Monday, July 28, 2014

On the death of Margot Adler

Today I heard of the death of Margot Adler. It seems you can't go a month without a big named Pagan dying nowadays, and it reminds me that as a movement we are entering the end of our first generation. We as a movement have to start grappling with Age and Death now, and Adler's is for me, a bit more personal.

I don't often do the BNP fanboy thing. Most are unimpressive, but occasionally I find myself really liking some. Adler was the first I got the nerve to speak informally to. We were at a festival and around the bonfire, and I came up to her and realized I was much taller than she. They seem giants in my mind, until we meet and they are just humans.

Anyway, so there she is and she turns to me. I say “I just wanted to thank you for something you said”. She asks me what that was. I said “Well, you mentioned a particular kind of Pagan, the Heinleinian Libertarian Pagan. For a long time, I thought In was the only one”.

And she laughed at me. In my face, and I laughed too.

Because we both knew that so much of modern Paganism owed itself to the work for the Church of All Worlds. And she profiled them in Drawing Down the Moon. But I entered Paganism ignorant of CAW, until much later. And I had a steady diet of Heinlein since my late adolescence.

And I knew what I was saying was absurd much later, but I wanted her to know that despite her work, there were Pagans who blended ideas on their own, independently.

The second memory of Adler was from another festival. It was bitterly cold that day and most workshops got moved around, mine got moved to an indoor basketball court. The acoustics were horrible, but I worked through it. Later that morning, Adler held a chant workshop in that same hall. The idea was to chant a simple note and hold it, and keep it going as a group. We ran that for about 30 minutes nonstop, and the roof was ringing it was so loud and strong. I was old my voice carried very loudly, but I don't remember. It was electric and power.

Later she started doing the vampire stuff after her husband died, which held no appeal for me. I attended one workshop she gave, and didn't really find it appealing. Now it makes a kind of sense.

That which is remembered lives.