# Talk:Doreen Valiente

Hutton is hardly a reliable source since he often reads into or misrepresents his sources as revealed by Ben Whitmore in "Trials of the Moon."  I have read Doreen's autobiography, and she does not undermine Wicca as a survival.  Why cite an untrustworthy historian such as Hutton when one can cite and even quote from the direct source itself: The Rebirth of Witchcraft, by Doreen Valiente?!  Contrary to Hutton's position, if I may digress, he admits in his book, "Witches, Druids and King Arthur" that as he was writing "Triumph of the Moon" he was both unable to prove the modernity of Wicca, and that he had discovered and intentionally ignored evidence tethering Wicca to pre-Christian paganism because it would have disproved the argument he was overly concerned with; therefore, "Triumph of the Moon" is an exercise in Confirmation Bias!  Something else Wiccans don't like to confront is, when Hutton's arguments are taken to their logical conclusions, Wicca is nothing more than a direct off-shoot of Christianity.  Hutton insists that all scholars who describe a goddess as a "Mother Goddess" are projecting the Virgin Mary onto their source data; there are no Dying-and-Rising gods other than Christ; the Horned God is nothing but a reimagining of Jesus; and that his thesis has always been that Wicca extracted the pagan elements of of Christianity, which Hutton refuses to acknowledge as being of an authentic provenance. Therefore, what other conclusion can one reach after reading "Triumph of the Moon"!  But, the trouble is that Hutton never openly disclosed his thesis in "Triumph of the Moon," he only explained it in an article, which few Pagans have ever read. 70.39.20.64 (talk) 05:02, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Hutton is one of the most respected scholars on the topic of witchcraft. Ben Whitmore is not a scholarly source and while that does not render his criticisms of Hutton necessarily invalid, I think it does make them unreliable for the purposes of Wikipedia.
If you have reliable sources that suggest Valiente was misquoted or misrepresented, those can be added, but Hutton shouldn't be removed just because his work has been poorly received by non-academics. 2603:7081:1603:A300:B963:EFA:D2CE:C8FD (talk) 00:02, 4 July 2023 (UTC)