9.

Religions from the Past—The Pagan Reconstructionists

OUTSIDE OF THE VARIOUS Witchcraft traditions, the most prevalent forms of Neo-Paganism are groups that attempt to re-create ancient European pre-Christian religions.

Church of Aphrodite

In the United States the first reconstructionist Neo-Pagan organization was the Long Island Church of Aphrodite, established in West Hempstead, Long Island, on May 6, 1938.

Gleb Botkin, founder and priest of the church, was the son of the court physician to the last Russian Tsar. After Botkin came to the United States he wrote several novels about Russia before and during the Revolution. Some of them, such as The Real Romanovs, concern the last days of the royal family; others depict the lives of students, priests, and more ordinary folk. But the theme of goddess worship drifts through many of them. The titles themselves are revealing—The Woman Who Rose Again (about Anastasia); Immortal Woman; The God Who Didn’t Laugh; and Her Wanton Majesty.¹

All the novels, dating from 1929 to 1937, involve women who inspire men to worship them, and men who are tempted and allured by the “divine feminine.” In two of the novels the Pagan religious ideal is stated directly: the protagonist becomes a worshipper of Aphrodite. Immortal Woman (1933) is the story of Nikolai Dirin, the son of a Russian priest, who flees to America shortly after the Russian Revolution and becomes a world-famous conductor. His musical ability is inspired by a vision of Aphrodite and by the remembrance of a real woman, a playmate from his youth. His dreams and daydreams lead him to reject his Russian Orthodox upbringing and to adopt the Aphrodisian religion:

The more he studied, the more convinced he became that his Goddess was no myth, that millions upon millions of human beings had worshipped her for thousands of years and that many continued to worship her in the present.²

Another novel, The God Who Didn’t Laugh, is the most autobiographical of Botkin’s works. It is the story of a Russian man who studies to be a monk, but is visited early in life by a vision of Aphrodite and, again, by actual women who seem to embody that vision. At one point, the protagonist imagines a world of Greek temples of white marble where naked worshippers sing hymns, burn incense, and fall asleep on the grass after laying wreaths of roses at Aphrodite’s feet.

While training for the priesthood, he is repeatedly instructed that women are the “Vessels of the Devil” and that he must reject all his experiences with them as dirty, repulsive, and sinful.³ Just before his ordination he realizes that his feelings toward women were the purest and most sacred he had ever experienced. He begins to find Christ at fault for thinking of women with disgust. At the end of the book he leaves the monastery with ambivalent feelings.

Gleb Botkin converted his vision into reality when he established the Long Island Church of Aphrodite in 1938. He had only about fifty followers. He created three different liturgies and he held worship services four times a week, before an altar with a replica of the Venus de Medici. Behind the statue was a purple tapestry. There was incense of frankincense and myrrh. Nine candles were placed on the altar, as well as the symbol of the church, the planetary sign for Venus.

In 1939 Botkin told a reporter for the New York World-Telegram that the purpose of the Aphrodisian religion was “to seek and develop Love, Beauty and Harmony and to suppress ugliness and discord.” The principle of Christianity, he said, was to suppress desire in order to develop the spirit; but the religion of Aphrodite sought to develop the spirit through antithetical principles. Botkin conceived of nature as good. He considered hate, selfishness, and jealousy “unnatural.” While in theory he idealized sex as a “divine function,” in practice he was conservative and concerned lest the church “attract neurotics and those emotionally unstable.”⁴

Botkin envisioned the Aphrodisian religion as a formal structure, complete with church, clergy, and liturgy. Unlike most Neo-Pagans today, he believed in monotheism and creed and dogma. Belief was considered necessary for salvation; one had to come into a “correct relationship” with the Goddess. During the services worshippers chanted their creed before the altar:

Blessed thou art, O beautiful goddess; and our love for Thee is like the sky which has no bounds; like eternity which has no ending; like thy beauty itself that no words could describe. For we love Thee with every atom of our souls and bodies, O Aphrodite: holiest, sweetest, loveliest, most blessed, most glorious, most beautiful Goddess of Beauty.⁵

Botkin died in 1969, and none of his five children carried on the faith.⁶ But one man who did was W. Holman Keith, a former Baptist minister who attended services at Botkin’s church in the early 1940s and became a convert. He wrote Divinity as the Eternal Feminine (1960), and has continued to write articles for Neo-Pagan publications. Keith is considered to be one of the true elders of the Neo-Pagan movement, but his views, like those of elders in many religions, are not very similar to the views of younger Neo-Pagans. Keith died in 1995.

Keith described Botkin as a man who seemed to dislike both communism and democracy and to be for “some kind of Theocratic rule through the Aphrodisian religion.” In an article in Green Egg he observed that many of Botkin’s views would not coincide with those of most Neo-Pagans today.

Freedom of conscience took second place for him to a rightly informed conscience from childhood on. . . . He did not believe in natural immortality . . . but in conditional immortality. The soul must come into the right relationship with the Goddess if it is to escape extinction. . . . Rev. Botkin was a monotheist in his doctrine of Deity. . . . Rev. Botkin was not cooperative with other Pagan sects. He believed that he had the Goddess truth in his teaching in all its purity.⁷

In many of these beliefs, Keith wrote, Botkin was more in line with the ancient mystery traditions than most Neo-Pagans would admit. Keith finally left Botkin’s church in a dispute over its dogmatism and today is an elder in the Neo-Pagan group Feraferia.

Feraferia: The Beautiful Jewel That Lies in Its Box

“How do you like New Crete?”

I blushed and said slowly: “Why ask me, Mother?”

“Mothers often ask their children questions to which they already know the answers.”

“Oh, well—it isn’t really beyond criticism. Though the bread’s good and the butter’s good, there doesn’t seem to be any salt in either.”

—ROBERT GRAVES, Watch the North Wind Rise⁸

 

 

In 1949 Robert Graves created a fictional utopia called New Crete in a book titled Watch the North Wind Rise. New Crete, he wrote, came into existence during a period filled with wars and revolutions, culminating in a nuclear war. An Israeli philosopher, concerned with the survival of humanity, recommended the creation of anthropological enclaves, each of which would represent a stage in the development of civilization.⁹ Each enclave was to be sealed off from the world for generations, communicating only with an anthropological council that studied the reports from these societies to determine which of them were viable and where civilization ultimately went wrong.

The enclaves devoted to the Bronze Age and early Iron Age became so successful that they were resettled on Crete. A new society evolved and, with it, a new religion devoted to the Mother Goddess, Mari, a religion similar to pre-Christian European Paganism, complete with agricultural festivals and mysteries. The new society on Crete was seen as “the seedbed of a Golden Age.”¹⁰

But the society of New Crete was not perfect. Although much different from the bureaucracy to which we are accustomed, it was no less authoritarian. Nothing outside the dictates of poetry could be manufactured; nothing purely utilitarian. Rigid patterns of custom ruled the country’s five classes. The protagonist, an Englishman from the 1940s, is sent for by the Goddess to shake the society up a bit, to put a little salt in the bread and butter, as the above quote suggests, and bring about the winds of change and freedom.

Graves was writing fiction, of course, but the idea of a Goddess religion emerging after a cataclysm is not uniquely his. Many Neo-Pagans told me they envisage a similar outcome, and several spoke to me of the Hopi prophesies of a Great Purification. Many of them seemed to feel that only a great catastrophe could bring about the seeds of change from which a new society could be created. “Look at the freak weather phenomena all around us,” was a comment I heard frequently. “Mother Nature is beginning to take things into her own hands.” Certainly the utopian vision that is central to a number of Neo-Pagan religions makes sense only in a world far different from the present one. And there is at least one group that could fit Graves’s description of a new Goddess religion awaiting the blessed cataclysm. That religion is Feraferia, founded by Frederick Adams.

 

What Fred Adams has in mind is having this magnificent reconstruction of a very ancient Goddess religion, which is a finished product—polished and sitting encapsulated on an upper shelf.

After the cataclysm, who is going to have faith in Christianity? So we simply pull it down from the shelf and say, “Look, Feraferia! We’ve gone through Hell; so let us celebrate the return of the Kore, the Maiden Goddess from Hell!”

—ED FITCH, Gardnerian priest

 

 

Of the many groups I have encountered, Feraferia is one of the most difficult to describe. Feraferia—the name is derived from Latin words meaning “wilderness festival”¹¹—is the most intricately formed of the Neo-Pagan religions in the United States. As the quote by Fitch implies, it is a jewel, an artistic creation, the private vision of one man, which sits like a beautiful crystal on a shelf, highly admired but mostly from afar. It is never contaminated by offshoots, or schisms, or changes, or even by many followers who might spread it too thin. As the sound of its name implies, it is a religion of both wildness and delicateness. Considered by its small following to be the aristocrat of Neo-Paganism, it has all the advantages and disadvantages that the word “aristocrat” implies.

Frederick Adams is a kind and gentle man who has spent most of his creative energies as an artist, astrologer, and researcher into archeology and geocosmic lore (such as ley-lines and henge construction). When I met Adams, he lived in Los Angeles with his partner, Svetlana Butyrin, in a small house covered with his artwork. When I visited them, I was welcomed with a short ritual in English and Greek. I was given a drink that tasted of cinnamon and mint, and a dish of fresh raspberries. The house radiated peace and beauty, and there was a frailty about Adams as he sat barefooted in a blue robe; I came away with the feeling that he had been buffeted by a harsh world that would not accept his sensitivity.

They were evicted from their former dwelling place several years before, after neighbors told their landlord about strange religious activities. Robert Ellwood described this home:

A visitor to Frederick Adams’ home is made immediately aware that this is no ordinary suburban house. The front porch is full of signs and symbols from out of the past—wreaths, crossed sticks, painted stones. In the backyard trees have been planted and given names. There is a henge—a circle of forked sticks oriented to the pole star and the rising sun. The group has a larger henge in the mountains to the north. Within the house are shrines to sun and moon, and a shrine room whose floor is a large wheel on which the passing days and seasons and motions of the planets are marked with stones. Here, the important news is not what comes in the paper, but what nature is doing.¹²

Fred Adams described Feraferia in Earth Religion News:

Feraferia is a Paradisal Fellowship for the loving celebration of Wilderness Mysteries with Faerie style, courtly elegance, refinement & grace. The Great Work of Feraferia is the lyrical unification of Ecology, Artistry, Mythology and Liturgy. In such Love-Play-Work many Women & Men achieve reunion with Great Nature, each other, and their own Souls, before and after the Transition we call “Death.” . . . Wilderness is the Supreme Value of Religion and Life! Feraferia offers, perhaps for the first time in known history, a Poetic Liturgy and Altruistic Theurgy of Holy Wilderness.¹³

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 others¹⁴; 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:

Green plants form a marvelous partnership with animal life . . . they purify the air for us, giving us the vital oxygen and themselves using the carbon dioxide which we throw off. Thus there is literally a magic circle between the plants and men. This relationship has reached its most intimate form in the food-bearing trees, which fed the primate family throughout its physical evolution and became the principal inspiration of its culture.¹⁵

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.

There is a way of life for Man which allows him to remain Man and yet also be an integral part of Nature. This way of life was abandoned not yesterday, not even in the space of many hundreds of years. It was disrupted and given up thousands of years ago. . . .

But the Way once existed in the world. It had hardly survived infancy when the urban-hierarchical-militaristic culminations of the different Neolithic phases of human History abruptly ended its career. However, the Way survives and smolders, imaginally, in the collective depths of the Human Psyche. If one taps these depths, dredges up the lost images of the Way, and takes them seriously, she or he is usually stigmatized as a hopeless romantic, or even worse.

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.”

Feraferia is a mystery religion in the most ancient sense because it teaches that Life in Nature cannot be reduced to logical formulae and that it is really wrong to try to do so.

The Divinities of Feraferia may appear as mighty spirits that people can feel surging through them, uniting them with Earth and Sky; or as radiantly beautiful bodies, as in myths and dreams; or as those mighty intelligences that dwell in the different forces of Nature.

The main sources from which the Queendom of the Gods has reached Feraferia are associated with ancient Britain, Greece, and Minoan Crete, although all wholesome Pagan Ways, such as the American Indians, ancient Egyptian and Eastern ones, have influence . . .

From Temples of the Earth Mother and Soul Daughter, like Eleusis, a wonderfully refined sense of Mystery has flowed secretly through the centuries from ancient Greece to us. And from the excavation of places like the Palace of Minos, on the island of Crete, the beautiful Earth devotions of the peaceful Minoans can now inspire and educate us. In our time of ecological crisis, we really need these original root-systems of Nature Religion.¹⁹

After it appeared, a number of people wrote to Adams that they were more confused than ever. Adams laughed when he told me this and said, “After that I gave up. I told myself, ‘You have a convoluted, schizoid mind and you just have to accept it.’” We should bear this in mind as we approach his writings.

According to Feraferian thealogy, the center of the universe, of all universes perhaps, is the Arretos Koura, an ancient Greek phrase for the ineffable bride, the Nameless Maiden. The Arretos Koura spins a cosmic dance from which all things come into existence, each of them unique and particular. The Nameless Maiden is not the “One” from which all things leave and return; she is, rather, the “transcendent unique,” the creatrix of all uniqueness. All the entities she creates interrelate with her, but never lose their individual essence. Thus, she represents polytheistic wholeness as opposed to monotheistic unity. An analogy to this might be a symphony, where each note is differentiated, but the whole is something beyond a “unity.”

Under the Arretos Koura are what Adams has called “the Goddessgiven Gods.” These are the archetypal beings—Mother, Father, Son, Daughter. Feraferia is unlike many other Neo-Pagan revivals in emphasizing the Young Maiden rather than the Mother Goddess. Feraferia deemphasizes the paternal and maternal aspects of life, which imply relationships based on a notion of authority. Lady Svetlana said, “We don’t want to think that authoritarianism is the primal thing in the universe.”

The Korê—the Maiden Goddess—is at the center of Feraferia’s paradisal vision. In Adams’s view only a new religion that worships the Maiden Goddess—beauty, creativity, and desire—and that “draws strength from all the mysteries of Immanent Nature and the flesh,” can bring the vision into reality. It is she “who is the ultimate image of delicacy and nonviolence, of playfulness and sensitivity and childlikeness. From such an archetype a society might develop in which no matriarchs or patriarchs would exist, and people would not develop hard and fast hierarchies.”

Adams stated this idea in an essay called “The Korê.”

To inform the dawning Eco-Psychic Age of Aquarius, wherein celebration will determine subsistence, a long repressed image of divinity is re-emerging: The Merry Maiden, Madimi, Rima, Alice in Wonderland, Princess Ozma, Julia, Lolita, Candy, Zazie of the Métro, Brigitte, Barbarella, and Wendy—a grotesque and incongruous assembly at first sight—are all early harbingers of the Heavenly Nymphet. She alone may negotiate free interaction between the other three anthropomorphic divinities of the Holy Family. These are the Great Mother, Who dominated the Old and New Stone Ages; the Great Father, Who initiated the Early Patriarchal Era; and the Son, who crystalized the megalopolitan mentality of the Late Patriarchal Era. It is the Dainty Daughter of the Silver Crescent who will transmute the saturate works of Father and Son to wholeness in the Maternal Ground of Existence, without sacrificing the valid achievements of masculine articulation. And She accomplishes this without a crippling imposition of parental or heroic authority images. How delightful to behold her tease and tickle Father and Son into respectable natural, Life-affirming Pagan Gods again.²⁰

Adams argued that the central problem of our time is how to reconcile “the primal parents,” the Mother and Father, the yin and the yang. The dominance of the Father excludes the Mother, but, said Adams, the Mother principle includes the Father, and must take precedence.

The emphasis on the feminine yin meant freedom for both yin and yang in their fusion. “In Yin,” he wrote, “Yin and Yang find full scope for the expansion of Life between them. This means Yin, in some transcendent-immanent way, is TAO.”

Within the Holy Family of four, it is the Daughter who brings about their harmony.

The Mother is Source and Center. The Son is creative separation, opening and outgoing. The Father is full outwardness, withdrawal and particularization. The Daughter or Holy Maiden is Creative Return, configuration, form. But the Daughter as Nameless Bride of ancient Eleusis is also the Mysterious Wholeness of the Four which consists in their dynamic separateness. We are initiating the Age of the Daughter, the Korê Age. (Korê is another name for Persephone, the Goddess of Spring and the Dead, Daughter of Demeter—the Great Mother, in the Eleusinian Mysteries.) The Korê Age will bring about the re-synthesis of the Maternal Whole of the Sacred Family.

It is only through the Maiden, Adams argued, that the balance can be restored in a way that will elevate freedom, playfulness, sensuality, and the imagination. The flaw of Christianity—and of most of the Eastern religions—is that they sought to create a balance through the Father principle, and were forced to do so through asceticism and the images of a pure, castrated male. Such an image, he wrote, would only continue the “Age of Analysis.” In contrast, the Maiden Way would provide the necessary spiritual cohesion to begin a shift in history that would end “the prisons of hierarchy and the garbage heaps of industrialism.” And this “Great Shift” or “Great Return” to the feminine could be seen by anyone who carefully examined the news of the day, or took a look at recent films, or novels, or essays, or poetry, but all “with an inner eye sharpened by the depth psychology of C. G. Jung.”

In Hesperian Life and the Maiden Way Adams wrote that all previous attempts at revolution were trying to return to some contemporary aspect of the Goddess, but failed because they could not rid themselves of “mechanization, hierarchy, exploitation of animals, [and] sex repression.” He argued that such an impulse had inspired Marx to talk about the “withering away of the state”; it was present on banners depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe during the Mexican Revolution. But the Maiden Goddess was never acknowledged as the guiding spirit of these reforms. Neither liberal education, nor totalitarian propaganda, nor the education of an elite vanguard, nor the victory of science and technology could ever bring this revolution about. “Only a great Religious Revolution, springing from the very broadest collective base of the Human Soul, can spread rapidly enough and thrust deeply enough without cataclysmic consequences to win the whole Human Race back to its Root Sense of the Organic Feminine Balance, and its natural destiny of Hesperian Life.”²¹

All life on Earth participates in
the dance of Moon and Sun.
And we, engendered in the oceans,
feel in our blood the pull of
our Moon upon the tides.
We are sunlight transformed by
trees into fruit and plasm, and we
are so intimately of the Earth that
our collective dream is paradise.
Thus we are moved to celebrate
the ceaseless play of the seasons
and to ensoul ourselves,
landscape and heaven.²²

—Frederick Adams

Frederick Adams has lived in the wilderness, and Feraferia has participated in reforestation work, regarding wilderness as “the supreme value of religion and life.”²³ Feraferia has stressed its spiritual link with ecology, stating that the lyrical unification of ecology and religion is its prime task. Adams has written that “The only way to reunite Mankind is to reunite Mankind with Nature. Mankind will become humane toward Man only when he becomes humane toward all nature.”²⁴

Feraferia’s first article of faith has been a belief that from wildness springs love, wonder, and joy, and that, as the famous quotation from Thoreau goes: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Adams has written that the primary cause of alienation and most psychological disorders is the severing of humanity from wilderness. Poetry, ritual, dance, and song unite the inner and the outer: they link “visionary nature within and ecological nature without,” microcosm and macrocosm. Adams emphasizes techniques that lead to a feeling of connectedness to the natural world. These include not only ritual techniques for producing ecstasy but techniques to reconnect one to the living cosmos—knowledge of wilderness, ecology, astronomy, astrology, and henge construction. Since all nature is sacred space, the planet and sky are Feraferia’s temple. Adams has devoted many articles to building temples in nature, orienting them to the four directions and the positions of the stars and planets. “Land-Feeling,” wrote Adams, “is absolutely essential to the Spiritual Reclamation of Man to Nature in Her hour of crisis,” and building a henge or “topocosmic mandala” promotes a feeling of “Land-Sky-Love.”²⁵

Feraferian rituals are oriented toward the play of the seasons and the transformations of the Maiden Goddess and her lover and son as the year progresses. Adams writes:

Our Earth, a very great Goddess in artistic communion with The Cosmic Korê, displays the magnificent pageant of the seasons. . . .

The year is a continual courtship between Moon and Sun. On May Day . . . Moon and Sun become engaged. At this time flowers are in full bloom. On the first day of Summer, They are married: fruits are forming. In the middle of Summer, Lammas, The Goddess and God are on Their Honeymoon: fruits are ripening.

On the first days of Autumn, Moon Goddess and Sun God come home: the fruits are dropping, crops being ingathered. At the middle of Autumn, Hallowe’en, the Divine Lovers prepare for the long Winter sleep of all Nature: leaves and seeds are settling to soil.

On the first day of Winter, Yule, the Goddess suddenly reawakens. She finds The God has mysteriously departed, but She is pregnant with The God of the coming year, really the same God, the Lord Sun Himself. . . . Yule is when the Sun starts North again, thus promising that Spring will follow the long cold rest period of Winter.

At the middle of the Winter, Candlemas, The Goddess emerges from Her Royal Bedroom, The Great Earth-Sphere, and prepares to give birth to The Sun God again as an infant: enscaled buds stand out on bare branches.

Then, on the first day of Spring, Ostara, She does give birth to the baby Sun: fragile buds emerge from their scales in the dewy Sunrise of the year. The Goddess bathes in Her magic fountain and becomes a girl again. She and The God grow up together, very rapidly. Once more They become engaged on May Day, when buds are opening into flowers.²⁶

Feraferia lays great emphasis on sensuality and eroticism, but by these words Adams does not mean genital sex. Rather, Feraferia stresses the idea that human beings should open themselves up to their own sensual nature, to the landscape, the earth, and sky, as well as to all other beings. Feraferia, like a number of Neo-Pagan groups, talks about sensuality as a sacrament, as the “feast of the Goddess and the Goddessgiven Gods.”

Feraferia distrusts modern technology much more than does any other Neo-Pagan group. Adams and Lady Svetlana feel that most mechanization has disrupted the flow of human life so that humanity is no longer in tune with the pulse of nature’s own rhythms: solar, lunar, and the circadian rhythms of our bodies. Adams told me that he hopes for a new science—a small, highly refined technology embodying solar energy, laser technology, and a combination of forms—some of it old, known to the megalithic stone builders, and some of it new. In one flight of imagination Adams told me of his fantasy of priests and priestesses creating orgone energy in great ley-line temple centers through the use of highly developed sex magic.

Some Neo-Pagans have called the Feraferian vision unrealistic, as well as too blatantly antitechnological. Others have criticized its vision of nature as “unnatural” because it accepts only the calm, refined, elegant, peaceful, and romantic aspects of nature. These Pagans believe that nature has a dark side, that the destruction caused by storms, the killing of one species by another, are part of nature’s laws and necessary for life. Adams told me, “Evolution is now maintained on this planet by predation and competition. There may be other principles for regulating evolution on other planets that are not as cruel as those on earth.”

Feminist Neo-Pagans have criticized Feraferia for emphasizing a glamorous, seductive, playful goddess. And both Fred and Svetlana have said that women should not make themselves less glamorous; rather, men should make themselves more childish, more delicate. Svetlana said, “Wilderness is highly decorative. We should emulate her beauty.”

But the main criticism by Neo-Pagans is that Feraferia is primarily an artistic creation rather than a functioning religion. In practice, it has had few followers. Feraferia emerged out of Hesperides during the 1960s; it was incorporated in 1967 and reached its height in the early seventies. Even then, it had an active group of only about fifty people (occasionally more appeared for big festivals), of whom only twenty or thirty were initiates. Feraferia has been very selective in accepting initiates.

In 1971 Robert Ellwood wrote about Feraferia:

Serious members are typically people who have been involved in pacifist, ecological and utopian movements. They seem in Feraferia to find a religious expression adequate to what has long been their real spiritual concern. . . . Adams’s exercise of the leadership role has illustrated the problems inherent in this vocation. The vision is preeminently his, and he has himself done most of the writing, created most of the art and devised most of the rites. In some ways he approaches religious genius, and undoubtedly without his labors the movement would not exist. . . . It is essentially a circle around a charismatic leader and has no real structure otherwise. It is not clear whether at this point it has any potential to survive him as a sociological entity. Yet there are those who feel that his personality stifles the creativity of others in the evolution of Feraferia, albeit he is a mild and winsome person whom all love and revere. Some feel his vision is so personal and intricate it does not communicate as easily as it should. Some have been through Feraferia and left to establish their own henges and forms of neopaganism, though no off-shoots have yet attained real structure.²⁷

At least one person told me he left Feraferia when Adams began to insist on belief in its thealogy. One couple, the Stanwicks, left to form an autonomous Feraferian group called Dancers of the Sacred Circle. Even though the circle around Adams was small, he continued to develop his artistry and vision. He and Lady Svetlana continually stressed the need to keep the vision pure. They were openly elitist. Lady Svetlana said, “We want to keep it small because it is so precious, like a diamond; you can’t just throw gems to the wind. Everything is worked out in so much detail that if any detail is changed ideologically, it would be very upsetting.” And of course, Feraferia is like a necklace of precious stones, intricately worked out: the religion is very detailed, complete with rituals, calendar, thealogy, and vision. Adams has said that he doesn’t think the vision will even begin to be realized until after his lifetime. He says that Feraferia’s aim should first be to find a territory, a sanctuary, where the Hesperian vision can be actualized. Then the training of priestesses should begin.

Feraferia’s purpose, according to Adams, is to save the earth and return humanity to a state of harmony with nature; to begin a transformation that will end with the dawning of a new culture throughout the galaxy, focused on the Korê. In Ellwood’s words, its purpose is clearly “to recover an ecstatic vision of wholeness and unity which utterly respects the reality of the particular. It brings together not only man and nature, but man and each seasonal and geographic particular of nature, and also man and each style of his own consciousness—masculine and feminine, analytic and dream, vision and fantasy.”²⁸ But, says Adams, the vision must be freely accepted; never imposed. “If we impose it, we’ll abort the attempt. We will become monsters and lose our historic mission to save the planet from disaster and to convince the Goddess to let us reenter Her Queendom.”

By the late 1980s Fred and Svetlana were not very active. They separated for a period, and later got back together again. Although Fred Adams was doing occasional rituals and leading discussions, and Svetlana Butyrin held public services for a while, Feraferia’s activities in the 1980s and 1990s were pretty minimal. But a new generation is becoming receptive to Feraferia’s vision.

Fred Adams remains the prime elder and visionary. In 2005, Fred Adams sat down with Harold Moss, priest of the Church of the Eternal Source, and talked about the origins of his vision. Moss has been videotaping a number of Pagan elders to make sure that their insights will not disappear. Asked what he would tell young people today, Adams said he would tell them to “get some acres, and set up a paradisial sanctuary.” “You could have started a witch coven,” said Moss, but Fred Adams said that seemed “too narrow.” He loved Gerald Gardner’s books, he said, but years before he knew anything about Wicca, he had wanted to create some institution that would emphasize a paradisial way of life, filled with orchards and gardens, a life with no violence or conflict—one that would emphasize a clothing-optional lifestyle, vegetarianism, and sensuality:

I was thinking and imagining a paradisal sanctuary long before I ever heard of witchcraft—a place where I and my friends would live in peace and harmony and have a beautiful sensual life, and the spiritual and the sensual were not separated.

In creating the name for Feraferia, he had sought the right word that would combine a sense of faery with service to nature. The word Feraferia seemed to have that right combination—joining a notion of faery with ideas of celebration and wilderness.

When he met Svetlana they had talked about founding a new religion based “squarely on the bliss between lovers.” It would have to emphasize the importance of the feminine and give ecology prominence. It would have to have new concepts of love that were sensitive and creative.

Today, halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Internet has revived Feraferia. Until recently it would have been almost impossible to get a hold of Feraferia’s rituals, essays, and artwork. In 1999, an artist living in Amsterdam came across Feraferia at a European Wiccan conference in Germany and got into correspondence with Fred Adams. Peter Tromp (Phaedrus) has his own Wiccan group, and has combined Feraferia with Wicca in his own work. He is now one of the two contact people for Feraferia worldwide (see Resources). Phaedrus offered to put Feraferia on the Web and to produce official versions of Feraferia’s core rituals. The Nine Yearly Festivals of Feraferia were produced in Dutch and English. Phaedrus says, “By way of the Internet, we now have the possibility to save Feraferia’s heritage from getting lost.” Phaedrus believes that with contact points in Europe and the United States, Feraferia is ready to regain its place in the Pagan community. He writes:

I do think the message is still important to make people in this modern world aware of the unity that exists between them and the natural landscape. We must not only preserve the heritage of those who came before us, but also actively use it to get maximum impact. Religion should be a way of living with poetry, art and magic, instead of blindly copying and following rules and traditions which in the end will suffocate every inspiration and energy we so desperately need to personally rediscover our connection and oneness with our fragile planet.

In my opinion, to be alive and fertile, every tradition has to be reinvented again and again by every new generation. Feraferia is and will always be Fred and Svetlana’s creation, which we will continue and elaborate—inspired by their example. After some years of silence, we now can use modern ways of communication to reach out. Instead of the artificial indoor traditions of too many Pagan movements, Feraferia is ready to guide and help people to regain their lost connections with nature in her wild aspect.

The Sabaean Religious Order: Rite as Art

One night, during a Midsummer Solstice festival held in a city park, a friend of mine observed the Neo-Pagan phenomenon for the first time. Afterward my friend remarked, “It was lovely. Sweet. Almost Edwardian.”

Those words grated upon me, because I agreed. I have always felt that a Pagan celebration should be powerful, energizing, ecstatic—never merely “sweet.” Seasonal festivals should suspend the dictates of convention and dissolve, however temporarily, the bonds of time and space. I remember being mesmerized many years ago by a Zuni corn festival in Colorado which lasted from morning until night. My attention never wandered from the dancers for that period of many hours. I have only rarely achieved such rapt attention during the rites of Neo-Pagans and Witches.

That this should be so is not surprising. It is the dilemma of modern life, a dilemma that arose with the destruction of the Pagan-folkpeasant traditions of Western Europe. The rise of Neo-Paganism in the United States must be understood as, in part, a search by uprooted Westerners for their own roots and origins, for a vibrant, rich culture equal to the cultures of tribal peoples and the great ancient civilizations. The Neo-Pagan movement is tied in ambiance if not in fact to those movements that seek to retain, preserve, and strengthen traditional cultures in Europe—the pan-Celtic movement, for example. It is no coincidence that some of the non-Gardnerian Witchcraft groups label themselves “Irish Traditionalist” or “Welsh Traditionalist.”

Many Neo-Pagans are drawn to Native American traditions, to Voudoun and Santeria: Pagan traditions involving whole cultures, communities, and even countries. People who are drawn to Neo-Paganism usually do not have a vital, indigenous tradition and are seeking to recover their roots, to rediscover folk tales, stories, songs, and dances that have largely vanished in the last hundred years.

Neo-Paganism in the United States is primarily a white phenomenon because it is mostly a revival of Western European Paganism. Many blacks and Latinos who are engaged in the same process—searching for roots—are drawn to Voudoun, Santeria, and Candomblé, all of which combine African religious and magical practices with elements of Roman Catholicism. (In Haiti the religion of the French colonialists and slavemasters mixed with the religions of the Dahomeans, Ibos, and Magos to produce Voudoun. Elsewhere in Latin America the Yoruba religion mixed with the religion of the Spanish and Portuguese colonialists, creating Santeria and—in Brazil—Candomblé).

These traditions are often more vital than the groups we have been discussing, simply because they took form within whole cultures and communities. But most white North Americans lack a culture that is still tied to the earth and its seasons. The Neo-Pagans are attempting to rebuild a whole new culture from a pile of old and new fragments. When they are honest with themselves, they admit their impoverishment; for even if their groves and covens succeed, it will take generations to create successful traditions.

At present, some of the most powerful rituals in the United States take place in the theater, in modern dance performances, sporting events, and rock concerts.

In the 1970s and 1980s, powerful Neo-Pagan rituals were rare. This should not be surprising, since the Neo-Pagan priesthood was in its infancy, picking up small pieces and discovering things often by chance.

Devlin, the Witch from California, once remarked to me, “Unfortunately, the raising of power is an accidental occurrence among us most of the time. In ancient Ireland the music of pipes and drums and harps was essential to the success of the rites. And so, I must say, was ritual drunkenness and ritual sex. I do not respect many ‘public’ Witches because I find among them a lack of ecstatic experience which I think marks these people as having incomplete traditions. And I hope that, in time, these incomplete forms will give way to complete forms.”

During my travels around the United States I attended many rituals, ranging from the full-moon ceremonies of small Witch covens and visits to private and personal shrines, to large, public, seasonal festivals attended by hundreds. Some were totally captivating. Often the simplest were the most powerful. But frequently, I felt that something was missing.

One of the most important exceptions to this was a wedding ritual in Chicago at the Temple of the Moon of the Sabaean Religious Order, a religious order inspired by ancient Basque, Yoruba, Sumerian and Babylonian sources. Like Feraferia, the Sabaean Religious Order comes out of the vision of a single man, Frederic M. de Arechaga, who is called Odun, but his vision is far different from Frederick Adams’s.

When I went to Chicago in the fall of 1975 I found so many rumors circulating about the Sabaean Religious Order that it was impossible to sort them out. Everything I had read about the order was confusing, almost as if Odun had sought to surround it with mystery. My first encounter was symbolic.

I had just arrived in Chicago and went to visit an old friend, the former editor of an underground newspaper—now defunct—and a veteran of many unusual experiences. This man had no particular interest in “the occult,” and I thought he would not easily succumb to fear of the unknown. But as we were walking on the North Side in Chicago, my friend began to cross the street in order to avoid passing a small magic shop. On the sidewalk in front of the shop were various magical symbols drawn into the concrete. I asked him why we were making this detour. He said that the owner of the shop was very strange, and was said to have put broken glass on his roof to prevent children from climbing. He described him as “weird and unpleasant.” He waited on the other side of the street while I entered El-Sabarum, the occult supply store of the Sabaean Religious Order and one of the five or six places in Chicago I was determined to visit.

In the next few days several occultists also warned me to be wary of Odun. I was told he practiced negative magic and performed animal sacrifices. I could find nothing to substantiate the first charge; the second was true—all animal food consumed in the temple had to be killed ritually. But since I was not a vegetarian, I felt I could hardly complain of this practice, any more than I might complain of the kosher laws of the Jews.

My own meeting with Odun (pronounced Ordun) was cloaked in mystery. There was a series of phone calls in which it was never clear whether Odun was in or out. I was kept waiting in a back room of the temple building, filled with statues and paintings. While I waited, a young woman in purple stockings practiced operatic arias on a piano. An hour later Odun arrived with six or seven members of the order, all carrying large grocery bags filled with food—a preparation for a wedding. Odun was dressed casually in jeans, a shirt, and sweater, but all were white, as might be required of an initiate into Santeria, which in fact he was.

Finally our interview began. I felt somewhat at a loss, having much less to go on here than with any of the other groups I’d met—a few articles, some confusing pages by Hans Holzer, and a bagful of rumors, some of them perhaps true, others perhaps the product of jealousy. My confusion had been aided and abetted by Odun’s evident love of weaving a bit of mystery around him. I came away with a wealth of impressions, a sense of great creativity and variety, but also the feeling that the group was hard to pin down, that I was missing certain signals.

Odun has described Sabaeanism as a philosophy of action that states that human beings should live in the present, identifying with those principles that are unchanging even in the face of death. One such principle would be the pursuit of knowledge, since knowledge, he observed to me, is the one thing we are not born with, but which we take with us when we go. Sabaeanism, he has said, is a system of thought that can be applied to all aspects of life.

According to an article in the order’s occasional publication, Iris, Sabaeanism is “a unique philosophy” that “extends back in time 6000 years or more, and as a living undogmatic principle is evasive when put into impersonal written words.” Sabaeanism was originally part of an effort “to preserve an antediluvian philosophy by means of deliberate hieroglyphics superimposed on the illusion of star groups in the heavens.” ²⁹ According to Berosus, a Babylonian historian, the last antediluvian kings were ordered to write down all history and deposit their writings at Sippar, the city of the sun god, Utu. This was to be no earthly city, since man-made and natural disasters would destroy such writings. So the city of the Sun God was really the heavens, and the history was recorded in the stars. Thus, astronomy evolved as the most important feature of Sabaeanism, along with astrology, temple building, and the study of the relation of place, time, and celebration to the planets and stars. “Sabaeanism” means worship of stars or star lore. But the Sabaean Religious Order has been involved in a large number of activities that have nothing to do with astrology and astronomy. Odun told me that Sabaeanism came to Egypt at the time of Menes (1st dynasty), and later emissaries brought it westward. He told me that during the seventeenth century, during the slave trade, it was brought to the New World and that is why the tradition has deep ties with Santeria.

Odun’s background in the arts seems to be the key to the order’s richness and mystery. He has been a choreographer and a designer. He told me he worked with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and designed jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal’s nightclub, the Alhambra. I once watched him work with a dancer during a wedding rehearsal in the temple. He ran and leapt and directed her until she moved gracefully to the music of the small temple orchestra. From the little I saw, Sabaean rituals are the most complex and beautifully organized of any Neo-Pagan group I visited. The use of music and dance was truly inspiring. The order has mounted mystery plays; they have synthesized art, dance, song, and ritual to a height I have not seen elsewhere. In addition, there are classes in herbalism, magic, and astrology. The priesthood seems small, with certainly less than a dozen members, but I noticed that many Chicago Neo-Pagans came to work with Odun for a period of time. Most of the Pagans I met in Chicago had dealt with the order—some favorably, some not favorably—and many had been influenced by Odun.

Frederic de Arechaga came to the United States from Spain. He changed his name to Odun Arechaga after his initiation into the mysteries of the god Obatala. He told me that he inherited the Sabaean tradition from his mother, but, whatever its origins, it bears the stamp of his own artistry. The order consists of the small supply store, El-Sabarum, which opens in the late afternoon and seems to cater to members more than the general public. El-Sabarum also runs a mail-order service and an occasional newsletter. Behind the shop is the temple, some space for classes, and living quarters for the priesthood. The temple was completely designed and built by members of the order and is the focus for religious gatherings small and large.

Sabaean theology describes God or the Gods as Am’n, a word that is said to mean the hidden, numberless point. Unlike the word God, the word Am’n can be singular or plural; it suggests neither maleness nor femaleness. The Am’n are seen as a Source, but hidden like the wind, which can be felt but not seen. An article in Iris observed that the Am’n “cleanse the imagery of deity to its original premise of self-metamorphosis; man’s ultimate responsibility to himself.”³⁰

The Am’n are seen as total knowledge; they are “indifferent, amoral and pure source.” They are “above being adored.” They “do not exist for the morbid preoccupation of a fanatic. But rather as avenues that can develop the individual to an awareness of himself and the universe that hitherto has remained unearthed.”

For the sake of convenience, the Am’n can be divided. Odun told me that the order represents the Am’n symbolically as five different goddesses. “Poetically we use the term goddess. After all, the female is a formidable symbol for creation. We always know who the mother is, and even the mother does not have to know who the father is. Still, the idea of creation must not be misunderstood. We are not feminists. The entire universe is not based on the feminine precept. The incident of sex or gender which comes about in an incarnation is only a necessity or need of evolution. Divinity is sexless. The most ancient descriptions of gods are androgynous. But it is very hard for people to concentrate on the abstract. That is the whole purpose of mythology, to familiarize yourself with certain mysteries in an unmysterious way through storytelling.”

The order also divides the Am’n to represent various races, seasons, philosophies, and theologies. The Red Goddess represents Autumn and the peoples native to this continent. The White Goddess represents winter and Caucasians. The Black Goddess represents the spring and blacks. The Yellow Goddess represents the summer and Asians. And the Blue Goddess represents leap year, the day between the years, and the races and peoples beyond earth.

The Am’n are also used to represent five aspects of philosophy—logic, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics—and five aspects of theology—atheism, pantheism, polytheism, monotheism, and henotheism. The Sabaean Religious Order adheres to henotheism as the most inclusive. A henotheist is a person who worships one god without excluding the existence of others. “A henotheist,” Odun said, “is a person who relates to deity in a personal way. For a time, one might be attuned to Venus; at another time, to Saturn.” An article in Iris explained further;

As a henotheist, a Sabaean can relate to an individual imagery that particularly reflects himself. . . . However he never forgets that there is another imagery he can [use] if it comes to pass that he changes and no longer can identify with the image he so fondly admired .³¹

Odun described henotheism as the “ultimate wheel of the fivepointed star which would begin with atheism, go through pantheism, polytheism, monotheism, and finally end up with henotheism before beginning all over again.” These five theisms, he observed, relate to all of human knowledge, to the five aspects of philosophy.

“Atheism seems to relate to logic (the idea that this is this and that is that). At the point when a person realizes that there is a form and a movement to things, this brings about a sense of aesthetics and leads a person to pantheism (the feeling of a tree, or a flower, of the wind). When a person comes to the realization that these feelings, these ‘spirits,’ have a kind of personality, this leads to polytheism, and the sensing of these diverse points of view and individualities leads a person to a sense of ethics. At this point, people often begin to manipulate reality and to move in one direction or another. Thus they come to politics and monotheism. At the point when a person realizes there is something beyond all this, they develop a sense of metaphysics and become henotheists.”

Odun said that one could be an atheist and still be a Sabaean, although, later, an atheist woman told me that she had left the order because she felt that her views were too far removed from the general conceptions of the priesthood.

Odun calls the Sabaean Religious Order a kind of finishing school and says that learning about the ancient philosophies and mystery traditions is equivalent to learning to be civilized. “We do not believe in teachers,” he told me. “The purpose of a priesthood is to be a catalyst, to sustain a strength for people who come to it so they can be vitalized.” Most people, he said, are unable to read the ancient books properly and to open themselves to the ancient myths. But despite his stress on ancient knowledge, Odun points out that the order is not anachronistic. There is no purpose to living in the past or attempting to mimic ancient times; most religions failed precisely because they did not take into account the metamorphosis of people, nations, mind. “The object of life,” he told me, “is to know yourself, to learn, to become, to grow; it’s the becoming divine, the principle of the mystery of deification. Sabaeanism is simply a term given to our people. But they are people who follow their own heads. They are not hung up on a book or on a prophet. They are not idolators of books. They know there are many different paths within Sabaeanism.”

The feeling one gets in visiting the order is of a constant stream of diverse activities. Odun told me that the one thing that was not allowed was wasting time. “We are constantly busy. We build. We teach. We do research. We write mystery plays. We choreograph. We teach dancers. We are a source.”

 

My visit to the Sabaean Religious Order culminated in a magnificent wedding ceremony, or “eclipse,” as the Sabaeans call it—literally, the movement of one planet in front of another. The length of an eclipse is decided by divination. If a couple decides to join for a period of years, it is called a solar eclipse; if for a period of months, a lunar eclipse.

The ceremony I attended in the late fall of 1975 was the solar eclipse of a priestess in the Sabaean Order. She was marrying a man who had no connection with the religion. It was, ritually speaking, the most beautiful wedding I have ever seen, surpassing a magnificent traditional country wedding I once attended in England.

The eclipse took place in early evening in the Temple of the Moon behind the small occult supply store run by the order. A door in the shop opened into a large high-ceilinged room lined with two rows of tall gray columns, each topped with a statue of a white elephant. The columns were ringed with wreaths of ferns and daisies. A brownish-gold curtain cut the inner portion of the temple in half.

Before entering the temple, we took off our shoes. Inside, on one side of the curtain, the bride sat on a golden chair covered with a soft animal skin. Her head was covered by a light yellow silk veil that fell loosely in folds like an Arab burnoose. A wreath of ferns and gardenias held it in place. Her dress, which she had made herself, was translucent light yellow with long silk tassels. She was barefooted and held in her hand a single white gardenia. All the women sat beside her—friends, mother, and the groom’s mother. On the other side of the curtain, seated on a silver chair, sat the groom with all the men around him. According to Sabaean lore, the woman is symbolized by the sun, and the man by the moon. In this it differs from most Neo-Pagan traditions.

After a while, Odun Arechaga appeared, dressed in white satin priest’s garb and a large white cap. He held a long white feather in one hand, and in the other a beautiful sistrum, an ancient musical instrument. Odun spoke of the Am’n. He then told a story. It was a pre-Hellenic myth that forms much of the basis for the Orphic mysteries, often called the Pelasgian creation myth. It went something like this:

“In the beginning the goddess Eurynome, mother of all things, arose naked from chaos, not finding a place upon which to stand. Moving through space she grabbed hold of the north wind and, catching that gust that moved behind her as she turned, she rubbed both winds between her hands to create the great cosmic serpent Ophion.

“No sooner had life breathed into his nostrils and he saw those divine limbs than did he lust to couple with her. But the action of time was slower for him than Eurynome. Whilst he still saw the divine naked matrix she in fact had metamorphosed into a dove and had laid a large silver egg that shone with divine eminence.

“Ophion, desiring to satisfy his lust, wrapped himself around this egg seven times. But so tightly did he coil that the egg split in two!

“Out tumbled a heaven of a thousand suns and moons without number. Planets and comets, nebulae and galaxies of stars!

“Ophion, stupefied and proud, boasted to the very plenum of his creation. He gorged himself on the self-adulation of genetrix and claimed the sole authorship in creation. He looked down upon Eurynome as a mere functionary of his great work.

“Instead, Eurynome bruised his head with her heel, and kicked out his teeth for this presumption. She split his sex as male and female and placed him on the many thousand worlds he created so that in time he can justify and merit that position he once had.

“Since then it seems that all male seeks female so as to regain a fragment of his other half, and somewhat nostalgically we are awed with the expanse of the night heaven, looking out there knowing not where we have come.”³²

The meaning of marriage is the reuniting of these two halves. To achieve this unification, both partners must die symbolically, they must abandon their individualities and become one. This death and rebirth, then, was the ritual we would witness. And we would do more than witness it, for Odun said that there could be no “observers” present but only those who were willing to participate fully in the rite. Those who did not wish to participate were asked to leave. No one left.

Odun began to shake the sistrum and to move in and out beneath the columns. He gave one candle to the bride and one to the groom. He told them to stand if they still wished to be united. The mothers of the pair stood with the bride, the fathers stood with the groom. The room was darkened. The temple orchestra played dark Middle Eastern themes intensely and rhythmically. There was a predominance of bells and drums. Suddenly, Odun pulled down the silken dividing curtain. It fell on top of the pair, covering them. Odun wrapped the curtain around them. He led them around the pillars in a slow dance, then down a flight of stairs and into a ceremonial chamber. There, out of sight, the couple did various rituals which we did not see. Meanwhile we danced circle dances.

Then the temple priests strewed barley and rice in patterns across the temple floor. While the music continued, the pair, still bundled together, was led up the stairs and through and around the pillars. They were taken into another chamber for divinations, and finally, into a third room where a bed waited, covered by elaborate spreads. They were left alone to consummate the marriage while, outside, the women danced together to send energy to the bride and the men danced together to send energy to the groom. Then we waited while a temple dancer, the one I had seen work with Odun several days before, danced for us with graceful, sensual movements. After a time, the couple opened the door and emerged. All the women danced with the groom and all the men with the bride.

Then the feast began, and what a feast it was! The bride and groom sat at either end of a long table covered with a cloth. Young priests, dressed in white, brought forth a large cauldron that stood on a tripod. With great ceremony they threw spinach and romaine lettuce into the cauldron from large straw baskets. To the sound of cymbals and drums, lemons were ceremoniously squeezed, eggs were shelled and tossed into the mixture, along with anchovies and salt. The priests poured vinegar and oil from large carafes. Finally, one of the young priests rolled up his long sleeves, thrust his arms deep into the cauldron, and tossed the enormous salad. Odun took a lettuce leaf and gave it to the bride, who approved it. Then all the guests dug in with their hands.

That was merely the beginning. It was followed by a procession of courses—vegetables, fish, beef, and fowl—from shrimp in sauces, deviled eggs, and stuffed clams to plates of stuffed grape leaves, sweet fried plantains, pita bread with various dips, tomatoes and peppers, and platters of pigeons, oysters, chickens, and geese. Each set of dishes had been prepared by the priests; they appeared with the flourish of cymbals and drums, and each course was washed down with a strong, foamy punch. In the midst of the banquet came the ritual meal of the bride and groom, and in contrast to our feast, it was simple. Two fish were broiled and served with parsley. Dessert included carrot cakes, wedding cakes and puddings, honeycombs dripping in honey, rows of papayas, persimmons, pomegranates, figs, and dates.

During the feast I came across a bowl of enormous goose eggs. I picked one up and gazed at it, to remind myself later that this had been a feast out of a fantasy. Finally, I could contain myself no longer. I walked up to Odun and said, “This is the most amazing feast I have ever seen, barring the banquet scene in Fellini’s Satyricon.”

Odun gave me a wry smile and said with a touch of affected humorous contempt, “Remember Satyricon was merely a movie.”

The Sabaean Religious Order moved to New Orleans in 2000. At the time of this latest edition, Odun had suffered a terrible stroke from which he still has not recovered. Bill Koeppen, a Sabaean who has been with Odun for many years, says, “There is a void in all our lives without his presence and all of us pray to the Am’n for his well-being.” As a result of Hurricane Katrina the staff of the Sabaean Religious Order made the decision to move to Denver, Colorado. Sabaeanism will continue. The priesthood intends to complete the books Odun was working on and publish them in his name. It plans to reopen the temple and storefront again.

The Church of the Eternal Source

Feraferia and the Sabaean Religious Order each sprang from the vision of one person. The power of these two groups reflects the energy, charisma, and talent of their founders.

The Church of the Eternal Source (CES), a federation of Egyptian cults, stands in contrast—devoid of charismatic leadership. Instead, it centers on the power, artistry, and beauty of a culture—ancient Egypt. Involvement in CES depends on a direct personal, intellectual, and emotional encounter with the force of Egypt, with its gods, with the beauty of its art. Most members usually had such an encounter at an early age, perhaps in a library or a museum, or through a book or a film. Since relatively few people in our culture have had such a fortunate experience, the Church of the Eternal Source is very small.

Many of the founders and priesthood of CES have similar stories: early identification with ancient and classical cultures—Greek, Roman, Egyptian—and an early religious bent. The late Donald Harrison, for example, one of the founders of the Church of the Eternal Source, was a commercial artist whose home was decorated with exquisite hand-carved replicas of Egyptian works of art. Harrison began carving statues of gods and models of temples as a child. Later, he converted to Catholicism and entered a Benedictine monastery. Then he rebelled, declared Christianity “anti-life,” and left the monastery a confirmed Pagan, determined to reestablish the ancient religions. Influenced by Gore Vidal’s novel Julian, in 1967 he founded the Julian Review, one of the earliest Neo-Pagan journals. Believing that the ancient Egyptian religion was too esoteric for most people, he joined Michael Kinghorn in founding the Delphic Fellowship, a group devoted to Greek Paganism. In the meantime, he began a six-year-project to create a full-size replica of the throne chair of Tehutimes III, hand-carved in two thousand pieces of ivory and rare woods. Finally, when the Church of the Eternal Source was established in 1970, after much study, Harrison declared himself a priest of the Egyptian god Thoth and began to reestablish the Thoth cult.

Jim Kemble had planned a career as an Episcopalian priest, but later became enamored of the classical religions of Greece and Rome. In high school he performed secret ceremonies to the old gods. He would walk to the beach in California and drop wine and bread into the sea, invoking Zeus, Poseidon, Bacchus, and Pluto. After 1970 he came upon CES, and the gods he had worshipped merged into the figure of Osiris. He began to study Egyptian history and religion and became a priest of Osiris, reviving the Osiris cult.

Elaine Amiro, a priestess of Neith, was fascinated as a child by native American and Egyptian cultures. She was attracted to the desert and at various times kept many strange animals, including iguanas, bobcats, monkeys, ocelots, and alligators. She taught Navajo children in New Mexico and studied the Navajo religion although, she told me, “as an Anglo, I was barred from learning much of the rites.”

After returning to her home in Massachusetts, Amiro said, she discovered the Goddess at the end of a period when her life had “just seemed to fall apart.” One day she was looking in an encyclopedia at the names of Egyptian gods and goddesses. “One name caught my attention,” she wrote me, “and I kept coming back to it. I had never heard of the Goddess Neith before. I wondered why I was so attracted.”

Neith, writes Amiro, was the great lady who was mother and daughter to Ra, the sun god, who “brought forth herself in primeval time, never having been created.” She was the “first to give birth to anything, when nothing else had been born, not even herself.”

Amiro found that her name matched Neith’s numerologically, and several strange experiences convinced her that Neith was her spiritual guide. She wrote that after this discovery her creative energies seemed set free. She began to paint, to write poetry, even to carve statues. “Life has never meant more to me than when I rediscovered ancient Egypt and the Goddess. All my talents began to surface. I was amazed at the number of things I could do and do rather well.” She began doing healings. Amiro, the mother of three children, worked as an elementary school teacher. She told me that she made Egypt and other ancient cultures come alive for children.

Later she found out about the Church of the Eternal Source and established the cult of Neith at her home in West Wareham, Massachusetts. “I finally discovered who I was and what my job on earth was—to be a servant and priestess of Neith.” Only after this, she said, did she really begin to live.

Harold Moss was one of those most instrumental in founding the church. One could say that CES began in fun, as a series of Egyptian costume parties originating with a group of students known as the Chesley Donovan Science Fantasy Foundation (CD). The group was formed in 1953, when Harold Moss was in high school in California. A CES pamphlet described the Chesley Donovan Foundation as “an elitist science fiction club and atheist organization.” Its members “quoted Thomas Paine and Willy Ley and Robert Heinlein, read horror comics, wore military helmets with meat cleavers implanted in them to social functions and school, and used ‘normal,’ ‘average,’ and ‘Christian’ as swear words.”³³

Harold Moss is a warm and compassionate man who, when I first met him, worked as an engineer in the daytime and by night lived in a house whose walls were covered with shelves of classical records. We spent a long evening talking, listening to Bach cantatas, and looking at pictures of the California desert. Harold told me that he had long been fascinated by the sophisticated cultures of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

“Just precisely how I became aware of Egypt is pretty clear to me. I did a lot of reading as a child and I loved to go to the movies. I was aware of the Arabian Nights stories, and movies such as The Thief of Baghdad, and even the old Cleopatra—as corny as it was. Roman epics fascinated me.

“I remember I particularly liked the idea that ancient people wore few clothes. I thought clothes were stupid and ridiculous and even as a child I kept trying to take them off. The Hebrews always seemed to wear too many clothes, whereas the Romans and the Egyptians ran around naked, and this made a lot of sense to me as a child.

“But mainly, I was captivated by the sense of beauty of the Egyptians. I find I am using this phrase a lot these days. I was utterly captivated by this magnificently developed sense of beauty. I felt there was no possibility that anything could be wrong with a people who could manifest such beauty.”

In 1954, after seeing the film The Egyptian, Moss went to the library and read James Breasted’s History of Egypt. The child of Theosophists, Moss was brought up as a free thinker, and it was natural for him at the time to identify with Akhenaten and the religion of Aten, finding it to be a kind of Pagan rationalism. “I was under the spell of Breasted,” Moss said, “with all his highly fictionalized accounts of Akhenaten as the lonely progressive in a world of hidebound people who were worshipping blindly, through habit. Akhenaten was the one who dared to think, to do something different, to be unusual. So, of course, he was the proper hero for an eighteen-year-old.”³⁴

Members of the Chesley Donovan Foundation adopted Akhenaten as their hero and began to wear ankhs. Moss pursued his interest in Egypt with his friends, who may not have taken it as seriously as he did. As the years progressed, he came to realize that he was captivated by all of the Egyptian religion, not just Akhenaten. By 1967 he had rebelled against Akhenaten’s monotheism, declared himself a polytheist, and immersed himself in the classic cult of Horus, the god of light.

Moss and a number of friends had started a tradition of Egyptian summer costume parties in 1964. Eventually, they were scheduled to coincide with the ancient Egyptian New Year’s celebration in mid-July. By 1970 Moss had come into contact with other Pagans, including Feraferia’s Fred Adams and various Wiccan groups. He met Don Harrison and Sara Cunningham, a priestess of Wicca, and together they founded the Church of the Eternal Source officially on August 30, 1970. It was incorporated the next January. Sara Cunningham later left CES and returned to Wicca.

 

The Church of the Eternal Source considers itself to be the refounded religion of ancient Egypt, authentic in spirit, scholarly, and intense. An early CES leaflet proclaims:

The Church of the Eternal Source is the refounded church of Ancient Egypt. We worship the original gods of mankind in their original names in the original manner as closely as possible. This religion produced in Ancient Egypt a golden age of peace, happiness, tranquility, and accomplishment unmatched since. . . .

Nothing stands still. . . . Our work is to establish a constantly evolving synthesis of ancient and modern knowledge under the direct guidance and in direct contact with the Eternal Gods. . . .

How can we reconcile a polytheistic faith to the “modern” ideas on religion? It is true that the central religious experience is unity with the universe. . . . But the distinctness of the Gods is a fact of our revelation. Like the facets of a precious jewel, each of them should be approached separately. . . . The human spirit is beautiful only when it is free. The diversity of the Gods commands a deep commitment to human diversity.³⁵

But what does it mean to be authentically Egyptian today? CES understands that the answer to that question is complicated, and that it can easily be misunderstood by those who think of ancient Egypt simply in terms of pyramids, burial customs, bureaucracies, and powerful pharaohs.

The priesthood of CES sees Egypt as the first truly religious culture and to them “Egyptian” means remaining true to the spirit of the ancient religion, a spirit exemplified by three things: ecumenicism, polytheism, and the mythopoetic view.

CES encourages its students to continue any religious practice they have found meaningful in the past. “We think our general viewpoint is more meaningful, more powerful and more satisfying, but whatever of value you have found we will urge you to keep. . . . Our purpose—the purpose of true religion—is to help you become more; not to tell you a lot of things you have to give up, nor to insult you, nor try to terrorize you.”³⁶

What, then, is this more meaningful, more general viewpoint? First of all, it holds that the Egyptian gods are not “Egyptian” in any national sense of the word. CES has no ties with the present-day Arab world. It views Egypt today as a place that has been devastated and violated by unbelievers and infidels. The sanctuaries have been desecrated; the shrines are in ruins. The Egyptian gods are seen as eternal forces, and all modern religions are simply aspects of the Egyptian view narrowly focused. For example, modern Judaism may be seen as a cult of Ra, Christianity as a cult of Amen-Ra-Harakhte with a touch of Isis thrown in, Buddhism as a cult of Amen. “This,” wrote Moss to a Protestant clergyman, “makes perfect sense, explains why men disagree, and gives us the ultimate answer to ecumenicism—freedom.”³⁷

The priests of the Church of the Eternal Source have often said that there is more of the truly Egyptian in Nepal, or in a Hopi pueblo, than in late Egyptian texts, which are tainted by foreign elements. CES encourages dressing in the Egyptian manner, learning hieroglyphics, using Egyptian dates and names, but at the same time it upholds the view that “the Egyptian culture we imitate was ancestral to the present culture of all Western nations,” and that therefore understanding of and respect for all religious practices are beneficial.³⁸

I asked Harold Moss how he looked at the gods. “I’m a Jungian introspectionist,” he said. “The Egyptian gods and goddesses represent constructs—personifications. . . . Do the gods exist? Yes. The conceptualization of polytheistic divinities is a useful way of explaining the kind of contact we do have with the transpersonal and transinfinite forces of life. These forces are beyond human conception, but we can establish a path of communication so that these forces react to us, to people, as though there were gods.” “Still,” Moss added, “the gods are real.”³⁹

CES is adamantly polytheist. “Polytheism,” a CES pamphlet states, “accepts a concept of Divinity based on the plurality of the Gods in human perception.” What a Christian might call God, a priest of CES might call “the gods”; but both stand for the totality of divinity.

There is surely a single source of Divinity, but this abstraction when translated into human institutions often results in the worship of the Ego, or in an enantidromia, a dualistic split, with “God” in an exalted position placed in opposition to Man and everything human. A polytheistic concept, on the other hand, can embrace the religious experiences of Monotheism and Pantheism also: we view Divinity as a balance of distinct divine vectors.⁴⁰

In this very Jungian view, the parts of a human being are infinite. Likewise the parts of “the gods.” When they are brought into harmony, health results; sickness comes when they are in disarray. In this scheme the goal of life would be to bring one’s own individuality into balance with these forces, into harmony with Ma’at, a word the ancient Egyptians used to describe the preexisting original order of the universe.

Unlike many of the “new” religions, CES does not print its own religious books. There is an occasional pamphlet and one can still get back issues of the magazine Khepera. But generally CES relies on the basic texts of scholarship on Egypt and the best translations of ancient texts.

If CES has one basic recommended introduction to the study of Egypt, it is Dr. Henri Frankfort’s Ancient Egyptian Religion. Frankfort stresses that to understand Egypt we have to begin to understand the mythopoetic outlook, a totally different way of perceiving reality, and dispense with our evolutionary bias. Whereas most Westerners are used to the idea of revelations from a single God transmitting one central truth, the ancients “admitted side by side certain limited insights, which were held to be simultaneously valid, each in its own proper context.” There was no single truth, no central dogma, no single coherent theory to explain reality, no one holy book. Frankfort wrote that this habit of thought, which is so unlike our own, “agrees with the basic experience of polytheism.” The universe is alive with multiple forces. The question of their “unity” does not arise. There are many gods and they are immanent in nature.⁴¹

In addition, Frankfort writes that many of our assumptions about Egypt are incorrect. For example, it is wrong to say that Egyptian religion evolved from more primitive forms, or that modern religions evolved from Egyptian forms that were more primitive. Nor was the worship of animals and animal gods a transitional phase toward the worship of human forces. Frankfort argues that the Egyptians viewed the universe “as a rhythmic movement within an unchanging whole” and believed that only the changeless participated in divinity. Since animals, unlike humans, have no history, and since the lives of animals change little in comparison with those of humans, animals shared more in divinity, in the eternal, than did humans.

Like Frankfort, the members of CES have a view of Egypt that is very different from the popular conception, which, they are quick to point out, has been distorted by Egypt’s conquerors. For example, we commonly think that in Egypt all religious power was invested in a priesthood, and that priests always functioned as intermediaries between a worshipper and the divine. But Harold Moss contends that this is a mistaken view; Egyptians had personal shrines and worshipped individually. One tenet of CES is that people should contact the gods daily. The priests are used for exceptional circumstances. Moss told me, “It’s controversial whether the Egyptians were really that sacerdotal. I think they were less so than Catholics today. The religion was political, but not in the sense of a state arm to oppress. The priesthood functioned to advise in all major undertakings. It oversaw rituals for fertility, for the rising and setting of the sun. The religion had the same ethical base as the Hopi religion—the great national festivals were for the purpose of securing the bounty of nature.”

Moss also told me that CES did not follow Egyptian burial customs and practices; his own travels to Egypt convinced him that those customs were conditioned by the environment of the Nile Valley and had continued to be practiced there long after the religion had faded. Most members of CES favor cremation and the return of their ashes to the earth. “The real question,” Harold said, “is what of the ancient Egyptian religion is truly for all the world and not simply for the Nile Valley? What parts of this religion fit in with the life of the United States?” He concluded that these questions must be solved by practice, not dogma. “We’re trying to avoid the mistake of the Christians. They started out with a whole lot of writings which they then spent the rest of their existence defending and trying to live up to.”

 

In practice, the Church of the Eternal Source is a federation of independent cults, each led by a priest or priestess who maintains services for a particular deity—such as Horus, Ptah, Sekhmet, Hathor, and Anubis—supervises initiatory procedures of that cult, and corresponds or meets personally with those students who express interest. Each cult is autonomous. Rituals are held separately. Most students reach CES through correspondence with one of its priests or initiates, who advise a course of study. Books and later rituals are suggested. If at a certain point a student makes a commitment to a particular deity, the study program is tailored in that direction.

As of 2006, the church has about six functioning priests and priestesses, three major shrines, three fully dedicated temple rooms, and substantial congregations in California, Oregon, and Idaho. The church also conducts correspondence with students in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Africa. The Egyptian New Year’s party continues, and has developed into an ecumenical Pan-Pagan gathering for many Neo-Pagans in California.

Religious practice in CES is centered on the personal shrine, which is created by each individual and may or may not be devoted to a particular deity. In addition to study of Egypt and worship at the shrine, members of CES are encouraged to learn psychic and divinatory arts (“Divination reminds us on a day-to-day basis that the macrocosm and the microcosm—the universe and man—are interrelated in function”), to produce works of art with Egyptian symbolism, to explore the wilderness and nature, and to involve themselves in community actions.

A church pamphlet, “Our Modern Practice of the Ancient Egyptian Religion,” states:

Tell us what you want, what you seek, and we will provide the maximum assistance possible. Our purpose is to aid each person to become her or his own Priestess or Priest, to aid each person in the attainment and fulfillment of her or his own vision and Goddess or God experiences.

The pamphlet says that the church provides information and instruction about “things Egyptian” and various occult techniques, but all from the following general standpoint: The church does not manipulate or coerce its members. “Power” is understood to mean a sense of wholeness that comes from living in harmony with the flow of the universe (Ma’at). The church does not believe that power shared is power lost, but rather that knowledge is increased as it is shared. There are no secrets. CES does not claim to teach “Ultimate Truth,” which, according to the pamphlet, “is endlessly discovered for and by one’s sef, throughout one’s existence and incarnations.”⁴² Moss reiterated this point by observing, “When a person assumes that his or her revelation is the only true one, it only says that this person has had very few religious revelations and hasn’t realized how many there are.” The pamphlet goes further:

We enjoy different peoples’ being different and do not teach sameness, conformity, or a rigidly bound system, but rather encourage diversity and “varieties of religious experience.”

We seek to help to open one to learning more and to heal the damage done by various religious and political systems that seek to degrade and use people. . . .

Harold Moss once observed that the Church of the Eternal Source faced one great hindrance as a religious organization—it lacked charismatic individuals. Its appeal has always been to intellectuals who enjoy scholarly pursuits. “My own approach to religion is intellectual,” Moss told me, “and since I am writing most of the introductory letters to people, as secretary of the church, this is a stumbling block. The only people the church has gathered are those who have been captivated by this force which reaches through Egyptian art across the centuries and which seduces people. Then a person has to be driven to want to understand what sort of intellectual force produced such a culture.

“Our smallness is a source of disappointment to some of us. The number of people who are interested in ancient Egyptian religion is rather limited. But we have made a beginning.” Moss became reflective and began to talk about why he has not lost his fascination with ancient Egypt. “I have always been wrapped up with the idea of permanence and commitment. And Egypt was a very conservative society, where obligations were often life-long, and where permanence and commitment were stressed. In our society, we often collide with one another like molecules in a gas; we interact briefly to form submolecular species and then go our separate ways. This is all part of the unfolding of the universal life force to understand itself, and I understand this intellectually, but it bothers me. Perhaps Egypt becomes, for me, a kind of utopia, where things never change.”⁴³

If the Church of the Eternal Source remains small, its importance for Neo-Paganism is disproportionately great, for it emphasizes more clearly than any other Neo-Pagan group a commitment to diversity, multiplicity, and freedom. Writing to Green Egg several years ago, Moss summed up the essence of CES:

Many people I think are disappointed in us because we are not the most mysterious of the mysteries. They think Egypt was like that, from the testimony of her conquerors. But Egypt was actually one of the most uncomplicated places that ever was, and religion was no exception. . . . The power of Egypt was closeness to the Earth. Her religious symbols were all of the Earth. Her religious acts were all celebrations of the cycles of the Earth. That is what I/we mean when we say: “We are all Egyptians.” The true living “Egyptians” are the American Indians. . . .

Many today seek the true Gods, the Egyptian wisdom, in dark rooms, arcane studies, ferocious secrecy. If they reach their goal they will find themselves standing in the sun under a clear blue sky, on the banks of a river—5000 years ago—singing and dancing for joy, heart brimming with love, mind afire with certainty of the harmony between the Gods and Man, of the brotherhood and sisterhood of all life.⁴⁴

In a recent series of films on Pagan elders, Harold Moss said, in November 2005, that, “Polytheistic religions, in general, command a reverence for diversity. Human diversity is a sacrament. That is the important thing we have to teach.” In 2005, Harold Moss told me he now lives on a farm and does work as a music critic and audio producer. The Reverend Donald Harrison died in 2004. The Church of the Eternal Source has several new priests and priestesses. There are also several new Web sites (see Resources).

Heathenism

When Drawing Down the Moon appeared in 1979, one of its most glaring oversights was the omission of Heathenism. While I had received many publications relating to Odinism—The Runestone, The Raven Banner, and others—I found myself in a quandary. Some of the information I received was from groups genuinely seeking a Norse Pagan path, but there were other groups clearly using Odinist symbols and mythologies as a front for right-wing and even Nazi activities. I even had a neighbor, around the corner from me in New York City, who was a leading member of a Nazi political party and who was communicating his religious ideas in the forum of the Green Egg. His cramped apartment on Ninetythird Street was crammed with books—one wall was filled with Nazi regalia and literature; the other wall was filled with books on the occult, with particular emphasis on Norse and German (and Vedic) mythology.

In addition, the common notion within much of the Pagan movement at that time was that Norse Paganism was filled with such people. And since the Heathen community was generally more conservative in its values and ideas anyway, stressing concepts like family, courage, and warrior virtues, it was easy to become confused. In the end I just gave up, deciding it was a can of worms I just didn’t want to open.

But Pagans interested in Norse mythology wouldn’t go away. There were serious seekers, flourishing organizations, and good scholarship. There are even places where indigenous Heathenism continues. For example, public Pagan worship was outlawed in Iceland over nine hundred years ago, but the ancient restrictions were repealed in 1874. In 1972, Nordic Paganism was officially recognized as a legitimate and legal religion, and Icelandic Pagan groups exist today.

The problem of being confused with Nazism is one that almost all Heathens have had to confront. As Alice Karlsdóttir, who used to edit Boreas, a journal of Northern European Paganism, said to me, “You will always find fringe people attracted to Paganism. Just as Witches have to contend with the occasional news report of weirdos torturing animals and calling themselves Witches, we in Norse Paganism have our own fringe types. There’s been a general assumption that the Norse religion is connected with the Nazis because the Nazis used Norse symbols. And Neo-Nazis sometimes get attracted to Odinism, because the trappings are the same.” And Prudence Priest, the editor of Yggdrasil, wrote me, “How are we ever to reclaim the swastika—symbol of both Thor’s hammer and the wheel of the sun (and dating back thousands of years before Hitler’s perversion of it).” Karlsdóttir told me of putting on a Norse ritual at a large Pagan festival and finding that many who came to it were wary that it “would be negative,” an impression that was only dispelled by the ritual itself.

As with Pagans from all cultures, people attracted to Scandinavian and Germanic forms of Paganism often come to it as part of a search for their own ancestral roots. Alice Karlsdóttir told me, “My family is Scandinavian, and as I was growing up, my mother read me the Norse myths, and they remained my favorite ones.” After attending an extremely conservative Christian college in Texas, Karlsdóttir decided she was not a Christian. She studied different religions, became interested in the occult, and, through a poetry teacher, began learning about Paganism. “The minute I realized Paganism was the religion for me, and that it was OK, and not weird, I immediately went back to the Norse gods, which had been in the back of my head all this time. There was never a question. I just knew. I thought, ‘I can really believe in these guys again!’ Perhaps it was the way I was raised, or perhaps I just had these images in my head.”

When I revised Drawing Down the Moon in 1986, the largest and most successful organization promoting Norse Paganism in the United States was the Ásatrú Free Assembly (AFA), which was started by Stephen McNallen in 1971. It later changed its name to the Ásatrú Folk Assembly. “I had wandered out of high school in rural Texas,” McNallen told me, “and had shaken off Catholicism because it conflicted with my basic instincts. I sampled many religions, read about Wicca, looked into Crowley, but none of it clicked. Then I ran across a novel about the Vikings. In retrospect, it wasn’t a great novel, but the Vikings, in contrast with the monks, were real; they were alive. They had all the intensity and courage. It was clicking into something I already believed, but it was still awhile until I became aware that you can choose your gods.”

McNallen said that many of the main Odinist groups (the Odinist Fellowship, the Odinist Committee in England, Ásatrúarfolks in Iceland, and the AFA) started within a very few months of each other, with no knowledge of each other’s existence. Perhaps it was “a wind blowing through the World Tree,” he said. The AFA published The Runestone, a quarterly journal, as well as assorted books and tapes on the religion, mythology, rituals, and values of Ásatrú. Every year the AFA holds an annual three-day festival called the Althing. Held in a rural setting, there are rituals, fellowship, music, and feasting. The AFA also created a system of guilds to encourage fellowship and the sharing of skills: the artists’ guild; the brewing guild; the warrior guild; the computer/shamanism guild; the writers’ guild; the sewing guild; even the aerospace technology guild.

Many people involved in Northern European Paganism use the word Asatru to describe themselves. Ásatrú means “belief in the gods” in Old Norse, or, more correctly, loyalty to the Aesir—one of the two races or groups of gods in Norse mythology. The other group is the Vanir. The Aesir consists of gods many people will find familiar: Odin, who is often seen as the high god, a kind of All Father principle; his wife, Frigga; his son Thor; Tyr; Balder; and many others. The Aesir, in Scandinavian myths are a race of sky gods. They are generally the more aggressive and outgoing, the movers and shakers. The Vanir consist of the gods of the earth, of agriculture, fertility, and death. The most well known are Frey and Freya, and there are some people involved in Norse Paganism who have concentrated on the Vanir. The Vanir also include Nerthus and Njord. The myths tell of a time way in the past when the Aesir and the Vanir warred. Later, the two pantheons merged. Most people involved in Heathenism are very polytheistic, preferring to honor all the gods, Aesir and Vanir.

On one level the gods are examples and models—inspirations, self-aware personifications of the forces of nature. On another level, McNallen says, “they are a numinous logic-defying reality, something apprehended only by means of symbols, something that speaks to us on deeper levels where words are inadequate. Studying the Gods, we can all add richness and power to our religious lives by tapping this ancient, non-verbal wisdom.”

In a pamphlet titled “What is Ásatrú,” McNallen describes the spiritual beliefs of Asatru as:

We believe in an underlying all-pervading divine energy or essence which is generally hidden from us because it surpasses our direct understanding. We further believe that this spiritual reality is interdependent with us—that we affect it, and it affects us.

We believe that this underlying divinity expresses itself in the forms of the Gods and Goddesses. Stories about these deities are like a sort of code, the mysterious “language” through which the divine reality speaks to us.⁴⁵

The gods are honored in daily rituals, and there are seasonal celebrations on the solstices and equinoxes and other ancient festival days. Some have told me that rituals are often sparser than those in Wicca. There are some groups that do circle rituals, using different symbols for the elements—perhaps a sickle or cakes for North, a spear or rune wand for East, a sword for South, a horn for the West. Many groups do not find the circle form of ritual appropriate. Some groups celebrate six of the eight traditional Pagan sabbats, having a six-spoked wheel of the year, rather than the eight of many Pagan traditions.

When I revised Drawing Down the Moon in 1986, most people involved with Heathenism would carefully distinguish themselves from other forms of Neo-Paganism, and only a few of them interacted with the larger Pagan community, went to festivals, or engaged in ecumenical activities. Part of this was because they did not see themselves in any way as part of a universal movement; in fact most Heathens do not believe in universal religions. Stephen McNallen has written that the various branches of humanity have different ways of looking at the world and that this is natural. McNallen wrote to me:

We’re not eclectic. You won’t find tarot or astrology or I Ching incorporated into Ásatrú—not because they’re not valid or powerful, but because they aren’t ours. This isn’t to say of course that an Odinist can’t utilize these systems as an individual, but they’re not a part of Asatru.

A second difference is that we are so intimately involved with the idea of ancestry as to be almost a “Norse Shinto.”

This is where it got complicated and problematic. Many of the Heathens I spoke with in the 1980s and much of the literature I read put a heavy emphasis not only on ancestry but on a belief in the primacy of genetics, as well as a belief that certain aspects of the soul are transmitted down the family line, that reincarnation comes within race, tribe, and family. In looking at the Jungian idea of archetypes, several articles in The Runestone observed that Jung’s original idea was that these archetypes were not culturally transmitted but inherited genetically. Today, Heathen thought on these issues is much more diverse, but at that time, one member of the AFA told me, “We are not racists, but we are racially aware. I look at my children’s red hair and freckles and think how many generations it took for them to get that way. I want them to be the same color as me.” To which I refrained from replying, “Suppose it was just a random mutation?” A woman in AFA told me that she had never had a black person apply to be in her group, but she would wonder why they weren’t interested in “their own religious roots.” This was completely at odds with, for example, Isaac Bonewits’s Druid group. “Most of the black people in the group have more Celtic blood than I do,” he observed. Speaking personally, if religious impulses and archetypes are transmitted genetically, I would never have been influenced by Athena and Artemis, and this book would never have been written. As David James, also a member of the AFA, once observed to me, “It’s rather funny, there are a whole bunch of Jews in the Celtic groups and a whole bunch of us Celts in the Norse groups.”

Despite observations like these, members of the AFA told me that duty to one’s ancestors and kin is a holy duty that comes first. Blood is thicker than water. “This way of looking at things is contrary to the dogma of this day,” McNallen observed, but he contended, “We know in our hearts . . . Ancestry is better than schemes which would deny these truths and propose a formless, alienated and unnatural universalism.”⁴⁶

In talking about Ásatrú as a very ancestral religion, with bonds that are genetic, “even paragenetic,” McNallen conceded that “it can easily be misinterpreted.” “How do you prevent misinterpretations?” I asked. Partly by explaining over and over again, he said. “We used to get people who thought we were out to save the white race. But we are not for putting anyone down. We are simply for the spirituality of our own people. This is a real religion. It is not a front for any political group.” McNallen says that while a lot of Heathens in the past were attracted for political and cultural reasons, a real religious development had been taking place with interest in magic, ritual, and runes.

But while the AFA stressed the religious aspects of Norse Paganism and downplayed the political, when I was originally writing about Heathenism, some Odinist organizations had a different view. The Odinist Fellowship, for example, devoted much of its journal, The Odinist, to political and philosophical articles on subjects ranging from attacks on liberalism to a defense of the original goals of apartheid. Instead of avoiding these political discussions, the Odinist Fellowship met them head on. It was frankly racist, although they would have probably preferred the term “racialist.” One article had these words: “The most distinguishable feature of Odinism is that for the first time a religion has declared itself founded upon the concept of race, with its correlation to culture and civilization. Without race there is nothing; therefore our first duty is a study of race and the significance of Aryan people to world history.”⁴⁷ As you will see, this kind of language is in no way typical of most Heathen groups today.

There do remain differences between Neo-Pagans and Heathens in regard to beliefs about ancestry, politics, and race; there are also some differences in values. A leaflet describing the values of the AFA lists them as follows:

Strength is better than weakness
Courage is better than cowardice
Joy is better than guilt
Honor is better than dishonor
Freedom is better than slavery
Kinship is better than alienation
Realism is better than dogmatism
Vigor is better than lethargy
Ancestry is better than universalism.

At the time I wrote this chapter, Heathenism did attract people who were more politically conservative than the majority of Neo-Pagans. They were uncomfortable with feminism, anarchism, and diversity in sexuality and life style. Of course, there were also conservatives in the general Neo-Pagan community. But all in all, there was less vegetarianism and more alcohol as opposed to other mind-altering methods. There was a stress on martial arts and on warrior values. (The Vikings are seen as freedom fighters, not robbers.) The AFA has, in the past, advertised in Soldier of Fortune. McNallen disagreed with my label “conservatism,” saying that modern society didn’t have much to conserve. “We are seeing the decline of the West,” he said, “we are living in the ruins.” Still, as Ariel Bentley, a woman in the AFA, put it to me, “I’m no longer a bleeding heart liberal,” and Alice Karlsdóttir said, “There’s stress on independence, courage, on not being pacifistic. The idea that life is a struggle and that’s fun, so go out and do it. It’s definitely not a meditative religion.” I asked her if she agreed with those ideas, and she said: “If someone came for me in an alley, I’d rather wipe ’em out, than rehabilitate them. In the ’60s it was uncool to have those thoughts and I repressed them. But I realized I was lying to myself.”

As for Heathen gatherings, Ariel Bentley described workshops, presentations by the guilds, rituals, feasting, songs around the campfire, and a sumbel—a Germanic ritual in which a drinking horn filled with mead is passed around and each person toasts, recites a poem or song. It is a place where the psychic storehouse of a group can be brought into the present. “There were songs, stories, prayers, bragging and boasting.” “Bragging and boasting?” I queried. “Yes,” she said. “Bragi is the god of poetry. All my life,” she said, “I was trained not to blow my own horn. But in Ásatrú, it is considered fine, a way of linking oneself to one’s ancestors.”

Like most Neo-Pagans, most Heathens do not believe in sin and regard guilt as a destructive rather than useful concept. In an article called “Joy is better than Guilt,” McNallen writes that guilt is a tool for forging a brave new world, filled with docile, interchangeable units. In Ásatrú, the gods inspire one to a different view.

Odin, pragmatically breaking the rules to safeguard the worlds of gods and men; Thor, indulging his appetites without shame or fear; Frey and Freya, reveling in healthy sexuality; these are powerful, liberating models casting off the chains of restraint. By invoking them into our lives we can experience the joy of existence in a world where strength, ambition, competence, and pleasures are not fettered with alien, life-denying bonds.⁴⁸

While Heathens tend to be more conservative than most Neo-Pagans, their religion puts them at odds with the mainstream conservative culture. Stephen McNallen has written that the religion of Ásatrú is under assault by Christian fundamentalists. “After a period of religious tolerance that has lulled us for several decades—a tolerance that has protected both the best and worst in American behavior—it is apparent that we are entering a time when we of Ásatrú are going to meet greater and greater resistance from the powers that rule this country.” McNallen notes that there is some irony in this situation, because “Many of the values championed by those who would oppress us are values with which we can readily identify, such as a strengthened family, less bureaucratic intervention in the life of the individual, and the rest. Unfortunately,” he adds, “it was the followers of the pale Galilean who coopted the movement back to traditional values more in keeping with those of our Folk—and we, who follow the gods that hallowed those values, stand to be crushed, if the new inquisitors have their way.”⁴⁹

Another distinction between much of Neo-Paganism and Heathenism is the relative position of male and female gods. In fact, some Pagans simply dismiss Norse Paganism as “patriarchal.” “People ask me, ‘How can you be a woman in Ásatrú?’” Alice Karlsdóttir told me. “It is true that there are more patriarchal aspects, after all, the head god is Odin. But I would call it ‘balanced,’ with a certain leaning toward male gods. It is true more men have been attracted to it than women, but that seems to be changing. And while some people in Ásatrú have traditional role models in mind, I have not found men to be hostile to me as a woman. I have only had encouragement, and I am not a traditional woman. I’m independent, I’m unmarried, I’m an actress. Remember that in ancient Norse culture, women had much more freedom than in Greece or Rome. Women could own property, divorce their husbands and take back their dowry. It’s true the most visible gods are Odin and Thor, and they have warrior values. They are very macho gods—so they appeal to men and more men join the group and people say it’s a male religion. But I’m hoping more women will become visible.”

Heathen women also reminded me that the Norse goddesses are powerful figures. Freya, for example, may be a goddess of love and procreation, but she is also a warrior, a goddess of passion and change. Stephen McNallen wrote in The Runestone:

Lest we fall into the snare of thinking of the Lady of the Vanir in the somewhat predictable female roles of sex goddess or promoter of the perpetual pregnancy, we must remember her fiercer side. . . . When we recall that she chooses half the battle-slain, when we reflect on her links to the valkyries, when we consider her many parallels with Odin, we are led to conclude that Freya’s martial abilities must be formidable. . . . Her message is simple: women too, can be strong, assertive, and full of fight. As Frey tells men that they can be lovers AND fighters, Freya says the same thing to women.⁵⁰

Alice Karlsdóttir and Maddy McNallen, Stephen’s wife, both told me there is beginning to be a determined effort to foster the role of the goddesses in Norse Paganism, to “redress the balance.”

A beautiful description of Northern European Paganism appears in the journal Yggdrasil, put out by the American Vineland Association. It describes Heathenism as a religion with a deeply felt spiritual link to the land, the forests, the seas, our ancestors, our successors, and to the celebration of life experience. Its principles are honesty, honor, the value of one’s word, keeping a healthy environment, placing principle above gain, and leading a worthy life.

Heathenism in the Twenty-first Century

There seems to be an amazing flowering of Heathenry today. Heathen groups now include a whole range of Northern European Pagan traditions. Volkhvy, a member of Minnesota Heathens, said, “Heathenry has grown in diversity.”

While the main mythic/cultural focus is still Aesir/Scandinavian & Germanic, new Heathen groups have formed around the Vanir gods and goddesses, the Anglo-Saxon, Sami, Baltic and Slavic peoples and cultures. Today, Heathens are anyone who follows one of the Northern European folkways. Basically, anything north of a line formed by the Rhine and Danube rivers—the cultures that were not subsumed by the Romans.

Heathen groups are also more diverse philosophically—they differ depending on whether they consider themselves to be folkish, universalist, or tribalist. Those who are folkish tend to believe that your genetic heritage gives you easier access to the deities. Heather Demarest of the Eldhrinir Kindred says many folkish people are not racist—they do not believe they are superior, but simply believe that “all people should follow the gods and goddesses of their blood ancestors, with none being ‘better’ than the other. They do tend to believe that only those descended from Northern Europeans should follow Ásatrú.” Some Heathens are tribalists. Demarest believes that the majority of Ásatrú falls into this category:

They honor the ways and practices of the Germanic peoples, holding to the lore and sagas for inspiration while allowing personal gnosis to guide them when it is reasonable and possibly circumstantially supported by cultural/historical evidence. They feel the religion can be practiced by anyone, regardless of bloodline or race. So, in tribalism, there tends to be a balance or middle ground between complete cultural reconstructionism and personal revelation, as well as an openness to all those who feel called by the God/desses.

Then there are universalists, who use practices of other traditions as well as Heathen practices in worship. They might focus more on the shared culture of a geographic area or historical era, such as Scandinavian, Germanic, or Viking. Volkhvy puts it this way:

Universalists recognize that there really is no such thing as a “pure” culture; each culture has influenced and has been influenced by its neighbors. Given the tendency for expansion and interbreeding, almost all cultures contain members whose ancestors were not originally members of that culture. So for universalists, it’s not necessary that your ancestors were Heathen, just that you have a deep attraction for one of the Northern Traditions.

Other Heathens say that the term folkish has taken on many different meanings to different people. As Ben Waggoner of the Troth puts it:

Some “folkish” types say that Heathenry can only be practiced by those of northern European descent. Others say that it comes most naturally to those of European descent, but that non-Europeans are capable of being Heathen if they choose. Still others seem to use “folkish” to mean “religiously conservative and anti-eclectic” without necessarily implying anything about people’s race; others use “folkish” to mean “restricted to a tribe of people” without necessarily defining that “tribe” in ethnic terms. There are also a lot of “folkuniversalists” out there, who would recognize one’s ancestry and ethnic origins as valid and good reasons for being drawn to Heathenry, but not necessarily discount other reasons.

Behind the debate over folkish, says Waggoner, lies something deeper. “A lot of Heathens are Heathens because they’re looking for something more integral,” he says, “something that offers a complete world view, something that breaks away from what scholars of postmodernism call ‘pastiche.’ Most feel that Heathenry is not and should never be ‘just another option’ in the marketplace that anyone can try out one day and abandon the next.”⁵¹

Many Heathen organizations are called “kindreds” and most are non-hierarchical. There are many different rituals, but among the most common are Blot and Sumbel. Blot, in its simplest form, is an offering to the gods. For example, mead might be consecrated, a libation poured and the drink shared. Sumbel is a ritualized toasting ceremony where stories are shared and sometimes oaths are given. It can take many different forms.

Heather Demarest says not only is Heathenism much more diverse, but the biggest change is the amount of information available through publishing and the Internet.

I think a lot of people started out in other paths because they didn’t really know about us, or the religion. Once the information got out there, many people embraced it. Also, people are becoming more willing to share the information. This sharing and expanding of knowledge is helping Ásatrú to evolve quicker and form a relatively cohesive practice that is more “newbie” friendly and less overtly challenging. We are also gaining information from shamanic journeying to help fill in some gaps of knowledge where written sources are lacking. This helps tremendously too as we get to know our deities better and realize that they seem far less concerned with infighting than humans are and that helps us to get a broader perspective and accept each other more.

One of the most exciting developments in the last decade or so has been research into shamanic practices within Northern European Heathenism, in particular the use and development of a particular form of trance-working known as seidh or, sometimes, oracular seidh.

Skill in various forms of divination was a specialty of the goddesss Freya, who taught it to the Aesir. The god Odin also practiced it.⁵² Seidh was used to describe many different shamanic practices, from calling up storms to prophesy. There is a description of seidh in Erik the Red’s Saga. But the modern reconstruction of seidh really began when writer Diana Paxson began exploring shamanism. As Paxson tells it, she had been practicing neo-shamanism based on Michael Harner’s teachings for several years, and finally had a chance to take his workshop in 1987.

At the workshop, “On the journey to the upper world” I rather unexpectedly encountered Odin, who became my teacher. After immersing myself in Norse culture by a year’s study of the runes, I began to analyze everything I could find about seidh in the lore, especially, the account in the Saga of Erik the Red, and the poems in which Odin talks to the Völva in the Eddas. As I have reconstructed it, we begin by purifying the space and honoring the dwarves who uphold the earth and Freyja, Odin, Hella, the Norns and the ancestors. We then journey to Hella’s kingdom, where the seer or seeress goes into deeper trance in order to answer questions.

Paxson’s group, Seidhjallr, first presented the oracular ritual publicly in 1990. She has also taught many seidh workshops in other parts of the country and in Europe. After working with seidh for a year, the group, Hrafnar, began performing it in various settings, including Pagan festivals like PantheaCon.

In oracular seidh, as practiced by Hrafnar, there is often first purification with water and sacred herbs. There may be honoring of directions and of local nature spirits. Gods may be invoked. There is a transition into the world of Norse myth. There is drumming, sometimes other kinds of music, relaxation exercises, and journeying. There is a tranceinducing chant that is sung after the journey, which allows the seidh-workers to go to a deeper level of trance. Paxson writes that in seidh “as performed by Hrafnar, singing is used to change consciousness and raise energy, the journey to the Underworld serves to bring everyone to the source of knowledge, and the formulaic questioning keeps the visionary state under control.”

A number of other Heathens have developed other approaches to seidh, some based on Paxson’s work and others independently. There are actually many different forms of divination used among Heathens. Some Heathens talk about “spae,” which many describe as a more passive form of divination than seidh.

Jennifer Culver is the founder of Widsith, a seidh group in Dallas, Texas. Her group has a different approach than Hrafnar, and is involved, for example, in many other kinds of rites that enhance luck, communicate “with the wights of the land and tap into various parts of the Heathen soul for reasons such as building strength and enhancing will.” She differentiates between spae and seidh this way:

If wyrd (seen by some as fate, a dynamic of the past shaping the present and what is becoming) is seen as a web, spae work is viewing the strands of the querent asking questions and where and how they intersect. Nothing is done with the strands, the seer is merely “seeing” information and relaying what is seen, be it an object, person, rune, or abstract form. I put seeing in quotes, because some people hear things or feel things as well. Seidh workers historically were working within a much more active context. These folk performed rituals involving weather working, removing the luck from a person, sending a nightmare, influencing battle, creating a fog, or singing on a rooftop so that the people who came out would fall down and die. Widsith’s approach to seidh is to acknowledge that if negatives exist, the positives exist as well. We create rituals, for example, that enhance (not remove) the luck of a person.

There are many Heathens who don’t do seidh at all or are even skeptical of it. For example, Stephen McNallen of the Ásatrú Folk Assembly said seidh was not really part of the AFA.

Today, oracular seidh is a limited but accepted part of Heathen tradition. Paxson says that there are active seidh-workers in California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Texas, New England, and Washington state. Groups are also being created in Florida and North Carolina. The performance of seidh at Pagan festivals has brought one form of contemporary Heathenry into a much larger setting.

Volkhvy says that this is just one aspect of how Heathenry has become more visible to the public. Groups such as the Troth have given public lectures. There is also generally much more of a Heathen presence at conferences and Pagan gatherings—both in the United States and in Europe—compared to when I last updated Drawing Down the Moon. Ben Waggoner, a member of the Troth, says Heathens have given presentations and put on rituals at Pagan gatherings such as Starwood, PantheaCon, and also at local Pagan Pride Day events. “Although small family oriented Blots and Sumbels are still the prevalent form of group ritual,” says Volkhvy, “Heathen networking is increasing—in large part because the Internet allows isolated individuals and small kindreds to find each other.”

Volkhvy says that he has also seen a change in the attitudes of Heathens toward non-Heathen Pagans. “While they still disparage the ‘fluffy bunnies,’ many are beginning to recognize that there are a core of groups in Wicca and Neo-Paganism that are just as serious about researching and understanding their traditions, as we are about our Heathen traditions. I see more of the attitude that ‘what you’re doing is not for me, but I can still respect you as a person of honor and integrity.’ This has spread to encompass non-European religions and cultures.” There is also more receptivity to alternate lifestyles and to gay and transgendered participants, something which did not seem common fifteen years ago.

On the other hand, Ben Waggoner says there is a debate within Heathenism: “What, exactly, should the relationship be between Heathenry and the wider Neo-Pagan community?” He says that from a Heathen perspective, “Wicca, or Wicca inspired Neo-Paganism, is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla.” Heathens often feel stifled by the assumption that they are simply a part of Neo-Paganism. And Waggoner says many Heathens are “baffled, if not offended, by a lot of what they see in the Neo-Pagan community.”

In an article, “The Pentagram and the Hammer,” written back in 1994 by Devyn Gillette and Lewis Stead, but considered by many to be “on the money” still today, the writers say that Wicca and Ásatrú have a few things in common: a respect and reverence for the earth (Nerthus to the Ásatrúar, Gaia to the Wiccan), but Nerthus plays a less dominant role in Ásatrú than the Earth Mother plays in Wicca and Paganism. Both rely on a romanticized past—and both have a belief in and use of magic. But Gillette and Stead argue that all similarities end there. They argue that Wicca—while nominally polytheistic—is more pantheistic, seeing the divine in everything, harmonious and in balance. In contrast, Ásatrú is more polytheistic, seeing the gods as separate and distinct and sometimes in conflict. They write, “The overall theological message in Wicca is essentially one of keeping attuned to natural cycles, while the overall message in Ásatrú involves continual vigilance and struggle for the same spiritual development.” So, they write, many Heathens do not like it when Pagans use Norse gods as archetypes, since they regard them as distinct entities whose minds and wills are separate from their own. Gillette and Stead also argue that Wicca tends to see itself as a mystery religion, with as much attention devoted to magical practice as religious devotion. The opposite is true of Ásatrú, which they describe as a votive religion, based on veneration of the gods. Magic is distinctly secondary. In addition, there is no belief in Ásatrú of a direct lineage to ancient times. We have seen that most claims of such a lineage in Wicca are questionable, and today many Wiccans understand that, but Gillette and Stead argue that Heathens have been up front about this from the beginning—that Ásatrú is the re-creation of a religion that did exist in history, but has been “re-created through modern research.”⁵³

Today, Heathens are forging ties with many other traditions: Native American tribes and Hellenic, Celtic, and Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Reconstructionists. Volkhvy writes:

We’re all working towards rebuilding modern expressions of our ancestral tribal folkways and have much that we can share. We’re finding we can work together as an alliance without endangering our individual group identities.

Northern European Pagan groups are also struggling to establish the right to hold ceremonies in prisons, and many prisons have Heathen groups that meet for Blot. One prisoner has been writing to me for years from a federal prison in the Midwest. At one point he sent me a photograph of a ritual—eighteen Heathens at the prison holding Blot in a tiny grove—three trees—right next to the Native American sweat lodge.

There is no question that Heathenism is one of most important and creative parts of contemporary Paganism today.

A Final Note on the History of Pagan Reconstructionism

Many of the organizations described in this chapter were influential in creating a Neo-Pagan consciousness. Feraferia and the Church of the Eternal Source, along with the Church of All Worlds and the Reformed Druids set the terms of much of the early debate and led the discussions that developed in Neo-Pagan journals. The leaders of these organizations developed key concepts and theories that are now common within Paganism as a whole. Although there is a tendency for many people to assume that Neo-Paganism and Wicca are synonymous, with the exception of unusual Wiccan groups like NROOGD and Nemeton, many of the most interesting ideas in contemporary Paganism came from these Pagan reconstructionists, as well as from the creators of futuristic religions like the Church of All Worlds.