I find myself thinking of Margot Adler

I find myself thinking of Margot Adler.

She was born in Little Rock, on the 16th of April, 1946. Not much later the family relocated to New York City, and that would remain her base for the rest of her life. The family were “the” Adlers. Her grandfather the noted early associate of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, who later developed his own school, Individual psychology. Her father was also a noted psychiatrist.

Adler earned her undergraduate degree at the University of California in Berkeley, and then a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She was a journalist who spent the balance of her career with National Public Radio. Over the years she served as a general assignment reporter, the New York bureau chief, as well as both a political and cultural correspondent.

Adler was also a noted neo-pagan and Unitarian Universalist. A spiritual combination that has enriched many lives. She was a member of All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Manhattan as well as a member of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans.

In 1988, when she and the psychologist John Lowell Gliedman married at Martha’s Vineyard in a Handfasting officiated by renowned pagan priestess Selena Fox, I’m pretty sure it was the first Neo-pagan wedding to be noted in the society pages of the New York Times.

Adler was the author of the critically acclaimed study of the earth-centered revival, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshipers and Other Pagans in America Today. She would go on to write several other books, including one with her husband, and a highly received memoir Heretic’s Heart.

I’ve long considered Drawing Down the Moon essential reading for anyone interested in the whole range of depth, silliness and profundity that has gathered together under the neo-pagan umbrella. Adler brings an obvious love of the emerging tradition as well as an insistence on a clear-eyed appraisal. It is a genuine classic of spiritual reportage.

Her husband died in 2010. And Margot Adler died on this day, the 28th of July, 2014. Their son Alex Dylan Gliedman-Adler was at her bedside.