Page 208: Feraferia

Many, many people believe that some sort of cataclysm is coming.  Extreme weather, rising sea levels, asteroids, soil exhaustion, war -- something is going to get us.  Many people believe that, in the aftermath of the inevitable disaster, a new culture will rise.  Neo-pagans tend to believe (hope?) that the new society will be much more devoted to the ideals of the Great Goddess.

Feraferia is one vision of the potential future utopia that awaits.  Created by Frederick Adams, the Feraferia philosophy/religion is a "Paradisal Fellowship for the loving celebration of Wilderness Mysteries with Faerie style, courtly elegance, refinement & grace." (quoted from Earth Religion News via the book Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler).

Feraferia was derived, at least in part, from a book called The Recovery of Culture by Henry Bailey Stevens.  Stevens' theory was that our primate ancestors lived in perfect peace and in balance with nature before the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry. Agriculture begat the ownership of land and animal husbandry begat the ownership of property that eventually spawned war -- over land and property.

Stevens believed that agriculture and animal husbandry were the "original sin" that literally cast humanity out of the Garden of Eden that was our primate past.

Feraferia wants to take us back to that past by worshiping the wilderness.

Agriculture and animal husbandry by humans emerged in the Levant and in Mesopatamia during neolithic times (9-10,000 years ago).  No one really knows how or why.  But more on that later...