Margot Adler

4/16

Birthday of Margot Adler

Margot Susanna Adler was a Wiccan High Priestess, writer, journalist, lecturer and author of the now classic book “Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today” (1979) an early seminal study of contemporary nature religions.  She was also a member the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS) and an elder in the Covenant of the Goddess (CoG). She had this to say about Witches, Wiccans and Pagans: 

“We are not evil. We don’t harm or seduce people.  We are not dangerous. We are ordinary people like you.  We have families, jobs, hopes and dreams. We are not a cult.  This religion is not a joke. We are not what you think we are from looking at TV.  We are real. We laugh, we cry. We are serious. We have a sense of humour. You don’t have to be afraid of us.  We don’t want to convert you. And please don’t try to convert us. Just give us the same right we give you, to live in peace.  We are much more similar to you than you think”. – Margot Adler 

Margot Adler was born the only child to a non-religious family in Little Rock, Arkansas on the 16th April 1946.  Shortly after her birth the family moved to New York, where she was raised within the city’s intellectual community.  Her Viennese father Dr. Kurt Alfred Adler was a psychiatrist and a self-professed atheist, while her mother Freyda Nacque Adler was a Jewish agnostic and a radical educator (she died in 1970).  Her grandfather Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was a renowned Viennese psychiatrist considered by many to be the father of Individual Psychology.

Margot’s early education was spent at the City and Country Grammar School in Greenwich Village, where during her fifth grade one of her teachers taught the class about the May Day festivals of old and how people used to dance around a Maypole singing in the May with songs.  The teacher arranged for a class outing to the country home of a sister and early on the 1st of May as the sun began to shine they sang the songs of May and picked flowers from the fields. Later they took flowers back to school and decorated a Maypole, which they danced around while singing.  Ever since then Margot had been fascinated by rituals. 

Later while in 7th grade, Margot spent the whole year studying myths of ancient Greece.  She was particularly drawn to the Greek deities Artemis and Athena, and could imagine their feminine strengths and powers.  As part of a school project she wrote a play about the Trojan War, which was part musical as it included hymns to Zeus and poems sung by Hera and other gods.  Coming from a fairly atheistic family of no particular persuasion, Margot mentally identified the ancient Greek religions as part of her own primal religion.

After graduating from City and Country Grammar School, Margot next studied at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art in Hamilton Heights.  While there she began to question and research her own beliefs about religion. As her family had no particular interest, she started to explore various churches and denominations in her neighbourhood.  She was particularly taken with the Quakers for their belief in pacifism, social equality and education, but was also mightily impressed with the rituals she witnessed in the Catholic Church.

In 1964 Margot interests in religion was put on hold for while as she started a politically active life at University.  As a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Freedom of Speech Movement (FSM), and as a member of the Executive Committee was among 800 protesters arrested during a massive sit-in protest at Sproul Hall.  This was Berkeley’s campus administration building, which they took over to promote the rights of student groups to support off-campus issues, and student rights to free speech and academic freedom. 

In the following year she helped to register black voters rights in the civil protests taking place in Mississippi, and in 1968 was an activist against the Vietnam War and demonstrated at the Democratic convention in Chicago.  Later in 1968, Margot received a B.A. degree in Political Science from Berkeley with a “Phi Beta Kappa” for outstanding scholarship. She then went on to earn a Master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York.  Much later in 1982 Margot was awarded a prestigious one-year Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. 

After graduating from Berkeley in 1968, Margot worked for Pacifica Radio, where she started as a volunteer at KPFA.  She then became a reporter, then a producer, and later Head of Pacifica’s Washington News Bureau. From 1968 to 1977 she hosted three radio talk shows:  “Hour of the Wolf”, “Unstuck in Time” and “The Far Side of the Moon”. Her talk shows dealt with cutting-edge topics and ideas about science, psychology, feminism, ecology, parapsychology, religion and spirituality. 

In 1979 she next joined National Public Radio (NPR) as a general assignments reporter working in their New York News Bureau.  There she helped to create and host the radio shows: “All Things Considered”, “Morning Edition” and “Weekend Edition”. Margot was always keen to document issues of national and societal importance, and covered such controversial issues as:  the confrontation between radicals and the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, AIDS in San Francisco, homeless people living in subways, and the state of the middle classes in society. She also reported on the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984, and again in Calgary in 1988. 

On the 19th June 1988 Margot married her long time companion John Lowell Gliedman in an out-door handfasting ceremony held at Lambert’s Cove Inn on Martha’s Vineyard in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.  Selena Fox the founder of Circle Sanctuary performed the ceremony inside a circle of flowers, after which they jumped the broom, in keeping with old Pagan traditions. Their wedding was the first Pagan handfasting to be written up in the society pages of the prestigious New York Times.

Gliedman was a psychologist and science writer, and co-author of a report for the Carnegie Council on Children called:  “The Unexpected Minority: Handicapped Children in America”. Raised in Lutherville, Maryland, his father the late Dr. Lester H. Gliedman was a psychiatrist.  Gliedman attended Park School in Baltimore, before moving on to Harvard University from where he earned a B.A. degree with a Magna Cum Laude (“with great praise”) as a mark of excellence.  He later received a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After their marriage, Margot who retained her maiden name for professional reasons gave birth to their only son Alexander Dylan Gliedman-Adler in 1990. 

Throughout the 1990’s Margot continued work as a Bureau Chief and Correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) in New York, as well as hosting “Justice Talking”, a weekly one-hour show recorded before a live audience in Philadelphia.  During the show Margot would introduce key cases and controversies being dealt with in the nation’s justice system, and examine the impact of their consequences on society as a whole. The show was then broadcasted nationwide. 

After the 9/11 terrorists attack on New York in 2001, Margot spent much of her time reporting on its aftermath, and documenting the human side of the tragedy.  In her reports Margot looked deeply into issues affecting those people directly involve, like those who have been deprived of their homes, or who have lost their jobs, the trauma of grieving relatives and those involved in relief efforts.  She also co-produced an award-winning radio drama called “War Day”. 

Away from her busy life as a news correspondent and radio host and while living in New York in the early 1970’s, Margot took time out to visit England.  While there she was inspired to investigate the history of the Druids, during which she discovered a number of evolving Witchcraft and Pagan organizations, one of which was being spearheaded by a fellow American called Joseph B. Wilson.  Wilson who was on a US Air Force posting in the UK had founded the “Waxing Moon” magazine, the first of its kind devoted to Witchcraft in America. While in the UK, Wilson had began collaborating with John Score the founder of “The Wiccan”, the UK’s equivalent magazine and its background organization “The Pagan Front” in efforts to set up a similar organization in the USA called the Pagan Way. 

On her return to New York, Margot subscribed to the “Waxing Moon” magazine, which led to her introduction and long time interest with Witchcraft and Paganism in America.  She first became involved when she attended a study group led by the New York Coven of Welsh Traditional Witches headed by Ed Buczynski. Then in 1973 she left the study group and took a more active role in a practicing Gardnerian coven called Iargalon, through which in 1976 she was elevated to the status of High Priestess and took the title of Lady Morvoren. 

By this time Margot was also running a Pagan Way grove in Manhattan, and was conducting Sabbat rituals at her own home.  At the time there was still very little information about the new age of Wicca and Witchcraft being published, except for magazines like “The Waxing Moon” by Joseph B. Wilson, “Nemeton” by Gwydion Pendderwen and Alison Harlow, and the “Green Egg” magazine by Oberon Zell-Ravenheart.  As such Margot’s journalistic instincts triggered in, and she started to explore outside her own immediate environment. 

It was about this time that Margot was introduced to a literary agent called Jane Rotrosen, who suggested she write a book.  With Rotrosen’s help Margot wrote and sold a proposal for the book to Viking Publishers who liked what they saw. She was awarded a $7.500 advance minus ten percent to Rotrosen, to cover her research and expenses.  Margot spent the next 3 years writing, traveling, interviewing and researching her book, the result being “Drawing Down the Moon”, first published in 1979. Initially outside of academic circles it received a medico reception, however updated and re-issued in 1986 and again in 2006, over the years it has become a classic best seller.

In 1982 after taking a year out from her coven practice to concentrate on her Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, Margot returned to New York but decide not to rejoin her coven, preferring to practice as a solitary.  She later joined the Church of All Souls, a Unitarian Universalist church in New York, and for the following ten years acted as an adviser on the board of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS). In 1997 Margot published her second book “Heretic’s Heart:  A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution”, a fascinating memoir of her time during the 1960’s. 

Sadly on the 2nd of February, 2010 at the age of 67, Margot’s husband of 35 years, John Lowell Gliedman passed away shortly after being diagnosed with an inoperable stomach cancer.

fter the death of her husband Margot continued to work as a NPR Correspondent at their New York Bureau from where she regularly broadcasted reports in programs such as:  All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. She also began a 3 years epic study of Vampirism. After reading over 260 novels from their earliest publications, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to viewing more recent film dramatisations like Interview with the Vampire (1994) by Anne Rice, she also studied scholarly works on the genre and its histories.  The results of her studies provided the material for her last two books Out for Blood (2013) and Vampires Are Us (2014). 

During the last decades of her life Margot remained one of the most visible and available leaders of the Pagan community in North America.  Based in New York where she lived with her only son Alexander, she traveled regularly around the country presenting lectures, workshops and rituals in her efforts to educate people about Wicca/Witchcraft and Paganism.   Her rituals, many of which involve ecstatic singing, chanting and seasonal celebrations, where a delight to all those who attended. 

Sadly in early 2011, Margot was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, which slowly metastasized over the following three years.  Margot Adler died at 10:30am on the 28th July 2014 at the age of 68.