Margot Adler was born in 1946 into a family that was Jewish, Marxist, and atheist. She was attracted to the spiritual from an early age and would travel to Mass with her best friend, who was a Catholic, to immerse herself in the church's music, incense, and ceremonies.
Her class was brought out early on May 1st when she was ten years old to the rural residence of her teacher's sister. They had learnt medieval May Day melodies and began singing and plucking flowers as the sun rose.
They returned to New York City with armfuls of flowers and flung them around the classroom while singing May Day tunes. After that, the students danced around the maypole. This was one of Adler's defining spiritual encounters, and she was attracted to rituals.
Her seventh-grade class was studying ancient Greece, and she was fascinated to the goddesses Artemis and Athena's tremendous imagery of confidence and inner strength. They evolved into her ideas.
She had grasped the social impracticality of worshiping Greek gods by the age of fourteen and had silently put them away for future use.
In 1970, Adler was inspired by the environmental movement as well as writers such as Thoreau, Eisley, Dubos, and Carson.
She characterizes her response to these works as religious, and in the universe, she discovered a new knowledge of everything's connection.
She felt for the first time in her life that she knew her position in the universe.
She read two pieces shortly after that that had a great impact on her: Arnold Toynbee's "The Religious Roots of Our Environmental Crisis" and Lynn Vhire's "The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis"
The directive in Genesis to "be prolific and multiply and have dominion over the world" has a flaw, according to these studies: It elevates us to a higher level. Nature, granting unrestricted permission to destroy the planet.
Older Pagan traditions and their views that the divine was present in everything were also discussed in the writings.
- She believed that the ancient view gave the world a more holy feel and a reluctance to harm it.
- She was traumatized and on the lookout for an ecological religion.
- She discovered many various sorts of Pagan organizations as she traveled through the United States.
- She liked the concept that certain traditions were not universal, and that they were not for everyone. These were more metaphorical and theologically flexible since they were based on oral tradition rather than the written word.
- She discovered that as she developed, she no longer believed in an exclusive "either -o r" dichotomy and instead concluded that most dichotomies were nonsense.
- Finally, Adler has decided to worship with a Unitarian church while maintaining her Wiccan Priestess practice. She feels that this provides her with the necessary balance.
- She believes that the Pagan community has introduced the pleasure of ritual to Unitarian Universalism, as well as a great deal of creative and artistic skills, which will result in a richer liturgy and a bit more juice and mystery for the faith.
Drawing Down the Moon, a famous study of Goddess spirituality and modern Paganism, and A journey Through Spirit and Revolution are among Adler's works.
- She was a reporter for National Public Radio, and her stories have aired on award-winning programs such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
- She was the host of Justice Talking, a new radio program created by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for Public Policy on the topic of the United States Constitution.
- She also gave talks on Paganism and Earth Traditions all around the country.
- She had been a Wiccan Priestess for almost twenty-five years.
You may also want to read more about Paganism here.
Be sure to check out my writings on Religion here.
