Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain by Francis Young (review)

Abstract

In Chapter 5, “The Cailleach,” Hutton investigates the persona also referred to as the Hag, or the Old Woman, indigenous to the Gaelic British Isles. This supernatural female entity is typically known for her vast size, old age, and association with topographical features, such as mountains and environmental features, such as harsh winters (143). This figure, according to Hutton, while stemming from localized popular culture, was not commonly known among the cultural elite until nineteenthand twentiethcentury folklorists began compiling and recording traditions and beliefs of the peoples in these areas between 1880–1930 (144). One of the common features of the Cailleach is the old age of the character—in one instance from Connemara she was thought to have survived for a millennium (144). Another commonality was her great size. She was often described as a sort of giantess, responsible for the shape of the topography of the landscape. Hutton suggests that the term Cailleach derives from the Christian tradition with the Irish word caille, meaning veil, stemming from the ecclesiastical Latin term pallium (149). Ultimately, it is the lack of a “unifying or incorporating figure behind” (154) the Calleach that leads Hutton to argue that “the entity seems only to have been perceived in the twentieth century” (155). In his conclusion Hutton offers a brief summation, stating that each of the female figures discussed are “countercultural” and they all “offer a direct challenge to current structures of academic debate” (196). This structure suggests that “Christian Europe, both in the Middle Ages and after, was capable of developing new superhuman figures which operated outside of Christian cosmology” (196). These figures, as Hutton eloquently demonstrates throughout his book, did not act in “direct opposition to Christianity,” and “were part of the thoughtworld of people who were otherwise orthodox Christians for their place and time” (196). For Hutton, this means we might need a “new labelling system for such entities, to fit an increasingly postChristian society in which more of their kind, such as the Green Man, are arising, and for which the old polarizing terminology of Christian and pagan is no longer suitable” (197).