Editorial Reviews
A scintillating new book by film-maker Jo Carson, in expanded second edition, now gives access to (Fred) Adams' 50-year oeuvre: rapturous poetry, erotically-charged ritual, glowing surreal paintings, and an overall vision of a human culture utterly defined by wilderness, eros, and Goddess.
In Celebrate Wildness: Magic, Mirth and Love on the Feraferian Path, Feraferia initiate Jo Carson unfolds the sumptuously-petaled flower of the Feraferian vision with a stunning simplicity and clarity that would have left Fred Adams, convoluted mind and all, grinning with boyish delight. Celebrate Wildness is a visually-stunning compendium of poetry, rituals, musings, and essays, illuminated (I use the word advisedly) by Adams' own kaleidoscopic artwork.
Dear reader, if you buy only one pagan book this year, let it be Celebrate Wildness, in which you will encounter the Feraferian vision, re-articulated for a new century and a new generation. In this book, you will behold (whether you knew it or not) our collective history.
And, just possibly, our future.
---Steven Posch, author of Radio Paganistan: Folktales of the Urban Witches
For some of us Feraferia is like a fairy tale, a half-remembered dream, a story we once heard from (Margot) Adler (in Drawing Down the Moon). We heard just enough to feel both curiosity and mystery, but had no access to the reality of Fred and Svetlana Adams’ cosmos of nature-inspired beauty become spirituality. Jo Carson’s new book, Celebrate Wildness: Magic, Mirth and Love on the Feraferia Path, brings the dream into beautiful focus, limned as it is with Adams’ visionary paintings. It also opens Feraferia ideas to a wider audience, explaining not only the history of the small movement, but articulating a Feraferia theology and sharing daily and seasonal practices.
Adams’ genius was to fuse his own artistic outlook with classical mythology and the emerging social trends of his day – feminism, environmentalism, and new religious ways such as Paganism. On canvas and in ceremony he found outlets in which he could evade the ever-encroaching post-industrial societal grime while putting forward a vision of beauty as Kore, queen and self.
---Holli Emore in Palimpsest on August 7, 2015
I had a hard time reading Celebrating Wildness, mostly because I kept being swept up in the exquisite and often deliberately mind-boggling art. But don’t be fooled: this is not merely a Pagan coffee-table book. The text is deep, rich, and every bit as beautiful and complex as the art.
Celebrating Wildness is Jo Carson’s explication of and paean to the Feraferian Tradition, founded by Fred Adams and Lady Svetlana over 50 years ago. They became much admired and influential elders in the Southern California metaphysical community among both Wiccans and Ceremonialists, numbering both Ed Fitch and Poke Runyon among their friends and sometimes-collaborators. When people wonder aloud how the Wicca of Southern California became so much more nature-oriented and wild than the British traditions from which it arose the one factor they don’t take into account, but should, is Feraferia.
Feraferia – a word Fred Adams coined from Greek roots meaning “wilderness festival” – is a Pagan tradition unlike any other. Based on Fred’s visions of the Divine Feminine, the sacredness of eros and the potential for intentional communities that truly do no harm to anything, it also draws upon themes familiar to Wiccans such as sacred landscapes, prehistoric beliefs, and the Faerie Faith. As Wicca itself once did, it harks back to Minoan Crete in a much-romanticized way. But then, you could say that all of Feraferia is a romanticized view of Nature and our place in it.
Celebrating Wildness is a unique, exquisite, and profound book. It created in me a sort of homesickness, a wistfulness for the idealist I was – we all were – back when we and the world and the Magic were all young and fresh. Though it’s a short book at only 115 art-laden pages, don’t expect to read it quickly; take your time and let it sink into your subconscious. What bobs to the surface will be wondrous.
---Dana Corby, in The Rantin Raven, July 19, 2015
Feraferia melds love of wilderness and the Dionysian ecstatic dimensions of Greek Paganism with the optimistic vision of the 60s. Celebrating Wildness offers means by which readers can enlarge and deepen their own practice, opening them up more deeply into the sacred energies of the earth and of the natural world whether or not they also choose the Feraferian path. Any NeoPagan who deeply feels the sacredness of nature, as I do, will find insight and inspiration here.
Feraferia focuses on celebration, the wildness within nature and its most basic rhythms such as sexuality and life and death. Although rooted in ceremonial magical traditions, compared to Wicca magick plays a small role. In Wiccan terms, Feraferians focus on the celebrations of the Sabbats rather than the work of the Esbats. It offers one very attractive way people can come into greater harmonious communion with Nature’s spiritual dimensions, primarily through their Goddess and the Fey, or faerie Folk. These are essentially the spirits of place and of the ancestors, two dimensions usually given less focus among NeoPagans today. Celebrate Wildness teaches how we can make better connection with the natural energies of the earth through ritual, celebration, and poetry.
One of this volume’s most useful contributions to contemporary Pagans are its guides as to how to establish this kind of connection, such as through creating a small henge and linking it with wild regions beyond through the creation of “Wildercharms.” (43-6) While I have never practiced Feraferia I will soon begin constructing an outdoors circle for ritual on recently leveled land, and now plan to incorporate many of these ideas.
Poetry and ecstatic dance and trance are central to this tradition. Unlike theology, poetry can take us beyond where words and reasoning alone can penetrate. Celebrate Wildness quotes Harry Beston that “It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.” (104) To work for the reader poetry must be experienced, not analyzed. Ecstatic trance and dance can take us there. Analysis can come later, if at all.
Celebrate Wildness artfully captures the idealistic spirit behind one of the earliest indigenous American NeoPagan traditions, and offers many insights on how the best of their practices can be incorporated by us all. Today people seeking experienced teachers outnumber the teachers available, and books able to help people get started on their own are valuable. This is one of them.
--- Gus diZerega, July 28, 2015, in Witches and Pagans
Product Details
Publisher : Natural Motion Pictures, Copyright 2015 by Jo Carson and Feraferia, Inc.
Language : English
Hardback : 115 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-0-9916470-1-9
Item Weight : 1.94 pounds
