Pagans and the Counter-Culture

Gerald Gardner was living in the East during World War I and its aftermath. He spent a few months as a hospital orderly in Liverpool, but a recurrence of malaria forced him back to Malaya. So he missed directly experiencing the most wrenching period of change in Europe in centuries. By 1918, war, disease, and famine had killed 9,400,000 soldiers and 30,000,000 civilians.

Political, social, and artistic systems all over the continent were rocked by the wake of war. The Dada and Surrealist movements in art, the Communist revolution in Russia, the emergence of Freudian psychology -- all were consequences of the post-World War I shakeup.

Britain got off lighter than the mainland nations where the battles had taken place, but still suffered enormous loss of life and of wealth. After 1921 it slipped into chronic economic depression, lasting until the Second World War. It's not much wonder that some Britons in the 1920s and 30s were looking for an alternative to their mainstream culture and religion. Legends of their ancestors, myths (however inaccurate) of a ancient witch-religion, provided a pleasant alternative.

WWI was less cruel to the U.S. Entering the war "over there" late, it suffered only a fraction of the casualties that the U.K. did. And partly due to a strong market in exports to war-ravaged Europe, America enjoyed an economic boom during most of the 1920s. Even when the Great Depression seized the U.S. in the 1930s, the optimism of the "New Deal" quickly became pervasive. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the combination of a demographic hump with a particularly stupid war led to a widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream culture in the U.S.

But there were important precursors of the 1960s counterculture emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s, and some going back even to the start of the century.

One of these was the woodcraft movement started by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton. He looked to a pre-Christian culture to find what he found lacking in early 1900s North American life -- not a European pre-Christian culture, but that of the Native Americans. Concerned with juvenile delinquency, he set up the "Woodcraft Indians", a youth movement dedicated in part to the preservation and promotion of "the culture of the Redman". When Seton met Robert Baden-Powell in England in 1906, the Boy Scout movement was born; but Seton moved away from Baden-Powell's jingoism during WWI.

It was largely through Seton's work that Native American culture (or at least, Seton's interpretation of it) was popularized to the rest of the nation.

By the Great Depression of the 1930s the idea that something had gone awry gained more traction. The decade saw the publication of two important works on Native American religion: John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, the story of a Sioux holy man, in 1932; and Seton's The Gospel of the Redman in 1935, in which he described a mystical Native American monotheism, the religion of the "Great Spirit".

Another alternative religious movement during the Depression was an attempt at a strict classical Pagan revival. In 1938, Gleb Botkin established the Church of Aphrodite in West Hempstead, Long Island. But though it may have been the first consciously Pagan modern religion, this monotheistic, dogmatic group never really took off.

The 1930s also saw the first stirrings of the "back to the land" movement, such as Ralph Borsodi's "School of Living" started in 1934. If industrial society was so fragile and brittle that bankers and stockbrokers could destroy it, some reasoned, perhaps we ought to reconsider whether or not it truly represented progress. The back-to-the-landers found their prophet in the works of Thoreau, especially in Walden.

And it was during the 1930s that Zen put down strong roots in the U.S. In 1931 two teachers from the lineage of Soyen Shaku (the Japanese priest who had represented Zen to the Parliament of Religions) formed groups to teach Americans. D.T. Suzuki's former roommate Nyogen Senzaki started the Mentorgarten Meditation Hall in Los Angeles, while in New York Sokei-an Sasaki formed the Buddhist Society of America.

Later, Sasaki's wife, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, played an important role in spreading Zen. In 1958 she was ordained a priest at Daitokuji, a prestigious Rinzai temple in Kyoto. Her son-in-law Alan Watts was key in introducing the West to Zen, Vedanta, and Taoism. And Senzaki's student Robert Aitken would do important work connecting Zen with the peace movement.

Also in the 1930s, in 1934 American Dwight Goddard founded a group called the "Followers of Buddha", but the group quickly foundered. Goddard fared better in publishing, and his 1932 collection of sutras, The Buddhist Bible became a success.

The development of Zen was interrupted by World War II. Both Sanzaki and Sasaki were among the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens, forced into the infamous concentration camps.

After the war, most Americans of the "G.I. Generation" just wanted to turn inward and live a quiet, normal life. But among those who had grown up with the war, the demographic group between the G.I. and the Baby Boomers, dissatisfaction was more common. The conformity, consumerism, and ongoing racism of post-war society, plus the growing consciousness of the threats of ecological devastation from pollution and of annihilation by nuclear war, prompted a search of alternative ways of living.

Some looked back to a "simpler" time, and the back-to-the-land movement picked up momentum. But when the forces of the real estate market co-opted the "escape the cities!" meme, the result was the suburbanization of the U.S.

Some looked to other cultures for a model. White hipsters, for example, looked to African-American culture, especially jazz. It was through the culture around jazz that cannabis use first became widespread, and introduced many to a new mode of thinking.

The writers of the "Beat generation" emerged from the "hip" milieu, starting around 1944 when Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, and William Burroughs met in New York City. The label "beat" originally came from the feeling of being "beat up" and "beat down". But later Kerouac repurposed it, linking it to the word "beatific".

The Beats were saddled with a reputation as nihilists -- clearly, anyone who rejected the wonders of post-war America must have been a pinko commie who hated all that was good in the world. But in truth they were trying affirm life, trying to say "yes" to a spiritual impulse that their society was burying under television and tranquilizers. In Kerouac's words: "I want to speak for things. For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammad I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out." They may have understood the feeling of being "starving hysterical naked", but they were also "burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night".

The poets of the Beat movement made connections to Buddhism both through looking to the past and through the impulse to learn from foreign cultures. Kerouac sought out Eastern philosophy after reading Thoreau, while Gary Snyder came to an interest in Zen through the works of D.T. Suzuki. Closing part of the loop, Philip Whalen was introduced to Buddhism as a boy in the 1940s through the books of the Theosophists.

When Snyder met Kerouac and introduced him to Zen -- and hiking and camping and mountaineering -- the result was Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, the book that brought Buddhist ideas to prominence in American popular culture. (Closing another part of the loop, on the day that The Dharma Bums was published, Kerouac visited D.T. Suzuki for an impromptu tea and haiku session. )

Snyder's Zen was influenced by his intense interest in Native America culture and woodsmanship -- when he organized a meditation retreat in December 1958, he replaced the traditional kinhin, or walking mediation, with a nighttime run through the woods, leaping over boulders and crashing through the undergrowth!

The Beats brought Buddhist, especially Zen, ideas to a new popularity. But their practice had real differences from traditional Buddhism. (At least, at first: after his meeting with Kerouac, Gary Snyder went to Japan to study, while in the 1970s Phillip Whalen became a bona fide Zen monk and Ginsberg a student of the Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.)

Alan Watts teased out the relationship in a brilliant 1958 piece in the Chicago Review called "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen". He contrasted the lawless, subjective, sometimes overly self-conscious "beat Zen", with the "square Zen" of rigid discipline, "a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved and established authority. There will even be a certificates to hang on the wall." He concluded that either path could work, as the true experience at the heart of Zen was robust enough to not be damaged by either sort of silliness.

Around the same time in the late 1950s, three young men -- Gregory Hill, Kerry Thornley, and Bob Newport -- were turning to yet another alternative to the cultural and religious mainstream: salvation through absolute nonsense. Inspired in part by an interest in Zen and its tales of lunatic masters who refused to behave respectably, they originated the Discordian movement.

The Discordians argue -- and the seriousness of the argument depends on the Discordian and on the circumstances -- that Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and confusion, is the one true divine power in the universe. Eris is best known to students of mythology for her wedding gift of the golden apple inscribed "Kallisti (For the Prettiest One)", which Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena squabbled over until they got the Trojan War started. (Note that in standard versions of the tale Eris gets the blame, but she wasn't one of the ones bribing the judge to win a beauty contest!)

The argument that Eris is the supreme being has some strong points - after all, somebody had to put all this chaos here! And any group raising a fuss about a Goddess all the way back in the 1950s, is pretty remarkable.

This "Non-prophet Irreligious Disorganization" has become the sacred clowns of the Pagan movement, the safety valve that helps protect it against "the Curse of Greyface" - the idea that life is Serious Business and that Order must be preserved above all. At any sufficiently large Pagan event, you will hear someone yell "Hail Eris!" or "Kallisti!" -- paying their respects to the forces of chaos.

The Discordian influence on the counter-culture is a strange, largely unexplored historical territory. It has been claimed that they helped turn the "V" hand gesture from "V for victory" to the "peace sign": the Discordians associated it (via Roman numerals) with the sacred number 5. Of course, this claim comes from Discordians, and should be taken with heaping amounts of salt.

(The gesture was popularized in Japan in the 1970s, and now you'll see little old ladies getting their picture taken at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, flashing this Discordian symbol. Hail Eris, indeed!)

But the oddest part of the Discordian story is the tale of co-founder Kerry Thornley. He served together with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marine Corps, found Oswald a fascinating character and started a novel, The Idle Warriors, partly inspired by his defection to the USSR. This made Thornley the only author to write about Oswald before the JFK assassination, and brought him to the attention of the Warren Commission and, later, of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that Thornley might have been "second Osawld", or otherwise involved in the assassination. Sucked into the weirdness vortex, for a time he became a genuine paranoid.

Such can be the risks of dealing with Eris. As Thornley told Greg Hill, "[I]f I had realized that all of this was going to come true, I would have chosen Venus."

Another group that started out as a joke and took on an unexpected depth was the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA), formed at Carleton College, Minnesota in 1963. It was created as a humorous protest against a requirement for students to attend religious services, and had no intention of being an actual alternative religion. Its members were mostly members of mainstream religions who just happened to have a certain sense of humor and an anti-authoritarian streak.

But to the surprise of its founders, the RDNA persisted after the requirement was lifted, and eventually gave birth to the New Reformed Druids of North America, which took a definite Pagan direction. Out of the NRDNA evolved Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), an influential Druidic group founded by Issac Bonewits.

For those looking for a different way of life, another source of ideas was found in science fiction and fantasy. In the 1950s and 60s, the best work of the genre had begun to mature from pulp adventure tales to deeper explorations of cultures that never were -- and in so doing cast a critical eye on our own society.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, published in a popular paperback edition in the U.S. in 1965, became a touchstone of the 1960s counter-culture. His "Middle Earth" was invented in the waning days of the first World War, and the Shire of his hobbits is a glorification of a pastoral English village. The hobbits ally with forest-dwelling elves and with dwarves who live under the mountains, and even with walking trees, to preserve their way of life against an enemy who embodies industrialization. His work echoes the Romantic movement's elevation of the pastoral over the urban, and the widespread longing in post-WWI England to return to a "simpler" time.

Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) gave readers a more human and sympathetic wizard than Tolkien's Gandalf. (Knowledgeable readers of Tolkien know that Gandalf is actually an Istari, a being something like an angel in Tolkien's cosmology.) Earthsea's hero, Ged, works toward balance and harmony rather than a military triumph of "good" over "evil".

Le Guin's work is influenced by her Taoist, feminist, and multi-cultural outlook. Literary critic and theorist Robert Scholes has said that she "works not with a theology but with an ecology, a cosmology, a reverence for the universe as a self-regulating structure...it is a deeper view, closer to the great pre-Christian mythologies of this world[.]"

(The Earthsea novels are simply fantastic. The recent television miniseries that claimed to be based on them had little connection, and was disavowed by Le Guin. Its creators need keel-hauling.)

On the science-fiction side, Star Trek (1966 to 1969) gave viewers the elfin-eared Vulcan Mr. Spock, who projected a logical detachment from destructive emotions while engaging in hypnotic, telepathic "mind melds" -- a sort of future Merlin to Kirk's King Arthur.

Star Trek's attitude toward religion was not one where gods fared well. In the (second) pilot episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", after an encounter with a mysterious energy field a crew member starts to develop god-like powers, and Captain Kirk has to kill him. In a later episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais?", Kirk and the crew knock off Apollo. Several cultures have computers that the locals think of as being gods -- Kirk short-circuits them or blows them up.

Even though military hierarchy is strictly maintained on the ship, Star Trek radically overthrew the cosmic hierarchy of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and gave us something more in the Greco-Roman style: men (and women and Vulcans) who strive with gods.

Robert A. Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) told the tale of a Valentine Michael Smith, a human being raised by Martians. When he returns to Earth as a young adult, he brings Martian religions practices with him. These include the ritual of "sharing water" -- critical on a desert planet like Mars -- and the notion of "grokking", knowing someone or something so deeply that observer and observed unite. Tim Zell (later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and a few co-conspirators took the novel as inspiration and founded the Church of All Worlds in 1968.

The overlap between science fiction fandom and the Pagan movement remains strong to this day: both are cultures that respect bold imagination. (Of course, then there's that other religion that came out of science fiction: Scientology. Which shows the danger of taking suspension of disbelief too far. Really, "body thetans" resulting from frozen aliens being dropped into volcanoes and blown up with H-bombs?)

But even stranger than science fiction were the visions of "psychonauts" who experimented with the "psychedelics" or "entheogens" peyote, mescaline, LSD and psilocybin.

Peyote is ancient ceremonial drug of Native American cultures. Its use was promoted by Havelick Ellis as early as the 1890s. The main active alkaloid, mescaline, was isolated in the 1890s, synthesized in the 1910s, and popularized by Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception. Peyote and mescaline were popular with the beats; Ginsberg's "Howl" was partially inspired by a 1955 peyote vision.

Psilocybin, as found in "magic mushrooms", is another ancient psychedelic, used in Native cultures and popularized by Timothy Leary starting in 1960. But it was LSD, introduced into the world by Albert Hoffman in 1943, that made the movement. By 1959 LSD was being used by psychotherapists, and got a lot of attention when it was used by high-priced Beverly Hills therapists who treated celebrities like Cary Grant.

By 1962 Tim Leary had gotten ahold of LSD -- or it ahold of him -- and the avalanche began.

The experiences of the psychonauts were often similar to the states of mind described in some forms of yoga and in esoteric Buddhism. This inspired a great deal of interest in Eastern philosophy. Huxley and Leary, for example, both had a fascination with the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead Leary's research partner Richard Alpert went to India and became a convert, changing his name to Ram Dass. Images of Hindu and Tibetan deities became prominent.

The same deities, in different masks, can be found in Japanese Buddhism, even in Zen. But Zen had always taught that visions -- whether of heavenly pleasure-realms or of agonizing hells -- that arose during meditation were to be let go of without attachment. It was a system grounded enough to be neither much excited nor disturbed by all the psychedelic hubbub.

Which is not to say it stayed apart. Zen and the psychedelic movement came together in 1967 at the first "Human Be-In" in San Francisco. Gary Snyder read his poems, and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki made an appearance, holding up a single flower. Alan Ginsberg chanted the Prajnaparamita Sutra. Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were there; Leary spoke about getting humans out of cities and back to a tribal or village organization, and urged the crowd to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Shortly after the Be-In, the San Francisco Oracle (Haight-Ashbury's underground newspaper) gathered Leary, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Alan Watts for a discussion of what it all meant. Watts resolved to be a bridge-builder between the anxious "squares" and the "drop outs". Leary saw humanity spliting into two cultures, one organized as an dehumanized anthill or beehive while the drop outs formed an independent tribal society.

But Snyder looked forward to a long-term social evolution: "The children of the ants are going to be tribal people....We're going to get the kids, and it's going to take about three generations." In his view the psychedelic movement was merely an acceleration of this trend away from the consumer society, toward something more contemplative.

By this point, the alert reader may have noticed something about the historical characters mentioned: very few women. Perhaps this made the final contributor to the countercultural melange, feminism, more wild and way-out than even science fiction or psychedelic visions.

The idea that the half of the human race that had been largely ignored for most of history might, just might, be worthy of equal respect and have some worthwhile ideas to contribute, finally started to gain traction in the 1960s.

The ritual magic tradition of the Golden Dawn had been open to women on an equal basis. Gardner's Wicca continued that and went further, making Goddess imagery more prominent and redeeming the term "witch" from the picture of the wicked old crone to a wise practitioner of an ancient craft. (In Gardner's usage, "witch" is a gender-neutral word.)

American feminists seized on the myth of the witch, and especially the notion of the "burning times": the idea (from the inaccurate theories of Margaret Murray) that millions of women in Europe had been executed for practicing a pre-Christian religion. Witches became heroes to many in the women's movement.

For example, from the 1968 manifesto of WITCH - the "Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell", though the meaning of the acronym changed many times: "Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.)"

Feminism and American Paganism have become so closely related that the 1996 edition of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon -- the best general book extant on the Pagan movement -- is labelled by its publisher as belonging under two categories, "Religion" and "Women's Studies".

So this, then, was the supersaturated environment of the late 1960s: the anti-war, feminist, anti-racist, and ecological movements, all simmering together with a heaping helping of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

During the 1950s Wicca started to leak into the U.S. via the books of Gardner and a few others, but it officially came over when Rosemary and Ray Buckland founded a Gardnerian coven in 1964. This pro-nature, goddess-oriented, anti-dogmatic religion proved highly compatible with the counter-culture.

More, its claim of ancient origin was comforting to many who felt adrift -- what better response to critics who charged that the counter-culture had "no respect for tradition", than to adopt a religion tradition that (claimed to) pre-date that of the critics?

Wicca was a seed crystal dropped into the supersaturated environment of 1960s America. A new religious movement crystallized around it, including it but taking many elements also from the surrounding solution.

It was Kerry Thornley, co-founder of the Discordian Society, and Tim Zell, of the Church of all Worlds, who gave the new thing a name. Thornley had joined Kerista, "a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe", and wrote in the group's newspaper, Kerista Swinger:

"...[L]et us look at the jobs of the far less intellectual, but far more constructively functional religions of old. These were the `pagan' religions -- the religions that survive to this day in England and the United States as `witchcraft.'"

Margot Adler credits this as the first use in the U.S. of "Pagan" to describe past and present nature religions -- not just the witchcraft revival, but the broader phenomenon. (For the record, Thornley said his influence on the movement had been exaggerated. ) Tim Zell picked up Thornley's use of the word, and by 1968 was publicizing its use in the Church of All Worlds newsletter, Green Egg.

And from there, we have a Pagan movement.