Drawing Down the Moon (43 page)

After it appeared, a number of people wrote to Adams that they were more confused than ever. Adams laughed when he told me this and said, “After that I gave up. I told myself, ‘You have a convoluted, schizoid mind and you just have to accept it.'” We should bear this in mind as we approach his writings.

According to Feraferian thealogy, the center of the universe, of all universes perhaps, is the Arretos Koura, an ancient Greek phrase for the ineffable bride, the Nameless Maiden. The Arretos Koura spins a cosmic dance from which all things come into existence, each of them unique and particular. The Nameless Maiden is not the “One” from which all things leave and return; she is, rather, the “transcendent unique,” the creatrix of all uniqueness. All the entities she creates interrelate with her, but never lose their individual essence. Thus, she represents polytheistic wholeness as opposed to monotheistic unity. An analogy to this might be a symphony, where each note is differentiated, but the whole is something beyond a “unity.”

Under the Arretos Koura are what Adams has called “the Goddessgiven Gods.” These are the archetypal beings—Mother, Father, Son, Daughter. Feraferia is unlike many other Neo-Pagan revivals in emphasizing the Young Maiden rather than the Mother Goddess. Feraferia deemphasizes the paternal and maternal aspects of life, which imply relationships based on a notion of authority. Lady Svetlana said, “We don't want to think that authoritarianism is the primal thing in the universe.”

The Korê—the Maiden Goddess—is at the center of Feraferia's paradisal vision. In Adams's view only a new religion that worships the Maiden Goddess—beauty, creativity, and desire—and that “draws strength from all the mysteries of Immanent Nature and the flesh,” can bring the vision into reality. It is she “who is the ultimate image of delicacy and nonviolence, of playfulness and sensitivity and childlikeness. From such an archetype a society might develop in which no matriarchs or patriarchs would exist, and people would not develop hard and fast hierarchies.”

Adams stated this idea in an essay called “The Korê.”

Adams argued that the central problem of our time is how to reconcile “the primal parents,” the Mother and Father, the yin and the yang. The dominance of the Father excludes the Mother, but, said Adams, the Mother principle includes the Father, and must take precedence.

The emphasis on the feminine yin meant freedom for both yin and yang in their fusion. “In Yin,” he wrote, “Yin and Yang find full scope for the expansion of Life between them. This means Yin, in some transcendent-immanent way, is TAO.”

Within the Holy Family of four, it is the Daughter who brings about their harmony.

It is only through the Maiden, Adams argued, that the balance can be restored in a way that will elevate freedom, playfulness, sensuality, and the imagination. The flaw of Christianity—and of most of the Eastern religions—is that they sought to create a balance through the Father principle, and were forced to do so through asceticism and the images of a pure, castrated male. Such an image, he wrote, would only continue the “Age of Analysis.” In contrast, the Maiden Way would provide the necessary spiritual cohesion to begin a shift in history that would end “the prisons of hierarchy and the garbage heaps of industrialism.” And this “Great Shift” or “Great Return” to the feminine could be seen by anyone who carefully examined the news of the day, or took a look at recent films, or novels, or essays, or poetry, but all “with an inner eye sharpened by the depth psychology of C. G. Jung.”

In
Hesperian Life and the Maiden Way
Adams wrote that all previous attempts at revolution were trying to return to some contemporary aspect of the Goddess, but failed because they could not rid themselves of “mechanization, hierarchy, exploitation of animals, [and] sex repression.” He argued that such an impulse had inspired Marx to talk about the “withering away of the state”; it was present on banners depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe during the Mexican Revolution. But the Maiden Goddess was never acknowledged as the guiding spirit of these reforms. Neither liberal education, nor totalitarian propaganda, nor the education of an elite vanguard, nor the victory of science and technology could ever bring this revolution about. “Only a great Religious Revolution, springing from the very broadest collective base of the Human Soul, can spread rapidly enough and thrust deeply enough without cataclysmic consequences to win the whole Human Race back to its Root Sense of the Organic Feminine Balance, and its natural destiny of Hesperian Life.”
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Frederick Adams has lived in the wilderness, and Feraferia has participated in reforestation work, regarding wilderness as “the supreme value of religion and life.”
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Feraferia has stressed its spiritual link with ecology, stating that the lyrical unification of ecology and religion is its prime task. Adams has written that “The only way to reunite Mankind is to reunite Mankind with Nature. Mankind will become humane toward Man only when he becomes humane toward all nature.”
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Feraferia's first article of faith has been a belief that from wildness springs love, wonder, and joy, and that, as the famous quotation from Thoreau goes: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Adams has written that the primary cause of alienation and most psychological disorders is the severing of humanity from wilderness. Poetry, ritual, dance, and song unite the inner and the outer: they link “visionary nature within and ecological nature without,” microcosm and macrocosm. Adams emphasizes techniques that lead to a feeling of connectedness to the natural world. These include not only ritual techniques for producing ecstasy but techniques to reconnect one to the living cosmos—knowledge of wilderness, ecology, astronomy, astrology, and henge construction. Since all nature is sacred space, the planet and sky are Feraferia's temple. Adams has devoted many articles to building temples in nature, orienting them to the four directions and the positions of the stars and planets. “Land-Feeling,” wrote Adams, “is absolutely essential to the Spiritual Reclamation of Man to Nature in Her hour of crisis,” and building a henge or “topocosmic mandala” promotes a feeling of “Land-Sky-Love.”
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Feraferian rituals are oriented toward the play of the seasons and the transformations of the Maiden Goddess and her lover and son as the year progresses. Adams writes:

Feraferia lays great emphasis on sensuality and eroticism, but by these words Adams does not mean genital sex. Rather, Feraferia stresses the idea that human beings should open themselves up to their own sensual nature, to the landscape, the earth, and sky, as well as to all other beings. Feraferia, like a number of Neo-Pagan groups, talks about sensuality as a sacrament, as the “feast of the Goddess and the Goddessgiven Gods.”

Feraferia distrusts modern technology much more than does any other Neo-Pagan group. Adams and Lady Svetlana feel that most mechanization has disrupted the flow of human life so that humanity is no longer in tune with the pulse of nature's own rhythms: solar, lunar, and the circadian rhythms of our bodies. Adams told me that he hopes for a new science—a small, highly refined technology embodying solar energy, laser technology, and a combination of forms—some of it old, known to the megalithic stone builders, and some of it new. In one flight of imagination Adams told me of his fantasy of priests and priestesses creating orgone energy in great ley-line temple centers through the use of highly developed sex magic.

Some Neo-Pagans have called the Feraferian vision unrealistic, as well as too blatantly antitechnological. Others have criticized its vision of nature as “unnatural” because it accepts only the calm, refined, elegant, peaceful, and romantic aspects of nature. These Pagans believe that nature has a dark side, that the destruction caused by storms, the killing of one species by another, are part of nature's laws and necessary for life. Adams told me, “Evolution is now maintained on this planet by predation and competition. There may be other principles for regulating evolution on other planets that are not as cruel as those on earth.”

Feminist Neo-Pagans have criticized Feraferia for emphasizing a glamorous, seductive, playful goddess. And both Fred and Svetlana have said that women should not make themselves less glamorous; rather, men should make themselves more childish, more delicate. Svetlana said, “Wilderness is highly decorative. We should emulate her beauty.”

But the main criticism by Neo-Pagans is that Feraferia is primarily an artistic creation rather than a functioning religion. In practice, it has had few followers. Feraferia emerged out of Hesperides during the 1960s; it was incorporated in 1967 and reached its height in the early seventies. Even then, it had an active group of only about fifty people (occasionally more appeared for big festivals), of whom only twenty or thirty were initiates. Feraferia has been very selective in accepting initiates.

In 1971 Robert Ellwood wrote about Feraferia: