Drawing Down the Moon

If you were to ask modern Pagans for the most important ideas that underlie the Pagan resurgence, you might well be led to three words: animism, pantheism, and—most important—polytheism. Neo-Pagans give these words meanings different from the common definitions, and sometimes they overlap.

Animism is used to imply a reality in which all things are imbued with vitality. The ancient world view did not conceive of a separation between “animate” and inanimate.” All things—from rocks and trees to dreams—were considered to partake of the life force. At some level Neo-Paganism is an attempt to reanimate the world of nature; or, perhaps more accurately, Neo-Pagan religions allow their participants to reenter the primeval world view, to participate in nature in a way that is not possible for most Westerners after childhood. The Pagan revival seems to be, in part, a response to the common urban and suburban experience of our culture as “impersonal,” “neutral,” or “dead.”

For many Pagans, pantheism implies much the same thing as animism. It is a view that divinity is inseparable from nature and that deity is immanent in nature. Neo-Pagan groups participate in divinity. The title of this book implies one such participation: when a priestess becomes the Goddess within the circle. “Drawing down the moon” symbolizes the idea that we are the gods, or can, at least, become them from time to time in rite and fantasy. This idea was well expressed in the quotation at the beginning of the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”⁴ The Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds has expressed this idea by the phrase: “Thou Art God/dess.”^f

The idea of polytheism is grounded in the view that reality (divine or otherwise) is multiple and diverse. And if one is a pantheist-polytheist, as are many Neo-Pagans, one might say that all nature is divinity and manifests itself in myriad forms and delightful complexities. On a broader level, Isaac Bonewits wrote, “Polytheists . . . develop logical systems based on multiple levels of reality and the magical Law of Infinite Universes: ‘every sentient being lives in a unique universe.’ ”⁵ Polytheism has allowed a multitude of distinct groups to exist more or less in harmony, despite great divergence in beliefs and practices, and may also have prevented these groups from being preyed upon by gurus and profiteers.

In beginning to understand what polytheism means to modern Pagans we must divest ourselves of a number of ideas about it—mainly, that it is an inferior way of perceiving that disappeared as religions “evolved” toward the idea of one god.

The origin of this erroneous idea can be traced to the eighteenth century. We can see it, for example, in the works of the philosopher David Hume, who wrote that just as “the mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior,” polytheism prevails “among the greatest part of uninstructed mankind”; and the idea of a “supreme Creator” bestowing order by will is an idea “too big for their narrow conceptions. . . .”⁶ Until recently many writers labeled tribal religions “superstition,” while dignifying monotheistic beliefs (usually Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) with the term “religion.” These notions are usually not stated so boldly today, but they persist.

Many anthropologists have long disrupted the notion that religions “evolve” in linear fashion. Paul Radin more than fifty years ago wrote that monotheism exists in some form among all primitive peoples. Ethnologists must admit, he said, that “the possibility of interpreting monotheism as a part of a general intellectual and ethical progress must be abandoned. . . .” He showed that monotheism often existed side by side with polytheism, animism, and pantheism. Radin regarded monotheism and polytheism merely as indicators of those differences in philosophical temperament that exist among all groups of people.

As for monotheism in our society, Radin observed, “The factors concerned in the complete credal triumph of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism have never been satisfactorily explained, but they are emphatically of an individual historical and psychological nature.” He added that no progress in solving this riddle will be made “until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history,” and that the great mistake lies in applying Darwinian thinking to analyses of culture. Radin considered primitive societies to be as logical as modern ones, often having a truer, more concrete sense of reality. Most primitive societies exhibit all types of temperaments and abilities: “The idealist and the materialist, the dreamer and the realist, have always been with us.”⁷

Harold Moss, a Neo-Pagan writer and priest of the Church of the Eternal Source, once wrote that monotheism existed in many tribal societies ; many later societies developed a polytheistic theology as they became more complex and sophisticated. “Today,” he said, “in place of a single Christianity with multiple Gods, we see a shattered Christianity, each sect worshipping a slightly different God.”⁸

Another problem confronts us when we attempt to look at old and new Pagan religions with fresh eyes: the notion of “idolatry” and the image of dull natives abasing themselves before a stone idol. I remember seeing this image often in books I read as a child—The Story of Chanukah is one that I recall vividly. It was easy to feel pity for the poor heathens, as well as a patronizing superiority. Monotheistic religions have long assumed that the worshipper who stands before a statue or a grove of trees can see no further than that statue or grove, that such a worshipper invests divinity in those things and nothing more, and, contrarily, that other people’s worship of neutral, omnipotent, and unknowable deities is necessarily pure and sublime.

The best refutation of these notions is in Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends. The statue and sacred grove were transparent windows to experience, Roszak says—means by which the witness was escorted through to sacred ground beyond and participated in the divine. The rejection of animism, first by the Jews and later, most dogmatically, by certain Christian groups, resulted in a war on art and all imaginative activities. Roszak finds no evidence that the animist world view is false. He notes that none of us has entered the animist world sufficiently to judge it existentially.

Our idea of idolatry is therefore a kind of racist perception grounded in ignorance. For Roszak, if there is any idolatry, it exists in our society, where artificiality is extolled and religion viewed as something apart from nature, supernatural. Roszak has called the modern view “the religion of the single vision.”

In theological circles an early champion of a new polytheism in the 1970s was David Miller. Miller relies heavily on Jungian ideas. For him, polytheism is the rediscovery of gods and goddesses as archetypal forces in our lives. Miller’s arguments, set forth in The New Polytheism, are similar to the views of many Neo-Pagans. Yet at the time of publication Miller was apparently unaware of the widespread emergence of Neo-Pagan groups. At the time he was a professor of religion at Syracuse University and reported that his students had become deeply drawn to the Greek myths, at the same time that theologians and psychologists were reappraising the idea of polytheism. Theologian William Hamilton, for one, had said at a conference that students are now seeking access to all the gods, “eastern and western, primitive and modern, heretical and orthodox, mad and sane.” These gods are “not to be believed in or trusted, but to be used to give shape to an increasingly complex and variegated experience of life.” Hamilton added, “The revolution does not look like monotheism, Christian or post-Christian. What it looks like is polytheism.” This remark was the beginning of Miller’s journey.

By the end of it Miller had come to believe that the much talked of “death of God” was really the death of the one-dimensional “monotheistic” thinking that had dominated Western culture from top to bottom, influencing not only its religion but its psychology and politics as well. Polytheism, by contrast, was a view that allowed multiple dimensions of reality.

Far from being merely a religious belief, polytheism, for Miller, is an attitude that allows one to affirm “the radical plurality of the self.” In psychology, for example, it would allow one to discover the various sides of one’s personality. Beyond that, it becomes a world view that allows for complexity, multiple meanings, and ambiguities. Like Roszak’s “Old Gnosis,” it is at home with metaphors and myths. Yet this new polytheism is “not simply a matter of pluralism in the social order, anarchy in politics, polyphonic meaning in language”; the gods, for Miller, are informing powers, psychic realities that give shape to social, intellectual, and personal existence.

Miller disagrees with a number of theologians who espouse monotheism—in particular, H. Richard Niebuhr, who says that the central problem of modern society is that it is polytheistic. Niebuhr, defining gods as value centers, sees modern polytheism as the worship of social gods such as money, power, and sex. Against this social polytheism Niebuhr opposes a radical monotheism that worships only the principle of being.

Miller’s reply calls for a deeper polytheism. He sees the gods not as value centers but as potencies within the psyche that play out their mythic stories in our daily lives.

Miller believes that we can experience multiplicity without jeopardizing integration and wholeness. He observes that polytheism includes monotheism, but the reverse does not hold true. For most people, religious practice comes down to a series of consecutive monotheisms, all within a larger polytheistic framework.

Here Miller is close to the modern Neo-Pagans who devote themselves to one of a number of gods and goddesses or one of a number of traditions, without denying the validity of other gods or traditions.¹¹

Miller relies heavily on James Hillman’s essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic.” Hillman said that psychology had long been colored by a theology of monotheism, especially in its view that unity, integration, wholeness, is always the proper goal of psychological development and that fragmentation is always a sign of pathology. Hillman argued that the images of Artemis, Persephone, and Athena collectively formed a richer picture of the feminine than the Virgin Mary. Carrying this idea to the extreme, Hillman suggested that the multitude of tongues in Babel, traditionally interpreted as a “decline,” could also be seen as a true picture of psychic reality. He then argued that some individuals might benefit from a therapy that, at times, led to fragmentation.

In the end Hillman advocated a “polytheistic psychology” that would allow many possible voices:

By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it would find a place for each spark. . . . It would accept the multiplicity of voices, the Babel of anima and animus, without insisting upon unifying them into one figure. . . .¹²

Hillman’s contention that Jung always stressed the self as primary and considered all exploration of archetypes as preliminary to something higher is open to dispute. His views have not been accepted by most Jungians. Still, his question, “If there is only one model of individuation, can there be true individuality?” is close to the Neo-Pagan religious and social critique.

Miller’s and Hillman’s ideas about polytheism at times seem too much like the liberal notion of pluralism, a kind of competition of factions. Most Neo-Pagans that I know see polytheism not as competitive factions but as facets of a jewel, harmonious but differing. Many Neo-Pagans do, however, see the gods in Jungian terms. The late Gwydion Pendderwen, one of the best-known bards in the Craft, told me, “The gods are really the components of our psyches. We are the gods, in the sense that we, as the sum total of human beings, are the sum of the gods. And Pagans do not wish to be pinned down to a specific act of consciousness. They keep an open ticket.”

Miller writes that the task at hand is to incarnate the gods, to “become aware of their presence, acknowledge and celebrate their forms.”¹³ These gods, he observes, are worlds of meaning; they are the comings and goings, the births and deaths within our lives. They are generally unrecognized because our culture is not in harmony with them.

He notes that the old ways of knowing (such as mysticism, alchemy, and gnosticism) still exist, but most of us are divorced from them. The recent widespread interest in occultism is, in part, a wish to reclaim them. These systems are richer in imagery than the Judeo-Christian tradition as it has come down to most of us. Despite this, both Miller and Hillman worry about a Pagan revival. Hillman is apprehensive about a “true revival of paganism as religion,” fearing that it would bring dogmas and soothsayers in its wake. He advocates a polytheistic psychology as a substitute.¹⁴

Miller advocates a return to Greco-Roman polytheism because we are “willy-nilly Occidental men and women” and other symbol systems are inappropriate.¹⁵ Much of the remainder of Miller’s book is an attempt to use Greek mythology to explain modern society. He sees the problems of technology as the playing out of the stories of Prometheus, Hephaestus, and Aesclepius; the military-industrial complex is Hera-Hephaestus-Heracles; the outbreak of the irrational is Pan; and so forth. This may be fine for students of ancient Greek polytheism, but most Neo-Pagans diverge from him at this point.

When Miller’s The New Polytheism appeared, one Pagan journal called it a “stunning victory for our point of view.” Harold Moss, on the other hand, wrote that Greco-Roman polytheism was not a suitable framework for today.¹⁶ And one of the strongest criticisms of Miller’s book came from Robert Ellwood, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, in his Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America.

Ellwood accurately picked up the Neo-Pagan complaint about Miller when he wrote, “One may feel he [Miller] gives our revitalized heritages in Celtic (Yeats), Nordic (Wagner), African (LeRoi Jones), and Amerindian (many names) polytheistic religions short shrift.”

Ellwood is no proponent of Paganism, but unlike Miller he spent some time among Pagans and Neo-Pagans. He asks, “Is Polytheism in practice what Miller makes it out to be? What would a serious polytheistic stance in modern America be like?”

Ellwood first looks at the practice of Shinto in Japan and sees polytheism there as a binding, structured system, a reaction, in fact, to increased multiplicity, a means of structuring it into an empire, a cosmos. He argues that polytheism in the past appealed to organizers of the official cults of empires and that the fervent cults of the dispossessed were, largely, monotheistic—the mystery religions, Christianity, and the new religions of Japan.

As for Neo-Pagans in the United States, he acknowledges their “reverence for sun and tree,” their sincerity, and the reality of their experience. “The personal vision of some of the Neo-Pagans is deep and rich; they are seers if not shamans,” he says. But he sees these groups as unstable, and concludes that “polytheism puts a severe strain on group formation and continuity,” and that it “can only be an intensely personal vision,” the vehicle for the subjective. Each group is “tiny, struggling, and probably ephemeral”; he finds it difficult to believe that Neo-Paganism as a religious view can deal adequately with human alienation. He claims that polytheism has never been a cause, only a backdrop against which causes have moved.

Ellwood considers the great spiritual problem of the day to be “dealing with multiplicity,” but implies that Miller’s position, and polytheism in general, lead ultimately to a life of “anchorless feelings,” constant changes in lifestyles that will eventually precipitate a backlash. One such form of backlash, he notes, can be seen in the Jesus Movement with its slogan “One Way,” and of course there are many other new monotheistic movements. Certainly one would have to agree that Neo-Paganism is a minority vision, struggling amid the majority trend toward authoritarian cults.

Ellwood sees polytheism in the United States as the “polytheism of the lonely poet” rather than that of the temple priest. It is epitomized by the lonely shaman, withdrawn from common feelings and goals. Such images are already staked out, Ellwood says; they can be seen in the personages of Ged in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Don Juan in the series of books by Carlos Castaneda. These are all persons who form no lasting groups, have no lasting friends; they share an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, but ultimately remain alone and sad.¹⁷

For Ellwood, polytheism can never provide social cohesion, nor can it increase multiple options except in private ways. He implies that it is fundamentally antipolitical and antisocial.

Practicing Pagans might say to Ellwood that their religion is not at odds with the experience of wholeness. And while there are always groups that end, and new ones that begin, the Pagan community is much more cohesive today than when Ellwood was writing. Since the 1990s, modern Pagans have begun to form lasting communities—not only legally recognized religious organizations, a trend that has been occurring for thirty years, but seminaries, nature sanctuaries, and organizations and gatherings with a twenty-five year track record.

Most Neo-Pagans would agree with Ellwood that “only monotheistic or monistic religions ‘convert’ nations. We are not likely to see a temple to Hera, Heracles or Hephaestus on the lawn of the Pentagon.” Most would also regard this as a great strength of polytheism—that it does not lend itself to holy wars. Even David Hume’s fierce condemnation of polytheism as idolatry and superstition was mitigated by his acknowledgment of polytheists’ tolerance of almost any religious practice, in contrast to the intolerance shown by almost all monotheistic religions.

In practice, Neo-Pagans give a variety of reasons for their polytheism. ¹⁸ “A polytheistic world view,” wrote one, “makes self-delusion harder. Pagans seem to relate to deities on a more symbolic and complex level. Personally I think all intellectualizing about deities is self-delusion.” Others told me that polytheism was more likely to encourage reverence for nature. A woman wrote to me: “Polytheism and particularly animism demand the cherishing of a much wider range of things. If you are a monotheist and your particular god is not life-oriented, it is easy to destroy the biosphere you depend on for sustenance—witness where we are right now.”

A third reason given to me is the one most emphasized by Miller: diversity and freedom. Alkemene, a Craft priestess in New York, wrote to me:

A monotheistic religion seems analogous to the “one disease—one treatment” system still prevalent in modern medicine. When worshippers view deity in a single way this tends to feed back a homogenous image. The worshippers begin (1) to see homogeneity as good and (2) to become homogenous themselves. Eccentricity becomes “evil” and “wrong.” Decentralization is seen as a wrong since what is wrong for “A” cannot possibly be right for “B.” A polytheistic world view allows a wider range of choices. A person can identify with different deities at different times. Differences become acceptable, even “respectable.”

The old pagan religions did not have much trouble seeing that many different names were “at heart” the same. Of course, their cultures and politics clashed, but they had relatively few holy wars. All of our wars seem to be holy wars of one kind or another.

This idea of diversity and tolerance was also stressed by Isaac Bonewits, who told me, “The Pagans were tolerant for the simple reason that many believed their gods and goddesses to be connected with the people or the place. If you go to another place, there are different gods and goddesses, and if you’re staying in someone else’s house, you’re polite to their gods; they’re just as real as the ones you left back home.” Bonewits called monotheism an aberration, but “particularly useful in history when small groups of people wanted to control large numbers of people.” In The Druid Chronicles he observed that monotheism, “far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, is in fact a monstrous step backwards—a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.”¹⁹

Many other Neo-Pagans emphasized that polytheism allowed for both unity and diversity, and several asserted that they were monotheists at some moments and polytheists at others. Penny Novack, a Pagan poet, once wrote that glimpses of the One could make her happy, awed, and excited, “but I can’t imagine a religion based on it.”

Still another wrote to me:

I do not believe in gods as real personalities on any plane, or in any dimension. Yet, I do believe in gods as symbols or personifications of universal principles. The Earth Mother is the primal seed—source of the universe. . . . I believe in gods perceived in nature; perceived as a storm, a forest spirit, the goddess of the lake, etc. Many places and times of the year have a spirit or power about them. Perhaps, these are my gods.

And those Neo-Pagans in the Craft, the followers of Wicca, might well be considered “duotheists,” conceiving of deity as the Goddess of the Moon, Earth, and sea, and the God of the woods, the hunt, the animal realm. Feminist Witches are often monotheists worshipping the Goddess as the One. Morgan McFarland, who headed the Dallas convenstead of Morrigana, told me, “I consider myself a polytheist, as in the statement Isis makes in The Golden Ass when she says, ‘From me come all gods and goddesses who exist.’ So that I see myself as monotheistic in believing in the Goddess, the Creatix, the Female Principle, but at the same time acknowledging that other gods and goddesses do exist through her as manifestations of her, facets of the whole.” One male polytheist said that certain portions of the Craft were afflicted with “the curse of Goddess monotheism which is apparently driving so many Witches mad.”²⁰ Of the many answers to the question “What does it mean to you to be a Pagan and a polytheist?” the answer that I like best came from the late Wiccan priestess Alison Harlow:

I am confronted very often with trying to explain to people what I mean by Paganism. To some people, it seems like a contradiction to say that I have a certain subjective truth; I have experienced the Goddess, and this is my total reality. And yet I do not believe that I have the one, true, right and only way.

Many people cannot understand how I find Her a part of my reality and accept the fact that your reality might be something else. But for me, this in no way is a contradiction, because I am aware that my reality and my conclusions are a result of my unique genetic structure, my life experience and my subjective feelings; and you are a different person, whose same experience of whatever may or may not be out there will be translated in your nervous system into something different. And I can learn from that.

I can extend my own reality by sharing that and grow. This recognition that everyone has different experiences is a fundamental keystone to Paganism; it’s the fundamental premise that whatever is going on out there is infinitely more complex than I can ever understand. And that makes me feel very good.

That last sentence struck me profoundly. What an uncommon reaction to people’s differences and how unlike the familiar reactions of fear and hostility! What kind of a person is able to say this—to celebrate differences? This is the question I struggle with. Who are those who can embrace polytheism, accepting a bit of chaos in their spiritual perspective without denying rational modes of thinking? Who are those who are able to suspend belief and disbelief at will and are equally comfortable with scientific discourse and magic ritual? Who, in short, can afford a nonauthoritarian religion? Are we talking about a broad-based phenomenon in this country? Surely not. Are we talking about ways of being that are available only to those strong enough to break with certain aspects of the dominant culture?

My own experience with the Pagan resurgence has made me reluctant to categorize Neo-Pagans according to simple age and class divisions. I am not comfortable with the “radical” analysis that says that the recent rise of occult groups is a white middle-class phenomenon. It is too simple, although many of those I subsequently met did fall into this category.

My tentative conclusion is that Neo-Pagans are an elite of sorts—a strange one.²¹ The people you will meet here may be some of those few who, by chance, circumstance, fortune, and occasionally struggle, have escaped certain forms of enculturation.

Most Pagans are avid readers, yet many of them have had little formal education. Few are addicted to television. They are, one priest observed to me, “hands-in-the-dirt archeologists,” digging out odd facts, “scholars without degrees.” They come from a variety of classes and hold down jobs ranging from fireman to Ph.D. chemist. But as readers, they are an elite, since readers constitute less than twenty percent of the population in the United States.

The paradox of polytheism seems to be this: the arguments for a world of multiplicity and diversity are usually made by those few strong enough and fortunate enough in education, upbringing, or luck to be able to disown by word, lifestyle, and philosophy the totalistic religious and political views that dominate our society. Perhaps in my own fascination with the Neo-Pagan resurgence I am hoping that these attitudes can become the heritage of us all.

Here’s the big question: Has the polytheistic affirmation of diversity come at a time when most people increasingly fear complexity and accept authoritarian solutions? Neo-Paganism is a growing movement. According to some sources,²² there are a million Neo-Pagans around the world. In previous editions of this book, I wondered if Neo-Paganism was doomed to be a delicacy for the few. I am still convinced contemporary Paganism will remain a minority religious phenomenon; but I am more convinced today that it has staying power.