Adam Anczyk
Jesuit University Ignatianum in Kraków
No Sympathy for the Devil?: Isaac Bonewits’s Satanic Adventure
and Other Stories from the Life of a Reformed Druid
Born in Royal Oak, Michigan („The perfect place – as he liked to joke – for a future Archdruid”), Isaac
Bonewits (1949-2010) was one of the prominent figures in the history of contemporary Druidry.
Bonewits was himself much more interested in religions than his peers at an early age (e.g. he attained
a Catholic high school, which he soon left). In 1966, aged seventeen, he enrolled in the University of
California, where he became a member of the Church of Satan for about eight months. Bonewits spoke
of this episode in his life as of an adventure of an immature teenager, searching for his place among
the alternative spiritualities, and he also became very keen on investigating psychomanipulative
character of some groups (which led to framing the Advanced Bonewits’ Cult Danger Evaluation
Frame, 1979). In 1969 he became a Reformed Druid, and in 1983 he founded Ár nDraíocht Féin
(registered 1990), the largest Neo-Pagan Druidry group in the USA up to date. During the presentation,
I will discuss selected biographical data of this Pagan leader, being an exemplification of a (rocky)
road of becoming a follower of a given new religious movement, so in psychological terms – a history
of both conversion and deconversion.
No Sympathy for the Devil?: Isaac Bonewits’s Satanic Adventure and Other Stories from the Life of a Reformed Druid
Born in Royal Oak, Michigan („The perfect place – as he liked to joke – for a future Archdruid”), Isaac Bonewits (1949-2010) was one of the prominent figures in the history of contemporary Druidry. Bonewits was himself much more interested in religions than his peers at an early age (e.g. he attained a Catholic high school, which he soon left). In 1966, aged seventeen, he enrolled in the University of California, where he became a member of the Church of Satan for about eight months. Bonewits spoke of this episode in his life as of an adventure of an immature teenager, searching for his place among the alternative spiritualities, and he also became very keen on investigating psychomanipulative character of some groups (which led to framing the Advanced Bonewits’ Cult Danger Evaluation Frame, 1979). In 1969 he became a Reformed Druid, and in 1983 he founded Ár nDraíocht Féin (registered 1990), the largest Neo-Pagan Druidry group in the USA up to date. During the presentation, I will discuss selected biographical data of this Pagan leader, being an exemplification of a (rocky) road of becoming a follower of a given new religious movement, so in psychological terms – a history of both conversion and deconversion.