Margot Adler Speaks on Paganism Today
Margot Adler's talk from the recent Unitarian Universalist General Assembly is summarized here, together with video links.
Jason Pitzl-Waters has more commentary. Here's mine:
Adler, who became interested in paganism, and in particular, Wicca, during the sixties, remembers that in those days paganism was a coven-based movement. You had to join a coven to find out about paganism. No neighborhood coven? No connection.
She is looking back through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and perhaps the filter of her own experience. Actually, there were plenty of people in the 1960s or 1970s who were solitary, who had read a book or two and started practising on their own. They believed that somewhere there were covens, but they had not found any. But that lack did not stop them.
The only difference was that solitary Witchcraft did not feel respectable until Scott Cunningham made it more so.
Gerald Gardner's writing reached America in the 1950s, after all, and began having an immediate effect.
Tags:Paganism, Unitarians
Jason Pitzl-Waters has more commentary. Here's mine:
Adler, who became interested in paganism, and in particular, Wicca, during the sixties, remembers that in those days paganism was a coven-based movement. You had to join a coven to find out about paganism. No neighborhood coven? No connection.
She is looking back through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and perhaps the filter of her own experience. Actually, there were plenty of people in the 1960s or 1970s who were solitary, who had read a book or two and started practising on their own. They believed that somewhere there were covens, but they had not found any. But that lack did not stop them.
The only difference was that solitary Witchcraft did not feel respectable until Scott Cunningham made it more so.
Gerald Gardner's writing reached America in the 1950s, after all, and began having an immediate effect.
Tags:Paganism, Unitarians
posted by Chas S. Clifton at 11:41 AM Permalink
5 Comments:
I wasn't actually there, I just watched the video and the Q&A.
My mistake, Jason. I fixed the text.
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There was plenty of non-coven activity in the UK, too - the Regency for example.
And thanks for your comment on my Livejournal :)
Yvonne, you're welcome, and if you cruise the archives, you will see that I derive a simple please from visiting Bristol
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