I learned today of the passing on August 9 of Frederick McLaren Adams, co-founder of the Southern California Pagan group Feraferia in the 1960s.

(Right: Fred and Svetlana Adams at a Feraferia ritual during the late 1960s.)

Although later cross-fertilized by Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite, Feraferia (“wilderness festival”) was a unique creation, with its roots in ancient Greek religion, in Adams’ own visionary experiences of the gods, in the writings of Robert Graves, and also in the California “Nature Boys” tradition, of which I plan to write more later.

(Right, Fred Adams in about 2005.)

I have a framed front page of the Autumn 1968 issue of the Feraferia journal hanging over my computer desk. Its subtitle reads “The Charisma of Wilderness, Seasonal Celebration, Visionary Ecology.” Forty years ago — before most Pagans were even using the term “nature religion.”

(Photos courtesy of Harold Moss.)