Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Turning Point--being the first chapter in To Madness Near Akin: The Spiritual Autobiography of Aidan Anthony Kelly

On the evening of Saturday, September 11th, 1976, I was attending a meeting—at Lydia’s home in the Richmond district of San Francisco—of the local council of the Covenant of the Goddess, the national church for Witches that I, my dear friends Tom DeLong (who wrote under his Craft name of Gwydion Pendderwen) and Alison Harlow, and a great many other people had created the year before. We were rather jazzed about COG. Seventeen covens of at least half a dozen different Traditions had signed the Covenant on June 21, 1975, bringing the church into existence, and had elected an interim board, with Alison as First Officer. A year later, the first official national board had been elected by the full procedures laid out in the charter and by-laws. At this meeting, we were electing the first official board for the local council; Lydia was chosen as its First Officer. Finally, the business completed, about a dozen people went home, leaving the rest of us to socialize.

I was still 35 that evening; I am now almost 70. It was exactly halfway through my life, so far. The story of how I became fascinated, then involved, with Witchcraft during the years from 1955 to 1976 needs to be very detailed. I will save that for later.

Because I had promised to help Dick and Judy move the next morning, I had decided before I left home not to take the first drink that evening. Long experimentation had proven to me that if I did not take the first drink, I could not get drunk. However, while my right hand was gesticulating punctuation of whatever we were discussing, my left hand reached out, seized the wine jug, and poured me that first drink.

After a while people in twos and threes began disappearing into the bedrooms. I wanted intensely to join them, but I had not yet drunk enough to overwhelm my still very good-Catholic-boy inhibitions. I could not go in by myself, but could not decide which woman friend to invite to come with me. Finally I took the hand of one of our priestesses and entered the master bedroom with her. As soon as I stepped into the dim room, a beautiful woman (now well-known as a writer), with a triumphant “Aha!”, grabbed me with both hands, helped me remove my clothing as rapidly as possible, and pulled me into a bed.

Later on Gwydion was teasing me, saying that only a true Irishman would insist on carrying the wine jug with us as we wandered from room to room, talking about . . . Goddesses? Magic? I cannot remember now.

Later still, an exquisite young woman gave herself to me. We made love; we walked about with my arm holding her close to me, talking with everyone; we went back into the bedroom and made love again. You see, I was an alpha male back then, not rich or powerful, true, but famous enough as a writer and ringleader in that faith community and immensely attractive to women, although one effect of my Catholic upbringing was that, even into my thirties, I could not grasp just how attractive I was. My wife, Melinda, has looked at photos of me from that era and says simply, “You were hot.”

Perhaps I glimpsed what rock stars experience with “groupies.” Melinda, who worked for ten years in the entertainment business in Hollywood, has told me of respectable middle-class women who did not hesitate to jump into bed with an actor or musician, then were bewildered afterward about what had come over them. That “what” was atavistic instincts, buried in each of us, that once helped guarantee the survival of our species.

A Puritan, ill-advisedly reading this, would by now be thinking, “Those Witches really do have orgies!” No, that’s not what they were—at least, the pejorative overtones of that term are completely inaccurate—but there is no established name for such events. “Dionysian” comes closer. They happened only spontaneously, by inspiration, never by planning. They happened when the energy of a group reached such a peak that it exploded into joyous celebration. And they happened rarely—I can remember only a half dozen such occurrences during the decade before that night—even though we all knew they were among the most extraordinary spiritual experiences we had ever had. Witches often refer to that phenomenon simply as “the Mystery.”

Puritans will also generally find it impossible to believe that, let alone comprehend how, such an event could be spiritual at all, but the Witches I know do not believe that the flesh and the spirit are opposed, or that sex and religion are opposed. Many have come to the Craft movement specifically because they felt, as I did, that they had been abused by the community they grew up in. They too resented having been lied to, by being told that sex is evil, sinful, dangerous, immoral, and so on. Many of them instead believe now that sex is religious, that religion is inherently sexual. Those beliefs are in complete accord with the genuinely fundamental tenets of both Judaism and Christianity—but that is a topic I will explore later.

Many people these days do think it perfectly okay to have sex just for fun—if your mental health allows you to. The atmosphere of a swingers party is hedonistic and, as far as I have observed, guilt-free—but not spiritual at all. In contrast, the “Mystery” of the Witches is not pious, not reverent—it is far too wildly exuberant to be so serious—but afterward all who have partaken of it know they have been in touch with an aspect of divinity that most people never realize must exist.

So I do not regret the sacramental sexuality of that September evening. I cherish the memory of every woman whom I have been blessed and privileged to adore with my body, my mind, and my spirit. Even 35 years later I still have a tenuous but perceptible spiritual bond with that woman writer. I regret that I did not ask that other young woman her name. But what I deeply regret, the grievous sin I did commit, was that about 3:00 a.m. I drove six people, including Gwydion, home over the San Francisco Bay Bridge, in a car with no brakes, fading in and out of blackout. I don’t remember how I got us all home.


The next morning, sitting on a bench in Judy’s yard in San Anselmo, hung over, having had little sleep, listening to the bells of St. Anselm’s, thinking about the previous night, I realized that my decision to not take that first drink was still sitting there, rather like an IBM punch card behind my left ear. It had not been executed. I had not changed my mind, but I had gotten drunk anyway. Deciding to not take that drink no longer kept me from drinking. I had no control left over whether to drink or not. “My God,” I said, “I’m an alcoholic!” Then I wondered how I knew that.

I thought about the insanity of that drive home not many hours before. I must have a guardian angel who’s been doing double duty for me. I felt a presence to my right. Turning toward it, I saw my angel clearly, in my mind’s eye. He was tall, robed in white, had no wings, and was glaring at me. He said, in my mind, “All right, turkey. Now you know. You do that again, you’re on your own.” He slammed shut his attaché case and left. Having felt his presence, I now felt his absence. I was alone.

I got up, went to find Alta, told her what I had realized. She was not pleased. She had been trying to ignore the evidence. She knew that when I drank, I sometimes ended up in bed with another woman. She did not approve of that, but she understood it; she never threatened to divorce me over that. But she did not want to believe that I was indisputably an alcoholic. She had gotten herself to Overeaters Anonymous a few months before, and she and my stepdaughter had often been discussing the Twelve Steps in my hearing. I was not consciously paying attention to their discussions, or perhaps I was unconsciously trying to ignore them. But I had heard; that is why I knew.

Because Alta had a copy of the A.A. Big Book, I was able to read through it before going to my first meeting. When I came to the Fifth Chapter, to the Twelve Steps, I thought, “This is how you do it!” I came to the Third Step: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our Higher Power.” At that moment I made the decision to do that; I knew that was what I would need to do; but I had no idea how to do it. Turning my will over to God seemed about as impossible as picking myself up by the hair and holding myself out at arm’s length. Looking at the rest of the Steps, I thought, “Perhaps these are the process that enables you do that.” As I later learned, that was not a bad guess.

On the evening of September 12th, 1976, I attended my first A.A. meeting, at the Island Fellowship on Lincoln Avenue in Alameda, California. I had trepidations. I had no clear idea of what I might be facing. Perhaps I would have to swear allegiance to 39 incomprehensible articles of faith, paint myself blue, and dance on the tables. That made no difference. Whatever it was, I had to do it, because the alternative was to die. There’s an A.A. saying: “There’s nothing like the threat of death to make a man reasonable.” It was a great relief to discover that all I had to do was sit at a table, tell the truth about myself, and listen to others telling the truth about themselves. Not that discovering such truth is easy or simple.

Thus I added a daily A.A. meeting to my schedule of freelancing as a book editor and continuing with my doctoral program, now beginning its fourth year. I explained what I was now doing to all those in my life who deserved to know: Wayne Rood, my mentor and best friend at the Graduate Theological Union; Bruce Armbruster, since I was editing science texts and monographs for his new company; Sarah.

“What happened to you?” she asked at Kirby Cove, where we were performing our annual commemoration of the Eleusinian Mysteries at the fall equinox.

“I got sober,” I told her.

She was more than disappointed. That was at least the third time I had walked away from her.

I also told Elaine Feigenbaum, the new Managing Editor whom the German owners of Scientific American had recently sent to take over the editing at W.H. Freeman and Company, its book-publishing subsidiary. She didn’t deserve to know, but I was being thorough.


After I had graduated with my M.A. in Poetry from San Francisco State in June of 1968, I went to John Gildersleeve, then the Managing Editor at Freeman, for whom I had done some freelance editing, and asked if he had an opening for me.

“Ordinarily I wouldn’t,” he said, “but there is a possibility.”

So, because Elmarie Hutchinson had asked if she could freelance instead of being on staff, John hired me to fill her position. For the next five years, it was the almost perfect job. For me it was relatively easy and stress-free. Not only was I good at it, but I also worked with some of the most brilliant scientists in the world, some of whom, like Fred Hoyle, had been my heroes during my teens. It also left me ample time and energy to work on our creating of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn—but I’ll come back to that.

In early 1973, just after my oldest daughter, Maeve Adair, was born (on January 12), Alta asked me if I had thought any more about going back to school to get my Ph.D. Sitting at a traffic light in Berkeley, I made the decision to do so at that instant. Maeve’s birth had forced me to grow up a little more; it was now or never. I also knew from talking with friends that at the Graduate Theological Union I would be able to design my own doctoral program, instead of being forced to study what someone else thought I should be interested in.

But I needed letters of recommendation, and almost every teacher I’d worked with had passed on, moved on, or become otherwise unreachable. Wondering what to do, I remembered the advice I’d given to Elmarie a year or so earlier. Having rejoined the staff, she had decided she needed to go earn her Ph.D. in genetics. (Publishing is one of the very few industries in which having a Ph.D. is considered an advantage rather than a disability.) But she too had lost touch with previous teachers and was wondering what to do.

“Elly,” I said, “you’ve only been working with some of the greatest geneticists in the world. Ask them. They know what your abilities are.”

“Oh,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever have considered imposing on them.”

“I don’t think they’ll consider it an imposition,” I said.

And they didn’t. The Freeman authors were generally very grateful for our work on their behalf. She asked; they wrote; she later received her Ph.D. from the University of California.

Now I needed to take my own advice. The major barrier I was facing was that the GTU worked in cooperation with the University of California, to which I needed to be admitted as a graduate student. And so it came to pass that my application included letters of recommendation from John Archibald Wheeler, then the world’s greatest expert on the mathematics of relativity; Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer and science-fiction author; and James Schevill, whom I had studied with at SF State (Wayne was later much impressed by my having the letter from Schevill, whom he considered to be one of the greatest religious dramatists of the century). The application also mentioned my GRE score of 1560. (I’ll explain later why that score resulted in good part from my being an Army brat.) Soon after I had mailed all that, I received a phone call, at 10:00 p.m., from a UC administrator, saying essentially, “You’re in! You’re in!” I did feel very smug about that.

During the last half of 1973, I studied a Greek textbook for about an hour a day, on the commuter bus from Oakland to San Francisco and back. As a result, when I began my program at the GTU in January of 1974, I could already read the New Testament in its original language, as well as the Septuagint. A translation is always someone’s opinion about what the original meant.

I resigned from Freeman at the end of 1973. Richard Warrington, then the President, was quite supportive. He commented that for the very talented people who were good editors, working there was merely a way station. I took the $5000 I had accrued in my retirement fund and prepaid for my entire doctoral program. (Those 1974 dollars were equivalent to about $50,000 now in buying power.)

Just before I began my program, Mary Hogue, a secretary at Freeman and the divorced wife of Harlan Hogue, who was somehow still a professor at the Episcopalian seminary within the GTU, recommended that I immediately look up her old friend, Wayne Rood. I did find him in a hallway on the first day of classes, gave him Mary’s regards—he was glad to hear about her—and asked if I could please enroll in his seminar on creativity. “Well, it’s already too full, but come on,” he said.

There were 16 people in the seminar—a huge class for that graduate program—and a very varied crowd they were. There was Jim Gauer, an ex-Jesuit who had done undercover labor union organizing in South Korea and who went down to Hollywood to edit a film whenever he ran out of money. Kent Nerburn was a sculptor who could articulate the creative process of his work. I wish I could remember all the details of the lives that were shared. The discussions were wide-ranging and intriguing. By the end of the quarter I had asked Wayne if he would be the chair of my doctoral committee. He accepted and said, “As your political commissar, my job is now to make sure you get your degree.” The GTU, staffed almost entirely by ordained ministers, operated with rules far more ethical and compassionate than the rules at many other schools.

At the end of the quarter, the seminar went for a weekend retreat at a campground in Marin County. On the first evening, after the Roods had gone off to their cabin and the rest of us were sitting before the fireplace in the lodge’s main hall, in the midst of the conversation, one of the others said to me, quite hesitantly, “Aidan, do you know there are rumors going around the school that you’re involved with witchcraft?”

I thought for a moment, then said, “Well, the reason for the rumors is that they’re essentially true.”

There was a silence. Someone asked, “So, what are you into? Dark forces?”

“No,” I said. “Goddess worship.”

The group erupted into laughter, and Kent said, “Heck, I worship a goddess myself.”

Phil Mullins, who would become a philosophy professor, hunkered down into the couch, chewed on his pipe, and said, “People are so damned interesting.”

Much conversation followed, with me giving an overview of the history, theology, and practices of Gardnerian Witchcraft. They were fascinated, but they offered to not mention any of it to Wayne. Although we all loved and trusted him already, no one was sure just how he might take it.


Wayne was an amazing man in many ways. He was raised as a Seventh-Day Baptist, a tiny dissenting sect from England, with one seminary, in West Virginia. He earned his doctorate in historical theology, but little theater was his avocational passion; when he got tired of the traditional lecturing format, he began using theater as a vehicle for teaching theology. I composed and helped perform incidental music for performances of Auden’s For the Time Being in late 1976.

During a course on, essentially, educational psychology and pastoral counseling, Wayne told us his autobiography, explaining that, at graduate level, students must understand who the teacher is in order to understand why the subject matter of the course is important to him. He told us of the day when, walking down along Strawberry Creek on the University of California campus, he realized that he needed to become a minister, which he proceeded to do. He told us of the day when bodies began washing up on the seashore by his church in Connecticut, and he realized he needed to volunteer to serve as a chaplain. He told us much about serving for forty months, with no vacations, as a chaplain for a beachhead battalion in the south Pacific (they go in the night before, in order to hold down a beach for the Marines to land on in the morning). When he joined his unit, it had 15,000 men; by the end of the war, it had 300. His unit was scheduled to be among the first to begin the invasion of the main island; Wayne knew he would not have lived through that. But instead, because of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his was the second unit to begin the occupation.

There are no standard names for what I felt at that moment. Wayne, one of the most admirable human beings I have ever known, this good man, who had touched and improved the lives of thousands of students, was alive because of that appalling evil—perhaps Hiroshima saved more lives than it took, but Nagasaki was pure evil. He commented that he had turned his life over to God early in the war, and when he returned home, he had never bothered to take it back. So when I first saw the Third Step, that decision to turn one’s life over to God, I knew that it could be done.


From 1974 to 1976, I freelanced almost fulltime for Freeman. But then, in late 1976, when Gunder Hefta, my good friend from the poetry program at San Francisco State, who had become Managing Editor after John retired, decided to move on, the Germans sent Elaine (we have completed that loop), with orders to cut loose all those uppity editors with ridiculously high standards whom John had hired. Another editor, Michelle Liapes, who had been a year ahead of me at Tamalpais High, filled me in on the in-house machinations. Nevertheless, I found myself with no cash flow by the end of the year.

However, my good friend Peter Beren, whom I had met through the brilliant clairvoyant reader Helen Palmer, who had connected with Alta and me at the Berkeley Psychic Society, had earlier that year been offered a position as Managing Editor at And/Or Press, a new publishing company in the East Bay, on the condition that he get some hands-on training in copy editing. He asked if I could help him; so I had him work with me on editing some science monographs, until he felt confident that he knew enough to supervise the copy editors. He then accepted the position.

Now I went to him, told him what had happened at Freeman, and asked if perhaps he might have some work for me. Yes, he did.

And/Or was a rather odd company. It had been put together by half a dozen Jewish ex-dope dealers who needed something legal and interesting to do with their money. They would put out many reference books dealing with psychedelics, as well as radical politics, holistic health, and many “fringe” topics. Their authors included Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Jacques Vallee, Ernest Callenbach, among others. I co-authored about half a dozen books for them during the twenty years that I worked with them on and off.

The project that Peter needed help with was indeed a mess. The beginning of the book was already in page proofs, the end hadn’t been written yet, and everything in between was at every stage of the publishing process. Could I possibly get it straightened out?

Looking it over, I saw that I could. It was essentially an agricultural textbook; I had handled several of those for Freeman. With a great deal of hard work by many people during the following months, the book was published and became a huge success. The irony is that, starting at three months sober, I thus helped create the Marijuana Growers Guide. It was given rave reviews, as an agricultural textbook, by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the High Times. It was used as the handbook for most of the marijuana grown in the USA for the last 35 years. It is still listed on Amazon.com, with my name prominently displayed as its editor. I have wondered just how much bad karma I thus accumulated.

Getting sober—more accurately, getting comfortable with being dry—was not easy. It never is, for anyone. I have not had an alcoholic drink since September 12th, 1976, but I had to totally restructure my life and my beliefs in order to persevere in that. My initial problem was that I was the only sober Pagan around. I had no idea how to use the Craft to work the Twelve Steps, and there was no one, in the Craft or outside it, who could give me any advice. I had the First Step down; I admitted with no reservations that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable. But the Second Step? Came to believe? I then had no beliefs that were of any use for working the Steps. I understood that the program, that recovery, depended on rigorous honesty. It was not only useless but probably harmful to pretend to believe something that I in fact did not believe. So what did I do? I went to a meeting every day, and complained every time I spoke about how painful life was.

I had disengaged greatly from the NROOGD in late 1973, in order to free up time for my doctoral studies. Now I had to disengage even more. After the athame had been dipped into the chalice, which was then passed around the circle—those had been the most frequent occasions on which I had taken the first drink, and it was difficult to be in circle and yet not drink. On October 29, 1976 (according to the records that I have kept), Sarah was going to take her Garter as High Priestess of the Moebius Strip coven, and she begged me to come to the ritual. I was sorely tempted, but I knew it would be a rather high-energy evening, and Alta convinced me that I would in fact be risking my still very fragile sobriety. I apologized to Sarah, I declined, and I tried to explain. She could not understand my reasons and was furious with me. Fortunately, she was never able to stay angry at me for very long.

I began going to A.A. meetings up in the hills of the East Bay, in the wealthier neighborhoods, where the members did not think I was showing off if I mentioned my graduate studies or that I had read a book. One evening in January, after the meeting, Paul came over to me and said, “Aidan, you’re a lot like Samson. You’re going to kill yourself with the jawbone of an ass if you don’t learn to shut up at meetings and listen. You’re spending your time thinking up what to say when your turn comes, instead of hearing what everyone is saying. Do you have a sponsor?”

“Yes, Art N.”

“I don’t like the way Art sponsors. He’s too laidback. He’s not going to give you the kind of guidance you need.”

Paul went on at great length. When I got home, I thought about what he had said. I knew Paul was smarter than me; that was essential. I knew I could not lie to him, by omission, commission, or putting a spin on anything. He was half Icelandic, half Native American, Jesuit educated, and one of the best Oriental art dealers in America. I called him up and asked him to be my sponsor.

“Good,” he said. “I was hoping you would ask. Now that I’m running your life, this is what you’re going to do. At meetings, you will say, ‘I’m Aidan, I’m an alcoholic, and I pass.’ I want you to listen. I’ll let you know when I think you might be ready to talk. And if I ever hear that you’ve talked at a meeting I wasn’t at, I’ll come over and knock you through the wall. You know that’s not how A.A. works, but that’s what you need, and if you don’t like it, you can fire me.”

I knew it would be stupid to ignore the advice of a man with twenty years sobriety who obviously cared a great deal about me; so I began following his instructions. And I did learn more by just listening.

By March 1977, I could not stand the stress of circling but not drinking any longer and dropped my Craft activities entirely. Alta had resigned from our coven, Eurynome, in December and turned it over to Judy. For the next six months I went to A.A. meetings without any outside source of spiritual strength. It was as dry as living on a diet of sand.

After I had been silenced for six months, Paul gave me permission to speak at a meeting one night. Afterward he came over to me and said, “Aidan, you’re still not getting it. You haven’t connected with the heart of the program. You’re going to die drunk. You have nothing to prevent that.” And so on. His intensity frightened me. I did not doubt that he knew something I could not yet comprehend.

When I got home, I used a trick I had read about. I kicked my shoes under the bed, got down on my knees to pull them out, and while I was down there, prayed. It was a simple prayer, but one I meant: “God, please help me. I don’t want to die drunk.”

And while I was on my knees, it occurred to me that it was now nine months during which I had not taken that first drink. I knew I had no more power to avoid that drink than I had had on September 12. Somehow the impossible had in fact happened. Somehow what I could not do for myself had been done for me. One plausible explanation for this utterly improbable fact was that there was Somebody Up There (or in some direction) who did indeed care enough to do the impossible for me. And this was my story. This had happened to me. Everything else, the Gospels, every other scripture, was someone else’s story—but this was mine, my version of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum: I have not drunk; therefore I am alive; therefore God (or a reasonable approximation thereto) must exist. I had already had to totally rethink the philosophical bases for my life many times—and this time would need to be even more total than ever before.

I had not arrived at any firm decisions or conclusions before September. As my first A.A. birthday approached, Alta and I began discussing what religion we might try to raise Maeve in, now that we were no longer practicing the Craft. (Wayne told me that, since she was almost five, her religious proclivities were already firmly in place.) I suggested to Alta that we might try going to Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes, down by the lake. I had heard that the liturgy was very different from what it had been back in the 1950s. Alta thought that was worth a try.

So, on Sunday morning, September 12th, 1977—which was also Alta’s 43rd birthday—we sat down in a pew in that church. For the opening hymn, I found myself singing “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee,” an English version of Freude, schöner Gotterfunken, the chorale in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—and I began weeping. (I’ll explain later why that chorale has special significance for me.) The Cantor (that’s what he was in that particular church) led the congregation in amazing new hymns and prayers. Before the Nicene Creed, he remarked, “If the theologians can sing our songs, then we can pray their prayers.”

I was thinking, “So, the Reformation has finally caught up with the Church—or vice versa.” I had passed my doctoral comprehensive examination in New Testament Studies in the middle of 1976. I was trained as a Roman Catholic theologian—although, oddly enough, most of the training had been carried out by Protestant ministers. I didn’t think there could be a vast number of people in the world who knew even more about Christian history, theology, etc., than I did—but I knew that for me, all that learning was just intellectual information.

That was one factor in what happened next. The other was Monsignor Clogher, perhaps the least likely vessel for the Holy Spirit that I have ever seen. I got the impression that he said this English Mass, in his thick Irish brogue, because Rome said he had to—but he didn’t have to like it.

At the end of the Mass, Monsignor was making announcements.

I was a mess. I had been crying almost uncontrollably during most of the Mass and did not have even a Kleenex with me.

Monsignor was encouraging the congregation to bring more family and friends to church.

I was thinking, “Can I do this? Could I come back to this church, with all I think I know about it? Is there room in the church for someone like me?”

Monsignor waved his arms at the empty pews, looked straight at me, and said, “There is room in the church for all who wish to come.”

The impact of his words was almost like a physical blow. That wording had little to do with what he was announcing. I could not doubt that those words had been addressed to me. I had never known or believed that a message could be delivered so forcefully and clearly, in plain sight, with no one else aware of what had happened.

As we walked out of the church, me with my nose running, Alta looked at me and said, “Kelly, you had better make your peace with the church.”

I nodded. “Yes, I think I must.”