Our late autumn theme here at HP is “Responsibility“. This is the first in a 3-part series, looking critically at contemporary Neo-Paganism from an earth-centered perspective. Note: The views expressed in this essay are the author’s and are not necessarily representative of HumanisticPaganism.com or any of its other contributors.
“Until we get our heads out of the clouds and come down to the earth we so love, and get our hands dirty… we won’t be leaders in the environmental movement. It’s time to organize!”
— , in response to the question why Pagans aren’t the leaders of the environmental movement
Neo-Paganism has been around for almost 50 years, if you date it to 1967, the year Feraferia, the Church of all Worlds, and NROOGD were all organized. Back then, Neo-Paganism showed real potential as a new “Earth religion”. Feraferia and the Church of All Worlds in particular styled themselves as nature religions, with ambitious goals short of nothing but saving the world from itself. Chas Clifton, author of Her Hidden Children, The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, identifies 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day, as the year when Wicca transformed from a “mystery religion” or “metaphorical fertility religion” into a “nature religion”. That same year, the founder of the Church of All Worlds, Oberon (then Tim) Zell, had a vision of Mother Earth as a living planet several years before James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis was popularized. A few years later, Margot Adler would describe the Neo-Paganism of the mid- to late-1970s as a “celebratory, ecological nature religion.” Since then, though, Neo-Paganism has struggled to reconcile its exoteric earth-centered principles with the esoteric Self-centered practices which it inherited from traditional Wicca. Anthropologist Susan Greenwood reports finding from her research among Pagans in 1990s “that there was more emphasis on ritual and psychospiritual ‘internal’ nature as personal experience rather than a connection to, or even an interest in, the environment.”
Read More
Naturalistic Paganism
Naturalistic Paganism 