Drawing Down the Moon (62 page)

All these seemed to be proper questions to ask a modern Pagan living on the Mother's Earth. And strange it was back in 1976 to find that most of these questions had never been asked or answered, despite the many books on modern Witches and the sprinkling of books and essays on Neo-Paganism. Most books had focused on the “beliefs” of Pagans, on stories and anecdotes of psychic experiences, on descriptions of initiation rites and seasonal festivals, and on the history of the worship of ancient deities. But none had asked how comfortable these Pagans were with the world around them.

In seeking answers to some of these questions, I typed up a questionnaire with more than seventy questions. The questionnaire was published in
Green Egg
¹
and became the basis for the interviews I conducted around the country. Several Pagan groups used the questionnaire as a basis for discussion topics. All told, I received about one hundred replies.

In 1985 I passed out another much shorter questionnaire. It was published in
Panegyria
and four hundred copies were passed out at three Pagan festivals. One hundred ninety-five were returned.

I came to Neo-Paganism out of a search for a celebratory, ecological nature religion that would appease my hunger for the beauty of ancient myths and visions without strangling my mind with dogmas or cutting off the continuing flow of many doubts. In a family of agnostics, atheists, and Marxist humanists I was a secret childhood worshipper of the Greek gods and goddesses. But later I was heavily influenced by the politics of the sixties and early seventies. I was jailed and convicted in Berkeley, teargassed in Chicago, and nearly killed in Mississippi. Still later, as a journalist, I witnessed political trials and covered political demonstrations, and I twice visited Cuba and East Germany. I have come to understand that all things are interconnected. I reject
nothing
in this past, neither the jails nor the goddesses, neither the moonlit rituals nor the political activism and analysis.

My views have changed during the last thirty years. It would be fair to say that I now tend toward a “longer,” more “cosmic” view of the world, and that my politics are more decentralist, if no less radical. Still, I did not come to Neo-Paganism out of a
rejection
of or escape from the political. Instead, Paganism seemed to me a philosophy that could heal the breach between the spiritual and the material. If ecology studied the interrelatedness of all living things and their environment, Neo-Paganism seemed to be a religion that would celebrate those interrelationships, that would heal into synthesis all oppositions: primitive and civilized, science and magic, male and female, spirit and matter.

Given this position, I was drawn to those writers who perceived a split in humanity's consciousness and sought to heal it. For example, I was drawn to the works of anthropolgist Stanley Diamond, especially his book
In Search of the Primitive
(1974).

Diamond argues not only that the spread of modern civilization has conquered and imperialized primitive peoples, but that it is “ultimately man's self, his species being, which is imperialized.” Civilized humanity, by losing touch with the primitive, the primary, lost and subordinated what was essentially human within itself. The central question, Diamond writes, is, “What part of our humanity have we lost and how and why we have lost it and how and in what form we may regain it.” It is clear that primitive societies had their disadvantages, but it is also clear that many of them allowed for more participation in community life and that many primitive religions were more in tune with human existence. “The sickness of civilization,” Diamond observes, consists in “its failure to incorporate (and only then to move beyond the limits of) the primitive.”
²

Hundreds of other writers have discussed the split between mind and body, that split which historian E. R. Dodds called the most farreaching and perhaps the most questionable of all the gifts we received from classical culture.
³
Lynn White placed the blame on Christianity. Theodore Roszak wrote eloquently on the perils of objectifying nature to the exclusion of ecstasy, and B. Z. Goldberg described that ecstasy in
The Sacred Fire.
Neo-Paganism, it seemed, was a philosophy that could join ancient and modern values. As Pagan writer Allen Greenfield observed to me, “The future must be built from the best material of past and present, and on the grave of those elements in both which were/are adverse to human life and living.” Neo-Paganism seemed also to be a religion and way of life that allowed one to regain kinship with nature without sacrificing one's individuality or independence.

These influences, among many, led me to certain assumptions. NeoPagans, it seemed to me, had turned to new and old nature religions for nourishment and inspiration at a time when the degradation of nature and the artificiality of the environment were among the supreme facts of life, particularly in urban and suburban areas, where most Neo-Pagans—and most people in the United States—lived.

Since Pagans often looked to the past for
sources
of inspiration, I assumed that they, like myself, would have an ambivalent and troubled attitude toward modern civilization and would distrust linear concepts of progress. I assumed that the majority would be fervent ecologists, that most (given the prominence of female deities) would be sympathetic to feminism and would favor decentralized and regional forms of governance. I also assumed that Neo-Pagans, critical of the society around them, would find their lives filled with contradictions that they would be trying to resolve. They would see Neo-Paganism as an alternative to much of the status quo, and even a vehicle for ultimate transformation. And finally, I assumed that the excesses of Neo-Pagans would be my own: a tendency to ludditism and to romanticizing the past.

Many of these assumptions turned out to be false, but they were natural ones to make—not only because of the philosophical influences that informed my own journey but because such views have often been central to the political movements of indigenous peoples. A journal like
Akwesasne Notes,
for example, the newspaper of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne in upstate New York, had always taken such a critical perspective.

Orginally
Akwesasne Notes
was a newspaper that reported on the ferment in Native American communities. Starting in 1969, with the occupation of Alcatraz by a group of Native Americans, it chronicled the development of the American Indian movement. It reported on the situation at reservations throughout North America. It described with unparalleled excellence and accuracy the occupations, arrests, trials, shootings—all facets of Native American political struggles in North America. In addition, it combined religious traditionalism and political radicalism in a unique way.

Eventually, as one editor told an interviewer, “we began to realize that it was not going to be sufficient to remove an oppressor off our backs. We had to discover something positive. We had to recreate a destroyed way of life.”
⁴
Soon
Notes
came to embrace a viewpoint more universal than Native American traditionalism. The newspaper advertised itself as a voice for all “Natural” as well as Native people, the voice of people who were trying to live lives in tune with the natural world and the “Laws of the Creation.” Many of its articles pointed out that people in North America—natives and non-natives alike—were caught up in complicated social processes that they did not understand, processes that were destroying them physically and spiritually. The newspaper took the position that Western culture was impoverished, artificial, and diseased—“a cancer.” Western culture offered visible ease and convenience, but at a price that was indirect and invisible, except to those who had purified themselves by returning to a less artificial way of life. The flushing of a toilet was visible and direct; the lowering of water tables and pollution of waters was often invisible and indirect.

Many articles in
Notes
stressed a central theme: the pervasive penetration of artificiality into daily life, coupled with the loss of diversity and freedom. As one
Notes
editor remarked, after traveling around the country with the Native American group White Roots of Peace,

The task at hand was to define and begin to free oneself from consumer culture. The newspaper saw itself “at war with the most destructive forces ever assembled in the history of mankind,” but in “a unique position to raise the most critical questions,” to voice concerns about survival that were generally unspoken.
⁶

Notes
did not romanticize the situation of Native Americans, as many whites tend to do. It often pictured the ancient traditions as fragmented, much like those of modern Witches. Most “Indians” were as much the victims of Western culture as most whites. But Native American traditions were seen to contain many answers to the problem of how to live a human life on the North American continent. Most important, the conditions and problems were universal problems of survival, of “being humanhuman beings,” that other political movements had failed to address.

How did one “regain those real ways”? Many articles conceded that it was almost impossible, the job of a lifetime, since most people's lives were enmeshed in a web of contradictions that clouded true perception. To take one example, an article describes the plight of a Native American farmer whose cattle are dying of chemical poisoning from the nearby Reynolds aluminum plant. Once his cattle begin to sicken, the farmer is forced to find outside work. Where can he find it? Why, at the Reynolds plant, of course, the company that is destroying his way of life. His understanding becomes clouded when he becomes thankful to get the job. “How can you fight something that you work for?” The article adds, “The monster gives you no choice. It pokes you in the eye at the same time that it fills your wallet and it destroys your garden and cattle at the same time that it offers you jobs.”
⁸

Another writer describes the progress of his family and neighbors during a rent strike in a large Eastern city. After a long struggle that takes up most of their energies, they win a difficult court case and possibly will soon own the building themselves. Is this a victory? The writer begins to notice the knotweed that threatens the foundations of their building. Eventually these houses will decay. His family has stopped planting lettuce in the front-yard garden because the lead from passing automobile exhausts will coat the lettuce and build up in the body of their child. What does it really mean, he asks, to fight for an artificial reality? He continues:

The writer notes that he has begun to change his perception. While he remains a political activist, he no longer feels that the overall struggle is simply between warring classes. He now believes that the issue is survival (everyone drinks the water), he admits his fear and ignorance of “the natural world to which we must head for survival,” and he asks himself, Will I become so caught up in the survival struggles of the artificial world that I forget what the real issues are?
⁹
The idea that one must constantly strive to attain clarity on these issues was a constant theme in
Akwesasne Notes.
Rarihokwats, editor of the paper until 1977, told an interviewer:

Although it should be clear to readers of this book that modern Witches are creating their traditions from fragments, using past sources for inspiration but mixing them with modern creativity, many whites tend to assume that most Native Americans, in contrast, possess
complete
traditions.
Notes
showed Native Americans in a similar struggle to revive natural religions that have been suppressed over centuries. The position of many Native Americans did not seem so far removed from that of modern-day European descendants of the ancient Celts, although it can be argued that more of the ancient traditions survived on the American continent, since the arrival of Christianity here was a more recent event.