“TheaGenesis”
(1968–1970)
And Yes! Yes! to the pulse that flows,
The stream of life’s rebirth,
The sacred flame intones your name,
Oh Gaia, soul of the Earth.
—from “hymn to gaia” by tom williams
NARRATOR: Publishing Green Egg long before home computers, desktop publishing, or even copy shops was in itself something of a magickal act. In the years that would follow, Green Egg grew in size and in circulation, and it went nationwide and global. Tim Zell was able to discover other people, both individuals and groups, who were walking down similar paths, and they were all able to find out about and learn from each other. Tim printed all the letters he got unedited, so there was an ongoing discussion of what was going on and what could happen next. Green Egg and its fabulous forum became an important part of the formation and early growth of modern Earth-based spirituality—in all of its many variations.
This was also way before the World Wide Web, search engines, and social networks. But in a way it provided the same services—just at a much slower speed. The basic idea for it came from, once again, science-fiction geeks. For decades sci-fi fans, who typically didn’t know too many people with similar interests in their local communities, had been using self-published “fanzines” to communicate with like-minded individuals in other towns. These zines frequently featured prominent letter sections—it cost a lot of money to make long-distance phone calls back then. Tim Zell used the same tools and format that they did, and helped create a different kind of “fandom.”
One of the first people Tim Zell connected with was an artist and visionary named Fred Adams, who had founded a group he called Feraferia (“wild festival”) and published a newsletter called Korythalia in California.
OZ: What I read in Korythalia seemed very much along the lines of what we were looking for. At that time we didn’t have much liturgical and theological stuff developed. We had just decided that what we really were was Pagans, but all we had was a rough philosophy. We didn’t know how to put it into a coherent form or what to do with it. Feraferian literature was filled with liturgy, ritual, theology, mythology, sacred art, and poetry. It was all about the seasonal cycles of celebration, and that was the first time I came across that idea.
TOM WILLIAMS: In Green Egg number 12, dated December 12, 1968, there are the first mentions of Pagan holidays—the periods of Repose and Yule. These came from a little pamphlet called The Nine Royal Passions of the Year that Tim got from a group called Feraferia in Southern California. I remember in 1968 when Tim first showed me the pamphlet, which was printed in four colors. I felt a twinge go through me like some half-remembered longing, like some affinity with long-forgotten rituals and connections. It was a brief description of the old Celtic Pagan cycle of the Wheel of the Year, the celebrations and their significance. We started to date our Green Eggs according to Robert Graves’s tree calendar, which Feraferia followed. These were the first seeds of what was to eventually lead to the transformation of the Church of All Worlds. Or better put—the expansion of our purpose and consciousness to embrace the living planet.
OZ: As soon as we got the information about the Wheel of the Year, we started aligning ourselves with it. There were marvelous revelations around finding out that the annual holidays and celebrations that I grew up with were linked to a greater and more ancient cycle. There was a sense of deepening and of feeling the roots of all these things and weaving them all together. It was very exciting to have a larger context for that stuff. I started researching worldwide holiday customs, and the more I learned, the more I started to appreciate them.
Our central format for rituals, which allowed a lot of this stuff to be woven around it, was that there always a circle where things were passed around. Of course, the first time we did it was with a glass of water. Later it would be food, or stories. We didn’t have a “doing” ritual as much as a “sharing” ritual. We would read little passages and poetry that were relevant to the season. It was very simple and unstructured back in those days. Over time these things evolved, and we got better and better at it. We would find out what other folks were doing and take bits and pieces of it and integrate them into our rituals.
These things were foundational to what happened in the ’70s. The ’60s were all about finding the pieces, bringing them all together, putting them in the same place, and taking a look at them. We started putting out notices and inviting people to join us. People started showing up, and the idea spread.
NARRATOR: As time passed, the CAW purchased bigger and better printing technology, and Green Egg continued to grow in page count. Circulation increased; they began to take advertising; and new people were reached not just by word of mouth, subscription, and trade, but also by retail sales in bookstores.
OZ: I did all the typing, layout, and design for each issue. I didn’t do much of the actual writing because there was so much stuff coming in from other people. My main job was to be an editor. I would deal with all the letters that came in. I really enjoyed it—I had ink in my blood. I learned how to do every single aspect of publishing.
When the issue was all ready and printed up, we would have collating parties. People really looked forward to this—it was like having a quilting bee. We would lay all the pages out on a long table and sit down around it on pillows on the floor. People would collate the pages, and we’d straighten them out and staple them. We’d bundle them and put on the mailing labels. Most of it would be done in one day, in one big push.
NARRATOR: The magazine continued to be published, in what was to be the first phase of its existence, for the entire time Tim was in St. Louis. During those seminal years, it helped to both create and unify a community and the use of the word Pagan to describe it. Green Egg had a direct influence on many, including a young journalist named Margot Adler.
MARGOT ADLER: My book Drawing Down the Moon would not exist if it hadn’t been for Green Egg and its letters column. When I was coming into the Pagan movement, there were no festivals; there was no Internet. There were little newsletters. And most of those you found out about by complete chance, or by knowing someone who knew someone. Green Egg devoted some twenty to thirty pages of each issue to letters, and those letters were from the real theorists and theologians and thealogians of the Pagan movement. It and Nemeton were the first intellectual Pagan publications. I started doing research for my book in fall of 1975. I took Green Egg, and I looked at every single interesting letter over twenty issues, and I wrote those people letters and said, “Hi! I’m thinking of doing this book on Paganism. Can I come visit you?” And that’s how I constructed Drawing Down the Moon. Once I had a bunch of people who I went to see, they would introduce me to other people, and one thing led to another. But Green Egg was my best source for guidance.
NARRATOR: Early on in this process, Tim Zell contacted Fred Adams and discussed the possibility of forming a Pagan ecumenical organization.
OZ: The way my thinking has often gone in my life has been “Let’s throw a party and invite all our friends.” Virtually everything I’ve done has been a version of that. Fundamentally I’m a host (which would explain the parasites . . .). Fred came up with the name “The Council of Themis.” Themis was the Goddess of harmony in Greek mythology (Romans called her Harmonia), and is depicted in our modern iconography as the blindfolded figure of Justice holding balance scales in one hand and a sword in the other. The Council rapidly expanded as word got out. In the process of discussing this grew the term Neo-Pagan for the modern groups, to be distinguished from the primordial pagans. Most of the groups that got involved were from California. There were maybe a dozen groups total.
NARRATOR: As editor of Green Egg, Tim was probably the best-informed person on the planet about the Pagan population, and at that point he had still not heard anything about the existence of real Witches or a Witchcraft movement. The prevailing mythology then in popular culture was that Witches were different from regular humans, who were referred to as “mortals.” One had to be born a Witch—Witchcraft wasn’t presented as a religion or something that someone could join or get trained in. And, in fact, this fictional idea of Witches continues today in the Harry Potter books, where anyone who doesn’t come from a magical family is a “muggle.”
Then, in 1968, Sybil Leek published her book Diary of a Witch. Her story, which she claimed to be true, was congruent with the mythology. She said she came from a family of Witches in England, that she had magical powers, and that they were hereditary. This was exciting news for Tim—the possibility of psychic abilities had intrigued him since he was a kid. Sybil’s book got some attention in America, and she came to St. Louis as part of a promotional tour. Tim figured that if she really was a great and powerful Witch, then he should be able to connect with her telepathically. So, when she visited the campus of Washington University, he sat in the front row and attempted to do just that.
She did not respond as he had hoped. But he was not discouraged. Soon the CAW heard from some American Witches, and they turned out to be human beings just like everyone else. Tim brought them into the growing Pagan movement, and he even met a Witch who was running a metaphysical/occult shop in his own town . . .
TOM WILLIAMS: So Tim and I signed up for a sixteen-week course in Witchcraft taught by a local St. Louis Witch named Deborah Letter (now Bourbon). I still have the course material from that class and was impressed to see that the definitions and orientation of the class do not adhere to any one Wiccan tradition but are general enough to appeal to more general Pagan sensitivities. For example, the definition of a Witch in the first lesson is as follows: “A Witch is a person, either male or female, who has learned to use the powers of the body and mind (as well as those of Nature) to either help or hinder.”
That’s a definition that could apply to shamans and magicians in general. After we took the class, Tim and I both eventually received initiations in different Wiccan traditions. However, the generalist nature of the background we received in our first encounters with shamanism and Magick (in addition to the “eco-psychic” awareness we had begun to cultivate) made it difficult for us to commit to any single, strictly defined tradition.
NARRATOR: In 1969, Hippie Paganism seemed to take over the world, or at least it seemed like that for one weekend when 400,000 people gathered on a farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival. According to Arlo Guthrie, it was “a lotta freaks, man.” Author Ayn Rand would later describe Woodstock as being Dionysian. Although she didn’t mean it as a compliment, many people agreed and thought it was a great idea.
People were inspired by books like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and there was a lot of talk about getting away from it all and moving to the country. The Whole Earth Catalog was published (and regularly updated) to give people access to the tools needed to make the transition. Joni Mitchell told the flower children that it was time to go “back to the garden,” and the new comic book hero was a rustic, bearded sage named Mr. Natural (who looked a lot like OZ does now).
OZ: Of course, the most significant event in 1969 was the first moon landing on July 20—which I had been looking forward to all my life. Tom Williams and I watched the whole thing together on TV from start to finish. It was incredibly emotional for us—as I’m sure it was for nearly everyone on Earth. Finally, the world was catching up to science fiction!
So just over a month later, when the World Science Fiction Convention was held in St. Louis, we just had to go! After all, we were a science-fiction-based religion! There we met a seventeen-year-old kid from Winnipeg, Canada, named Bill (his name would later be Orion Stormcrow). He’d hitchhiked down to the con, and we put him up in our room. Over the following years he became very much like a younger brother to me, and along with Tom Williams, we became quite a trio—sometimes like the Three Musketeers, and other times more like the Three Stooges!
NARRATOR: The CAW continued to have weekly Friday-night gatherings and Green Egg collating parties at the Zells’ house, where the animal menagerie was steadily growing.
OZ: The most special critter in my life during this period was Histah—a lovely boa constrictor I bought as a baby from a pet store. I named her after the ape word for “snake” in the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Histah soon became much more than a pet. She was my constant companion and a true familiar. Although I built a really spectacular habitat for her—using a curved truck windshield for a front—most of the time she had free run of the house. At night, I could “dream-fast” with her, and in my dreams I would see through her eyes as she roamed around the house and finally settled on a new place to sleep. Then in the morning I would go straight to her hiding place and take her out, where she spent most of the day wrapped around my shoulders. As she grew, I often took her to children’s schools and other places, where she would win everyone over—even confirmed ophidiophobes. Whenever there were people around, she was as social with them as any cat.
I was intensely focused on my work, and I disciplined myself to get by on six hours of sleep a night. My life was a constant training program. I didn’t give myself any time to just veg out. From 1970 on, I used to bicycle to work every day, unless it was raining or snowing. It was eleven miles each way. When I was at work I would use my break periods to work on Green Egg. I’d take a bag lunch and sit there at my desk eating and typing at the same time. I hung out at the local underground radio station, KDNA, and was a regular guest on Elizabeth Gips’s show, talking about the CAW.
I didn’t go out and hang out in bars or go to football games. It’s amazing what you can do with your life if you make room for it by not doing things that are not productive. Even now I have to make an effort to un-discipline myself, to pry loose and hang out. If I’m left on my own, my default mechanism is this focused behavior. If somebody says, “Hey, let’s go for a walk” or “Let’s go to a party,” then I may break loose and join them. But if I’m left alone, I’ll just keep on working by sheer momentum. I was kept going by a utopian vision of creating a new world and new society.
NARRATOR: But Tim’s efforts to make the world a better place were causing stress in his family life, and so was their open relationship.
MARTHA TURLEY: I was always the jealous type. Deep down I was probably not happy with our open relationship. Tim was my first sexual experience, so I made up for lost time. I enjoyed being with the other guys, but I was still jealous of Tim. I never really accepted it too much emotionally. That was there from the beginning. I’m a very passive person. I go along with things and don’t cause trouble. I think it comes from hearing my parents argue constantly. I said, “When I get married, I am not going to fight.” I don’t remember Tim and I ever having any arguments. I always did everything Tim ever wanted to do. I’m not saying that he was a domineering, pushy person. I’m kind of a sheep, you could say.
Tim became more Pagan, and I didn’t. At our house they used to get together on weekends. If I was there, I stayed by myself in the bedroom. Or else I went out with whichever gentleman I was dating then. I don’t even know what they did at those rituals. Bryan was at them, but not me.
DEBORAH DIETZ: There was a period of time when I lived at Tim’s house. My function was to take care of his son. I think that Martha was more conventional in many respects. The impression I always had of her was that she was being swept along like in a tidal wave. I remember thinking that she was married to someone who was completely different from her—she was a nice woman in a difficult situation.
NARRATOR: This didn’t slow down in 1970, a year of sex, drugs, the first Earth Day, and some major spiritual activity for Tim Zell and his tribe.
OZ: There was a total eclipse of the sun on March 7, 1970. And some of the folks who lived in St. Louis threw an eclipse party that featured a big bowl of electric orange juice (that is, spiked with LSD). At that point I decided that the occasion I had waited years for had arrived. I was waiting for the perfect moment to try LSD, having been given all the big build-up by Tim Leary’s writings about having the perfect set and setting.
It was an amazing, totally transformative experience. I had such a great trip—including an incredible sexual encounter in a bathtub full of balloons with two lovely women—that I never actually went out and looked at the eclipse itself! I have regretted this ever since—especially after I finally witnessed such a spectacular celestial event in 1979.
TOM WILLIAMS: In early 1970, some of us decided to get involved with a St. Louis group called The Coalition for the Environment. We attended meetings with some well-intentioned liberal types who were trying to work within the system to address some of the pressing issues of urban and automobile pollution, clean air and water issues, and local environmental concerns. These were the beginnings of what would eventually blossom into the environmental movement.
Also that same spring, for daring to protest a brutal and senseless war that was destroying the soul of America, four students were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. Just in case anybody had trouble remembering what his or her ethical priorities were.
Earth Day was a world event, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. We did notice that we were the only group at the event that called itself a church. Where were the other churches? It wasn’t hard to figure that out. The admonition in the book of Genesis that humans shall “have dominion over the Earth and over every creeping thing” suddenly stood out in sharp relief. Why should Christian churches care about Earth Day when their real goal was Heaven and when their Bible admonished them to exploit the Earth? We began to see ever more clearly why people who called themselves Pagans were basically different.
OZ: We decided that we were going to do the Earth Day thing in a big way, with a booth, presentation, and display. We designed and worked on them for weeks. One of the things we wanted to do was create a big poster based on Robert Graves’s thirteen-month calendar of the year. While I was going through National Geographics and selecting pictures to put on the calendar, a young woman came in to help out.
She was just eighteen at the time and one of those beautiful, Witchy, vegetarian kind of girls that you ran into in those days. Her name was Jodie Parker. In the process of working on the calendar, as we got to know each other and talk about what we were doing, we fell in love. Our relationship became quite a romance and a major focus of my life for the next few years. I often refer to her as my second wife, although we were never married.
So on April 22, we toted all of our stuff to Forest Park and set it up. The idea that Earth Day topics could be of a religious concern was unheard-of at the time. So we made our theme all about what would eventually come to be called “Deep Ecology”—or “Green Religion.” In addition to our “Eco-Psychic Calendar,” we created a pile of trash with a large globe and a human skeleton (from my days in pre-med) tossed akimbo into the heap to convey the idea that trashing the Earth was also destroying humanity, as we were all interconnected. This was the first inkling of the expression, originally stated by Cicero: Omnia vivunt; omnia inter se conexa (“Everything is alive; everything is interconnected”).
My old Beatnik friend Jim Igoe turned me on to Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Until that time CAW didn’t have a coherent theology, per se. We vaguely embraced mythology, in general, and used science fiction as a mythic framework. But there was no coherent theological basis of how it all worked. Graves’s book moved us in that direction, at least from the point of view of the impact of the Divine Feminine in culture and literature. It gave me something to think about.
My lifetime of interest and pursuit of studies of biology, natural history, evolution, and paleontology all came together over Labor Day weekend of 1970. At that point Jodie was getting ready to go away to college. We decided that we needed to do something really spectacular before she left. Our friend Jim’s brother was a prominent attorney with a very nice house; he had gone away for the weekend and kind of left our friend in charge of the house. So he invited us to come over.
Jim had a few doses of what he had been told was organic mescaline, but it was probably acid laced with something else. We went into the backyard in the night where there was a big trampoline. We lay stark naked on it on our backs looking up at the sky. It was easy to imagine just floating off into space. I know the constellations; Jodie, like most city people, didn’t. But this was a clear night, and you could see the stars well. I started tracing the constellations to show her what some of the more prominent ones were. Having just learned how to see auras from Deborah, I discovered that if I stuck my finger up into the sky and drew a line with my aura, the line would stay there (in acid-speak these are called “trails”). So it was easy for me to connect the dots.
I made the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign (from Star Trek), and got absorbed in watching the auras of my fingers as they moved back and forth. And in the pattern of the auras, I had a vision of a cell dividing. As the concept of the cell formed in my mind, I linked myself with what I was seeing. I went diving down through the continuity of cellular division, of mitosis. It was like running a film backwards as the cells divided, until I was back to the first cell that I was, fertilized in my mother’s womb. I felt how my life began, when I was conceived as a single cell that multiplied and became all of me. And then I went further down, through all the cells that coalesced to form my parents. I kept going through this reverse coalescence all the way back through geological time, experiencing all these cells congealing, all the way back for billions of years, till I reached that first original primal cell that began all life on Earth, and from which we are all descended. And it was like all of us were condensed in that single cell. It was sort of like the Big Bang of biological evolution.
And then I ran the film back the other way—forward. And that cell divided and all the living things came out of it. And the different species emerged, and I saw the whole tree of life open up, down through the different lineages. I traced the protoplasm through all these different divisions, which was like tracing the entire history of the DNA molecule. As that life from the first cell spread out across the planet, my consciousness rose from the surface and looked down on the whole Earth below me.
Just that previous year, the first photographs of the Earth from space had been taken by the Apollo astronauts returning from the moon. So I rose above the Earth, and I saw the life spreading across the planet. And I saw all this connection; I saw all this as one, vast, single organism. Because it was absolutely identical to the way my own body had grown from the first fertilized cell. Evolution was nothing but embryology on a planetary scale.
I looked down, and at that point, the mythology of Gaea overlaid itself upon this entire organism. I suddenly saw the Earth in a whole new light, through this perspective. I saw this living being instead of just a planet full of unrelated creatures. And at that point, it was like She opened her eyes and smiled at me, and said, “Now you know me.”
And I did know Her. I was overwhelmed with this incredible sense of love, kinship, and recognition. It was an astonishing epiphany. And my immediate response was, “I shall ever serve you.” And I have, from that moment forward.
It wasn’t just a vision; it was a Revelation. I felt this in the deepest part of my soul. It is still hard to speak of this without choking up with tears, because it was the most profound experience of my life.
I have no idea how much time passed. When I came down, I went into the house and told Jim about the whole experience. At the end of all that, Jim said, “Well, I knew that if I hung around with you long enough, you would get some great revelation. That’s the kind of guy you are. And there you have it.” He encouraged me to write it all down, which I did over the next few days.
A week later was our weekly Nest meeting, and I came in with it all written up, and delivered my first actual sermon in the history of the Church of All Worlds. Interestingly enough, I got a considerable amount of argument. There were people who were deeply offended, fearing that this church that they had joined specifically because it didn’t have any official dogma was now going to be saddled with such. They thought I was going to establish some orthodox set of doctrines that everybody was going to be required to believe in.
I kept coming back to it over the next few months. Though I contributed the gist of it to a couple of books by Leo Louis Martello (Black Magic, Satanism & Voodoo and Witchcraft: The Old Religion), I didn’t officially publish it in Green Egg till the next year. It was so far out there, so radical, that I really wanted to be on solid ground before I tried to bring it out to the world. I sought more information, background, and details on the biology involved. I did research into genetics and DNA and cosmology and nucleotides and the nature of amino acids found in meteorites.
Forty years later, we know a whole lot more. But this was three years before James Lovelock first published his famous “Gaia Hypothesis.” He was an atmospheric biochemist on assignment from NASA to help them design sensors for some of the probes they were developing to detect life on other planets. And that led to a lot of additional research, all of which has essentially confirmed the premise that all life on Earth is indeed descended from a single cell. Lovelock got the idea from seeing that same photograph of the Earth. But he saw it from the outside looking in. I saw it from the inside out, equating evolution with embryology.
TOM WILLIAMS: Tim had articulated what came to be known as “TheaGenesis.” Basically what that means is that the Earth is a living being; the various biomes and ecosystems, plant and animal communities, and their interaction are analogs to the organs and systems of a living body. In addition, this being has a spirit, a consciousness. That spirit has been instinctively revered and worshipped through the ages by native peoples as a Goddess whose names are as numerous as the cultures and peoples who honor Her. Eventually, we settled on calling her Gaea, for the Greek Earth Mother.
The Church of All Worlds transformed that year of 1970 into a new dimension, not abandoning the values on which it had been founded, but adding the ecstatic identity of ourselves and all living things with this grand and nurturing Being, this Divine Mother, and realizing that we were both Her and Her children. The Church of all Worlds had finally become Pagan in the truest sense of the word.