玛戈特·阿德勒

玛戈特·阿德勒（Margot Adler，1946年4月16日—2014年7月28日），是一名美国作家、新闻家、演讲家、现代巫术的女祭司。她曾经供职于美国公共广播电台。

2014年，她因子宫内膜癌死于纽约市的家中，享年68岁。

Margot Susanna Adler (April 16, 1946 – July 28, 2014) was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She worked as a correspondent for National Public Radio for 35 years, became bureau chief of the New York office, and could be heard frequently on nationally syndicated All Things Considered and Morning Edition on National Public Radio (NPR). A Wiccan high priestess, Adler wrote Drawing Down the Moon, a seminal work on neopaganism in America.

Early life

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, she was the only child of Dr. Kurt Adler, and the only grandchild of renowned psychologist Alfred Adler, a contemporary and associate of Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s in Vienna before the Second World War. She was also the only child of her mother Freyda Nacque Adler (née Pasternack) who was the daughter of uneducated immigrants, both of whom were dead by the time Margot was born. Freyda was charismatic--Margot likened her to Auntie Mame, beautiful, and a renowned political activist, and beloved mother to Margot. Both parents were Jewish although neither practiced the religion nor observed its religious holidays.

In her autobiographical account of growing up in the 1960s, Heretic's Heart, she branded herself, “an alien in America.” Her paternal grandfather had been a personal friend of Leon Trotsky’s. Trotsky was ruthlessly hunted and ultimately assassinated by Stalin and his henchmen. Her grandfather had brought his family to the United States to avoid persecution by Stalinist, anti-Trotsky factions in Austria. But he was unable to save his oldest daughter, Valentine, who was imprisoned in Russia. Albert Einstein, a friend of the family interceded on the Adlers’ behalf and learned that Valentine and her husband had died in a gulag in 1942.

Margot describes herself as “raised by left-wing parents,” a red diaper baby, in the height of the McCarthy era. Her father, like her grandfather, was a psychiatrist, who remained a cipher to Margot. He devoted his life’s work to analyzing his father’s theories of human psychology and drawing parallels to those of Karl Marx’s theories of economic socialism, although this work remained incomplete at the time of his death. Margot wrote, “The only thing that was beaten in my head was the Adlerian notion of ‘social interest,’ which, while never clearly defined in my youth, seemed to have something to do with being cooperative and merging your individual desires with the needs of society—rather like socialism”.

Margot grew up in Manhattan where she attended the liberal City and Country School in Greenwich Village, “my utopia, and the place that remained whole and intact and vibrant, even when my own family fell apart” . It was here that she fell in love with the stories of the gods and goddesses of myth that were later foundational in her decision to become a Wiccan priestess. There she also discovered her love of singing and performance which would influence her to go to the High School of Music & Art (later joined with the High School of Performing Arts to become the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts) in New York City.

It was her mother Freyda to whom she was closest and with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce. Her mother retained the family apartment on Manhattan’s West Side overlooking Central Park, which Margot inherited when it was still a rent-controlled apartment and which she and her husband subsequently purchased when the units became condominiums. Margot referred to the apartment as her bit of heaven on earth, high up on the western edge of Central Park with a view of the city. It came with all of the family mementos stored there since Margot’s childhood, including the letters that formed the basis of Heretic’s Heart.

Education

Adler received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York in 1970. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982.