Recently, I got hold of a copy of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which I think must have given Neopaganism a big boost, probably in England as well as in North America. It came out in 1979, but I had the 1986 expanded edition, which added material on Gay Spirituality of the Neopagan Kind, and on Asatru, and otherwise tried to bring the story up to date. I had been through this book before, but had skipped over much of it as being of little interest to me. This time, however, I was taking notes, as I do now, and so was reading the parts I read, closely.
Adler, a journalist, starts out saying that in the early Seventies she got interested in finding alternative ecological religion, and in her search, she discovered the, at that time, largely unknown, nearly underground world of neopagan religion. But the only really ecological groups she found were Ferferia and the Church of All Worlds, and those are well-covered in the book, but the mass of it is about other neopagan expressions showing less or no apparent interest in Ecology. But that was, and still is, the reality in Neopaganism, just as Ecology (it was called just Environmentalism then) was merely one of many smorgasbord-choices in the Sixties Counterculture, out of which Neopaganism mostly sprang. Sure, increasingly since then you find ecological statements made in Neopagan books, generally either in the first or last sections, or even in a separate chapter, and books are often, in the title or cover-text, presented as ecological. But then you find the book itself to be not primarily about Ecology. And you look at the main types of Neopaganism-- Wicca, Celtic, Druidry, Northern, Shamanism*, and it's more or less the same. You get Ecology as an afterthought, as a selling-point, as an estimable issue to get behind-- if that. Even so, it's a sight better than you get in the traditional established world religions, for all I can tell.
Further: I found that there isn't an Ecopaganism page in Wikipedia, and I've looked up that and 'Eco-druidry', 'Eco-heathenism', etc., there and on Google, and it seems that what I get is usually a derogatory usage (these people see us coming!). So-- Eco-anything, apart from Eco-spirituality, granted, is just not a thing. Maybe it's that Ecology has been so often embraced, then set aside so that writer and readers can get to what really interests them, that it's like,"Sure, we're green-- isn't everybody? (yawn)". Or if a Neopagan group is truly ecologically-oriented, they just don't advertise it in their name-- like those 'tree-hugger' Druids you hear about, who are about as deep-green as you can get. And I don't name this blog-site 'Ecopaganism'-- maybe I would, except that the Shaggy Mythos, a pretty gnarly, peculiar product, cannot be representative of Ecopaganism in total. But if I could find an Ecopagan directory, I would want to get the Mythos on it. The advantage for me would be that I might discover my kind of people, who are Ecopagan, but not necessarily locked-into one of the standard categories-- as I am not-- despite my obsession with germanic vocabulary and interest in things germanic, I am not a Heathen.
Well, though I am baffled and chagrined by the absence of Ecopaganism from the roster of major Neopagan denominations, I still have hopes that it, or something like it, will come to the fore. If I knew what I could do to promote this, I would. If you know of any worthy ecopaganish persons, sites, or groups, I would appreciate hearing about it at shtrahler@yahoo.com. In the meanwhile, I'll see if a new search gets me any further than previous searches.
*I think that Native American spirituality is a de facto main type, though it's now classified as a subtype of Shamanisn, which I think is unfair. For more on this, see next shtook (post).
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