Drawing Down the Moon Read Online Free

in my childhood world. I was brought up in a family of agnostics and atheists. Still, feeling that there was some dimension lacking in their lives, I embarked on a quasi-religious search as a teenager. I felt ecstatic power in the Catholic mass (as long as it was in Latin); I went to Quaker meetings and visited synagogues and churches. Today it seems to me I thirsted for the power and richness of those original experiences, though I found only beliefs and dogmas that seemed irrelevant or even contradictory to them. I wanted permission for those experiences, but not if it would poison my integrity or my commitment to living and acting in the world.
    I remember coming across the famous words of Marx on religion: “Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, the opium of the people. . . .” 3 And having no place to put this experience of Goddess nor freedom enough to continue the ancient practice I had stumbled on, I gradually left it behind, and set my sights on the soulless conditions. It was 1964, I was in Berkeley, and there were many soulless conditions with which to concern myself.
    In 1971, while working as a political reporter for Pacifica radio in Washington, D.C., I became involved in various environmentalist and ecological concerns. During that year John McPhee wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker called “Encounters with the Archdruid,” later published as a book. The articles narrated three wilderness journeys made by David Brower (president of Friends of the Earth and former head of the Sierra Club) in the company of three of his enemies on environmental issues. Two passages from this book come to mind as emotional springboards to the events that followed. The first was Brower’s statement that the ecology movement was really a spiritual movement. “We are in a kind of religion,” he said, “an ethic with regard to terrain, and this religion is closest to the Buddhist, I suppose.” In the second quote, one of Brower’s enemies, a developer, spoke against the practices of conservationists and called Brower “a druid.” I began to search for an ecological religious framework. I started by searching for Druids. 4
    Around that time two noted historians, Arnold Toynbee and Lynn White, wrote essays in which they said that there was, in fact, a religious dimension to the environmental crisis.
    Toynbee’s article appeared in 1972, in the International Journal of Environmental Studies. Its main point was that worldwide ecological problems were due in part to a religious cause, “the rise of monotheism,” and that the verse in Genesis (1:28), “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it,” had become biblical sanction for human beings to assert their rights over all nature. Toynbee felt that his education in pre-Christian Greek and Latin literature had had “a deeper and more enduring effect on my Weltanschauung ” than his Christian upbringing:
    In popular pre-Christian Greek religion, divinity was inherent in all natural phenomena, including those that man had tamed and domesticated. Divinity was present in springs and rivers and the sea; in trees, both the wild oak and the cultivated olive-tree; in corn and vines; in mountains; in earthquakes and lightning and thunder. The godhead was diffused throughout the phenomena. It was plural, not singular; a pantheon, not a unique almighty super-human person. When the Graeco-Roman World was converted to Christianity, the divinity was drained out of nature and was concentrated in one unique transcendent God. “Pan is dead.” “The oracles are dumb.” Bronsgrove is no longer a wood that is sacrosanct because it is animated by the god Bron. . . .
    The Judeo-Christian tradition gave license for exploitation. Toynbee advised “reverting from the Weltanschauung of monotheism to the Weltanschauung of