Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today
Encyclopedia
Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today is a sociological study of contemporary Paganism
in the United States written by the American sociologist, Wiccan and journalist Margot Adler
. First published in 1979 by Viking Press
, it was later republished in a revised and expanded edition by Beacon Press
in 1986, with third and fourth revised editions being brought out by Penguin Books
in 1996 and then 2006 respectively.
According to the New York Times, the book "is credited with both documenting new religious impulses and being a catalyst for the panoply of practices now in existence" and "helped popularize earth-based religions." Adler is a Neopagan
and "recognized witch" herself and a reporter for National Public Radio.
The book is an examination of Neopaganism in the United States
from a sociological
standpoint, discussing the history and various forms of the movement. It contains excerpts from many interviews with average Pagans, as well as with well-known leaders and organizers in the community.
The first edition of the book sold 30,000 copies.
Successive versions have included over one hundred and fifty pages of additional text and an updated contacts section. It has been praised by Theodore Roszak
, Susan Brownmiller
, the New York Times Book Review and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion
.
Since the original publication of Adler's work, a number of other books on the subject have been published, such as the sociologist Helen Berger's A Community of Witches
(1999).
used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements
, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan
beliefs of pre-modern Europe. The religion of Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca
, is one of a number of different Pagan religions, and developed in England during the first half of the 20th century. The figure at the forefront of Wicca's early development was the English occultist Gerald Gardner
(1884-1964), the author of Witchcraft Today
(1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft
(1959) and the founder of a tradition known as Gardnerian Wicca
. Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God
and a Mother Goddess
, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year
and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as coven
s. Gardnerianism was subsequently brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s by an English initiate, Raymond Buckland
(1934-), and his then-wife Rosemary, who together founded a coven in Long Island
.
In the U.S., new variants of Wicca developed, including Dianic Wicca
, a tradition founded in the 1970s which was heavily influenced by second wave feminism, rejecting the veneration of the Horned God and emphasizing female-only covens. One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions, who used the pseudonym of Starhawk
(1951-), later founded her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca
, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
(1979), through which she helped to spread Wicca throughout the U.S.
One reviewer noted that the alterations made for the 1986 edition "often creates a vivid contrast with events and persons first described in 1979."
, Mara E. Donaldson of the University of Virginia
commented that Adler's book provided an "extensive study of paganism" that "demythologizes" the movement "without being sentimental or self-righteous." Considering it to be a "serious corrective to common misconceptions" propagated in the media, Donaldson stated that it was "worth reading" despite what she herself perceived as "neopaganism's weaknesses", namely the movement's lack of "historical-traditional-cultural memory" and a lack of "sensitivity to the Western problem of evil".
Writing for The Women's Review of Books, Robin Herndobler praised Adler's "clear, graceful prose", and the manner in which she had written about Paganism "with interest and compassion."
In a 1996 paper discussing the various sociological studies that had then been made of Paganism, the sociologist Sarah M. Pike noted that Drawing Down the Moon had gone "a long way towards answering the question" as to "what makes these [Pagan ritual] activities valid and viable to those who engage in them". In doing so, Pike believed that Adler's work was an improvement on earlier sociological studies of the movement, namely that of Nachman Ben-Yehuda
,which had failed to answer this question. Noting Adler's position as a practicing Wiccan, and the impact which this would have on her study, Pike however felt that the book was "less defensive and apologetic than sociological studies conducted by many supposedly objective "outsiders"." Summarizing Drawing Down the Moon as being "unmatched" in its "sweeping survey" of the Pagan movement, Pike notes that in providing an overview of the subject it failed to focus on "detailed examination of specific issues and events."
, the sociologist Helen A. Berger noted that Drawing Down the Moon had been influential in getting many Wiccans to accept the non-existence of a historical Witch-Cult
from which their religion descended.
Paganism (contemporary)
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
in the United States written by the American sociologist, Wiccan and journalist Margot Adler
Margot Adler
Margot Adler is an author, journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess and radio journalist and correspondent for National Public Radio .- Early life :Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Adler grew up mostly in New York City...
. First published in 1979 by Viking Press
Viking Press
Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...
, it was later republished in a revised and expanded edition by Beacon Press
Beacon Press
Beacon Press is an American non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association.Beacon Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses....
in 1986, with third and fourth revised editions being brought out by Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
in 1996 and then 2006 respectively.
According to the New York Times, the book "is credited with both documenting new religious impulses and being a catalyst for the panoply of practices now in existence" and "helped popularize earth-based religions." Adler is a Neopagan
Neopaganism
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
and "recognized witch" herself and a reporter for National Public Radio.
The book is an examination of Neopaganism in the United States
Neopaganism in the United States
Neopaganism in the United States is represented by widely different movements and organizations. The largest Neopagan religion is Wicca, followed by Neodruidism. Both of these religions were introduced during the 1950s from Great Britain. Germanic Neopaganism and Kemetism appeared in the US in...
from a sociological
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
standpoint, discussing the history and various forms of the movement. It contains excerpts from many interviews with average Pagans, as well as with well-known leaders and organizers in the community.
The first edition of the book sold 30,000 copies.
Successive versions have included over one hundred and fifty pages of additional text and an updated contacts section. It has been praised by Theodore Roszak
Theodore Roszak (scholar)
Theodore Roszak was professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.-Background:...
, Susan Brownmiller
Susan Brownmiller
Susan Brownmiller is an American feminist, journalist, author, and activist. She is best known for her pioneering work on the politics of rape in her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Brownmiller argues that rape had been hitherto defined by men rather than women; and that men use,...
, the New York Times Book Review and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion
American Academy of Religion
The American Academy of Religion is the world's largest association of scholars in the field of religious studies and related topics. It is a nonprofit member association,...
.
Since the original publication of Adler's work, a number of other books on the subject have been published, such as the sociologist Helen Berger's A Community of Witches
A Community of Witches
A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the north-eastern United States written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of West Chester University...
(1999).
Paganism and Wicca in the United States
Contemporary Paganism, which is also referred to as Neo-Paganism, is is an umbrella termUmbrella term
An umbrella term is a word that provides a superset or grouping of concepts that all fall under a single common category. Umbrella term is also called a hypernym. For example, cryptology is an umbrella term that encompasses cryptography and cryptanalysis, among other fields...
used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements
New religious movement
A new religious movement is a religious community or ethical, spiritual, or philosophical group of modern origin, which has a peripheral place within the dominant religious culture. NRMs may be novel in origin or they may be part of a wider religion, such as Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism, in...
, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
beliefs of pre-modern Europe. The religion of Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca
Wicca
Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...
, is one of a number of different Pagan religions, and developed in England during the first half of the 20th century. The figure at the forefront of Wicca's early development was the English occultist Gerald Gardner
Gerald Gardner
Gerald Brousseau Gardner , who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and...
(1884-1964), the author of Witchcraft Today
Witchcraft Today
In the book Gardner also repeats the claim, which had originated with Matilda Joslyn Gage, that 9 million victims were killed in the European witch-hunts." Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft during this time period vary between about 40,000 and 100,000.The...
(1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft
The Meaning of Witchcraft
The Meaning of Witchcraft is a non-fiction book written by Gerald Gardner, the, known to many in the modern sense as the "Father of Wicca", based around his experiences with the religion of Wicca and the New Forest Coven...
(1959) and the founder of a tradition known as Gardnerian Wicca
Gardnerian Wicca
Gardnerian Wicca, or Gardnerian Witchcraft, is a mystery cult tradition or denomination in the neopagan religion of Wicca, whose members can trace initiatory descent from Gerald Gardner. The tradition is itself named after Gardner , a British civil servant and scholar of magic...
. Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God
Horned God
The Horned God is one of the two primary deities found in some European pagan religions. He is often given various names and epithets, and represents the male part of the religion's duotheistic theological system, the other part being the female Triple Goddess. In common Wiccan belief, he is...
and a Mother Goddess
Mother goddess
Mother goddess is a term used to refer to a goddess who represents motherhood, fertility, creation or embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother.Many different goddesses have...
, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year
Wheel of the Year
The Wheel of the Year is a Neopagan term for the annual cycle of the Earth's seasons. It consists of eight festivals, spaced at approximately even intervals throughout the year. These festivals are referred to as Sabbats...
and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as coven
Coven
A coven or covan is a name used to describe a gathering of witches or in some cases vampires. Due to the word's association with witches, a gathering of Wiccans, followers of the witchcraft-based neopagan religion of Wicca, is also described as a coven....
s. Gardnerianism was subsequently brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s by an English initiate, Raymond Buckland
Raymond Buckland
Raymond Buckland , whose craft name is Robat, is an English American writer on the subject of Wicca and the occult, and a significant figure in the history of Wicca, of which he is a High Priest in both the Gardnerian and Seax traditions.According to his written works, primarily Witchcraft from the...
(1934-), and his then-wife Rosemary, who together founded a coven in Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
.
In the U.S., new variants of Wicca developed, including Dianic Wicca
Dianic Wicca
Dianic Witchcraft and Dianic Feminist Witchcraft, is a tradition, or denomination, of the Neopagan religion of Wicca. It was founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest in the United States in the 1970s, and is notable for its focus on the worship of the Goddess, and on feminism...
, a tradition founded in the 1970s which was heavily influenced by second wave feminism, rejecting the veneration of the Horned God and emphasizing female-only covens. One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions, who used the pseudonym of Starhawk
Starhawk
Starhawk is an American writer and activist. She is well known as a theorist of Paganism, and is one of the foremost popular voices of ecofeminism. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post online forum on religion...
(1951-), later founded her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca
Reclaiming (neopaganism)
Reclaiming is an international community of women and men working to combine earth-based spirituality and political activism. Its predecessor organization, the Reclaiming Collective, was founded in 1979 by two Neopagan women of Jewish descent, Starhawk and Diane Baker, in order to explore and...
, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
The Spiral Dance
The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess is a best-selling book about Neopagan belief and practice written by Starhawk. It was first published in 1979, with a second edition in 1989 and a third edition in 1999...
(1979), through which she helped to spread Wicca throughout the U.S.
Synopsis
Drawing Down the Moon offers a guide to the Pagan movement across the United States.1986 revision
In 1986, Adler published a revised second edition of Drawing Down the Moon, much expanded with new information. Identifying several new trends that had occurred in American Paganism since 1979, Adler recognized that in the intervening seven years, U.S. Pagans had come to become increasingly self-aware of Paganism as a movement, something which she attributed to the increasing number of Pagan festivals.One reviewer noted that the alterations made for the 1986 edition "often creates a vivid contrast with events and persons first described in 1979."
Reviews
Writing in the Journal of the American Academy of ReligionJournal of the American Academy of Religion
The Journal of the American Academy of Religion is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion...
, Mara E. Donaldson of the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
commented that Adler's book provided an "extensive study of paganism" that "demythologizes" the movement "without being sentimental or self-righteous." Considering it to be a "serious corrective to common misconceptions" propagated in the media, Donaldson stated that it was "worth reading" despite what she herself perceived as "neopaganism's weaknesses", namely the movement's lack of "historical-traditional-cultural memory" and a lack of "sensitivity to the Western problem of evil".
Writing for The Women's Review of Books, Robin Herndobler praised Adler's "clear, graceful prose", and the manner in which she had written about Paganism "with interest and compassion."
In a 1996 paper discussing the various sociological studies that had then been made of Paganism, the sociologist Sarah M. Pike noted that Drawing Down the Moon had gone "a long way towards answering the question" as to "what makes these [Pagan ritual] activities valid and viable to those who engage in them". In doing so, Pike believed that Adler's work was an improvement on earlier sociological studies of the movement, namely that of Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Nachman Ben-Yehuda is a professor and former dean of the department of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel....
,which had failed to answer this question. Noting Adler's position as a practicing Wiccan, and the impact which this would have on her study, Pike however felt that the book was "less defensive and apologetic than sociological studies conducted by many supposedly objective "outsiders"." Summarizing Drawing Down the Moon as being "unmatched" in its "sweeping survey" of the Pagan movement, Pike notes that in providing an overview of the subject it failed to focus on "detailed examination of specific issues and events."
Pagan community
In her 1999 study of American Wiccans, A Community of WitchesA Community of Witches
A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the north-eastern United States written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of West Chester University...
, the sociologist Helen A. Berger noted that Drawing Down the Moon had been influential in getting many Wiccans to accept the non-existence of a historical Witch-Cult
Witch-cult hypothesis
The Witch-cult is the term for a hypothetical pre-Christian, pagan religion of Europe that survived into at least the early modern period. As late as the 19th and early 20th centuries, some scholars had postulated that European witchcraft was part of a Satanic plot to overthrow Christianity; most...
from which their religion descended.
Academia
In her sociological study of American Paganism, Loretta Orion, author of Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited (1995), noted that she had "benefitted" from Adler's study, believing that it contained "insightful reflections" on those whom it was studying.Editions
- Original edition 1979, hardcover, ISBN 0-670-28342-8 (Viking, New York)
- Original edition 1979, paperback, ISBN 0-8070-3237-9 (Beacon Press, Boston)
- Revised edition 1986, paperback, ISBN 0-8070-3253-0 (Beacon Press, Boston)
- Revised edition 1996, paperback, ISBN 0-14-019536-X (Penguin, New York)
- Revised edition 2006, paperback, ISBN 0-14-303819-2 (Penguin, New York)
Reviews
- Bittner, Amy. 'Review of Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
- Dangler, Michael. A Review of Adler's Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, and Other Pagans in America Today
- Donaldson, Mara E. Untitled review in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 1982), pp. 303-304.
Interviews
- The Wiccan / Pagan Times. Drawing Down the Moon: TWPT Talks with Margot Adler