The resurgence of romanticism

In one of the earliest texts of British neopaganism, the naive protagonist, sick from asthma, awakes suddenly in the light of the moon.

Now I cannot tell what I said to the moon, or what the moon said to me, but all the same, I got to know her very well. And this was the impression I got of her—that she ruled over a kingdom that was neither material nor spiritual, but a strange moon-kingdom of her own. In it moved tides—ebbing, flowing, slack water, high water, never ceasing, always on the move; up and down, backwards and forwards, rising and receding; coming past on the flood, flowing back on the ebb; and these tides affected our lives. They affected birth and death and all the processes of the body. They affected the mating of animals, and the growth of vegetation, and the insidious workings of disease. They also affected the reactions of drugs, and there was a lore of herbs belonging to them. All these things I got by communing with the moon, and I felt certain that if I could only learn the rhythm and periodicity of her tides I should know a very great deal.

(Fortune 1978 [1938]:15) In a later novel of the genre, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, the protagonist, a priestess of the goddess, describes her struggle to regain the knowledge of her priestcraft after many years of dormancy.

I learned again to count sun tides from equinox to solstice and back to equinox again…count them painfully on my fingers like a child or a novice priestess; it was years before I could feel them running in my blood again, or know to a hairline’s difference where on the horizon moon or sun would rise or set for the salutations I learned again to make. Again, late at night while the household lay sleeping around me, I would study the stars, letting their influence move in my blood as they wheeled and swung around me until I became only a pivot point on the motionless earth, center of the whirling dance around and above me, the spiralling movement of the seasons.

(Bradley 1982:682) Modern neopaganism—the ‘new’ paganism—acquired its shape as The Golden Bough was being written, and the first modern witches probably danced around their first bonfires in the years after Jessie Weston analysed the Arthurian grail legend as an ancient fertility rite. The magic was part of the mythic, folkloristic romanticism that flourished in the late nineteenth century. That romanticism arose out of the imaginative gap that widened as a mechanistic understanding of the universe took hold, as science and pragmatism increasingly dominated the foreground of the intellectual middle class. It still fills this gap. In its own way, neopaganism is a natural outgrowth of nineteenth-century romanticism, a child of the impulse to save traditional religious concepts by recloaking them in nature and thus in the scientifically ‘real’. In neopaganism there is no god, masculine, separate and transcendentally aloof, but rather an ancient divinity immanent in the world, at once as metaphysical and as empirical as Wordsworth’s daffodils. This is a world of stone circles and Celtic mythology, of British shamanism and a homespun web of Wyrd, of the ‘Goddess’ and her stag-horned consort, a world in which Frazer and Campbell are ransacked for details. And the natural world, from the mythicized perspective, is larger than itself, full of intensity and joy and pathos.