Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

to another place, there are different gods and goddesses, and if you’re staying in someone else’s house, you’re polite to their gods; they’re just as real as the ones you left back home.” Bonewits called monotheism an aberration, but “particularly useful in history when small groups of people wanted to control large numbers of people.” In The Druid Chronicles he observed that monotheism, “far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, is in fact a monstrous step backwards—a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.” 19
    Many other Neo-Pagans emphasized that polytheism allowed for both unity and diversity, and several asserted that they were monotheists at some moments and polytheists at others. Penny Novack, a Pagan poet, once wrote that glimpses of the One could make her happy, awed, and excited, “but I can’t imagine a religion based on it.”
    Still another wrote to me:
    I do not believe in gods as real personalities on any plane, or in any dimension. Yet, I do believe in gods as symbols or personifications of universal principles. The Earth Mother is the primal seed—source of the universe. . . . I believe in gods perceived in nature; perceived as a storm, a forest spirit, the goddess of the lake, etc. Many places and times of the year have a spirit or power about them. Perhaps, these are my gods.
    And those Neo-Pagans in the Craft, the followers of Wicca, might well be considered “duotheists,” conceiving of deity as the Goddess of the Moon, Earth, and sea, and the God of the woods, the hunt, the animal realm. Feminist Witches are often monotheists worshipping the Goddess as the One. Morgan McFarland, who headed the Dallas convenstead of Morrigana, told me, “I consider myself a polytheist, as in the statement Isis makes in The Golden Ass when she says, ‘From me come all gods and goddesses who exist.’ So that I see myself as monotheistic in believing in the Goddess, the Creatix, the Female Principle, but at the same time acknowledging that other gods and goddesses do exist through her as manifestations of her, facets of the whole.” One male polytheist said that certain portions of the Craft were afflicted with “the curse of Goddess monotheism which is apparently driving so many Witches mad.” 20 Of the many answers to the question “What does it mean to you to be a Pagan and a polytheist?” the answer that I like best came from the late Wiccan priestess Alison Harlow:
    I am confronted very often with trying to explain to people what I mean by Paganism. To some people, it seems like a contradiction to say that I have a certain subjective truth; I have experienced the Goddess, and this is my total reality. And yet I do not believe that I have the one, true, right and only way.
    Many people cannot understand how I find Her a part of my reality and accept the fact that your reality might be something else. But for me, this in no way is a contradiction, because I am aware that my reality and my conclusions are a result of my unique genetic structure, my life experience and my subjective feelings; and you are a different person, whose same experience of whatever may or may not be out there will be translated in your nervous system into something different. And I can learn from that.
    I can extend my own reality by sharing that and grow. This recognition that everyone has different experiences is a fundamental keystone to Paganism; it’s the fundamental premise that whatever is going on out there is infinitely more complex than I can ever understand. And that makes me feel very good.
    That last sentence struck me profoundly. What an uncommon reaction to people’s differences and how unlike the familiar reactions of fear and hostility! What kind of a person is able to say this—to celebrate