Feraferia, a Love Culture for Wilderness

Feraferia promotes the love of nature, the "land-sky-love-body" of all wild. We take nature in the widest sense, to include ecology, physiology (human and non-human) and psychology.

Feraferia sees the Goddess as the most ancient deity of all humankind. To honor Her, we hope to serve the community of all life. At the same time, the unique deity we celebrate most is the young maiden Goddess, the laughing Girl Goddess, the Merrie Maiden - also known as Kore (pronounced kor-ee), from the ancient Greek. By her characteristic innocent grace, She allows for the freedom and joy of all.

Our basic spiritual goal is the awakening of a deeper identity with landscape as a conscious, living presence. Just as the body image of the human infant shapes up as a unity from a welter of sensations, so the earth's "body" and soul can be similarly "shaped up" to enlarge the identity of the human being with it, through systematic application of a series of Yoga-type techniques. We have many of these as part of our work. They are quite straightforward, like Hatha Yoga practices, and require only consistent, focused use to become effective.

Here is a foundational reference which explains the background to our approach, and is a principle source of our morality and ethics: Henry Bailey Stevens, The Recovery of Culture Harper, 1953. "Culture" here refers to both human-created ways and mores, and to cultivation, as in agriculture and especially horticulture.

Feraferia offers daily devotions and prayers, which relate to the moment of time right now, as marked by the stars and planets, and to the actual place, in the natural world where one is. We also hold communions of the more meditational kind. During these, we "travel" imaginatively to a given spot in a nearby forest, or in the higher mountains, agreed upon by all participants. We have all acquainted ourselves thoroughly with this place, with "every stick and stone of it", so we can meet there in spirit. Only, when we imagine the designated place during this Kore Communion, we also "dress the scene" with symbolic monuments. Then, in the course of the exercise, we imagine in great detail the Epiphany of The Goddess within the setting of that sanctified wilderness location. We also invoke there Her Consort, the God of the changing seasons (Vertumnus), and the faeries of wild nature, with whom we want to reopen spiritual communications.

For these communions we sit comfortably in semi-darkness, close our eyes and speak softly to each other so that we remain together. Or we may all keep stream of consciousness notes, which, upon cross reference, reveal, it seems, a continuing expression of the will of The Goddess, and the will of the arcane Nature Beings man has ignored or driven out of Earth's sphere - ALMOST.

After this passive, astral communion, comes more formal ceremony. On the full moon, we hold a structured ritual. These rituals are important to draw into the world of everyday possibilities those benign forces and influences that commercial materialism has driven away. At each of the Nine Royal Festivals (the Solstices and Equinoxes, the Cross-Quarters, and our inward-focused "Repose", mid-November) we perform our rituals. The liturgies vary according to the time of the year, for ours is a religion of Seasonal Feeling and Seasonal Response to Nature.

This system of Seasonal Festivals comprises a Mystery Religion in the sense that the core of meaning can never be explained with words, but must be actually experienced. Our Initiation, which is based on the Mysteries of ancient Eleusis, is profound, but is held rarely; if one feels called to know more about it, please contact us.

In our earlier Bulletins, "Korythalia" (the name refers to the young branch of a fruit tree; an early newsletter is pictured here), there are many examples of prayer, basic ritual, and the Festival Calendar in its traditional folklore form, which we follow from Robert Graves, author of "The White Goddess".

We celebrate the nine major Festivals each year; these include, besides prayer and ritual, much fun and merrymaking. However, the merry-making and feasting always has an ecological theme, determined by what is actually happening in the region of the celebration during that Season. This is our main focus: That humans as grand celebrants and lovers of nature must rejoin nature in full response to Her transcendent seasonal program of celebrational manifestations. We see this as one of the first teachings of the Goddess.

from Dancing With Gaia

Feraferia has the long term goal of developing of a series of paradisal wilderness areas, which will be both shrines, playgrounds, self-sufficient sustainable living places, and safe places for creatures of the wild, to live with wildness, wonder, magic, mirth and love!

From a piece by Fred Adams, Copyright Feraferia, Inc. 7/23/1968