Drawing Down the Moon (44 page)

At least one person told me he left Feraferia when Adams began to insist on
belief
in its thealogy. One couple, the Stanwicks, left to form an autonomous Feraferian group called Dancers of the Sacred Circle. Even though the circle around Adams was small, he continued to develop his artistry and vision. He and Lady Svetlana continually stressed the need to keep the vision pure. They were openly elitist. Lady Svetlana said, “We want to keep it small because it is so precious, like a diamond; you can't just throw gems to the wind. Everything is worked out in so much detail that if any detail is changed ideologically, it would be very upsetting.” And of course, Feraferia
is
like a necklace of precious stones, intricately worked out: the religion is very detailed, complete with rituals, calendar, thealogy, and vision. Adams has said that he doesn't think the vision will even begin to be realized until after his lifetime. He says that Feraferia's aim should first be to find a territory, a sanctuary, where the Hesperian vision can be actualized. Then the training of priestesses should begin.

Feraferia's purpose, according to Adams, is to save the earth and return humanity to a state of harmony with nature; to begin a transformation that will end with the dawning of a new culture throughout the galaxy, focused on the Korê. In Ellwood's words, its purpose is clearly “to recover an ecstatic vision of wholeness and unity which utterly respects the reality of the particular. It brings together not only man and nature, but man and each seasonal and geographic particular of nature, and also man and each style of his own consciousness—masculine and feminine, analytic and dream, vision and fantasy.”
²⁸
But, says Adams, the vision must be freely accepted; never imposed. “If we impose it, we'll abort the attempt. We will become monsters and lose our historic mission to save the planet from disaster and to convince the Goddess to let us reenter Her Queendom.”

By the late 1980s Fred and Svetlana were not very active. They separated for a period, and later got back together again. Although Fred Adams was doing occasional rituals and leading discussions, and Svetlana Butyrin held public services for a while, Feraferia's activities in the 1980s and 1990s were pretty minimal. But a new generation is becoming receptive to Feraferia's vision.

Fred Adams remains the prime elder and visionary. In 2005, Fred Adams sat down with Harold Moss, priest of the Church of the Eternal Source, and talked about the origins of his vision. Moss has been videotaping a number of Pagan elders to make sure that their insights will not disappear. Asked what he would tell young people today, Adams said he would tell them to “get some acres, and set up a paradisial sanctuary.” “You could have started a witch coven,” said Moss, but Fred Adams said that seemed “too narrow.” He loved Gerald Gardner's books, he said, but years before he knew anything about Wicca, he had wanted to create some institution that would emphasize a paradisial way of life, filled with orchards and gardens, a life with no violence or conflict—one that would emphasize a clothing-optional lifestyle, vegetarianism, and sensuality:

In creating the name for Feraferia, he had sought the right word that would combine a sense of faery with service to nature. The word
Feraferia
seemed to have that right combination—joining a notion of faery with ideas of celebration and wilderness.

When he met Svetlana they had talked about founding a new religion based “squarely on the bliss between lovers.” It would have to emphasize the importance of the feminine and give ecology prominence. It would have to have new concepts of love that were sensitive and creative.

Today, halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Internet has revived Feraferia. Until recently it would have been almost impossible to get a hold of Feraferia's rituals, essays, and artwork. In 1999, an artist living in Amsterdam came across Feraferia at a European Wiccan conference in Germany and got into correspondence with Fred Adams. Peter Tromp (Phaedrus) has his own Wiccan group, and has combined Feraferia with Wicca in his own work. He is now one of the two contact people for Feraferia worldwide (see Resources). Phaedrus offered to put Feraferia on the Web and to produce official versions of Feraferia's core rituals.
The Nine Yearly Festivals of Feraferia
were produced in Dutch and English. Phaedrus says, “By way of the Internet, we now have the possibility to save Feraferia's heritage from getting lost.” Phaedrus believes that with contact points in Europe and the United States, Feraferia is ready to regain its place in the Pagan community. He writes:

One night, during a Midsummer Solstice festival held in a city park, a friend of mine observed the Neo-Pagan phenomenon for the first time. Afterward my friend remarked, “It was lovely. Sweet. Almost Edwardian.”

Those words grated upon me, because I agreed. I have always felt that a Pagan celebration should be powerful, energizing, ecstatic—never merely “sweet.” Seasonal festivals should suspend the dictates of convention and dissolve, however temporarily, the bonds of time and space. I remember being mesmerized many years ago by a Zuni corn festival in Colorado which lasted from morning until night. My attention never wandered from the dancers for that period of many hours. I have only rarely achieved such rapt attention during the rites of Neo-Pagans and Witches.

That this should be so is not surprising. It is the dilemma of modern life, a dilemma that arose with the destruction of the Pagan-folkpeasant traditions of Western Europe. The rise of Neo-Paganism in the United States must be understood as, in part, a search by uprooted Westerners for their own roots and origins, for a vibrant, rich culture equal to the cultures of tribal peoples and the great ancient civilizations. The Neo-Pagan movement is tied in ambiance if not in fact to those movements that seek to retain, preserve, and strengthen traditional cultures in Europe—the pan-Celtic movement, for example. It is no coincidence that some of the non-Gardnerian Witchcraft groups label themselves “Irish Traditionalist” or “Welsh Traditionalist.”

Many Neo-Pagans are drawn to Native American traditions, to Voudoun and Santeria: Pagan traditions involving whole cultures, communities, and even countries. People who are drawn to Neo-Paganism usually do not have a vital, indigenous tradition and are seeking to recover their roots, to rediscover folk tales, stories, songs, and dances that have largely vanished in the last hundred years.

Neo-Paganism in the United States is primarily a white phenomenon because it is mostly a revival of Western European Paganism. Many blacks and Latinos who are engaged in the same process—searching for roots—are drawn to Voudoun, Santeria, and Candomblé, all of which combine African religious and magical practices with elements of Roman Catholicism. (In Haiti the religion of the French colonialists and slavemasters mixed with the religions of the Dahomeans, Ibos, and Magos to produce Voudoun. Elsewhere in Latin America the Yoruba religion mixed with the religion of the Spanish and Portuguese colonialists, creating Santeria and—in Brazil—Candomblé).

These traditions are often more vital than the groups we have been discussing, simply because they took form within whole cultures and communities. But most white North Americans lack a culture that is still tied to the earth and its seasons. The Neo-Pagans are attempting to rebuild a whole new culture from a pile of old and new fragments. When they are honest with themselves, they admit their impoverishment; for even if their groves and covens succeed, it will take generations to create successful traditions.

At present, some of the most powerful rituals in the United States take place in the theater, in modern dance performances, sporting events, and rock concerts.

In the 1970s and 1980s, powerful Neo-Pagan rituals were rare. This should not be surprising, since the Neo-Pagan priesthood was in its infancy, picking up small pieces and discovering things often by chance.

Devlin, the Witch from California, once remarked to me, “Unfortunately, the raising of power is an accidental occurrence among us most of the time. In ancient Ireland the music of pipes and drums and harps was essential to the success of the rites. And so, I must say, was ritual drunkenness and ritual sex. I do not respect many ‘public' Witches because I find among them a lack of ecstatic experience which I think marks these people as having incomplete traditions. And I hope that, in time, these incomplete forms will give way to complete forms.”

During my travels around the United States I attended many rituals, ranging from the full-moon ceremonies of small Witch covens and visits to private and personal shrines, to large, public, seasonal festivals attended by hundreds. Some were totally captivating. Often the simplest were the most powerful. But frequently, I felt that something was missing.

One of the most important exceptions to this was a wedding ritual in Chicago at the Temple of the Moon of the Sabaean Religious Order, a religious order inspired by ancient Basque, Yoruba, Sumerian and Babylonian sources. Like Feraferia, the Sabaean Religious Order comes out of the vision of a single man, Frederic M. de Arechaga, who is called Odun, but his vision is far different from Frederick Adams's.

When I went to Chicago in the fall of 1975 I found so many rumors circulating about the Sabaean Religious Order that it was impossible to sort them out. Everything I had read about the order was confusing, almost as if Odun had sought to surround it with mystery. My first encounter was symbolic.

I had just arrived in Chicago and went to visit an old friend, the former editor of an underground newspaper—now defunct—and a veteran of many unusual experiences. This man had no particular interest in “the occult,” and I thought he would not easily succumb to fear of the unknown. But as we were walking on the North Side in Chicago, my friend began to cross the street in order to avoid passing a small magic shop. On the sidewalk in front of the shop were various magical symbols drawn into the concrete. I asked him why we were making this detour. He said that the owner of the shop was very strange, and was said to have put broken glass on his roof to prevent children from climbing. He described him as “weird and unpleasant.” He waited on the other side of the street while I entered El-Sabarum, the occult supply store of the Sabaean Religious Order and one of the five or six places in Chicago I was determined to visit.

In the next few days several occultists also warned me to be wary of Odun. I was told he practiced negative magic and performed animal sacrifices. I could find nothing to substantiate the first charge; the second was true—all animal food consumed in the temple had to be killed ritually. But since I was not a vegetarian, I felt I could hardly complain of this practice, any more than I might complain of the kosher laws of the Jews.

My own meeting with Odun (pronounced Ordun) was cloaked in mystery. There was a series of phone calls in which it was never clear whether Odun was in or out. I was kept waiting in a back room of the temple building, filled with statues and paintings. While I waited, a young woman in purple stockings practiced operatic arias on a piano. An hour later Odun arrived with six or seven members of the order, all carrying large grocery bags filled with food—a preparation for a wedding. Odun was dressed casually in jeans, a shirt, and sweater, but all were white, as might be required of an initiate into Santeria, which in fact he was.

Finally our interview began. I felt somewhat at a loss, having much less to go on here than with any of the other groups I'd met—a few articles, some confusing pages by Hans Holzer, and a bagful of rumors, some of them perhaps true, others perhaps the product of jealousy. My confusion had been aided and abetted by Odun's evident love of weaving a bit of mystery around him. I came away with a wealth of impressions, a sense of great creativity and variety, but also the feeling that the group was hard to pin down, that I was missing certain signals.

Odun has described Sabaeanism as a philosophy of action that states that human beings should live in the present, identifying with those principles that are unchanging even in the face of death. One such principle would be the pursuit of knowledge, since knowledge, he observed to me, is the one thing we are not born with, but which we take with us when we go. Sabaeanism, he has said, is a system of thought that can be applied to all aspects of life.

According to an article in the order's occasional publication,
Iris,
Sabaeanism is “a unique philosophy” that “extends back in time 6000 years or more, and as a living undogmatic principle is evasive when put into impersonal written words.” Sabaeanism was originally part of an effort “to preserve an antediluvian philosophy by means of deliberate hieroglyphics superimposed on the illusion of star groups in the heavens.”
²⁹
According to Berosus, a Babylonian historian, the last antediluvian kings were ordered to write down all history and deposit their writings at Sippar, the city of the sun god, Utu. This was to be no earthly city, since man-made and natural disasters would destroy such writings. So the city of the Sun God was really the heavens, and the history was recorded in the stars. Thus, astronomy evolved as the most important feature of Sabaeanism, along with astrology, temple building, and the study of the relation of place, time, and celebration to the planets and stars. “Sabaeanism” means worship of stars or star lore. But the Sabaean Religious Order has been involved in a large number of activities that have nothing to do with astrology and astronomy. Odun told me that Sabaeanism came to Egypt at the time of Menes (1st dynasty), and later emissaries brought it westward. He told me that during the seventeenth century, during the slave trade, it was brought to the New World and that is why the tradition has deep ties with Santeria.