Drawing Down the Moon Read Online Free PDF

the Western world derive from our long-standing ideology of monotheism, which remains the majority tradition in the West. They might add that monotheism is a political and psychological ideology as well as a religious one, and that the old economic lesson that one-crop economies generally fare poorly also applies to the spiritual realm.
    If you were to ask modern Pagans for the most important ideas that underlie the Pagan resurgence, you might well be led to three words: animism, pantheism, and—most important—polytheism. Neo-Pagans give these words meanings different from the common definitions, and sometimes they overlap.
    Animism is used to imply a reality in which all things are imbued with vitality. The ancient world view did not conceive of a separation between “animate” and inanimate.” All things—from rocks and trees to dreams—were considered to partake of the life force. At some level Neo-Paganism is an attempt to reanimate the world of nature; or, perhaps more accurately, Neo-Pagan religions allow their participants to reenter the primeval world view, to participate in nature in a way that is not possible for most Westerners after childhood. The Pagan revival seems to be, in part, a response to the common urban and suburban experience of our culture as “impersonal,” “neutral,” or “dead.”
    For many Pagans, pantheism implies much the same thing as animism. It is a view that divinity is inseparable from nature and that deity is immanent in nature. Neo-Pagan groups participate in divinity. The title of this book implies one such participation: when a priestess becomes the Goddess within the circle. “Drawing down the moon” symbolizes the idea that we are the gods, or can, at least, become them from time to time in rite and fantasy. This idea was well expressed in the quotation at the beginning of the Whole Earth Catalog : “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” 4 The Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds has expressed this idea by the phrase: “Thou Art God/dess.” f
    The idea of polytheism is grounded in the view that reality (divine or otherwise) is multiple and diverse. And if one is a pantheist-polytheist, as are many Neo-Pagans, one might say that all nature is divinity and manifests itself in myriad forms and delightful complexities. On a broader level, Isaac Bonewits wrote, “Polytheists . . . develop logical systems based on multiple levels of reality and the magical Law of Infinite Universes: ‘every sentient being lives in a unique universe.’ ” 5 Polytheism has allowed a multitude of distinct groups to exist more or less in harmony, despite great divergence in beliefs and practices, and may also have prevented these groups from being preyed upon by gurus and profiteers.
    In beginning to understand what polytheism means to modern Pagans we must divest ourselves of a number of ideas about it—mainly, that it is an inferior way of perceiving that disappeared as religions “evolved” toward the idea of one god.
    The origin of this erroneous idea can be traced to the eighteenth century. We can see it, for example, in the works of the philosopher David Hume, who wrote that just as “the mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior,” polytheism prevails “among the greatest part of uninstructed mankind”; and the idea of a “supreme Creator” bestowing order by will is an idea “too big for their narrow conceptions. . . .” 6 Until recently many writers labeled tribal religions “superstition,” while dignifying monotheistic beliefs (usually Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) with the term “religion.” These notions are usually not stated so boldly today, but they persist.
    Many anthropologists have long disrupted the notion that religions “evolve” in linear fashion. Paul Radin more than fifty years ago wrote that monotheism exists in