Drawing Down the Moon Read Online Free Page B

to accept a part of my own psyche that I had denied for years—and then extend it.
    Like most Neo-Pagans, I never converted in the accepted sense. I simply accepted, reaffirmed, and extended a very old experience. I allowed certain kinds of feelings and ways of being back into my life.
    I tell these stories in a book that contains little personal history in order to respond to the statement I frequently hear: I don’t believe in that! This is the standard response to many of the ideas and people with which this book is concerned. But belief has never seemed very relevant to the Neo-Pagan movement. 9
    In my fifteen years of contact with these groups I was never asked to believe in anything. I was told a few dogmas by people who hadn’t ridded themselves of the tendency to dogmatize, but I rejected those. In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostics and that this has never inhibited their participation in or leadership of Neo-Pagan and Craft groups. Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings.” Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.” As one scholar has noted, it is a religion “of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos, in a word, constructed by the imagination. . . .” 10
    My own role has been that of observer-participant. I began by trying to find reasons for my involvement and then traveled across the country to visit hundreds of people in order to contrast my own experiences with theirs. By the end of my travels I found that many of my early assumptions were incorrect.
    For example, I found that Neo-Pagan groups were very diverse in class and ethnic background. My first experiences brought me in touch with a much broader spectrum of people than I had known in the student movements of the 1960s. The first three covens I encountered in New York and England were composed largely of working-class and lower-middle-class people. Later, I met covens and groups composed predominantly of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Then I met groups whose members worked as insurance salesmen, bus drivers, police, and secretaries. All my class stereotypes began to fall by the wayside.
    Another assumption, and one I was slow to drop, was that the Neo-Pagan resurgence was, fundamentally, a reaction against science, technology, progress. My own involvement had come through a kind of Luddite reaction, so I assumed it was typical. But in many interviews Neo-Pagans and Witches supported high technologies, scientific inquiry, and space exploration. It is true that most Neo-Pagans feel that we abuse technology; they often support “alternative” technologies—solar, wind, etc.—and hold a biological rather than a mechanistic world view.
    In general, I have tried to be aware of my own biases and to make them clear so that, if you wish, you can steer between the shoals.
    Lastly, a few words about the reasons for this Neo-Pagan resurgence. One standard psychological explanation is that people join these groups to gain power over others or to banish feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. Obviously (some of the studies referred to later show this) some people do join magical and religious groups in order to gain self-mastery, in the sense of practical knowledge of psychology and the workings of the psyche, so they can function better in the world. But this reason was not among the six primary reasons that Pagans and Witches gave me in answer to the questions “Why is this phenomenon occurring?” “Why are you involved?” Many of their reasons are novel, and completely at odds with common assumptions.
    Â 
    Beauty, Vision, Imagination. A number of Neo-Pagans told me that their religious views were part of a general visionary quest that included