The History of English Folktroth and the works of Andrew Erskine Chester (1853-1928)
As we approach the 100th Worldmoot of the Daen, it is time for a dispassionate look at the work of the founder of one of Modern Britain's most successful religious movements. Following the publication of several biographies on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2003 and the 80th anniversary of his death in 2008, much material is now, thankfully, available to the interested reader that until recently was out of reach of even the most dedicated scholars.
Andrew Erskine Chester's early career, as far as it can be reconstructed, was an unremarkable one. Born as the second son of a country parson in Somerset, he attended Shrewsbury and read Classics and Oriental Languages at Brasenose College, Oxford, before gaining entry into the ICS. Speculation about the religious and phiolosophical influences on him by Welsh Neo-Druidism, an elusive Indian teacher of Sanskrit identified by various names, and his agnostic uncle has as yet prpoven to have no grounding in evidence. As far as we can tell, Chester left for India a practising low-church Anglican.
It was during his work in the Bombay Presidency that he came into contact with the Parsi community and took an interest in their religion and culture. By his own account, he then reached his revelation or Kenning, though this has been doubted by friends and acquaintances who describe him as an avid student, but not follower, of Indian religions. Several of Chester's papers were published in the Asiatic Society's journal and commented warmly by scholars in both India and Britain. During this time he travelled to Persia on business of the Government of India and corresponded with several leading archeologistrs and experts on Persian culture and art. Several of his letters to John Lockwood Kipling survive in the Kipling estate and show him as an eager and dedicated scholar with a talent for languages. By the the time of his retirement from the ICS in 1894 due to ill health, he had mastered Old and Middle Persian, Accadian, Pali and Syriac in addition to Arabic, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
Returning to his native England, Chester settled into the modest lifestyle of a retired gentleman-scholar. He held lectures and published a number of articles to some acclaim before the best-selling 'Religious Traditions of the Aryan Peoples' of 1897. By this time he had already begun correspondence with several people throughout the country that would later become founder members of the Daen and close associates. Arthur Machen, already a successful writer and speaker of Welsh, visited Chester several times and may have been instrumental in introducing him to the Celtic tradition (Chester had learnt Old Welsh and Old Irish well enough to publish his own translations from the Mabinogion and the Brehon law by 1900). Almost imperceptibly at first, Chester began to turn from philologist to prophet, from student of ancient religions to founder of a new one.
'The Religious Traditions of the Aryan Peoples' already contained the core beliefs of the Daen (a loan word that Chester, like so many others, adopted from Old Persian): a theology built around the concept of light and dark, the concept of fate or Worldwyrd, the central role of judgment to determine the future fate of human souls and the strong emphasis on individual religious insight (Kenning). By 1900, with the publication of 'Aryosopheia', this had become integrated into a belief system that Chester believed to be fundamental to every Indo-European tradition and hoped to see resurrected in Europe. He would dedicate the remainder of his life to this task.
Controversial Prophet
Chester's circle of followers formalised itself into a religion on 21 December 1899, with a ceremony greeting the rising sun of the new century. The tenets of its faith were published in the spring of 1900 in the high-end volume 'Aryosopheia' and, the same year, in the shorter, cheaper and far more accessible 'Faith of the English - Aryan Troth for a Modern Land'. It is thought that this book - written by Chester, but heavily redacted by Machen and dialectologist Robert Vorne - marks the starting point of the Anglish tradition the Daen has adopted in England. It is here that the terms Folkmoot, Folktroth, Landtroth, Kenning, Worldwyrd and Eversoul are first documented. Interestingly, Chester's own writings always made heavy use of Romance terms and did not follow the habit of other writers in the Daen. Initial sales were disappointing, but the expanded edition 'Troth of the English' of 1903 has never been out of print since.
The early 1900s were a successful time for Chester, who was able to publish several books on religious traditions and spiritual self-improvement and attracted a followership of dedicated believers soon numbering in the thousands. The moots held at his Somerset home every winter solstice drew crowds of visitors, and in 1906, he rented several buildings in Bristol to accommodate the first formal Folkmoot of the English Troth. By that time, correspondents in Wales and Ireland had already begun following his teachings, and he urged them to found their own troths based on the tradition and sacred language of their peoples. It was in 1908 that he first seriously considered the idea of a unifying Aryan religious community. At the 1909 Folkmoot, he formally introduced the structure he was going to give this system and commissioned the translation of 'Aryosopheia' into several languages. In 1910, the first Worldmoot of the Daen was held in London.
Chester from this point onwards held the offices of both head of the Daen Council and Witan of the English Folkmoot, a situation that would lead to great tension in the organisation during and after World War I. He adopted the Persian word 'Daen', from which he had originally derived the English 'Troth', to describe the Aryan religious tradition as a whole and hoped to gain converts in every Indo-European country. By 1914, there were Daen member groups - though most of them small - in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Italy, France, the United States and South Africa (the latter two affiliated with the English Folkmoot) as well as separate Daen organisations with their own council seats in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
Both modern Trothfolk and their critics tend to be uncomfortable with closer scrutiny of Chester's beliefs. He has been accused variously of being a racist, and antisemite, an internationalist, a leveller, of hating Christianity and of plotting the destruction of the United Kingdom. A close reading of his work bears none of this out fully. It can not be denied, however, that the Daen set itself up in conscious opposition to the Christian church which Chester regarded as an alien, Semitic religion unsuited to an Aryan people. This did not, however, go hand in hand with the venomous hatred some German Ariosophists expressed around the same time. He did not regard the semitic peoples as inferior or Christianity as a fundamentally bad religion, but was firmly convinced that it was wrong for the national character of the English. In his view, many of the abuses of the middle ages, the confessional wars of the early modern period and even the Irish tension of his own day were ultimately caused by the introduction of a foreign religion. He also rejected the idea that born Jews should convert to the Troth (he wrote as much in a letter to London convert Benjamin Issaacson in 1921, who nonetheless was allowed to remain a member), but again only because he thought their own faith would serve them better. That he believed in an absolute national and ethnic character is clear, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he fiercely maintained the principle that 'men of all races (were) equally capable of great achievement while remaining in the troth of their folk' (as he wrote in 1922 on the occasion of inducting the first Russian Pravda of the Daen among the exile community in Paris).
Loss and Separation
The international nature of the Daen sat ill with the predominance of the English in its ranks, and World war I brought these tensions to a head. The German and Austrian groups formally dissolved all association with their English chairman in 1914, and the Irish followed in 1919. Tension remained throughout the war years and their aftermath, and the hostility that erupted between the English Folktroth and the Celtic Daen member associations was to take a particuzlar toll on Chester. After the Irish organisation left the Daen in 1919, he decided to settle the matter by resigning from the position as chairman of the Daen council and putting the office up for election by the national associations. This step provoked unhappiness in England, where members of the Folktroth already outnumbered all other Daen members worldwide, but it was vindicated when the 10th Worldmoot elected Chester as chairman with only one vote against (Wales, cast for Arthur Machen). Through the 1920s, small Daen communities were founded in many European countries and their representatives frequently visited Chester to confer about religious questions. His Kenning was now widely acknowledged among neopagans. Formal moots and ceremonies abroad often invited him, and despite his already frail health, he frequently attended, travelling to Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Chicago, Florence, Oslo and Amsterdam. His death in 1928 precipitated a crisis for the Daen that would not be resolved until 1947.
After Chester succumbed to pneumonia in March 1928, Arthur Machen was selected as the temporary chairman of the Daen Council while Ramsay Thurgood succeeded him as Witan of the Folkmoot. Thurgood and Machen, however, disagreed violently on the direction the movement should take. Thurgood began publishing Kennings, laying claim to the prophetic mantle of Chester, while Machen aimed to continue in the Chesterian tradition, but deemphasise prophecy, making the Daen a loose association of religious groups. After acrimonious debnate, a faction in the Folkmoot of 1931 attempted to oust Thurgood in a vote of no confidence which was narrowly lost. His supportes then voted to change the rules, making the position of Witan lifelong and contingent upon the gift of Kenning. This led to the split of the Folktroth and the exclusion of the Thurgood faction from the Daen at the 1932 Worldmoot. The two parties were not reunited until after Thurgood's death in 1946, and it would take until 1994 for the Irish Tuath Daen to return to the fold.
The Age of Restoration
Internal squabbles, falling membership numbers and recurring disputes in the Daen council hounded the organisation in the 1930s and 1940s. Machen, attempting to maintain even-handedness in the council, was forced to resign in 1939 over his policy of not taking a position on international events. The Folkmoot and the Daen council both voted strong motions of support for the Anglo-French war effort, with only the Paris Pravda Russkaya abstaining (the German, Italian and Polish groups had been forcibly dissolved), but the group's own sense of ireelevance was only heightened when wartime rationing limited it to biannual newsletters and the Moots of 1941-45 had to be cancelled, with elections held postally. In 1944, an Englishwoman named Judith Masson was elected as Witan to the surprise (and frequently indignation) of male members. She would, in time, prove to be the saviour of the Daen.
After the end of the war in 1945, Masson, a London schoolteacher, was instrumental in forging the Daen's political stance. Hitherto ambiguous and often associated with rather unsavoury groups (a large part of the American moot had been members of the Ku Klux Klan or other racist organisations, and the Polish, Russian and south African organisations also had developed in a similar direction), the postwar council in 1946 dedicated itself unreservedly to supporting human rights (Manright), political equality (Mootright), freedom of religion (Trothfreedom) and national self-determination (Folkfreedom). Though the reformist party was able to decide the resulting squabbles in its favour in every case, the membership rolls kept declining. It was proving especially difficult to recruit young people, and as many members of the first generation died, not enough of their children joined to keep up numbers.
This was to change dramatically with the 1960s. The literary works of some Daen members - Arthur Machen, former American Moot Witan Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft- experienced a resurgence in popularity and the romantic strain of spiritualism that Chester had found so appealing once again drew a large audience. It was the deft marketing ability of Judith Masson, who, while never claiming any Kenning for herself, made herself into the interpreter and expounder of Chester's writing, that brought especially young women into the fold. While the entire Daen in 1945 had counted less than ten thousand members, by 1965 this figure had risen to almost 50,000 in the English Folktroth alone. The close association between Folktroth literature and modern fantasy gave rise not only to some derision, but also to several angry comments from writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who appreciated the newfound love for mythology, but deeply disapproved of neopaganism.
Towards the end of the Masson tenure in 1972, the Folktroth also began opening up towards immigrant communities. Masson herself, to the chagrin of many established members, attended the founding celebration of the short-lived Obeah Moot of Jamaica and London. While the Daen remains primarily a white European faith - as Chester had envisioned it - it has been making some headway among young Asians. Neopagan communities in Central and eastern Europe, too, used affiliation with the Daen council as a source of funding, support and legitimacy following the end of Communism. By 2000, the Daen had come closer to the true internationaöl nature that its founder had dreamed of than ever before in its history. With an estimnated 900,000 members worldwide, of which 300,000 live in the United Kingdom and about 400,000 in the USA, it is the largest neopagan community in the world today.
As we approach the 100th Worldmoot of the Daen, it is time for a dispassionate look at the work of the founder of one of Modern Britain's most successful religious movements. Following the publication of several biographies on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2003 and the 80th anniversary of his death in 2008, much material is now, thankfully, available to the interested reader that until recently was out of reach of even the most dedicated scholars.
Andrew Erskine Chester's early career, as far as it can be reconstructed, was an unremarkable one. Born as the second son of a country parson in Somerset, he attended Shrewsbury and read Classics and Oriental Languages at Brasenose College, Oxford, before gaining entry into the ICS. Speculation about the religious and phiolosophical influences on him by Welsh Neo-Druidism, an elusive Indian teacher of Sanskrit identified by various names, and his agnostic uncle has as yet prpoven to have no grounding in evidence. As far as we can tell, Chester left for India a practising low-church Anglican.
It was during his work in the Bombay Presidency that he came into contact with the Parsi community and took an interest in their religion and culture. By his own account, he then reached his revelation or Kenning, though this has been doubted by friends and acquaintances who describe him as an avid student, but not follower, of Indian religions. Several of Chester's papers were published in the Asiatic Society's journal and commented warmly by scholars in both India and Britain. During this time he travelled to Persia on business of the Government of India and corresponded with several leading archeologistrs and experts on Persian culture and art. Several of his letters to John Lockwood Kipling survive in the Kipling estate and show him as an eager and dedicated scholar with a talent for languages. By the the time of his retirement from the ICS in 1894 due to ill health, he had mastered Old and Middle Persian, Accadian, Pali and Syriac in addition to Arabic, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
Returning to his native England, Chester settled into the modest lifestyle of a retired gentleman-scholar. He held lectures and published a number of articles to some acclaim before the best-selling 'Religious Traditions of the Aryan Peoples' of 1897. By this time he had already begun correspondence with several people throughout the country that would later become founder members of the Daen and close associates. Arthur Machen, already a successful writer and speaker of Welsh, visited Chester several times and may have been instrumental in introducing him to the Celtic tradition (Chester had learnt Old Welsh and Old Irish well enough to publish his own translations from the Mabinogion and the Brehon law by 1900). Almost imperceptibly at first, Chester began to turn from philologist to prophet, from student of ancient religions to founder of a new one.
'The Religious Traditions of the Aryan Peoples' already contained the core beliefs of the Daen (a loan word that Chester, like so many others, adopted from Old Persian): a theology built around the concept of light and dark, the concept of fate or Worldwyrd, the central role of judgment to determine the future fate of human souls and the strong emphasis on individual religious insight (Kenning). By 1900, with the publication of 'Aryosopheia', this had become integrated into a belief system that Chester believed to be fundamental to every Indo-European tradition and hoped to see resurrected in Europe. He would dedicate the remainder of his life to this task.
Controversial Prophet
Chester's circle of followers formalised itself into a religion on 21 December 1899, with a ceremony greeting the rising sun of the new century. The tenets of its faith were published in the spring of 1900 in the high-end volume 'Aryosopheia' and, the same year, in the shorter, cheaper and far more accessible 'Faith of the English - Aryan Troth for a Modern Land'. It is thought that this book - written by Chester, but heavily redacted by Machen and dialectologist Robert Vorne - marks the starting point of the Anglish tradition the Daen has adopted in England. It is here that the terms Folkmoot, Folktroth, Landtroth, Kenning, Worldwyrd and Eversoul are first documented. Interestingly, Chester's own writings always made heavy use of Romance terms and did not follow the habit of other writers in the Daen. Initial sales were disappointing, but the expanded edition 'Troth of the English' of 1903 has never been out of print since.
The early 1900s were a successful time for Chester, who was able to publish several books on religious traditions and spiritual self-improvement and attracted a followership of dedicated believers soon numbering in the thousands. The moots held at his Somerset home every winter solstice drew crowds of visitors, and in 1906, he rented several buildings in Bristol to accommodate the first formal Folkmoot of the English Troth. By that time, correspondents in Wales and Ireland had already begun following his teachings, and he urged them to found their own troths based on the tradition and sacred language of their peoples. It was in 1908 that he first seriously considered the idea of a unifying Aryan religious community. At the 1909 Folkmoot, he formally introduced the structure he was going to give this system and commissioned the translation of 'Aryosopheia' into several languages. In 1910, the first Worldmoot of the Daen was held in London.
Chester from this point onwards held the offices of both head of the Daen Council and Witan of the English Folkmoot, a situation that would lead to great tension in the organisation during and after World War I. He adopted the Persian word 'Daen', from which he had originally derived the English 'Troth', to describe the Aryan religious tradition as a whole and hoped to gain converts in every Indo-European country. By 1914, there were Daen member groups - though most of them small - in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Italy, France, the United States and South Africa (the latter two affiliated with the English Folkmoot) as well as separate Daen organisations with their own council seats in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
Both modern Trothfolk and their critics tend to be uncomfortable with closer scrutiny of Chester's beliefs. He has been accused variously of being a racist, and antisemite, an internationalist, a leveller, of hating Christianity and of plotting the destruction of the United Kingdom. A close reading of his work bears none of this out fully. It can not be denied, however, that the Daen set itself up in conscious opposition to the Christian church which Chester regarded as an alien, Semitic religion unsuited to an Aryan people. This did not, however, go hand in hand with the venomous hatred some German Ariosophists expressed around the same time. He did not regard the semitic peoples as inferior or Christianity as a fundamentally bad religion, but was firmly convinced that it was wrong for the national character of the English. In his view, many of the abuses of the middle ages, the confessional wars of the early modern period and even the Irish tension of his own day were ultimately caused by the introduction of a foreign religion. He also rejected the idea that born Jews should convert to the Troth (he wrote as much in a letter to London convert Benjamin Issaacson in 1921, who nonetheless was allowed to remain a member), but again only because he thought their own faith would serve them better. That he believed in an absolute national and ethnic character is clear, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he fiercely maintained the principle that 'men of all races (were) equally capable of great achievement while remaining in the troth of their folk' (as he wrote in 1922 on the occasion of inducting the first Russian Pravda of the Daen among the exile community in Paris).
Loss and Separation
The international nature of the Daen sat ill with the predominance of the English in its ranks, and World war I brought these tensions to a head. The German and Austrian groups formally dissolved all association with their English chairman in 1914, and the Irish followed in 1919. Tension remained throughout the war years and their aftermath, and the hostility that erupted between the English Folktroth and the Celtic Daen member associations was to take a particuzlar toll on Chester. After the Irish organisation left the Daen in 1919, he decided to settle the matter by resigning from the position as chairman of the Daen council and putting the office up for election by the national associations. This step provoked unhappiness in England, where members of the Folktroth already outnumbered all other Daen members worldwide, but it was vindicated when the 10th Worldmoot elected Chester as chairman with only one vote against (Wales, cast for Arthur Machen). Through the 1920s, small Daen communities were founded in many European countries and their representatives frequently visited Chester to confer about religious questions. His Kenning was now widely acknowledged among neopagans. Formal moots and ceremonies abroad often invited him, and despite his already frail health, he frequently attended, travelling to Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Chicago, Florence, Oslo and Amsterdam. His death in 1928 precipitated a crisis for the Daen that would not be resolved until 1947.
After Chester succumbed to pneumonia in March 1928, Arthur Machen was selected as the temporary chairman of the Daen Council while Ramsay Thurgood succeeded him as Witan of the Folkmoot. Thurgood and Machen, however, disagreed violently on the direction the movement should take. Thurgood began publishing Kennings, laying claim to the prophetic mantle of Chester, while Machen aimed to continue in the Chesterian tradition, but deemphasise prophecy, making the Daen a loose association of religious groups. After acrimonious debnate, a faction in the Folkmoot of 1931 attempted to oust Thurgood in a vote of no confidence which was narrowly lost. His supportes then voted to change the rules, making the position of Witan lifelong and contingent upon the gift of Kenning. This led to the split of the Folktroth and the exclusion of the Thurgood faction from the Daen at the 1932 Worldmoot. The two parties were not reunited until after Thurgood's death in 1946, and it would take until 1994 for the Irish Tuath Daen to return to the fold.
The Age of Restoration
Internal squabbles, falling membership numbers and recurring disputes in the Daen council hounded the organisation in the 1930s and 1940s. Machen, attempting to maintain even-handedness in the council, was forced to resign in 1939 over his policy of not taking a position on international events. The Folkmoot and the Daen council both voted strong motions of support for the Anglo-French war effort, with only the Paris Pravda Russkaya abstaining (the German, Italian and Polish groups had been forcibly dissolved), but the group's own sense of ireelevance was only heightened when wartime rationing limited it to biannual newsletters and the Moots of 1941-45 had to be cancelled, with elections held postally. In 1944, an Englishwoman named Judith Masson was elected as Witan to the surprise (and frequently indignation) of male members. She would, in time, prove to be the saviour of the Daen.
After the end of the war in 1945, Masson, a London schoolteacher, was instrumental in forging the Daen's political stance. Hitherto ambiguous and often associated with rather unsavoury groups (a large part of the American moot had been members of the Ku Klux Klan or other racist organisations, and the Polish, Russian and south African organisations also had developed in a similar direction), the postwar council in 1946 dedicated itself unreservedly to supporting human rights (Manright), political equality (Mootright), freedom of religion (Trothfreedom) and national self-determination (Folkfreedom). Though the reformist party was able to decide the resulting squabbles in its favour in every case, the membership rolls kept declining. It was proving especially difficult to recruit young people, and as many members of the first generation died, not enough of their children joined to keep up numbers.
This was to change dramatically with the 1960s. The literary works of some Daen members - Arthur Machen, former American Moot Witan Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft- experienced a resurgence in popularity and the romantic strain of spiritualism that Chester had found so appealing once again drew a large audience. It was the deft marketing ability of Judith Masson, who, while never claiming any Kenning for herself, made herself into the interpreter and expounder of Chester's writing, that brought especially young women into the fold. While the entire Daen in 1945 had counted less than ten thousand members, by 1965 this figure had risen to almost 50,000 in the English Folktroth alone. The close association between Folktroth literature and modern fantasy gave rise not only to some derision, but also to several angry comments from writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who appreciated the newfound love for mythology, but deeply disapproved of neopaganism.
Towards the end of the Masson tenure in 1972, the Folktroth also began opening up towards immigrant communities. Masson herself, to the chagrin of many established members, attended the founding celebration of the short-lived Obeah Moot of Jamaica and London. While the Daen remains primarily a white European faith - as Chester had envisioned it - it has been making some headway among young Asians. Neopagan communities in Central and eastern Europe, too, used affiliation with the Daen council as a source of funding, support and legitimacy following the end of Communism. By 2000, the Daen had come closer to the true internationaöl nature that its founder had dreamed of than ever before in its history. With an estimnated 900,000 members worldwide, of which 300,000 live in the United Kingdom and about 400,000 in the USA, it is the largest neopagan community in the world today.