossover” potential of its own for magical studies. Spät’s analysis focuses on a region of northern Iraq with a Muslim majority and Christian and Yezidi minorities. Officially, the groups reject one another’s doctrines, and the Yezidis have historically even been proclaimed to be devil worshippers by some Muslim authorities. Yet Spät finds a steady crossover of members from each group patronizing each other’s sacred sites, seeking services from each other’s ritual specialists, and employing each other’s empowered items (amulets, etc.). This is most evident in processes of ritual healing, in which a “try anything” approach often seems to prevail. Such dynamics are easily transposed to other contexts, both contemporary and historical, in which a variety of magical practices might be officially condemned, but still enjoy widespread popular patronage and support.