Soul-Searching is Required
A review of The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland
This book review is the result of a dive down the rabbit hole after reading Kelle Bandea’s post A Plea to Pagans to Stop Promoting Child Abusers. Her essay is about The Mists of Avalon, a book which was deeply moving for many Pagans in Gen X and earlier. This isn’t about Mists. It’s a review of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s daughter’s account of her abuse at the hands of her parents.
Ostensibly, Marion Zimmer Bradley was Pagan. Having read Moira Greyland’s account, I find it hard to swallow that MZB genuinely believed in anything greater than herself. Bradley’s father was Christian and raped her repeatedly. She then married a man she knew to be a pedophile, ignored his repeated offenses, even facilitating them by moving him into a house where he had no supervision. Bradley also verbally, physically, and sexually abused her children. Moira suffers from complex PTSD from which she will never heal, and her surviving brother is in worse shape than she.
The book is both terrible to read and deeply compelling. Greyland speaks to the reader, telling her story as if the reader sits before her. I often found myself wanting to give her a hug, but knowing touch would be a problem. I’m a survivor of abuse as well, although not nearly as bad as hers. In her story, I found some understanding of my own feelings and behaviors.
I’m also far too familiar with the culture in which she grew up. Greyland describes Berkeley in the late 60s and 70s. While I lived in the Bay Area in the late 80s and early 90s, I can’t say that things had changed. Polyamory, and an ethic of ‘consent,’ was predominant in my life when I was there. Even now, my old friend who never moved away, is in a relationship that would allow her husband to go have a child with another woman if he wanted.
Grelyand’s life scars are the culmination of the ‘free-love’ movement, the ‘ethic of consent,’ and the feminist ideology of pretending sex - not the act, but the chromosomes - is purely a thing of conditioning. Both her parents maintained that boys should not pursue any masculine role or behavior, and Moira herself was berated for anything resembling feminine behavior. Weirdly she was also criticized for being overly masculine by being excellent and aggressive at fencing.
Greyland was forced into sex with her mother from age three through age twelve when she at last felt able to resist that particular nightmare. Which didn’t stop the verbal, physical, or emotional abuse. Bradley - and her husband, Walter Breen - subscribed to the ideology that sexual desire was programable, and the earlier one ‘programed’ children, the more likely they were to see any sexual acts as acceptable and pleasurable.
In my involvement with the polyamory movement [on the East coast], I came across the idea that everyone should desire sex with anyone else, and withholding sex from men I didn’t like - and frankly found creepy - made me a bad person. I avoided such people only because I’d already escaped a violent relationship and taken up martial arts. The culture of the dojo taught me what boundaries looked like, and how to maintain them physically if necessary.
Greyland eventually turned her father in to the police when she found him molesting an 11-year-old boy, surrounded by child porn. After that, she fell apart for a while. Until the depositions of Bradley and her lover Elizabeth were released, Moira was not believed.
It should be noted that while Bradley was influential on Paganism, I don’t think she had faith in anything higher than her own high-IQ mind. [She and Walter met in Mensa.] But what of those in her periphery? Greyland talks about being raped as a six-year-old by Isaac Bonewits, the founder of the ADF. He said he’d already done this with another child at the commune where he lived. The organization he founded disavowed him four years after Greyland’s book was published. [It should be noted that the Wikipedia entry on Bonewits doesn’t imply the rape which is clear in Greyland book.] Another peripheral figure was Diana Paxon, Moira’s aunt by bearing a child out of wedlock to Bradley’s brother. Paxon worked the Darkmoon Circle with Bradley in the 70s and they co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism. Paxon was evicted from the Troth on 2024 and still practices Northern Tradition. She and Bradley were close. I can only surmise that she engaged in willful blindness to what was happening in the Bradley/Breem household and used the culture’s ideology as a pathway for self-justification.
There is nothing moral or religious about that.
This book is not a light read. If I hadn’t already been asking hard questions about why I was Pagan and why should I not go back to being Christian, or convert to Judaism, it might have been devastating. I understand Moira’s repudiation of Paganism as silly and meaningless. She spends little time on religious reflection, but her understanding of the Christian divine seemed personal and heartfelt. Her religion is something that gives her comfort and guidance.
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As my gods do for me.
The Last Closet concludes with a repudiation of homosexuality. Moira has yet to meet the child of a homosexual couple that did not long for a parent of the opposite sex, or who didn’t feel guilty about being attracted to the opposite sex. She also cites the statistically high levels of abuse by homosexual parents.
Greyland’s book has given me many threads to tease out and I’ll no doubt be referring back to this review. I recommend the book. Pagans [and non-pagans] need to understand the blackhole that is leftist culture if we’re going to escape with our souls intact. This book might make some people who are on the fence repudiate Paganism. Or maybe it will make you think hard about what your religion means.
Near the end of the book, Greyland recounts her year spent being a professional dominatrix. Her musings on childhood damage and healing are simple and should seem obvious. If playing out one’s hangups [as catharsis] is healing, why do do few people leave BDSM? To quote her: We do not lose our impulses by acting them out. We strengthen them.
Paganism has been characterized by the same ‘consent culture’ that allowed a pedophile to go unexamined and unstopped for decades. That requires some soul searching. The sooner the better.
Note: I want to thank
for putting up her post. The rabbit hole was worth it and I’m glad this is something Pagans are thinking about. We need more of that.If you’re curious about Paganism/Heathenism/Wicca/Druidry, please feel free to message me and I’ll be happy to answer questions.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.
Pagan Organizations
Sexual abuse destroys a person in every aspect (mental, physical, emotional, & spiritual) and takes years or decades to heal from. Sadly, it happens in every religion and often the perpetrator were abused.
You and I have different interpretations about what this means. I see it as further reason to repudiate sexual deviancy and sexual violence--in no way do the horrible experiences described reflect Pagan philosophy and doctrine in any way.
Now--it does describes some of the *leftists* who infect Paganism and bring their deviancy into it, but just as you'll find Pastors who try to twist scripture to suit their abuse you'll find people claiming to be Pagan and twisting things to do the same.
The issue is the manipulation and being able to distinguish monsters who creep into every society.
The horrific abuse is something our Pagan ancestors would have killed the perpetrators for. Look at any of the norms (beyond Rome and Greece when their civilizations were sinking under the weight of indefensible depravity) for Pagan society and it's easy to imagine how violently and swiftly such abuse would have been stopped, once known. Some Pagan cultures were far more sexual conservative than what we tend to see--in some Germanic tribes it was considered disgraceful for men *not* be virgins if they were younger than 20. In those societies, virginity of both sexes was prized, and girls were expected to be untouched until they were married.
I do not consider sexual predators to be representative of their religion unless their religion specifically permits their crimes (like Islam, which cannot be banished from the West too soon!).