Wicca-pedia

If you've ever heard Margot Adler on National Public Radio, you know she's a skilled radio news reporter. She also happens to be the granddaughter of the pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler, a less famous contemporary of Freud and Jung. I ran across her book Drawing Down the Moon (NY: Penguin, 1986/2006) because it was on a minister friend's recommended reading list. At first I was just curious, then astounded by her erudition, critical questioning, reasonableness, and fairness. If you have even the remotest interest in what is sometimes called "Earth-centered spirituality," this book has something for you. To wit:

James Hillman’s essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic”....said that psychology had long been colored by a theology of monotheism, especially in its view that unity, integration, wholeness, is always the proper goal of psychological development and that fragmentation is always a sign of pathology....Carrying this idea to the extreme, Hillman suggested that the multitude of tongues in Babel, traditionally interpreted as a “decline,” could also be seen as a true picture of psychic reality. (p. 28)

I remember once at a yoga retreat in north Georgia, it was Sunday afternoon and everybody was feeling good, the event was winding down, and someone was playing a guitar and singing "We are one, we are one," and my friend Alex turned and quietly said, "No, we're not." There is a giant prejudice in Amerikan culture toward unification, standardization, and monoculture, with a concomitant fear of pluralism, differences, and multiple anything (species, languages, religions, sexual orientations, ethnicities, narratives, histories, deities). E Pluribus Unum maybe should be E Unibus Plurum.

Here's another excerpt that might (or might not) make sense in this context:

Often our conceptions of psychic reality and the magical techniques we might use are simply a function of the particular culture we live in. Robert Wilson humorously observes:

Modern psychology has rediscovered and empirically demonstrated the universal truth of the Buddhist axiom that phenomena adjust themselves to the perceiver....The fairy-folk are like that. They come on as Holy Virgins to the Catholics, dead relatives to the spiritualist, UFOs to the Sci-Fi fans, Men in Black to the paranoids, demons to the masochistic, divine lovers to the sensual, pure concepts to the logicians, clowns from the heavenly circus to the humorist, psychotic episodes to the psychiatrist, Higher Intelligences to the philosopher, number and paradox to the mathematician and epistemologist. (p. 161)

Maybe I'm just bored with the usual religious vocabulary, but I'm looking forward to learning more about this kind of thing. I'm sure there are plenty of unreliable sources, wacko practices, and people I don't want to associate with, but I have a feeling there might be some interesting folks out there on the fringes.