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pantheism, which is older and was once universal.”
    The plight in which post-Industrial-Revolution man has now landed himself is one more demonstration that man is not the master of his environment—not even when supposedly armed with a warrant, issued by a supposedly unique and omnipotent God with a human-like personality, delegating to man plenipotentiary powers. Nature is now demonstrating to us that she does not recognize the validity of this alleged warrant, and she is warning us that, if man insists on trying to execute it, he will commit this outrage on nature at his peril. 5
    While Toynbee stopped short of advocating a return to polytheism, and implied that many of the pre-Christian deities were too crude for our age, his basic perception was strikingly similar to the impulse that led to the creation of many Neo-Pagan groups.
    The article by Lynn White had appeared several years earlier in Science and had begun quite a controversy. While much of White’s article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” dealt with changes in methods of farming and agriculture over the centuries, a few of its points were strikingly similar to Toynbee’s. White observed that “the victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.”
    Christianity in absolute contrast to ancient paganism . . . not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. . . . In antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. . . . By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects. 6
    In the following years I searched in books and articles for an ecologicalreligious framework compatible with my own politics and commitment to the world. I soon entered into a lengthy correspondence with a coven of Witches in Essex, England. Being no less a victim of stereotypes than most, I pictured the couple who led this group as in their thirties and middle class. But Doris and Vic Stuart turned out to be in their late forties and fifties. He was an old unionist and socialist and she was a factory worker . 7 At this period, I also contacted a Pagan group in Wales. Frankly, at the time I thought that corresponding with Witches was bizarre and even amusing. I certainly had no thought that there might be any link between these groups and my own experience of Goddess, which still came to me, unbidden, at odd moments.
    One day the coven in Essex sent me a tape recording of some rituals. The first one on the tape was called “The Drawing Down of the Moon.” I did not know it then, but in this ritual, one of the most serious and beautiful in the modern Craft, the priest invokes into the priestess (or, depending on your point of view, she evokes from within herself) the Goddess or Triple Goddess, symbolized by the phases of the moon. She is known by a thousand names, and among them were those I had used as a child. In some Craft rituals the priestess goes into a trance and speaks; in other traditions the ritual is a more formal dramatic dialogue, often of intense beauty, in which, again, the priestess speaks, taking the role of the Goddess. In both instances the priestess functions as the Goddess incarnate, within the circle.
    I found a quiet place and played the tape. The music in the background was perhaps by Brahms. A man and woman spoke with English accents. When it came time for the invocation, the words came clearly:
    Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called Artemis, Astarte, Melusine, Aphrodite, Diana, Brigit and many other names. . . . 8
    A feeling of power and emotion came over me. For, after all, how different was that ritual from the magical rituals of my childhood? The contents of the tape had simply given me permission