Drawing Down the Moon (101 page)

13
Harriet Whitehead, “Reasonably Fantastic: Some Perspectives on Scientology, Science Fiction and Occultism,”
Religious Movements in Contemporary America,
pp. 547–87. The original quote from William James (“His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobstershell”) appears in William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,
being the Gifford Lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., Ltd., 1903), p. 93.

1
Among those books influencing my childhood were: Caroline Dale Snedeker,
The Spartan
(or
The Coward of Thermopylae
) (New York: Doubleday, 1911) and
The Perilous Seat
(New York: Doubleday, 1923); Mary Renault,
The King Must Die
(New York: Pantheon, 1958).

2
For an understanding of
Star Trek
literature, see J. Lichtenberg, S. Marshak, and J. Winston,
Star Trek Lives
(New York: Bantam, 1975); see also spin-off
Star Trek
myths written by fans in Jacquelin Lichtenberg,
Kraith Collected,
Vol. I, and issues of
Babel,
a “Trekkie” fan magazine.

3
The famous “opium of the people” quote is almost never given in full. My favorite translation is in Christopher Caudwell,
Further Studies in a Dying Culture
(London: The Bodley Head, 1949), pp. 75–76: “Religious misery is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against that misery. Religion is the sigh of the hard pressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.” For a more accessible version, see Karl Marx,
Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy,
trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 27.

4
John McPhee,
Encounters with the Archdruid
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), pp. 84, 95.

5
Arnold Toynbee, “The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis,”
International Journal of Environmental Studies,
Vol. III, 1972. Also published under the title “The Genesis of Pollution,” in
Horizon,
Vol. XV, No. 3 (Summer 1973), pp. 4–9.

6
Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,”
Science,
Vol. 155 (March 10, 1967), 1203–07. Also in
The Environmental Handbook,
ed. Garrett de Bell (New York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 12–26. Quotations on pp. 19 and 20.

7
See “An Interview with Doris and Sylvester [Vic] Stuart,”
Earth Religion News,
Vol. 1, No. 4 (1974), 23–25.

8
Published versions of this ritual—often called “The Charge of the Goddess”—can be found in
The Grimoire of Lady Sheba
(St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1972), pp. 145–47, and in Stewart Farrar,
What Witches Do
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971), pp. 193–94. The version on the Stuarts' tape that I heard was written by Neo-Pagan writer Ed Fitch.

9
This attitude toward
belief
is actually not uncommon among writers who treat “occult” subjects. For example, D. Arthur Kelly writes in “Theories of Knowledge and the I Ching,” “I cannot say that I ‘believe' in the I Ching; rather, I would say that I have learnt a great deal about life and the universe from a contemplation of its ‘teachings' ” (
Gnostica,
Vol. IV, No. 5 [January 1975], 33).

10
Robert S. Ellwood, Jr.,
Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 189.

11
In “An Interview with Doris and Sylvester Stuart,” p. 24, Sylvester Stuart observes, “I see Wicca as the only hope of the survivors of mankind after there has been a complete breakdown in our present type of society, a breakdown which I see coming in the forseeable future.” Stuart said he saw the Craft as a repository for survival skills.

1
R. H. Barrow, trans.,
Prefect and Emperor, the Relationes of Symmachus A.D. 384
(London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 40–41. From an address to Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius. In Latin: “Eadem spectamus astra, commune caelum est, idem nos mundus involvit: Quid interest, qua quisque prudentia verum requirat? Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum.”

2
James Henry Breasted,
Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912), p. 315.

3
Dagobert D. Runes,
Dictionary of Philosophy
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1942), p. 242.

4
Whole Earth Catalog
(Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1969).

5
Isaac Bonewits, “The Second Epistle of Isaac,”
The Druid Chronicles (evolved)
(Berkeley: Berkeley Drunemeton Press, 1976), 2:13.

6
David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,”
Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects
(Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1825), II, 384–422. Quotations are on pp. 386 and 395.

7
Paul Radin,
Monotheism Among Primitive Peoples
(Basel: Bollingen Foundation, Special Publication No. 4, 1954). Quotations are on pp. 24, 29, 30, and 25.

8
Harold Moss,
Green Egg,
Vol. V, No. 51 (December 21, 1972), Forum section, p. 5.

9
Theodore Roszak,
Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society
(New York: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 108–09.

10
David Miller,
The New Polytheism
(New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 4. Other quotations from Miller are on pp. 5–6, 59–60, vii–viii, ix, and 24.

11
For example, in noting the controversial monotheistic Witchcraft system of Gavin and Yvonne Frost's School of Wicca, Harold Moss of the Church of the Eternal Source observed, “In the discussions with the Frosts, we should remember that polytheism can contain monotheism, but not the other way around. When we say that Witches are polytheists, we are admitting that some of them were and are monotheists. [The Frosts are] monotheist(s) in a polytheistic religion . . . which is perfectly OK!” (
Earth Religion News,
Vol. I, No. 4 [1974], 3–4).

12
James Hillman, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,”
Spring 1971
(New York: Spring Publications, 1971), pp. 197, 199–200.

13
Miller,
The New Polytheism,
p. 55.

14
Hillman, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” p. 206. Hillman considers a revival of Paganism a “danger” because it would bring “along its accoutrements of popular soothsaying, quick priesthoods, astrological divination, extravagant practices and the erosion of psychic differentiations through delusional enthusiasms” (p. 206).

15
Miller,
The New Polytheism,
p. 81.

16
Harold Moss,
Green Egg,
Vol. VII, No. 63 (June 21, 1974), p. 28.

17
Robert Ellwood, Jr., “Polytheism: Establishment or Liberation Religion?”,
Journal of the American Academy of Religion,
Vol. XLII, No. 2 (1974), 344–49.

18
The next few quotations were culled from answers to a questionnaire sent out in the mail to various Neo-Pagans during the winter and spring of 1976. The questionnaire appeared in
Green Egg,
Vol. VIII, No. 76 (February 2, 1976), 32–36.

19
Isaac Bonewits, first quote from interview; second from “The Second Epistle of Isaac,”
The Druid Chronicles (evolved)
(Berkeley: Berkeley Drunemeton Press, 1976) 1:12. In an editorial in
Gnostica,
Vol. IV, No. 6 (February 1975), 2, Bonewits, with typical humor, added that “monotheistic religions inevitably promote bigotry and chauvinism of all sorts, but let us not forget that polytheistic cultures have also produced chauvinistic behavior. . . . However, while monotheists are
required
to be bigots, for polytheists, bigotry is merely an exciting option.”

20
Harold Moss,
Green Egg,
Vol. VIII, No. 70 (May 1, 1975), 38.

21
Apropos Neo-Pagans as an elite, Bonewits, in an editorial in
Gnostica,
Vol. IV, No. 9 (July 1975), 2, writes that Neo-Pagans are part of the
andermenschen
—the
other people
—as opposed to
übermenschen
or
untermenschen:
“We have always had the
andermenschen
—the odd ones, the different people. We have always had the
andermenschen,
in every society on our planet; they are our painters and poets, our composers and musicians, our dancers and story-tellers, our witches and mediums, our mystics and shamans, our magicians and psychics. These are the strange ones, the people who have dipped their toes into the otherworld and come back raving and enchanting, healing and prophesying, always trying desperately to point toward the new and the inexplicable as the only source of salvation for our poor, confused species.”

22
See
www.adherents.com
.

1
Ann Belford Ulanov, “The Witch Archetype,” a lecture given to the Analytical Psychology Club of New York on November 17, 1976. Printed in
Quadrant,
Vol. X, No. 1 (1977), 5–22.

2
Elliot Rose,
A Razor for a Goat
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 3.

3
Isaac Bonewits, “Witchcraft: Classical, Gothic and Neopagan (Part I),”
Green Egg,
Vol. IX, No. 77 (March 20, 1976), 15. Bonewits's etymological excursion through the word
witch
appears on pp. 15–17.

4
“Witchcraft in Wichita,”
The Waxing Moon
(British edition), New Series No. 1 (Samhain 1970), p. 5.
The Waxing Moon
was the journal of the Pagan Movement in Britain and Ireland.

5
Robert Graves,
The White Goddess,
amended and enlarged ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 14.

6
For a summary of this myth see Raymond Buckland,
Witchcraft from the Inside
(St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1971).

7
Elliot Rose,
A Razor for a Goat,
pp. 8–10. Actually Rose, in humor, puts forth four schools: Bluff, Knowing, Anti-Sadducee, and Murrayite.

8
Margaret A. Murray,
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 12, 233, and 236.

9
Margaret A. Murray,
The God of the Witches
(London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1933);
The Divine King in England
(London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1954);
My First Hundred Years
(London: William Kimber and Co., Ltd., 1963).

10
Norman Cohn,
Europe's Inner Demons
(New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 125. Other quotations are on pp. 104–09, 124, and 258–61. The reference to the Witches International Craft Association refers to New York Witch Leo Martello whose civil-rights activities on behalf of Witches can be read about in his book,
Witchcraft: The Old Religion
(Secaucus, NJ: University Books, 1973).

11
Mircea Eliade, “Some Observations on European Witchcraft,” in
Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 71.

12
Ibid., p. 85. Other quotations are on pp. 75–78 and 81.

13
Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow,
Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteen- and Seventeenth-Century Europe
(Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001) pp. 1–2.

14
Ibid., p. 25.

15
H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The European Witch-Craze and Social Change,” in
Witchcraft and Sorcery,
ed. Max Marwick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 121–23, 127–28, 131–32, 136, and 146.

16
Scarre and Callow,
Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteen- and Seventeenth- Century Europe,
p. 44.

17
Starhawk, “The Burning Times: Notes on a Critical Period of History,” in
Dreaming the Dark, Magic, Sex and Politics
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, 1997), pp. 183–219.

18
Ronald Hutton, e-mail: October 28, 2005.

19
Lucius Apuleius,
The Golden Ass,
trans. Robert Graves (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951); also W. Adlington trans. of 1566 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

20
Charles Godfrey Leland,
Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
(London: David Nutt, 1899); reprinted (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974).

21
Jeffrey Burton Russell,
Witchcraft in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 298.

22
Leo Martello,
Witchcraft: The Old Religion
(Secaucus, NJ: University Books, 1973), pp. 45–68. See also Ronald Hutton,
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 141–148.

23
Charles Godfrey Leland,
Etruscan Roman Remains
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892).

24
Rose,
A Razor for a Goat,
p. 218.

25
Leland,
Aradia,
pp. 5–7.

26
Jessie Wicker Bell,
The Grimoire of Lady Sheba
(St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1972), p. 145.

27
T. C. Lethbridge,
Witches
(New York: Citadel Press, 1968), p. 9.

28
Buckland,
Witchcraft from the Inside,
p. 50.

29
Doreen Valiente,
An ABC of Witchcraft Past & Present
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 12.