The Quest for the Wicker Man

"The Quest for the Wicker Man" (2006), edited by Franks, Harper, Murray and Stevenson is a study of history, folklore and pagan perspectives. This is a brief review of the book.

Part of the material consists of a commentary on the making and genesis of the cult film "The Wicker Man". In one chapter, Robin Hardy, who along with Tony Schaffer created the film, explain how they wanted to move away from the gothic melodrama of the Hammer Horror film, and present something quite different, based upon their reading of what they saw as pagan survivals, chief of which, of course, is the "Wicker Man" in which Edward Woodward as the policeman meets his grisly end.

Hardy also explains one of the weaknesses of the film, where a contrast is made between the sacrifice of the communion, for which they placed the policeman in an Scottish Episcopalian setting, and the sacrifice of the Wicker Man, where the policeman is the body and blood of sacrifice. For much of the film, however, he behaves as a Presbyterian low churchman, and his background is at odds with his character, perhaps the reason why it was excised by the distributors in pre-release edit of the original.

However, as Richard Sermon shows in his article on "The Wicker Man, May Day and the Reinvention of Beltane", a lot of the background upon which they draw is the work of anthropologist Sir James Frazer, who in his 12 volume "The Golden Bough" conflated different practices from around the world in support of his thesis, with cheerful disregard for context, geography and history. Like Frazer, the film also brings disparate elements such as "sympathetic magic, gods from Celtic mythology, classical accounts of the Druids, and a number of mainly but not exclusively English folk traditions and customs".

In the film, as in Frazer's reconstruction, there is a "Pan Celtic year" , consisting of Imbolc, Beltane, Lugnasad and Samain, along with Spring and Winter equinoxes and two solstices. But as Sermon notes, there are serious problems with this kind of conflation. Imbolc, Beltane, Lugnasad and Samain are found in the Goedelic branch of Celtic - Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic - but not found in the Brithonic branch - Welsh, Cornish and Breton, "which therefore casts doubt on the the claim that these were Pan-Celtic festivals". Sermons' second point is that the early Irish texts "do not mention festivals on the solstices or equinoxes, hence the lack of Old Irish names for these". Lastly, he notes that these festivals, supposed to have been observed by the Celtic Britons (although this is problematic) are assumed to have passed from them into English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) folk tradition.

In fact, by way of contrast, when Old English, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old High German, Old Norse, Swedish, English, German and Dutch are compared, there is more more of a common year than is ever supposed to have existed in the Celtic area, and on linguistic evidence, there are certainly good grounds for a common year in the Germanic speaking parts of Europe. Here is a brief extract from Sermon's table:

Old English: Geola, Lencten, Eastron, Sumor, Middansumor, Haefest, Winter, Middanwinter
English: Yule, Lent, Easter, Summer, Midsummer, Harvest, Winter, Midwinter
Old Norse: Jol, Var, ?, Sumar, Miorsumar, Haust, Vetr, Miorvetr
Swedish: Jul, Var, ?, Sommar, Midsommar, Host, Vinter, Midvinter
Old High German: ?, Lengizen, Ostarun, Sumar, Mittesumar, Herbist, Wintar, Mittewintar

There is nothing like this linguistic parallelism with the Celtic speaking world.

May Day and Beltane are again conflated, but the English May day celebrations were marking the start of Summer with celebration, and the traditions involved the May Queen, and garland, maypole dancing, Morris dancing, hobby horses, while the Beltane traditions in Ireland and Highland Scotland "were very different and involved the lighting of bonfires and rites to purify livestock such as cattle and sheep".

Regarding the Wicker Man itself, this occurs in two classical sources. Caesar's Gallic War, which mentions "figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men which being set on fire, the men perish in the flames", and Strabo in his Geography, who mentions "a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing". Aylett Sammes (c1636-c1679) gave the first illustration of a Wicker man, and this imaginative construction formed the mould from which all other designs have been drawn, as with the film. However, Strabo is probably deriving his material from Caesar, and Caesar is only describing practices in Gaul, so it is dangerous to extrapolate from this to a widespread practice. Virgin sacrifice is not mentioned in this context, but only introduced by Frazer.

An example, not related to the film, of the dangers of geographical over-generalisation occurs where Pliny provides a description of Druids cutting mistletoe. Yet we know both that there were Druids in Ireland, and that mistletoe was introduced into Ireland only in the 18th century, so clearly the association of Druids with mistletoe cannot be transferred across Europe.

In "The Folklore Fallacy", Mikel Koven (yes that is a real name!) notes how people like Frazer stood within a colonial tradition, "which sees the Celtic nations as an undifferentiated whole" As Koven argues "Victorian anthropology and folklore studies tended to conceive the world in grand master narratives. Based on surface comparisons, world cultures were seen to celebrate more-or-less the same calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies; and differences were seen as unimportant cultural deviances... This approach, while superficially appearing to be egalitarian, is in actuality purely colonial: only from a point of cultural hegemony can one hold one's culture up as a template for other cultures and say that they are more or less the same." The "folklore fallacy" of the film is to take Frazer's perspective uncritically at face value; in this, as a literal depiction of his mix of many cultures, it is certainly successful, but as far as the supposed "authenticity" of its paganism goes, it is too indiscriminate in its inclusion of any and all forms of paganism into its supposedly Celtic pagan mix.

Lastly, I would note that having reviewed the film recently, it has a wonderfully eclectic mix, and certainly has not the period feel of the gothic Hammer film. But there are undoubtedly elements which seem more flower-power than paganism, more hippy than heathen, not least when Christopher Lee dons a rather silly wig and sways back and forth in the musical finale as the Wicker man burns. Young girls dancing in a stone circle naked also seems to have a tendency towards a pagan "pan's people" from Top of the Pops. But the repressed central performance of Edward Woodward certainly makes up for this, as does the ambiguous ending, never quite resolved (what will happen next?), and certainly not a simplistic Hammer Horror narrative of good winning against evil.