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The focus of Heretic’s Heart was Margot’s experiences in the 60s. She was a freshman at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted there in 1965 in response to the University of California’s crackdown on student and faculty rights to meet and organize on political issues, specifically to enlist students as workers in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Campus protests and finally a sit-in at Sproul Hall, the Berkeley Administration Building, resulted in the largest mass arrest of students for political protests in the nation’s history. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Margot did not shy away from political activism. She embraced it, drawn to issues, feeling matters deeply to the point where she willingly went to jail for 90 days for her protests in FSM when she might have escaped her punishment. It was at this time that Margot began working as a volunteer journalist reporting on FSM for Pacifica Radio, KPFA, in Berkeley.

She followed up this experience by going to Mississippi the summer, after her freshman year, to work as a volunteer for the Democratic Freedom Party registering African Americans to vote. This was not a positive experience on many levels. There was discord between the volunteers and regular staff workers; little success in registering many voters; and finally, she found herself stranded with other volunteers on a lonesome country road where they were forced at gunpoint to abandon the one African American volunteer who was with them and who ultimately walked back to safety on his own. The experience left Margot shaken and she decided to return home to New York. She stopped en route in Little Rock, (where she had been born while her father was stationed there during the Second World War) to visit a family friend who lived in an all-white neighborhood and who shared with Margot her regret at the recent school desegregation in that city. This served to further underscore Margot’s sense of alienation in her own country.

At the core of Heretics Heart is the correspondence between Margot and a GI in Vietnam that took place after she returned to Berkeley. They wrote 200 pages of letters between the spring of 1967 to later that year when they finally met after he returned in October from a war he didn’t support but had had to fight in order to survive. He and Margot finally rendezvoused in San Francisco and spent several days together. However, the love affair did not last, and there is no record that they stayed in touch afterward although it came closest to the romantic stories of herself that she was always spinning in her mind.

After graduating from Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in political science, she chose to pursue a career in journalism and was accepted into the Master’s Program at Columbia University. But being part of the establishment did not end her political activism. She and a friend, as part of their studies, joined the Venceremos Brigade harvesting sugar in Cuba to support the Cuban revolution and to counter the crippling impact of the USA economic embargo against the country. Her stay ended when she was called back to her mother’s bedside in the final days of her battle with lung cancer. She died in 1970 at the age of 61.

Margot then went to Washington, D.C. during the Nixon years to serve as bureau chief for Pacifica radio. These were difficult times for her. She struggled with her weight and body issues and felt “I was way over my head in the strange land of Richard Nixon’s Washington. On the outside I tried to look reasonably ‘straight’ and presentable; I spoke softly and politely. On the inside I was raging.” She was awarded a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1972. It was at this time that Margot begin to explore the environmental movement, which ultimately engaged her in paganism.

Margot’s partner in life was John Gliedman whom she married in June of 1988 when she was 42. Like Margot, he was the child of a psychiatrist, very well educated with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They held a commitment ceremony in 1976. They were wed in a pagan ritual that took place on Martha’s Vineyard where Margot had loved family vacations with her parents as a child. “Their wedding was the first Pagan handfasting to be written up in the society pages of The New York Times.” Margot and John had one child, a son, Alexander Dylan Gliedman-Adler born in 1990.

In addition to Heretics Heart written in 1997, Margot wrote Drawing Down the Moon, the first edition published in 1979. It was her pattern to be drawn in very emotionally by a quote that led her deeper into study. It was the work of environmentalists and science writers John McPhee, Arthur Toynbee, and Lynn White Jr. that drew her into paganism.

Having grown up in a nonreligious home, Margot searched for a spiritual outlet. She had explored different churches and been enthralled by the Quakers and the ritual of the Catholics, but ultimately found the belief systems foreign and dogmatic. She felt a close affinity to the earth-centered worship of the pagan ceremonies which may have also reminded her of her early attraction to stories of the gods and goddesses that she and her friends wrote and acted plays about in primary school. These were empowering to Margot, “The fantasies enabled me to contact stronger parts of myself, to embolden my vision of myself. Besides, these experiences were filled with power, intensity, and even ecstasy that, on reflection, seem religious or spiritual.”[1] This opened to her a spiritual world that did not require a catechism of belief but instead allowed her to suspend rationalism and give herself over to something more akin to art, poetry and music.[2]

She was also drawn to paganism as the spiritual side of her feminism which rejected the hierarchy of monotheism seeing it as “imperialism in religion.”[3]

The second edition of Drawing Down the Moon was published in 1986, followed by Heretics Heart in 1997. Margot turned to vampires in later years and published Out for Blood in 2013, and Vampires Are Us:   Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side in 2014, just before her death. She presented her theories about vampires to the Second International Convocation in October, 2012 in Marosvásárhely, Romania where she was a keynote speaker. She compared America’s fascination with vampires in the 21st Century to that experienced in Great Britain at the close of the 19th Century with the publication of Count Dracula by Bram Stoker. [1] She theorized that our two cultures were similar in experiencing the end of empire and perhaps also sharing a view of ourselves as evil, sucking the blood from colonies in the case of the British and in our case sucking oil instead of blood through our powerful multinational corporations. [2]

It was her “unflinching honesty[1]” as a journalist and writer that most endeared her to her public [1] Starhawk. (2014, October 31). Samhain 14 Remembering Margot Adler. Retrieved from starhawk.org: http://starhawk.org/samhain-14-remembering-margot-adler/ [1] Wikipedia. (2009). Vampire Literature. Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_literature#Twentieth_century

[2] Vampires Are Us by Margot Adler,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BHYg6Ksf0w [1] “Moon,” p 16.

[2] The Julien Review as quoted in “Moon,” p. 20.

[3] James Breasted quoted in “Moon,” p. viii.