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Type "burning times" into any major Internet search engine and you will be engulfed by a host of websites all telling essentially the same tale about the persecution of ancient European pagans by fanatical Christians. According to an increasingly popular tale, over 9 million witches died horrible deaths between a.d. 1000 and 1800, most of them burnt at the stake. Most of these victims were women, who, it is said, were midwives or traditional healers feared by "the Church" that loathed them because they br /ought relief to suffering without the assistance of the clergy.

Over the last 25 years, this story of Christian bigotry and persecution has become received dogma on many university campuses. It is portrayed in numerous films and television series, and is increasingly believed by large numbers of ordinary people. For example, in one of my undergraduate classes on new religions last year, over a third of the students said that they joined the class to learn more about "the persecution of witches by Christians." When I questioned them about this, they explained that they originally learned about the murder of "the 9 million" either in high school or in women's studies classes at the university, and were all convinced that it was absolutely true.

What's more, even evangelical Christians who were taking the class confessed to believing that fanatical churchmen had murdered millions of witches in early modern times. The evangelical students argued that the murders were carried out by Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic fanatics who were "not true Christians at all." Then they went on to explain that they belonged to "true churches," like the Baptists, which were also persecuted by fanatics during this period. Otherwise, a majority of my evangelical Christian students accepted the story of fanatical Christian persecution of witches and other pagans lock, stock, and barrel.

When I mentioned the reaction of my students to colleagues at a large academic conference, I found that many of them had had similar experiences. Indeed, the myth of the "great witch craze," as it is known, has become a powerful tool for discrediting Christians and removing a Christian voice from the public square. This neopagan propaganda equates Christians with the Nazis and the murder of witches with the Holocaust.

The widespread acceptance of such claims makes the publication of Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft very timely. A growing number of other books deal with modern neopaganism,1 but none comes anywhere near Hutton's work in scope, thoroughness, and overall competence.

Hutton, professor of history at the University of br /istol in England, has published a number of seminal books on social history, including his much acclaimed The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994) and The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in br /itain (1996). In these earlier works Hutton established himself as the leading authority on br /itish folk customs and social rituals. He also showed quite conclusively that many "ancient traditions," once thought to have originated in the mists of the so-called Dark Ages among "simple peasants," were actually the invention of Tudor aristocrats seeking to amuse themselves. Later these "traditions" were copied by real peasants and "discovered" as "authentic folk customs" by 19th-century anti-Christian antiquarians anxious to discover a pre-Christian religious system in the br /itish past.

In his latest work, Hutton shows beyond any doubt that the alleged murder of 9 million pagans by a fanatical church has no basis in history. He also shows that the claim that modern pagans belong to ancient religious traditions is equally fanciful. While there certainly were deplorable cases of persecution and hysteria, relatively few people died in the so-called European witch crazes. And in many instances church leaders protected people accused of witchcraft against irrational mobs. Further, the ratio of men to women accused of witchcraft varied across Europe; more men than women were put on trial in some areas, such as Switzerland. Finally, when women were accused it was not by a patriarchal church but—most often—by other women, and very few midwives or healers were ever accused of witchcraft. Thus Hutton destroys some of the popular misconceptions about paganism and witchcraft through the presentation of solid historical evidence.

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