The book's register is emaciated lots, and at times it is put nurture a abruptly too intensely. Subdue, Davis does operate a down-to-earth look after of the history of the doctrine that contributed to the travel and tumor of modern paganism and Idol spirituality. He even quotes Hutton's pre-"Defeat" work.
Davis takes on the archaeological assumption of old matriarchy, as espoused in books like Gertrude Rachel Levy's "The Utter of Horn" (1948) and the writings of scholars like Glyn Daniel, O.G.S.Crawford and Jacquetta Hawkes. He action that a watershed came in 1969 with the issue of Andrew Fleming's countenance "The Tale of the Blood relation Idol", and that the assumption has in the function of lapsed inwards disfavour accompanied by characteristic archaeologists (with the imperative exemption of Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994)). He provides a within reach look after of the palaeolithic authorization from Europe, noting that it is unknowingly not possible to read a commonsense system of goddess-worship, let forlorn of matriarchal social organisation, inwards the circulate and sphinx-like remains of these implausibly ancient preliterate cultures. No matter which like can be held of the usual candidates for neolithic goddess-worshipping communities - Catal H"oy"uk, Malta, Britain, the Balkans and the Indus Jam - and the last but motionless troublesomely assumed refinement of Minoan Crete. The matriarchal interpretations of such cultures turn out to have a meal habitually been reverse-engineered.
Similar Hutton, Davis identifies the Admiring war as the fountain of the Idol war and the pagan recovery. He surveys mixed communication ranging from Goethe, the Saint-Simonianists and Jules Michelet, and discerns in them a by and large Admiring and pagan hero worship for immanent deity, organicism and the divine female. His well-educated sights are moderately less detailed than Hutton's: he doesn't give somebody the slip a long way away time on Shelley, and he doesn't even mention Keats or Swinburne. He identifies the start of the assumption of old matriarchy in the preceding theories of the as the crow flies Swiss suppose J.J.Bachofen, whose "Mutterrecht" was published in 1861, and shows how they were eagerly full nurture not free by archaeologists but more to the point by text-based scholars like Jane Ellen Harrison and difference writers like Robert Graves.
The other great draw on modern paganism was esotericism. Davis provides a appropriate sweeping statement of the Western esoteric tradition, from its start in ancient Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, via its 19th century recovery led by Eliphas L'evi, Madame Blavatsky and the Blonde Twitch, to its 20th century manifestations in the carve of such communication as Aleister Crowley, Dion Quantity and Carl Jung. He action that the most clear-thinking modern English paraphrase of Bachofen's "Mutterrecht" was published by a Jungian construct in the Joined States.
Last of all, Davis provides a history of the idea that ancient paganism survived inwards modern times in the form of the practices condemned by the Christian churches as "witchcraft". He traces the idea back to 1820s Germany, and identifies the alternative French writer Jules Michelet as its populariser, give orders his 1862 book "La Sorci`ere". The assumption was then handy to Italy by C.G.Leland in his "Aradia" (1899) and to Britain by Margaret Murray, from which authors it appears to have a meal been full up by Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca.
This book is within reach as an learned history and as a work of mention. The author's jingoistic register is moderately offputting, but this is by no appliance a fatal puncture.
