Sharing Water
(1961–1965)
Then two college boys thought it would be a joy
To try and start livin’ like Martians in their dorm. (In their dorm!)
So they shared a glass of water and they did what they oughter,
And the Galloping Garrulous Grok-Flock was born!
—from “the galloping garrulous grok-flock”
by adam walks-between-worlds
NARRATOR: Tim Zell’s freshman year began at Westminster College, a small school in Fulton, Missouri, in 1961. Westminster was a men’s college, and there was a woman’s college across town called William Woods. He chose it because he intended to become a surgeon, and the school was well known for its pre-med program.
John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president in 1961. Unlike his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK was young, charismatic, and had a beautiful and charming wife. Eisenhower had been an army general in World War II and, during the eight years of his presidency, kept his strict military attitude and maintained the national status quo. At his inauguration, Kennedy declared a “New Frontier” and began working to create positive changes.
This was also a time when the first Baby Boomers began to mature and, inspired by President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, get involved in politics and social issues like the civil rights and free speech movements. Liberal college students graduated from rock and roll to folk and protest music, and were soon singing along to songs like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” And, following the example of the Beat poets and their interest in Buddhism, they began to explore Eastern religions and other alternative forms of spirituality.
Tim Zell’s mystic path would soon take him in a direction much different from even his liberal peers—as usual, he was following his own muse. His life was about to be changed by a friend he would meet and the science-fiction novel they would both read.
OZ: So I started college in the fall of 1961—the dawning year of what would eventually become known as the “Psychedelic Psixties.” At Westminster, the first-year students stayed in dormitories, but for your second year you had to live somewhere else, so I decided to join a fraternity. The first weeks I was there, they had the pledge parties. Nobody had explained the concept of the college fraternity thing to me, and, as was so often the case, I didn’t quite get it.
NARRATOR: To get an idea of what the frat scene was like back then, check out the movie Animal House, which is set in the same period of time that Tim was beginning his undergrad studies and pledging a fraternity.
OZ: I didn’t understand that the purpose of the fraternities was to make connections with people who could help you in your future career. Eventually I accepted a membership in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, which was, as it turned out, the lowest one on the social scale. Social status was something I’ve always been pretty oblivious to . . . even to this day.
And at the very beginning of all this I met Lance Christie.
LANCE CHRISTIE: I ran into Tim Zell during the pledge week. We were in the anteroom of one of the fraternities. One or the other of us, I don’t remember which, made some sort of wisecrack about the strange customs of the natives. The other one of us responded, “Ah! Somebody else who has the same view of things that I do.” Later on he told me that I was the first person he had ever met who seemed to be a member of the same species that he was. We discussed the whichness of what, and we were excited about all the information that we were coming across. We realized that there was a gigantic, wonderful picture puzzle out there that could be put together, that formed a road map to how to build a hopeful and enlightened future. Every time we came across another piece that seemed to fit into the puzzle, or at least told us where to look for the next piece, we would recognize it and be all excited about it. It was very emotional—this stuff was coming from the heart. It wasn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise.
From reading science-fiction authors such as Olaf Stapledon and Arthur C. Clarke, we had acquired the concept of the human race evolving. And there being subgroups within the race that were actually different subspecies. We concluded that we were members of a different subspecies than the mass of people. Of course in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described these people as being the innovators, the creative thinkers that the majority of people will then attack because they are different, and they feel threatened by these people operating outside the bounds of safe conventionality. We obviously could identify with that.
OZ: In college I was like a kid in a candy store. I signed up for everything I could—I took the maximum number of hours I was allowed, and continued doing so every year. The first year I took all the pre-med classes, statistics, etc., and I encountered the psychology department. There hadn’t been anything like that in high school. I was fascinated by this brand-new field with lots to study.
The head of the psych department, Gale Fuller, was interested in the transpersonal psychology movement of Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, and Eric Fromm, which was still quite new. The concept of the self-actualizing person, to me, played right into the idea of the next step in human evolution. That was a strong part of the science-fiction vision that I had been exploring. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on at that time. Gale Fuller was a very impressive mentor. He was brilliant, insightful, funny, and wise, and it was his influence that really inspired me to shift my major from pre-med to psychology, sociology, and anthropology. My folks never quite understood. They had envisioned having a son who was a successful brain surgeon, and they didn’t get it that my destiny lay along a different path.
That fall the October selection of the Science Fiction Book Club was a new book by Robert Heinlein called Stranger in a Strange Land. Lance was a subscriber, and he got the book. He took it home and read it over Christmas vacation. When he got back, he handed it to me and said, “You have got to read this!” So I did. There was an incredible sense of recognition—here was someone who understood us and was talking to us. And the ideas that he was putting forth were all ones that we resonated with on so many levels.
Having been an avid reader of Heinlein’s juveniles all through high school, I was really ready for Stranger in a Strange Land. As the protagonists in his previous works had all been about my age progressively, so it was with the newest one: Valentine Michael Smith—as an infant, the sole survivor of the first attempted manned expedition to Mars, which crashed upon landing. The baby is rescued and raised by native Martians, in their ancient and wise culture—with no idea of his human heritage. Twenty-five years later, a second expedition succeeds in reaching Mars intact, and brings Michael back to a home world he’s never known . . . with his Martian-trained mental abilities and alien cultural perspective. In the novel, Michael establishes the “Church of All Worlds,” built around “nests”—a fusion of congregation, group marriage, and intentional community. A key concept is grokking (literally, “drinking”)—i.e., the ability to be fully empathic. Thus the sharing of water is the most profound act of communion between two people—or a group.
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land introduced us to the ideas of immanent divinity (“thou art God”), pantheism (“all that groks is God”), sacraments (water sharing), Priestesses, social and ritual nakedness, intimate extended families as a basis for community, and, of course, open, loving relationships without jealousy and joyous expression of sexuality as divine union. By defining love as “that condition wherein another person’s happiness is essential to your own,” Stranger in a Strange Land changed forever the parameters of our relationships with each other—especially in the sexual arena. And all of this in the context of a legal religious organization—a “church”—that could have all the rights and privileges granted to the mighty Church of Rome! This was heady stuff, and we drank it up.
LANCE CHRISTIE: We talked a lot about the possibilities that were available to human beings to take a different path, in respect to the way society was put together and the premises on which it was founded. That’s where Stranger had such a powerful effect. Heinlein constellated the idea of trying to work out and install a different set of cultural premises, to develop an alternative human civilization based on more enlightened concepts about human beings—their relationships to each other, their relationships to the natural world, and the purpose and conduct of life, what constitutes right livelihood, what constitutes right action, and so on.
OZ: In Stranger, sharing water and saying, “Water shared is life shared,” is the fundamental ritual of the book. So on April 7, 1962, Lance and I sat down in a field, shared water, and became water-brothers, dedicating ourselves to creating a life based on the principles that were in this book—and to trying to actualize them and manifest them into reality. That was essentially the founding event of what eventually became the Church of All Worlds—as well as the Association for the Tree of Life.
When our girlfriends (and future wives) returned from spring break, we turned them on to Stranger and shared water with them, too. That was on May 25. And so it began . . .
NARRATOR: Using the results of psychology-department personality tests, Tim and Lance were able to find other like-minded students, turn them on to Stranger in a Strange Land, and form a “water-brotherhood.” They called it Atl, which is the Aztec word for “water”—with the esoteric meaning of “original home of our ancestors.”
LANCE CHRISTIE: The name Atl was chosen because it appears in Atlantis, the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa, and the Atlantic Ocean, all of which derived from the Greek mythological Titan Atlas, who carried the heavens on his shoulders.
OZ: Eventually Atl grew to about a hundred people, many of whom had grown up in different religions. We had come from Episcopalian, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, Jewish, and other backgrounds, but none of us really felt like that was the one for us.
We wanted to create an affiliation that was based on cherishing diversity, and a deeper level of bonds between the people, one that we really felt a natural affinity to. None of us felt like we quite belonged to the families we were born into, but we wanted family! We wanted a tribe. The only way we could get it was to come up with different criteria. The old saying was that “blood is thicker than water.” We created a family in which water is thicker (or at least deeper) than blood. And the sharing of water became a stronger bond to us than the blood relationships that formed the basis of all families prior to us. And in our new tribal family, we all took initiatory names—usually from Greek mythology. I was Prometheus, the fire-bringer who defied the authority of almighty Zeus to bring enlightenment to humanity; and Lance was Chiron, the wise centaur and teacher of heroes, such as Heracles and Jason.
And right about then I formulated my lifelong mission statement, which has remained unchanged ever since: “To be a catalyst for the coalescence of consciousness.”
LANCE CHRISTIE: Something that was very fundamental to our intuitive take on the world, that we still have, is that instead of the paradigm in which you have a prophet, or authority figure of some sort, or an intellectual leader who reveals or dictates a religious system, we had absorbed the concept that the only way of doing things was individually. What is essential to that process is that the individual actually breaks free of adherence to the normative values of their culture of origin and develops a highly individualized set of tastes, ethics, and understandings based on their particular characteristics of character. Self-actualization involves coming to understand who you are, what your skills are, what your proclivities are, and how to utilize those to both satisfy yourself and benefit the world.
The impulse to benefit the world seems to be a part of the package, because otherwise we would have a bunch of extremely effective raging sociopaths running around. That right there underlines the inherent optimism that you find in Oberon’s and my take on the world and its potential. What we both perceive is that when you actually get all the cultural craziness out of the way, and you have people develop and become this integrated human being that is not neurotic, not psychotic, that is not dragged down by all these shoulds, oughts, and weird cultural control mechanisms, then what you end up with, except for people who have a wiring defect and are sociopathic from the get-go, is a person who is, in fact, beneficent. The enlightened person wishes the world to be a better place.
With the water-sharing ceremony we were recognizing people who seemed to have the ability to look at society from an outsider’s point of view, and who were not inferior to the demands of society. Although some mistakes were made there, too. George Bernard Shaw, describing the early Christians in his commentary on “Androcles and the Lion,” observed that any progressive social movement attracts not only those who are superior to the demands of the contemporary society, but also those who are inferior to it. And we did acquire a number of people in the water-brotherhood who proved to be outcasts from society not because they were superior to it in the sense of being more intellectually, morally, or creatively developed, but in fact were people who had psychiatric issues that made them unable to function in society. It took some mistakes before we came to understand the difference between an intelligent but damaged individual versus a person who is more advanced ethically and socially.
OZ: We started putting out a newsletter called The Atlan Torch, which became the first “underground” paper that the school had ever seen. It was secretly subsidized by some of the more radical teachers, who let us use the school’s mimeograph machines and supplied us with paper. We tackled provocative issues like student rights and free speech, and poked fun at the campus socialists.
One of our Atlans was a streetwise New York hipster named Pete. He had been a part of the Greenwich Village Beatnik scene, and he introduced us to pot. It was an elaborate ritual—we pulled down all the shades, stuffed towels in the cracks under the doors, lit candles and incense, sat in a circle on the floor, and ceremonially passed the pipe. That really imprinted me. From that time on, my use of any kind of mind-altering stuff has always had to be done in a ritual setting of some sort—as a sacrament. And thus I never really did that much of it.
But this sort of ritual became a part of our lives. The whole format of sitting around in a circle and passing the sacred sacraments started with that particular event. After that we added wine to our rituals, but I never just opened up and drank a bottle of it on my own or even with a meal. It was always part of a ritual. And so I never got into beer or hard liquor. They just never appealed to me.
NARRATOR: Across the United States, young people were beginning to explore rituals like this. In the newfound freedom of their dorm rooms or apartments and away from home for the first time, they were discovering what opportunities were awaiting them in the brave new world in which they were becoming adults. They had read books like Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and wanted to open those doors for themselves. There were those who had grown tired of their family churches and were trying, on some level, to make a direct connection with what they thought of as “God.” They were hoping to do it with drugs, and their numbers were growing.
Tim Zell was not the only one who would go from this kind of ritual to what is now known as Paganism. What the modern Witches were doing in Britain at this same time was not known to Tim or almost anyone else in America then—more on them later. But there was a growing awareness of what shamans were, and of Native American spirituality. Indeed, anyone who had grown up playing cowboys and Indians in their backyard knew what it meant to “pass the peace pipe.” For them, this was just a taste of what was to come.
And this was all happening simultaneously with the beginnings of the feminist movement, which Tim and Lance incorporated into their early church philosophy.
LANCE CHRISTIE: We intuitively understood very early on that in order to get the world fixed, we had to reassert the importance of the feminine principle. Through reading history we realized that the Christian church, as an institution, was largely in competition with the Nature religions that preceded it. Those religions, of course, worshiped both the male and the female principle. We also realized that society had made the repression of sexuality a major part of its control mechanisms.
One can tend to rationalize something that one’s hormones are driving one to do with what one’s philosophies were recommending one do. I’m sure that there were times when we acted in an exploitative fashion. But the thing that would happen with us was that if we were getting out on a limb, most often we would realize it. Because we would start to see the gap between what we knew we believed in and what we were doing.
NARRATOR: During all this, and for years to come, the most important woman in Tim Zell’s life was someone he had met right at the beginning of his freshman year at Westminster College.
OZ: The first Friday there was a mixer with the William Woods girls. At that time I was trying to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to be a nerdy, non-social kid like I had been in high school. I took James Bond and Hugh Hefner as my role models, and I showed up looking very dapper. There was this gorgeous redhead there named Martha.
MARTHA TURLEY: It was love at first sight. We were inseparable after that. We did everything together. We used to call each other Prometheus and Gaea. I thought he was very handsome and intelligent. I was majoring in journalism and drama. In high school I had been the editor of the student paper.
OZ: As our dating got more and more intense, we discovered a great trysting place on the girl’s campus. There was a Gothic-style chapel that had a little prayer room up at the top of a small tower that nobody ever went to. I made some adjustments to the lock so that we were able to slip in when no one was watching and make out.
MARTHA TURLEY: I became pregnant with Bryan on December 15, 1962. We had just gone to see some religious epic movie—King of Kings. Bryan was born exactly nine months later, on September 15, 1963. We used to have a place in the church that was on the girls’ campus. There was a little chapel room upstairs that we used. It was like a tower. Tim had it all rigged up so it looked like it was locked and nobody could come in. Most of the other couples probably had cars they used for doing something like that. But we didn’t. This was in the winter when we couldn’t go outside.
OZ: Unmarried pregnancy was a very traumatic thing in those days. Of course, we had to talk to our parents about this, which was very difficult. But there was no question in our minds that we wanted to get married. So we arranged to have a wedding that spring in St. Louis. My parents made all the arrangements and paid for it all, and my fraternity choir came and sang. But just a few nights before the wedding they kidnapped me and shaved my whole body, so I was all bristly for our wedding night. This really put me off against the frat scene and their so-called sense of “brotherhood.”
Nobody had a clue that Martha was pregnant. We moved into a little duplex for the remainder of the semester, and I quit the fraternity, as it no longer suited my married or social life. Since no one before me had ever quit that fraternity, this didn’t set well with some of my fellow frat “brothers,” especially the frat president, who declared himself my sworn enemy and tried to make my life miserable clear into the mid-1970s!
I immediately enrolled in a course in developmental psychology, and I read everything I could get my hands on about radical theories and practices of child-rearing and early education. Eventually, these studies led me into a career in teaching and working with children.
In the previous year, one of the books that we’d read in the psychology department was B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. It was his vision of a utopian society based on the principles of behavioral psychology. The book had some provocative ideas for communal living that were almost science fiction. And one of these was a crib-type thing that was sort of a habitat environment for infants. So I wrote to Skinner. He had drawn up plans for this thing—which he called an “air crib”—and he sent them to me. It was quite a project—it had to have temperature and humidity controls and a woven nylon frame that the baby slept on with a drip pan underneath to catch pee, a Plexiglas window that could be raised and lowered in front, and shades that could be pulled down. I spent the summer of 1963 building it.
I was with Martha until Bryan was born. That was a very traumatic thing for me because the hospital would not let me attend the birth. And I had no idea that would happen. I had been reading about innovations in having fathers participate in the birthing experience, and I just naturally figured that was what we’d be doing. But in those days the doctors just went ahead and made all those decisions and never discussed them with the patients at all. So I was utterly unprepared when she was wheeled away into the delivery room and I was forcibly exiled into the waiting room.
There was another man out there with me who was considerably worried. The nurse came out to talk to him. I couldn’t help but overhear as she told him that his baby had been born dead. The guy fainted right on the spot. I was completely traumatized by this. I demanded to be let in, but they would not do it.
MARTHA TURLEY: I don’t remember the delivery. They knocked me out. I knew that there was no way I was going to have natural childbirth. My tolerance for pain is very low. They say that’s typical for redheads. Tim was with me the whole time I was having labor pains. I remember them giving me something in the delivery room, and it put me right to sleep. When I woke up, I was back in my own room.
Back in those days, they didn’t allow fathers in most hospital delivery rooms. It was something he maybe should have planned ahead of time and discussed or set it up with the doctor. Knowing Tim, it probably never even occurred to him that you had to do that.
OZ: It had a profound effect on our life. Giving birth is a moment when a woman needs to have her mate with her. And if he is not, the resentment that is created never really goes away. This contributed to the post-partum depression syndrome that she had really badly. After that event Martha completely lost interest in sex and we became alienated from each other. Our relationship was never the same after that.
MARTHA TURLEY: I guess I was scared of getting pregnant again because it was such a traumatizing experience. My mother kept me naïve about everything so I had no idea what was going to happen or what I was going to go through. It was all a big secret.
OZ: Right after Bryan was born, I had to go back to school. Martha stayed with her mom for a while and eventually came back to live with me in our new upstairs apartment. Somehow we got the air crib back there, too.
MARTHA TURLEY: Tim was a good, loving father. Even though he was in school full time, we were equal partners in parenting. As a matter of fact, he was much better at diapering than I was.
OZ: I got totally into being a father. We slept with Bryan cuddled in our bed at night (the air crib was mainly for naps). I kept elaborate logs of his feeding schedules, weight, measurements, and developmental milestones. Other than school, we took him everywhere with us and just doted on him.
Martha and I explored possibilities to heal our sexual relationship. One of the ones that seemed reasonable was opening our marriage. We thought that if this thing was damaged between her and me, perhaps she could heal it at her end by getting involved with other people. It was very trial-and-error and experimental. We didn’t have any clear-cut guidelines other than Stranger in a Strange Land, which laid out a premise that it was okay as long as everyone was open and honest about it. So at least we had a guilt-free context for this. It took me a while to get into it personally, because I was so busy. But we each managed to have a few other lovers during our college years. That worked out quite well, all things considered. Eventually things came back together between us, but there was always a scar across our marriage.
Martha and I became the first students in the history of Westminster and William Woods to get married while in school, and thus to have independent housing. Every other student either lived with their parents or in a fraternity, sorority, or some kind of school housing. So our place became a hangout for other students like us.
This was in the days of the hootenannies . . . the beginnings of the folk and protest music that came to define the ’60s. On weekend evenings there was usually someone with a guitar, and conversation was interlaced with folk singing. We maintained an open house at all times, encouraging people to drop by at their leisure. And because of the influence of Stranger in a Strange Land, it became the custom to be naked in our home. People would come in, take their clothes off, and hang out. Our apartment became an off-campus, clothing-optional haven for our growing Nest of water-siblings—as well as a trysting place—and we never lacked for baby sitters.
We had a sign posted on the inside of our front door, just like in Stranger, that said, “Did You Remember to Dress?” We kept that sign for decades—in fact, its successor is on our front door right now. We even had a bowl of money by the door that people could contribute to or take from. We did everything we could to create a Nest environment like in the book. Our pad acquired the reputation among friends as a place they could be themselves, and among our enemies as a den of iniquity.
We continued to publish The Atlan Torch. The articles that I wrote were not just controversial but were considered threatening to some. I attacked the draconian security systems set up by the girls’ school to keep them from having sex. (Of course, since we had an off-campus house, anybody who wanted to have a tryst could just come over to our place.) The Atlan Torch and our libertine Atlan ways did not set well with the administration of William Woods, and the Torch and I were both banned from the WW campus.
NARRATOR: Somewhere in that period, the Zells got a black-and-white television set, and they began watching The Addams Family and The Munsters, both of which had TV sitcom folks they could really identify with. Bewitched was another favorite, and for many years it provided their only example of what a modern Witch might be like. Tim Zell was still interested in increasing his psychic powers, and he thought that if Witches actually existed, they might be able to help him with that. But he didn’t personally know any or, indeed, if there even were any anywhere.
Another significant part of the Atl mythology came from two Marvel comic books that had just started publishing.
OZ: The first was The X-Men, which was based on the idea that some people are just mutants and not part of the same species as everyone else. That was a good metaphor for us, and something we could identify with. The setting also involved a “School for Gifted Youngsters,” which became an inspiration that I actualized forty years later with the Grey School of Wizardry. The other comic was Spider-Man, with a hero who had personal problems and angst just like the rest of us. His basic principle was that “with great power comes great responsibility.”
NARRATOR: The Nest continued to meet in the Zell home during the cold Missouri winters. When the weather was better, the party would sometimes move outdoors.
OZ: Exploring the countryside beyond the school and town, we discovered abandoned clay pits that had been used by the brickworks that had, once upon a time, been a mainstay of the town. There were hills of rejected materials that had been hauled out of the pits. They had been eroding for years and were covered with sparkling calcite crystals. The pits had filled with water, and minerals turned the water different colors—blue, green, and violet. Little marshes, trees, and vegetation had come back in and reclaimed the place. It was this incredibly magical oasis that nobody else seemed to know about. On weekends we would all go out to the clay pits. Lance would make up a big batch of sangria in a wastebasket. We’d go skinny dipping and roll around in the mud; we’d sing folk songs around a campfire; we’d make love under the stars; and on Monday we’d go back to school. Social nakedness and outdoor lovemaking was very liberating.
I continued taking every single course that I possibly could. By the time I graduated, I had the full credits for majors in pre-med, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I also took every class they had in comparative religion and natural history (including astronomy, paleontology, geology, zoology . . .). The senior colloquium assignment was to design a new religion for a newly emergent intelligent species. My thesis, “Freedom Through Existentialism,” drew upon our Atlan perspective in trying to live out our visionary ideas in an experiential experiment, laying the foundations for the actual church we would later come to create.
OZ’s BROTHER, BARRY: His college course load was amazing. He had more credits over four years than any other student his college president could remember, in addition to having a very high grade-point average.
NARRATOR: In an isolated town in rural Missouri, Tim Zell had found, and created, many of the elements that would be the foundation for what would become his Pagan church. And the next step in his spiritual and religious growth would come when he graduated from college and began to make contact with other people around the world who shared similar interests.