Utterly fawning coverage from the BBC of the pagan festival of Halloween or “Samhain”, including an interview with a chief pagan in a sheepskin. “We’ll be continuing with our coverage throughout the day, watching the celebration of the most important festival of the pagan year,” we’re promised.

Robert Piggott, the BBC’s bien pensant religious affairs correspondent, seems enchanted by paganism. “Indeed modern Paganism is a reinvented religion, whose members seek the divine in nature,” he
gushes.

“It originated among ancient Celts for whom the natural world was a wilderness that brought them death and danger as well as sustaining life. In contemporary Britain its members are more worried about the destruction of the natural world.”

There’s an interview with members of a coven “composed entirely of women” – not a problem for the BBC in the way that the all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church seems to be. And one witch works for the NHS!

There’s even a page on the BBC website devoted to paganism – or, rather, devoted to its propaganda. The Beeb acknowledges that modern paganism only dates back a hundred years or so, but it happily reproduces an intellectual history of the movement that, absurdly, presents the Renaissance as a stepping stone to the “rediscovery” of the wisdom of white witchcraft.
Even worse, it lends credence to the notion that today’s paganism has revived the beliefs and practices
of the Druids – about which we known virtually nothing – and mentions the belief that the Druids built Stonehenge without telling us that this is a historical fantasy as ludicrous as the proposition that the ancient Egyptians built the Aztec temples.

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