1. I understand you made a new film called "Dancing With Gaia." Can you tell us what it is about?
My feature documentary film, "Dancing With Gaia" is about connecting to earth energy, sacred sexuality and the goddess as Gaia. It shows ways to experience this connection with Earth and wild nature directly, as part of your own body. By moving earth energy currents up through us, sexuality can be a way to consciously experience the life force of the Earth.
2. I understand you're President of Feraferia now. What is Feraferia?
Feraferia is many things - a religion, a way of life, a philosophy, and a kind of magic. It's nature magic.
The name means celebration of wildness, and it's based on the Latin word roots. Feraferia is a faery faith, which means that the images and feeling tones of faery inform our whole way of how we want to live on earth.
Earth is seen as a vast land-sky-love body, and we are dancing on it and with it, all the time. Feraferia is a real religion, but it is so different from the type that is about hierarchies and power figures. It is about recognizing the sacred joy within, and the paradise all around us in wild nature.
Feraferia has a series of 9 seasonal celebrations of the sacred points of the year, which are called "The 9 Royal Passions".
The year is seen as a continual courtship between Moon and Sun. For example, on May Day, in the middle of Spring, Moon and Sun become engaged. At this time flowers are in full bloom.
Members of Feraferia are spread here and there across America and even in Amsterdam.
3. Where did Fred get his ideas?
Fred had many visions and direct inspirations of his own. He often wrote of them in the margins of the books he was reading, as well as his own writings. Fred was a vast reader and a student of the classics of antiquity. He felt especially drawn to the Elusinian Mysteries of the Mother and the Daughter, Demeter and Persephone. He always said those rites were the main rootstock of Feraferia. The astonishing thing about the religion of Eleusis was that it lasted for about 2000 years, yet no one ever revealed the essential nature of the experience the initiates had. Some said that it could not be revealed, because it was beyond words - it was described as ineffable. Fred studied ethnology from around the world, as well, and kept up a correspondence with many other interesting people, such as Robert Graves, author of "The White Goddess", and Tim Leary. There is a list I am compiling of the essential books of Feraferia - the ones that are most important to the Feraferian vision - and we'll list on the website soon.
4. What kinds of things did the Hesperides Fellowship and Feraferia do in the early days?
The groundstar ritual, described in DWG in the extra interviews, which is about doing a faerie trance in wilderness and later inviting the same spirits into your home temple, with ways to exchange connections between the two.
The Fruit Squash by the river; buying truckload of overripe summer fruit and squishing it all over each other while celebrating the summer climax of the season
Building a wilderness altar in the San Gabriel mountains nearby to where they lived, mostly in Sierra Madre Canyon area, and Pasadena, near there, and tending the altar, getting to know the local fay and land spirits in that one area really well.
5. Is there any way some of our listeners could experience Feraferia now?
The big news is that we will be doing a Feraferian ritual for Oimelc at PantheaCon - We will dance forth the Goddess from the Underworld, and entrance the local Fay (faerie) mostly from the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains and the San Francisco Wetlands and Bay, but also from the distant galaxies, to join us in the world between the worlds for a time of magic and revelry!
6. How did you come to make Dancing With Gaia? I knew Fred from the early '70's and in 1989 I saw his health starting to decline; I wanted his magic and teaching preserved for more people, so I started to do video interviews with him; then he pushed me to go interview more people, mostly women, and to travel to so many of the ancient sacred sites of Britain and the Mediterranian; so I did that, and that's how it got started.
7. Did you have profound experiences at the sacred sites?
Mnaijdra, described in DWG and in Leila Castle's book, "Earthwalking Skydancers: Womens Pilgrimages to Sacred Places", was a profound experience of connection with people who worshiped there over 5000 years ago.
And in the ruins of a very ancient temple to Demeter and Persephone in Western Turkey, where I had a chance to meditate and vizualize how it was used and how it felt, about 3,300 years ago. It was the first temple built in the area, and served to anchor the city built around it on the hill. One of the rare temples we still have to honor the Mother/Daughter relationship.
8. What were some highlights of your journey as you made this film?
Magical things, like getting to film alone inside New Grange with almost zero prior notice; having a photo of statues of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmetin the London Museum come back from processing with amazing halos around her head; no windows or direct lighting there, no visible source for such a phenomena. Getting lost in the countryside of Greece while searching for a Goddess temple and having strangers who spoke only Greek go way out of their way to help me find a way back.
9. Who were some of the amazing/phenomenal people you met while shooting the film?
15 visionaries, including of course Fred Adams, and also artist Monica Sjoo, teacher Francesca De Grandis, artist & poet Jill Smith, geomancer Richard Feather Anderson, teacher Serena Roney-Dougal Ph D, teacher and priestess Cerridwen Fallingstar, priestess Kathy Jones, geomancer Alex Champion and author Joan Marler. They are all people who have a following of their own, and they are all charismatic in some ways. I found the writer and artist Monica Sjoo almost frightening, she was so powerful in her feminist righteousness, but she revealed some of the most amazing mysteries of Wales to me, like up at Pentre Ifan. Pentre Ifan is a Neolithic dolmen which was called the "womb of Cerridwen", a place from which initiates could pass into the otherworld, or at least into a dark chamber within the dolmen. Faery folk could be seen dancing around the stones. I have video of Monica meditating in the dolmen in DWG, with the rain coming down around us. It was a magical moment. And Monica felt like an unstoppable force, herself. But sadly, she passed away in 2005.
10. I understand you created a freestanding Feraferia Library, and aren't you writing a book too?
We have built a small, freestanding library for Fred's' collection of esoteric, spiritual and books. Our hope is that eventually members of Feraferia can visit to do research, and be inspired to have the same passionate love for earth that Fred and Svetlana had when they created this beautiful approach to living.
We are also working on The Book of Feraferia now which is about 600 pages long. It contains all the essential rites and writings of Feraferia. We will put pieces from it on the website as we can, and when the book is printed up, it will be available there; but we are still working on the website now.
We have another website which Phaedrus, or Peter Tromp, our member in Amsterdam, runs. It is:
1) A brief bio: I grew up in the late 60's, a time famous for its ideas of love, peace, and interest in the exotic. I was first drawn to astrology and Magick when I was just 17. I have since followed pagan lines of thought and living for over 40 years, starting with the Order of the Temple of Astarte, then Feraferia, and in the Bay area, with Reclaiming-style approaches. I graduated from the UCLA Film School with a BA and MFA in Film Production. I worked for 25 years in the film industry as a cameraperson. My camera work may be seen in Tim Burtons' Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and on various installments of The Matrix, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Star Trek. In addition to Dancing With Gaia, my directing work includes two documentaries, Feraferia - A Dance for the Goddess, and the award winning short, "Himalayan Pilgrimage.