Drawing Down the Moon

“It was Christmas Eve and I was singing in the choir of a lovely church at the edge of a lake, and the church was filled with beautiful decorations. It was full moon, and the moon was shining right through the glass windows of the church. I looked out and felt something very special happening, but it didn’t seem to be happening inside the church.

“After the Midnight Mass was over and everyone adjourned to the parish house for coffee, I knew I needed to be alone for a minute, so I left my husband and climbed up the hill behind the church. I sat on this hill looking at the full moon, and I could hear the sound of coffee cups clinking and the murmur of conversation from the parish house.

“I was looking down on all this, when suddenly I felt a ‘presence.’ It seemed very ancient and wise and definitely female. I can’t describe it any closer than that, but I felt that this presence, this being, was looking down on me, on this church and these people and saying, ‘The poor little ones! They mean so well and they understand so little.’

“I felt that whoever ‘she’ was, she was incredibly old and patient; she was exasperated with the way things were going on the planet, but she hadn’t given up hope that we would start making some sense of the world. So, after that, I knew I had to find out more about her.”

As a result of her experience, Harlow began a complex journey to find out about the history and experience of goddess worship. This search led her, through various readings, into contact with a number of Craft traditions, until she ended up writing a column on feminism and Witchcraft for the Neo-Pagan magazine Nemeton (now defunct). It is perhaps only fair, at this point, to describe my own entry into this same world.

When I was a small child, I had the good fortune to enter an unusual New York City grammar school (City and Country) that allowed its students to immerse themselves in historical periods to such an extent that we often seemed to live in them. At the age of twelve, a traditional time for rites of passage, that historical period was ancient Greece. I remember entering into the Greek myths as if I had returned to my true homeland.

My friends and I lived through the battles of the Iliad; we read the historical novels of Mary Renault and Caroline Dale Snedeker¹ and took the parts of ancient heroes and heroines in plays and fantasy. I wrote hymns to gods and goddesses and poured libations (of water) onto the grass of neighboring parks. In my deepest and most secret moments I daydreamed that I had become these beings, feeling what it would be like to be Artemis or Athena. I acted out the old myths and created new ones, in fantasy and private play. It was a great and deep secret that found its way into brief diary entries and unskilled drawings. But like many inner things, it was not unique to me.

I have since discovered that these experiences are common. The pantheons may differ according to circumstance, class, ethnic and cultural background, opportunity, and even chance. There are children in the United States whose pantheons come from Star Wars, while their parents fantasize about Star Trek ² and their grandparents remember the days of Buck Rogers. The archetypal images seem to wander in and out of the fantasies of millions of children, disguised in contemporary forms. That I and most of my friends had the opportunity to take our archetypes from the rich pantheon of ancient Greece was a result of class and opportunity, nothing more.

What were these fantasies of gods and goddesses? What was their use, their purpose? I see them now as daydreams used in the struggle toward my own becoming. They were hardly idle, though, since they focused on stronger and healthier “role models” than the images of women in the culture of the late 1950s. The fantasies enabled me to contact stronger parts of myself, to embolden my vision of myself. Besides, these experiences were filled with power, intensity, and even ecstasy that, on reflection, seem religious or spiritual.

As I grew up, I forced myself to deny these experiences of childhood. At first I missed them; then I did not quite remember what I missed. They became a strange discarded part of youthful fantasy. No one told me directly, “People don’t worship the Greek gods anymore, much less attempt to become them through ritual and fantasy,” but the messages around me were clear enough. Such daydreams did not fit into the society I lived in, and even to talk about them was impossible. It became easier to discuss the most intimate personal, emotional, or sexual experiences than to talk of these earlier experiences. To reveal them was a kind of magical violation.

Religion had no official place in my childhood world. I was brought up in a family of agnostics and atheists. Still, feeling that there was some dimension lacking in their lives, I embarked on a quasi-religious search as a teenager. I felt ecstatic power in the Catholic mass (as long as it was in Latin); I went to Quaker meetings and visited synagogues and churches. Today it seems to me I thirsted for the power and richness of those original experiences, though I found only beliefs and dogmas that seemed irrelevant or even contradictory to them. I wanted permission for those experiences, but not if it would poison my integrity or my commitment to living and acting in the world.

I remember coming across the famous words of Marx on religion: “Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, the opium of the people. . . .”³ And having no place to put this experience of Goddess nor freedom enough to continue the ancient practice I had stumbled on, I gradually left it behind, and set my sights on the soulless conditions. It was 1964, I was in Berkeley, and there were many soulless conditions with which to concern myself.

In 1971, while working as a political reporter for Pacifica radio in Washington, D.C., I became involved in various environmentalist and ecological concerns. During that year John McPhee wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker called “Encounters with the Archdruid,” later published as a book. The articles narrated three wilderness journeys made by David Brower (president of Friends of the Earth and former head of the Sierra Club) in the company of three of his enemies on environmental issues. Two passages from this book come to mind as emotional springboards to the events that followed. The first was Brower’s statement that the ecology movement was really a spiritual movement. “We are in a kind of religion,” he said, “an ethic with regard to terrain, and this religion is closest to the Buddhist, I suppose.” In the second quote, one of Brower’s enemies, a developer, spoke against the practices of conservationists and called Brower “a druid.” I began to search for an ecological religious framework. I started by searching for Druids.⁴

Toynbee’s article appeared in 1972, in the International Journal of Environmental Studies. Its main point was that worldwide ecological problems were due in part to a religious cause, “the rise of monotheism,” and that the verse in Genesis (1:28), “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it,” had become biblical sanction for human beings to assert their rights over all nature. Toynbee felt that his education in pre-Christian Greek and Latin literature had had “a deeper and more enduring effect on my Weltanschauung” than his Christian upbringing:

In popular pre-Christian Greek religion, divinity was inherent in all natural phenomena, including those that man had tamed and domesticated. Divinity was present in springs and rivers and the sea; in trees, both the wild oak and the cultivated olive-tree; in corn and vines; in mountains; in earthquakes and lightning and thunder. The godhead was diffused throughout the phenomena. It was plural, not singular; a pantheon, not a unique almighty super-human person. When the Graeco-Roman World was converted to Christianity, the divinity was drained out of nature and was concentrated in one unique transcendent God. “Pan is dead.” “The oracles are dumb.” Bronsgrove is no longer a wood that is sacrosanct because it is animated by the god Bron. . . .

The plight in which post-Industrial-Revolution man has now landed himself is one more demonstration that man is not the master of his environment—not even when supposedly armed with a warrant, issued by a supposedly unique and omnipotent God with a human-like personality, delegating to man plenipotentiary powers. Nature is now demonstrating to us that she does not recognize the validity of this alleged warrant, and she is warning us that, if man insists on trying to execute it, he will commit this outrage on nature at his peril.⁵

The article by Lynn White had appeared several years earlier in Science and had begun quite a controversy. While much of White’s article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” dealt with changes in methods of farming and agriculture over the centuries, a few of its points were strikingly similar to Toynbee’s. White observed that “the victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.”

Christianity in absolute contrast to ancient paganism . . . not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. . . . In antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. . . . By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects.⁶

In the following years I searched in books and articles for an ecologicalreligious framework compatible with my own politics and commitment to the world. I soon entered into a lengthy correspondence with a coven of Witches in Essex, England. Being no less a victim of stereotypes than most, I pictured the couple who led this group as in their thirties and middle class. But Doris and Vic Stuart turned out to be in their late forties and fifties. He was an old unionist and socialist and she was a factory worker .⁷ At this period, I also contacted a Pagan group in Wales. Frankly, at the time I thought that corresponding with Witches was bizarre and even amusing. I certainly had no thought that there might be any link between these groups and my own experience of Goddess, which still came to me, unbidden, at odd moments.

One day the coven in Essex sent me a tape recording of some rituals. The first one on the tape was called “The Drawing Down of the Moon.” I did not know it then, but in this ritual, one of the most serious and beautiful in the modern Craft, the priest invokes into the priestess (or, depending on your point of view, she evokes from within herself) the Goddess or Triple Goddess, symbolized by the phases of the moon. She is known by a thousand names, and among them were those I had used as a child. In some Craft rituals the priestess goes into a trance and speaks; in other traditions the ritual is a more formal dramatic dialogue, often of intense beauty, in which, again, the priestess speaks, taking the role of the Goddess. In both instances the priestess functions as the Goddess incarnate, within the circle.

I found a quiet place and played the tape. The music in the background was perhaps by Brahms. A man and woman spoke with English accents. When it came time for the invocation, the words came clearly:

Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called Artemis, Astarte, Melusine, Aphrodite, Diana, Brigit and many other names. . . .⁸

A feeling of power and emotion came over me. For, after all, how different was that ritual from the magical rituals of my childhood? The contents of the tape had simply given me permission to accept a part of my own psyche that I had denied for years—and then extend it.

I tell these stories in a book that contains little personal history in order to respond to the statement I frequently hear: I don’t believe in that! This is the standard response to many of the ideas and people with which this book is concerned. But belief has never seemed very relevant to the Neo-Pagan movement.⁹

In my fifteen years of contact with these groups I was never asked to believe in anything. I was told a few dogmas by people who hadn’t ridded themselves of the tendency to dogmatize, but I rejected those. In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostics and that this has never inhibited their participation in or leadership of Neo-Pagan and Craft groups. Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings.” Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.” As one scholar has noted, it is a religion “of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos, in a word, constructed by the imagination. . . .”¹⁰

My own role has been that of observer-participant. I began by trying to find reasons for my involvement and then traveled across the country to visit hundreds of people in order to contrast my own experiences with theirs. By the end of my travels I found that many of my early assumptions were incorrect.

For example, I found that Neo-Pagan groups were very diverse in class and ethnic background. My first experiences brought me in touch with a much broader spectrum of people than I had known in the student movements of the 1960s. The first three covens I encountered in New York and England were composed largely of working-class and lower-middle-class people. Later, I met covens and groups composed predominantly of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Then I met groups whose members worked as insurance salesmen, bus drivers, police, and secretaries. All my class stereotypes began to fall by the wayside.

Another assumption, and one I was slow to drop, was that the Neo-Pagan resurgence was, fundamentally, a reaction against science, technology, progress. My own involvement had come through a kind of Luddite reaction, so I assumed it was typical. But in many interviews Neo-Pagans and Witches supported high technologies, scientific inquiry, and space exploration. It is true that most Neo-Pagans feel that we abuse technology; they often support “alternative” technologies—solar, wind, etc.—and hold a biological rather than a mechanistic world view.

Lastly, a few words about the reasons for this Neo-Pagan resurgence. One standard psychological explanation is that people join these groups to gain power over others or to banish feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. Obviously (some of the studies referred to later show this) some people do join magical and religious groups in order to gain self-mastery, in the sense of practical knowledge of psychology and the workings of the psyche, so they can function better in the world. But this reason was not among the six primary reasons that Pagans and Witches gave me in answer to the questions “Why is this phenomenon occurring?” “Why are you involved?” Many of their reasons are novel, and completely at odds with common assumptions.

Beauty, Vision, Imagination. A number of Neo-Pagans told me that their religious views were part of a general visionary quest that included involvement with poetry, art, drama, music, science fiction, and fantasy. At least four Witches in different parts of the country spoke of religion as a human need for beauty.

Intellectual Satisfaction. Many told me that reading and collecting odd books had been the prime influence in their religious decision. This came as a surprise to me. In particular, most of the Midwesterners said flatly that the wide dissemination of strange and fascinating books had been the main factor in creating a Neo-Pagan resurgence. And while class and profession vary widely among Neo-Pagans, almost all are avid readers. This does not seem to depend on their educational level; it holds true for high-school dropouts as well as Ph.D.s.

Growth. A more predictable answer, this ambiguous word was given frequently. Most Pagans see their lives not as straight roads to specific goals, but as processes—evolution, change, or an increase in understanding. Neo-Pagans often see themselves as pursuing the quests of the mystery traditions: initiations into the workings of life, death, and rebirth.

Feminism. For many women, this was the main reason for involvement. Large numbers of women have been seeking a spiritual framework outside the patriarchal religions that have dominated the Western world for the last several thousand years. Many who wanted to find a spiritual side to their feminism entered the Craft because of its emphasis on goddess worship. Neo-Pagan Witchcraft groups range from those with a mixture of female and male deities to those that focus on the monotheistic worship of the Mother Goddess.

Environmental Response. Many of those interviewed said that Neo-Paganism was a response to a planet in crisis. Almost all the Pagan traditions emphasize reverence for nature, and many believe that only by understanding the earth as sacred will human beings be able and willing to protect the planet. Some Pagans told me that a revival of animism was needed to counter the forces destroying the natural world.¹¹

Freedom. Another unexpected answer. The Frosts, who run one of the largest Witchcraft correspondence courses in the country, described the Craft as “religion without the middleman.” Many people said that they had become Pagans because they could be themselves and act as they chose, without what they felt were medieval notions of sin and guilt. Others wanted to participate in rituals rather than observe them. The leader of the Georgian tradition told me that freedom was his prime reason for making an independent religious decision.

This last reason seemed most remarkable. The freedom that is characteristic of the Neo-Pagan resurgence sets the movement far apart from many other religious revivals. Why have these groups refused to succumb to rigid hierarchies and institutionalization? And how is it possible for them to exist in relative harmony, in spite of their different rituals and deities? These groups can exist this way because the Neo-Pagan religious framework is based on a polytheistic outlook—a view that allows differing perspectives and ideas to coexist.