Drawing Down the Moon (64 page)

But today, many more Pagans and Wiccans are making their living as clergy.

Most Neo-Pagans live in urban areas and most, but not all, plan to stay there. “Why does Paganism grow up in cities?” I asked. “Because most people live in cities,” was the most common reply. “Because strange ideas grow up in cities,” was another. “Because books are printed there,” was a third. Many of the people I questioned believed that new ideas enter through cities. Publisher Carl Weschcke put it this way: “Most covens are urban covens. As long as we're talking about a
live
religious phenomenon, it's going to occur primarily in urban areas, just because that's where people are and that's where the need is. We will not all leave the city and go back to the land. The cities will either have a healthy future or we will have to condemn ninety percent of the population to extinction.”

It is clear that Weschcke differed greatly with the Feraferian vision of ten to twenty million people living in a horticultural paradise. Not all Pagans agreed with Weschcke, but his was the majority view. Today, there are more rural Pagans, but it is still a minority.

One common thread was the idea that the disadvantages of city living produced a reverence toward nature (the same idea was expressed by Fred Adams in an earlier chapter). Alison Harlow told me, “Urban Pagans feel most uprooted, most alienated from nature. Those in the country are living quietly. They don't need to talk about it. They don't know we're around. Maybe they don't need us.” Another priestess, Bobby Kennedy, from Ohio, expressed a similar idea. “City dwellers,” she told me, “are so isolated from nature that they need to venerate it more because it's so far away from them. Most religions, as far as I'm concerned, answer a need for something that's missing.”

“Is it contradictory to celebrate a harvest festival in the city?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “We are still eating the harvest. November is the only time pomegranates come around. That's something to celebrate!”

In contrast to the views expressed in
Akwesasne Notes,
and contrary to my own expectations and the assumptions of various scholars, the majority of Neo-Pagans are optimistic about the uses of science and modern technology. Furthermore, while they may take inspiration from the past, they do not want to return to it. Many, in fact, do not view the past positively at all. They were quite adamant on this point. Perhaps they reacted strongly because I expressed forcefully my own ambivalences and my surprise at their seeming complacency. My own Pagan journey had been highly colored by the writings of Theodore Roszak and Stanley Diamond and by the vast ecological literature of the early seventies. To me every “advance” seemed to have a heavy price.

Among those who felt differently was Leo Martello, who wrote from New York: “A Pagan life as currently and loosely defined is
not
a return to the mud hovel.” And Lady Cybele of Madison told me, “I'm all for technology, as long as it doesn't destroy the earth in the process. I'm very happy with technological advances. I'm very happy to climb in my car and drive two hundred miles to see Pagan friends.” She began to laugh and added, “It's a bummer flying my broom in the winter. Besides, modern conveniences have eliminated a lot of drudgery. Modern technology has freed up time so people can develop philosophical pursuits.”

Gwydion Pendderwen, the Craft bard, said, “There is a tendency among some Pagans to want to be back in, let us say, sixth-century Wales instead of wanting a
transformed
world. Going back to sixth-century Wales is a fantasy that is dear to me. It's part of the archetypal dream. But that is all it is. Nobody really wants to go back into the past, except a bunch of space cookies. It is not modern technology that is desensitizing. It is the misuse of it that is. I would not throw out my tape recorder for a bunch of lutes. I can use both to make music.”

The bluntest statement of all came from the late Herman Slater, who used to own the Magickal Childe, a New York occult shop. He wrote to me:

A few people were concerned about the idea that modern technology costs a heavy price in desensitization. “We are dulled by technological overload,” wrote Pagan writer Allen Greenfield, who observed that technology had “many gifts” but that our “high-energy culture was dehumanizing and alienating.”

Priestess Morgan McFarland of Dallas reflected, “Our civilization has tricked us into accepting as normal or natural things that are not. We only have flashes of insight and we are no longer producing real individuals, but cookie-cutter stereotypes.”

McFarland spoke also of her fear that television was destroying the “secret kingdom” of children's street games and play rituals, “the only place where real ritual still exists,” and she told me she often felt that it was almost impossible to attain a clear perspective. “I know that I am so involved in a lifestyle filled with modern technological conveniences that I do not really know what I need and what I could do without, what Pagans really need, and what we could do without.” Then, as we talked into the early hours of the morning, this priestess of three flourishing Dallas covens, a woman who struck me as one of the most perceptive coven leaders I had encountered during my travels, told me how deeply aware she was of contradictions in her own life. “The Craft is a way of life,” she said softly, “but that does not mean that we live it, that I live it. It is something I strive toward.”

The late Bonnie Sherlock expressed similar feelings. She was a bright, lovely, lonely woman in her forties who lived in the small town of Lander, Wyoming. Along with a small group of friends, Sherlock had published
The Medicine Wheel,
a small, sensitive Neo-Pagan journal that had never gone out to more than a hundred people. She had also presided as priestess in a coven that combined Celtic and Native American traditions. They called themselves the Delphians. A diabetic, dependent on extensive medication, she died in the fall of 1976. Her witty letters to
Green Egg
ceased, along with
The Medicine Wheel.

Less than a year before she died we sat in her tiny, cozy house and talked. She talked about the initiation she had received, years before, into a Native American tradition. Despite her diabetes, she had gone on a three-day fast and vision quest that landed her in the hospital and nearly in the grave. Recalling the experience, she said it had been worth it. She would do it again in a minute. “I'm not in tune, always, with the life I would like to lead,” she told me, pointing to her medications. She said that there was no history of diabetes in her family and called her illness “a disease of civilization,” aided in its course by commercial foods, sugars, and additives. “The Craft is a way of life. It is a religion that celebrates life and love of nature. But there are times when I am not living it, when I step in and out of it.”

She told me of her fantasies. They were simple. She said that she would like to be a caretaker of gardens, of temples with gardens where flowers bloomed and waters constantly flowed. It was February. The Wyoming desert lay under snow.

Despite the deep division in opinion about modern technology, almost everyone talked of the need for a return to the “primal,” the unconscious, the “primitive”—but a “primitive”
within,
not a “primitive” that one
went back to.
Tony Andruzzi, a Witch of Sicilian origin and former stage magician, told me, “A Pagan is a believer in the primitive,” but for him this meant a return not to the world of the primitive but to the roots of things. This did not necessarily conflict with a technologically advanced society, he said. Sitting in a room decorated with red and black velvet, Andruzzi said, “A Pagan is a believer in the values of self-survival, in literally sitting down in the swamp, knee deep in mud, and becoming a part of it, letting it become a part of one; of becoming earth, of becoming stars, of becoming a piece of something that encompasses beyond understanding a part of the spectrum of all we know.

“We have subjugated that. We have to shear away, we have to tear out the rock wall, the crypt of our social, psychological being. We need to get back to a more elemental way of being, of living with our environment. We must protect that flame from all wind or threat. We must allow the growth of that diamond chip of god within us.

“We have to get back to a more elemental way of
being,
not feeling, of
being.
I mean a living with our elements, a living with our environment instead of being superior to it.”

 

Turning to the question of “scientific” versus “magical” thinking, almost everyone I questioned felt that there was no conflict between the two; and most would have agreed with Robert Anton Wilson's humorous saying: “Advertising, Magic and Behaviorism all say the same thing—invoke often!” But two of the most important Pagan theorists made a careful distinction between scientific research done by scientists and what they called “the religion of science” or “Scientism” or “Scientolatry.”

“There is no fight between ‘science' and ‘magic,'” Aidan Kelly said. “But there is a fight between two different kinds of religions, one of which often falsely claims to be science.” He went on:

“I remember that I first thought about this over a year ago, when the American Humanist Association came out with their manifesto against astrology. The real clue was this—the newspapers reported the manifesto as if it were a pronouncement by the American Academy of Science on the discovery of a new planet, as if this were the scientific opinion of scientists speaking as scientists. But in fact, the manifesto was the dogmatic
opinion
of members of the American Humanist Association, speaking as members of a secular religion, the major religion among intellectuals in America today.

“This religion of scientolatry is usually referred to as science. But it is not. The first two dogmas of this religion are, first, that it is not a religion at all, but a purely rational philosophy. The second dogma is that all other religions are purely superstition. And intellectuals who do not subscribe to this religion are discriminated against.

“Unfortunately, the rebellion against the spiritual poverty of scientolatry, often ends up becoming a mistrust of science itself and a mistrust of any kind of technological development. This is a confusion. There is a great deal of wistful archaicism going on in this society, going back to the way it used to be. That is a fantasy. Science is a method, a technique. And technology is very useful. The problem is not with the tools, but with this idolatrous attitude toward science, this secular religion that denies all other aspects of being human.”
¹⁵

Another who expressed this view was Isaac Bonewits, who described himself as a “materialist” as well as an occultist, adding, “I just have a somewhat looser definition of matter than most people.” Bonewits told me that he preferred to take a “practical approach” in analyzing psychic phenomena. “Reality is consensual,” he said. “People define what reality is. In my personal definition of it, I include the fact that you can come up with a moderately logical explanation for everything that happens, provided that you are not hung up on using only Western logic.”

What about Aidan's distinction between “science” and “scientolatry,” I asked. Bonewits concurred: “Scientism is the worship of nineteenth-century science. It is also the unthinking acceptance of any statement made by any man wearing a white lab coat. That's scientism, and it's a very strong religion in America, mostly among mediocre scientists. You'll find very few topnotch ones who are scientistic in thinking. It's the second-level ones who are terrified of the occult.”

This distinction was stressed over and over by Neo-Pagans. They expressed anger not at “science” but at the “religion of science.”

Despite most Pagans' positive attitudes toward science and technology, real differences have surfaced from time to time, occasionally leading to open conflict between Neo-Pagan groups.

One example was an early dispute that came to be known as the Council of Themis War of 1972, perhaps the worst conflict to take place within the Neo-Pagan community. It was made worse by inaccurate reporting in several Witchcraft books.
¹⁶

Ostensibly, the issues in the dispute were twofold. The Council of Themis was an ecumenical meeting of some twenty Neo-Pagan groups that wanted to issue statements of common purpose. The dispute revolved, on the one hand, around the drug and sexual practices in Berkeley's Psychedelic Venus Church and the attitudes toward animal sacrifice in another group, the Hellenic Order; and, on the other hand, around unilateral actions taken by two members of the Council to expel these two groups without discussion and without the consent of all member groups. But underlying these issues were philosophical differences on the question of sexuality, drugs, authoritarianism, and technology.

During this dispute there was an interesting exchange of letters between Feraferia's leading lady, Svetlana Butyrin, and CAW priestess Carolyn Clark. Svetlana observed: