I'm not accepting it, putting it in my pocket, burning a candle to it, or wearing it around my neck on a gold chain.' (86) 'The important thing is that I'm 'working' with a fragment. The point isn't fidelity to a venerable lineage, but to what works for people now to restore their ties to a broken past.

As one Sicilian witch tells Adler, his mother may have taught him what she knew, or made up. The flexibility of modern pagans lies in their good-natured humor about how they choose which myths to live by today. This worldview may not, for Western Europeans, have survived after the Christian centuries, but practices did, if severed from their ancient roots. 'Modern Wicca descends 'in spirit' from precisely those fragments of pre-Christian beliefs and practices nobody denies: myths, poetry, the classics, and folk customs.' (83) Way back, all of our ancestors practiced a similarly rich combination. 'Most Neo-Pagans I know see polytheism not as competitive factions but as facets of a jewel, harmonious but differing.' (28) It's bracing to watch a belief option much more open to cooperative rather than hierarchical decision-making coalesce. It's a lower-profile system of thought and action which awaits those who tend to find in freedom of divine choice what they have always sought but did not know how to name.ĭiversity counts. Pagan seekers built an alternative that doesn't proselytize or threaten.

(Ummentioned here, but I found an interview that identified her as granddaughter of psychotherapist pioneer Albert Adler.) She explores in this feminine-based, earth-connected, non-salvific, and sexually freer array of practices and lore a fascinating variety of people who yearn for change, but who cannot find it within conventional intellectual, political, or religiously dominant frameworks.

Her depth of research matches a brisk yet contemplative style I found easy to read yet often profound in its conclusions.Īdler entered as a '60s activist bridging the social reforms she sought with a spiritual dimension that appealed to her even as a girl admiring the Greek deities while growing up in a secular Manhattan family. Myth-busting and myth-celebrating, Adler combines scrutiny with compassion, analysis with enthusiasm. An insider's chronicle, a journalist's survey, and a participant's history of 'witches, druids, goddess-worshippers and other pagans in America,' this third edition's welcome.

Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler