Drawing Down the Moon (42 page)

Much of Feraferian philosophy is connected to a body of utopian thought. It did not spring full blown from the head of Zeus, or even Fred Adams. Adams was the artist, but the vision shows the influence of many sources: the utopian novels of William Morris (
News from Nowhere
), Robert Graves (
Watch the North Wind Rise
), William Hudson (
A Crystal Age
), and several others
¹⁴
; writers on nature and wilderness, particularly John Muir and Henry David Thoreau; the archetypal psychologists (C. G. Jung, Erich Neumann, J. J. Bachofen, Karl Kerényi); surrealist artists and philosophers; naturalist and nudist movements;
The White Goddess;
and perhaps most of all, the work of Henry Bailey Stevens, whose
The Recovery of Culture
provided Adams with the philosophical basis for the paradisal vision of Feraferia.

Stated simply, the basic idea in
The Recovery of Culture
is that human beings have forgotten their primate origins and that this primate past, far from being a time of violence, was, in fact, the paradise of which all the myths speak. Stevens, a horticulturist, argues that the ancestors of human beings lived peacefully in trees for millions of years. It was no accident, he says, that the legends speak of Buddha's gaining enlightenment under a tree. Eden, Avalon, the Garden of Hesperides, all these visions of paradise hark bark to a time before the last ice age, a peaceful time before the beginning of animal husbandry, the eating of meat, and blood sacrifice. This paradise was no myth, but a real period of peace and plenty. The myth of the Fall was simply the story of the end of that era. The story of Cain and Abel was the story of the cropper versus the herdsman, of human beings steeling themselves to the necessity of throat cutting.

According to Stevens, grazing animals had caused the infertility of the soil, creating deserts out of gardens. “Only through gardens,” he wrote, “can the neolithic civilization be understood.” He added:

For Stevens, history began at the point where matters turned wrong. And all the great reformers in history were, in effect, attempting to turn civilization back on course. Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Wagner, Shelley, and Shaw all attempted to return humankind to a vegetarian, frugivorous existence. The end of that existence was the fundamental factor responsible for the wrong turning of civilization, the fundamental cause of wars, famines, and other catastrophes.

Stevens advocated that we “take up again our membership in the primate family,” since a properly developed plant-human ratio could make of the world “a new and more marvelous Garden of Eden.”
¹⁶
He hinted that one mechanism to bring all this about could be a new world religion. Frederick Adams clearly designed Feraferia to be this religion.

Adams's first direct experience of the Goddess came in 1956, while he was doing graduate work at Los Angeles State College. Before that he had explored the work of Robert Graves and C. G. Jung. He had immersed himself in occultism and ceremonial magic, and had long had a love for ancient Greece and the myths of the gods and goddesses. He also loved wilderness and had begun to draw and paint feminine religious figures.

On a spring day, during a period when he was rereading Robert Graves and studying anthropology and the works of Mircea Eliade, Adams was walking across the college campus, he told me, when “It flashed upon me! The feminine aspect of deity, the femininity of divinity. I realized at that moment that the divine feminine is the most important, most valid, most world-shaking truth that we can possibly realize. It came out of the blue, and I just started walking crazily in circles, thinking,
‘That's it, that's it, She is It.'
”

After that, Adams began a series of notebooks on a new theology. Their theme was that the Goddess was the only spiritual force and Jungian archetype capable of reuniting humanity's instincts with the biosphere, nature, and the cosmos. It had to be done through the feminine modality. This did not mean the masculine would be excluded, but the balance could be restored only
through
the feminine.

A year later, in 1957, Adams and some friends formed the group Hesperides, which preceded Feraferia. Adams wrote a pamphlet,
Hesperian Life and the Maiden Way,
which has been revised several times. Here is how the 1970 edition describes Feraferian philosophy.

Adams argued that the vision of Hesperian life still existed, to a limited degree, in various reform movements—nudist, naturalist, vegetarian, utopian, and so on. But these movements always failed because they functioned separately, and also because they lacked a “strong religious center.”

The elements needed to create the Hesperian life included organic gardening, with emphasis on tree crops; promotion of forestation and reverence for the Tree as the Guardian of Life; a diet of fruit, nuts, berries, and leafy vegetables; reverence for all animal, vegetable, and mineral life; no more use of animals as chattel and pets; the promotion of regionalism with small villages and palaces, as opposed to cities; outdoor living, preferably in warm climates where only a minimum of clothing is necessary; a reverence for health and natural medicine; the end of all divisions between “mind work” and “body work”; the end of rigid scheduling and regimentation, of arbitrary coercion, codified laws, and penalization; the elimination of artificial conditions that generate competitiveness, insensitivity, and indifference; the elimination of hierarchy, authoritarianism, and inequality of work; the implementation of safeguards against overpopulation and overorganization; the maximization of “free creative play and erotic development”; and finally, the elimination of “all purely utilitarian, instrumental, automotive devices and activities as loveless and disruptive of the
living
Cosmos.”
¹⁷

Adams was clear in his disdain for most modern technology, as well as in his belief that apocalypse could be avoided only by willing an end to industrialism. “The only task remaining,” he wrote, “for our overestimated, painfully inflated engineering, is to clear the Earth of its own debris and trappings, systematically and gradually over the next several hundred years. Otherwise the clearing of the Earth must be violent, for a clearing there will be.”

Fred Adams and Lady Svetlana described to me their vision of the future. It is far removed from the world of today, and far removed from their own life in Los Angeles. They envision a planet that would support a human population of ten to twenty million, living off horticulture, similar to the paradise pictured by Stevens. It would be “an egalitarian aristocracy, based on arborial culture,” since tree crops, they argued, produce more food per acre with less work than corn or wheat or livestock. This new aristocracy would be most feasible in a warm and fruitful climate, like Java or California. Lady Svetlana told me, “We think communities should have no more than a thousand people, all self-suffcient, since trees, when you get them going, are not hard to take care of. You could sing and dance as you picked the fruit and nuts. It's totally nonviolent.” Fred Adams said that, in his fantasy of the future, nation-states would erode into temple-palace estates. These would exist amidst garden groves that would graduate into wilderness. Each temple would be connected with every other by ley-lines,
^s
like the ancient sites of Britain. Vast tracts of land would be returned to their wild state. The population would be lowered drastically, either by sensible human measures or by the actions of the Goddess which, he told me, had already begun in earthquake activity and weather phenomena. “She will strike back,” he said. “She is not going to let the whole biosphere be torn apart by nuclear maniacs.”

The vision of Feraferia is of a Paganized world, but one that is far from primitive. Adams told me that it was his firm belief that if relatively small numbers of people lived in climates that were suitable and did not engage in destructive practices such as “animal husbandry and warfare,” a high culture would be conceived, exemplifying the best of ancient cultures such as Crete.

I asked Adams and Lady Svetlana for their views on the future of cities. They hoped that permanent cities would cease to exist, replaced by large cultural and sacramental centers where people would come together for seasonal festivals and cultural events. “Why then,” I asked them, “does Neo-Paganism grow up in cities?” I had noticed that the Neo-Pagan movement, like the ecology movement, is mostly an urban phenomenon.

“I'll tell you why,” Adams replied. “Most people who live on the farm are always fighting nature. They don't have the aesthetic distance to see other possibilities of relating to nature. Who, after all, started writing sensual literature during the early decades of this century? Who talked about freeing the sensual nature? D. H. Lawrence, an Englishman, a man from a country where people were more uptight and less sensual than anywhere else. Sometimes reversals have to come from their complete opposite; the yin gives rise to the yang, and the yang gives rise to the yin. I've known many people from the farm who can't sense Thoreau's love of wilderness; they can't sympathize with it because they are struggling with nature due to what we feel is a false agricultural approach.”

And Lady Svetlana added, “We call this false approach the corn-cattlebattle syndrome.”

Living in Los Angeles, a city far removed from the Feraferian vision, the life and actions of Frederick Adams exemplify the contradictions that sometimes afflict a Neo-Pagan. He is a man who functions best as Pagan priest, magician, teacher, and artist in a world that has no use for these vocations. Gentle, peaceful, almost an innocent, Adams made his living for many years as a caseworker for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department. He told me that the problem of living a split life, of trying to do meaningful nonalienating work, had been with him constantly since 1957. “All my life I have sensitized myself to be a visionary artist in a magic circle,” he said. “I used to spend all my time thinking about the Goddess and the Gods. Then I had to go into the freeway world.” Adams told me that he had often been subjected to harassment on the job because of his unorthodox religious beliefs. At the time, it was still his goal to find work that was not psychically damaging, and to leave Los Angeles. Neither goal seemed to be around the corner.

Adams often writes poetically, sometimes in language that few can understand. Much of it presumes a knowledge of esotericism and occultism. Occasionally, it falls into a social-science jargon.
¹⁸
A woman once wrote to him, “You need to get some of this stuff down to grade school level . . . or don't you intend for the common people ever to understand it?” The answer to that question is complicated. Fred Adams clearly believes that the philosophy and theology of Feraferia are all of one piece and cannot be separated or watered down. Still, he did publish a piece called “Feraferia for Beginners” in an issue of
Earth Religion News.
He wrote that the religion celebrated “the processes of Nature as a whole” and worshipped them as “a family of Gods issuing from a cluster of Goddesses.”