Drawing Down the Moon

Hans Holzer, a popular writer on the occult, implied that there was an unfortunate amount of controversy and bickering in Green Egg, and he disparaged the group for basing its vision “on the work of a prolific and popular science fiction writer” and “not on any ancient tradition.”² A Neo-Pagan group that takes its myths from the past seems obvious. One that looks to the future is something else again. But Holzer’s criticism is simply not valid. In fact, science fiction and fantasy probably come closer than any other literature to systematically exploring the central concerns of Neo-Pagans and Witches. Such writers of science fiction and fantasy are bound less than any others by the political, sexual, and racial mores of their society. In recent years some science fiction writers (notably women—Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, Vonda McIntyre)³ have even gotten beyond the traditional sexism of the genre to look anew at men and women. Science fiction has been the literature of the visionary; it has been able to challenge preconceived notions about almost everything, while at the same time attending to fundamental questions of the age. No wonder, then, that not only do many Pagans and Witches read science fiction, but some of them write it. In my travels I came across four well-known science fiction and fantasy writers who were members of Neo-Pagan groups. Of the four, only one—Robert Anton Wilson—was public. The remaining three did not wish to have their identities disclosed.

There has always been a relationship between science fiction and the occult, but it has often baffled serious scholars. Mircea Eliade writes: “The literature of fantasy and the fantastic, especially in science fiction, is much in demand, but we still do not know its intimate relationship with the different occult traditions.”⁴ Neo-Pagans often mentioned science fiction. “Science fiction/fantasy readers tend to think of things in terms of the galaxy as a whole,” one wrote to me, “rather than think in a local or national sense.” Another said, “Readers are usually more acutely aware of the problems of ecology, utopia (and dystopia), and changes brought about by technological advancement.”

“Science fiction,” Isaac Bonewits told me, “is the one element in my life most responsible for my not being a racist or a cultural bigot,” and Aidan Kelly said, “Science fiction is the major literature of the most intelligent people in this country at this point. The only authors who are coping with the complexity of modern reality are those who are changing the way people perceive reality, and these are authors who are tied in with science fiction.”

Science fiction might even be called a form of divination. Certainly history offers many examples (H. G. Wells, Jules Verne) where such divination was accurate. Robert Scholes in his essays on science fiction, Structural Fabulation, writes: “To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future,” and he observes that good science fiction allows us to leap from worlds we know to quite different worlds and thereby illuminate our situation. This is done through the techniques of defamiliarization and estrangement. Using such techniques, we are able to see the universe anew. Scholes, from the halls of academia, utters pure Neo-Pagan sentiments:

We are now so aware of the way that our lives are part of a patterned universe that we are free to speculate as never before. Where anything may be true—sometime, someplace—there can be no heresy. And where the patterns of the cosmos itself guide our thoughts so powerfully, so beautifully, we have nothing to fear but our own lack of courage. There are fields of force around us that even our finest instruments of thought and perception are only beginning to detect. The job of fiction is to play in these fields. . . .⁵

The Church of All Worlds has called science fiction “the new mythology of our age” and an appropriate religious literature. Tom Williams, a former editor of Green Egg and a priest of the church, wrote that science fiction could evoke a new age by generating new metaphors and an infinite array of new possibilities. Reality is “a construct,” a product of unspoken beliefs and assumptions that seem unalterable simply because they are never questioned. “It is from the oppression of overwhelming consensual reality constructs that the mythology of science fiction/fantasy so frees us. It does this in two ways: one, the most obvious, by offring us alternate reality constructs, and two, by revealing to us the way in which realities are made.” The true function of myth, he said, is not simply to explain the world in some simple form that a “primitive” can understand, but like art, music, and poetry, to create the world. Williams argued that both Neo-Paganism and speculative fiction were based on the expansion of human consciousness and both arose at the same time. Today, he wrote, we have a rare privilege—to choose consciously the myths we wish to live by and to know “that the world which is evoked is dependent on the mythic structure of a people and can literally be anything from the oil and bombers and pollution of the Pentagon and Kremlin to the Magic Wood of Galadriel.”⁶

The Church of All Worlds has been called everything from a “subculture science-fiction Grok-flock”⁷ to a “bunch of crazy hippie freaks.” But the real origins of CAW lead back to a small group of friends who, along with untold numbers of middle-class high-school and college students in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became infatuated with the romantic, heroic, compelling right-wing ideas of Ayn Rand. It is a sign of the peculiarity of North American consciousness that thousands of young students, at one time or another, have become possessed by her novels—Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem.

Jerome Tucille, in his witty, tongue-in-cheek tour of the libertarian right, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, could not have been more precise in his choice of title. He noted that Rand’s works were particularly appealing “to those in the process of escaping a regimented religious background.” Despite the author’s rigid philosophy of Objectivism, in her fiction she stirred a libertarian impulse and Atlas Shrugged became a “New Marxism of the Right.”

It was easy to be swept up by the intense struggles of Rand’s artists and creators, who stood larger than life, battling government and bureaucracy. The late Karl Hess, the former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who later became an anarchist on the left, once observed to me, “At a time when no one made arguments, when intelligence was undervalued, when smart kids were looked down on, Ayn Rand seemed to say to them, ‘You’re important.’ She seemed to have a philosophical system with a rigorous structure at a time when no one wanted to talk sensibly at all. She scratched that peculiarly American strain—ironically, the same strain scratched by Emma Goldman. She was appealing, even if her philosophy was better expressed by others, such as Max Stirner, and her writing style seemed to come straight from Jack London.”

The novels of Rand were seeds that sprouted and bore many strange fruits, most of which must have horrified her. CAW is certainly such an example. It is a religion, and Rand has consistently been intensely atheist. It has long considered ecology the supreme religious activity and study, and the harmony of human beings in the biosphere the goal of highest priority. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, has praised pollution as a sign of human progress. Her heroines have wept with joy at billboards and saluted smokestacks, regarding them as a sign of the human struggle against nature. She called people concerned about ecology “antilife” and “antimind,” and condemned Native Americans as “savages.” She even called smoking cigarettes a moral duty that aids the capitalist system.⁹

The ironies of life are many, I thought, after speaking to Karl Hess, a renegade from Rand as well as from Goldwater. He was building, by hand, a solar-heated house in West Virginia. I wondered about the founders of CAW, some of whom voted for Goldwater in 1964, the same year I was arrested on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. CAW can only be understood within a broad libertarian framework, but one that is hard to define within our traditional political notions of “left” and “right.”

CAW began in 1961 when a young group of high-school friends, including Lance Christie, later a priest of CAW, began discussing the novels of Ayn Rand. Six months later, now college students, they began to explore the self-actualization concepts of Abraham Maslow. In the beginning, as Christie described these discussions, they were “dialogue/ fantasies over the ills of the world,” and, much as in the plot of Atlas Shrugged, these friends fantasized “a withdrawal of creative, unenculturated people to a remote place to await Armageddon.” Christie wrote, “After Babylon had fallen again, we saw ourselves as coming forth to rebuild the world along rational lines.”¹⁰

Maslow’s attraction stemmed from his theories about the characteristics of those he called “self-actualizers”—people who perceived reality more clearly than others. They accepted themselves without unnecessary guilt or shame, and tolerated—even gravitated toward—the new, the ambiguous, and the unknown. They were spontaneous and natural, with a sense of humor that was neither hostile nor sick. They tended to be independent and at ease in solitude; they were ethical; they had social feeling; they had a wide perspective, a sense of wonder, and a sense of the mysterious. But Maslow’s “self-actualizers” were, he found, alienated from ordinary convention. They felt detached from the values of the culture. Maslow referred to such persons as “aliens in a foreign land,”¹¹ a phrase that struck a deep chord in Christie, Zell, and their friends.

Combining Maslow with Rand (some might think it a most unlikely combination), Christie envisioned an educational institution that would produce “Ayn Rand heroes, alias Maslonian self-actualizers.”¹² In Rand’s capitalist utopia of Atlas Shrugged, brilliant industrialists, creative artists, and pirates against the poor waited until the dross of civilization killed themselves off, or, more correctly, became so weakened that a takeover was possible. But at Westminster College, with the introduction of Maslow, Rand’s right-wing utopia got turned on its head: change the system, educate for intelligence, and Randian heroes and heroines can be the norm.

The novel tells of Valentine Michael Smith, who was born of Earthparents on Mars and raised there by aliens. When he returns to Earth as an alien, Smith looks at the planet with amazement. For example, he wonders if the grass minds being walked on since, after all, “these live.” In general, he expresses the philosophy of someone in tune with the universe.¹⁴

Only one writer, Robert Ellwood, Jr., has written well about the subtleties of the Church of All Worlds. His book, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, devotes a chapter, “The Edenic Bower,” to modern revivalist Neo-Pagan groups. He is, incidentally, Eliade’s one source. Ellwood writes of Heinlein’s novel:

The principal purpose of a Martian’s life is to “grok,” to intuit the “fullness” of something completely from within.

When Smith was brought to Earth, he seemed at first out of place. He did not understand elementary things, yet the deep things of character and Earth’s wisdom he could accurately intuit in a moment. He moves about the Earth at once guileless and wise. . . .

Eventually Smith created a religion, the “Church of All Worlds,” for his companions. It took the form of paradisical communities called “Nests,” in which the best of both planets was brought together. In the Nests they could learn Martian, and be initiated into the lore and psychic skill of the planet. They also joyfully practiced sexual love within the family of the Nest.

Ellwood wrote that Stranger in a Strange Land was one of the bibles of the youth of the sixties, for in a real sense they felt they were Martians on Earth. . . .

Childlike and mystical, lovers of beauty and harmony and magic, impatient of materialistic values and moral codes, they too seemed not to fit, almost to have dropped from another world. Many, like Smith’s friends, were seeking with eager desperation an alternative life style, other modes of relationship between man and nature, and different ways of understanding the relationship of consciousness and cosmos.¹⁵

In Stranger in a Strange Land the most profound ceremony is waterbrotherhood, the sharing of water, during which each person “groks” the other’s godhood and an empathic bond is formed between them. In April 1962 Zell and Christie shared water together, and during the next fall the concept of a waterbrotherhood, called Atl, emerged among this group of friends now living in Fulton, Missouri.

In a sense, the waterbrotherhoods seemed to create Maslow’s self-actualizers, and the statement “Thou art God,” used in Heinlein’s novel, expressed what Christie and his friends had sensed in the works of Ayn Rand. They began to criticize Rand’s philosophy at the many points where it conflicted with Maslow, and decided that intelligence was more important than doctrine.

The name Atl was said to come from an Aztec word for water that also had the esoteric meaning of “home of our ancestors.” The closeness of Atl to words like Atlas, Atlantic, and Atlantis was also noted. Water was seen as an appropriate symbol of life, since the first organisms came into existence in water and water is essential to life. Atl had its own emblem, the tiki, based on the Caribbean water god Ruba-tiki. One Atlan called the tiki “a not-for-sale sign” to hang on one’s life. Atl soon had a logbook, an inside journal called The Atlan Annals, and a student paper called Atlan Torch.

But Atl was never a formal, rigid organization. Lance Christie said the relationship of Atlans to one another was like “the ties between siblings” in a large family. They were “a group of friends around the country who shared a desire to explore human potential and social structure and to give each other emotional support”—an extended family in a world of nuclear families. “When the chips are down,” wrote Lance, “the family defends and shelters its own,” but there are, he added, “no ‘parents’ in Atl. One’s own judgment maintains in their place.” Atl was conceived to have no leaders and no followers. Besides being a family, it was also a dream, and Zell wrote: “We do not ‘belong’ to it. . . . Atl belongs to us, the dreamers.”¹⁶

The small group of Atlans, never greater than a hundred, saw themselves as the promoters of alternatives that would lead to the creation of human beings with godlike potentialities. Atlans attempted to infiltrate Mensa. They concerned themselves with educational experiments, studying the Montessori system and the works of A. S. Neill. They had a strange fascination with IQ and personality tests. Just when these tests began to be adversely scrutinized by radical critics, the Atlans were using them experimentally in their search for new Atlans. Still, tests were not primary; Atlans became Atlans by the same process we have seen in regard to Pagans generally, a process of coming home, an intuition.

Atlans were, above all, survivalists. They encouraged their “members” to learn such diverse skills as “speedreading, memory training, karate, yoga, autosuggestion, set theory, logic, survival training and telepathy.”¹⁷ Atlans saw themselves as brighter, more active, more creative, more in need of stimulation and interaction, and more able to make their own rules than other people. They often considered themselves outcasts, a “leper colony,” dangerous because they were uncompromising and refused to fit into the general “sociological matrix.”

Politically, they were hard to define. One Atlan described himself as a “left-wing-type democrat”; another said he favored “dictatorship without oppression”; a third said she hated “the NAACP, ban-thebombers, farm subsidies, and social ‘sciences.’” Zell wrote that his dislikes included the military, missionaries, isms, labels, commercials, atomic annihilation, and “original sin.” His greatest wish for the world was for the “full and controlled use of all the powers of ESP and PK for the entire human race.”¹⁸

Atl was not revolutionary in the ordinary sense of the word; it did not proselytize, and one Atlan wrote that “the happiness of this group can be assured without harming the rest of the world.” Still, Atl’s reading list was filled with visionaries of diverse and contradictory stripes: Neill, Maslow, Fromm, Leary, Huxley, Heinlein, Rand, The Realist. Some Atlans, like Zell and Christie, had visionary goals. They had short-term aims like establishing a press, a school, a nudist colony, a coffee house. In the long term their goals were, as Lance wrote, “to work toward a world along the lines seen in those books, a world where the children of Man may walk the hills like Gods.”

Others disagreed and felt Atl should have no real purpose “except to maintain communication” between friends. As Lance observed:

Atl is not a unitary movement with a rigid dogma and a narrow, specific Cause. It is a vast, heterogeneous assemblage of ornery, cantankerous, intelligent, independent, unenculturated human beings who have an indefinable something that sets them apart and binds them together. Expecting all Atlans to agree at any given time on anything is a classic example of wild-eyed optimism.¹⁹

The Church of All Worlds grew out of Atl in 1967. It was conceived, according to Christie, as a “living laboratory” to work out problems in communal living, philosophy, and communication. As in Heinlein’s novel, the Church had a structure of nine circles, each named for a different planet. The Church was “Tim Zell’s baby,”²⁰ Christie wrote at one point, and much of what came to pass was the evolution of Zell’s own vision, with which not all Atlans sympathized. Nor was sympathy considered obligatory.

From the beginning, Zell’s description of Atl was “a society dedicated to the maximal actualization of human potential and the realization of ultimate individual freedom and personal responsibility.” Within a few years the Church of All Worlds would only slightly rephrase that to proclaim that CAW was, in fact, a Neo-Pagan religion “dedicated to the celebration of Life, the maximal actualization of Human potential, and the realization of ultimate individual freedom and personal responsibility in harmonious eco-psychic relationship with the total Biosphere of Holy Mother Earth.”²¹

The real story of CAW is how contact with the ecology movement and other groups and research into the history of ancient and “primitive” peoples (the worship of the Mother Goddess, etc.) transformed into a Neo-Pagan religion an organization originally based on the visions of a science fiction writer, a psychologist, and a right-wing philosopher who hated with a passion all forms of reverence for nature and all forms of religion. And the transformation revolved around the word Pagan.

The change may have been due largely to Kerry Thornley, a man who appears in the next chapter in a most amusing role. Thornley, under the unlikely name of Omar Ravenhurst, helped found a complex of delightfully bizarre and surrealist Neo-Pagan groups—among them the Erisians, the Discordian Society, the POEE, the Erisian Liberation Front—all devoted to the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, the Lady Eris. In 1966 Thornley, calling himself “Young Omar,” wrote an article for a communitarian group called Kerista. He noted that B. Z. Goldberg, in his book The Sacred Fire, had observed that one function of primitive religions had been to provide refuge and relief; to lift temporarily the taboos of the society. Goldberg, according to Omar, wrote: “What was forbidden at large in the bush not only was permitted, but in fact, became a duty in the temple of the gods.”²³

Taking off from Goldberg, Omar said that since the Jewish and Christian traditions were not credible in this age of science, they should be abandoned. He wrote:

Let us forget them. Instead, let us look at the jobs of the far less intellectual, but far more constructively functional religions of old. These were the “pagan” religions—the religions that survive to this day in England and the United States as “witchcraft.”

Pagan religions “both stabilized and overthrew the social structure.” Modern psychotherapy, sensory awareness workshops, and existential games were attempting to do the same thing and had, most likely, been reintroduced into society for a similar purpose. To Omar, science provided confirmation of Paganism as “an institutionalized cultural countertrend” and paved the way for the return of Paganism as a legitimate social force.

As for Kerista, that group espoused spontaneity, community, eroticism, and liberty. Omar wrote that the aims of Kerista and Paganism, in general, were strongly opposed to dogma and creed:

Kerista is a religion and the mood of Kerista is one of holiness. Do not, however, look for a profusion of rituals, dogmas, doctrines and scriptures. Kerista is too sacred for that. It is more akin to the religions of the East and, also, the so-called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West. Its fount of being is the religious experience and that action or word or thought which is not infused with ecstasy is not Kerista. And Kerista, like those religions of olden times, is life-affirming.²⁴

Kerista disappeared and Young Omar became involved with the vagaries and intricacies of the Lady Eris, but he was perhaps the first person, at least in the United States, to use the word Pagan to describe past and present nature religions. Some have actually alleged that the entire Neo-Pagan movement is an Erisian Plot (see next chapter and Robert Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus). At this time the word Pagan was also being used by Witchcraft covens in the United Kingdom and the United States. It found its way into the publications of the Witchcraft Research Association in 1964 and 1965. But most Witches were using the term to describe the ancient religions of the British Isles and Continental Europe and their own religious practice as Witches, not the Neo-Pagan phenomenon outside the Craft revival.²⁵ It took a catalyst to create a sense of collectivity around the word Pagan, and in the United States the Church of All Worlds and its Green Egg filled this role. It was Tim (Oberon) Zell who picked up the term from Young Omar’s article.

For this reason alone the Church of All Worlds deserves a large place in this story. CAW was not the first Neo-Pagan group in the United States. As we have seen, Gleb Botkin’s Long Island Church of Aphrodite may well have been the first, and Feraferia was probably the first group to espouse polytheism openly. But CAW helped a large number of distinct groups to realize they shared a common purpose, and this gave the phenomenon new significance. Until then, each group had existed on its own, coming into contact with others only at rare events like the Renaissance fairs in California or science fiction conventions. CAW and Zell, by using terms like Pagan and Neo-Pagan in referring to the emerging collectivity of new earth religions, linked these groups, and Green Egg created a communication network among them.

The Church of All Worlds was formally chartered in March 1968. It rented a building for meetings and began publishing Green Egg. At this time it came into contact with Feraferia and a number of Witchcraft covens, and began to involve itself in the growing environmental movement. In the earliest issues of Green Egg Paganism was seen as encompassing transcendental meditation and liberal Unitarianism. But contact with these groups changed CAW’s conception of Paganism.

At first, CAW was most inspired by Feraferia’s vision. In 1969 CAW was using Feraferia’s calendar and its greeting “Evoe Korê!” hailing the Divine Maiden. It was Feraferia’s Fred Adams who coined the term eco-psychic to explain Neo-Paganism’s religious ecology. Zell wrote that Feraferia had developed virtually all aspects of a Pagan religion—myths, rites, ceremonies, celebrations, and a eco-psychic vision of truly gigantic proportions—whereas the Church of All Worlds had concentrated more on ethics, psychology, sociology, human development, and morality. An alliance seemed to Zell most natural.

Green Egg became more serious in tone, as befitted the newsletter of a church with a mission. CAW began to look seriously at the question of rite, ritual, and myth. Fred Adams wrote:

It is the Neo-Pagans’ Destiny to supply the “Cult-Culture-Cultivation” foundations for the now rising, yet psychically rootless Conservation Action Movement(s). Not only must we re-implant the Soil of Holy Earth. We must also re-implant the Human Soul & Body! Thus reforestation as Celebration for one thing—Pagan celebration. . . . The gap between work and play must be closed.

These two Turtle-Back movements must be joined: 1) Panerotic Freedom and 2) Wilderness Conservation.²⁶

Tom Williams, a priest of CAW, described to me the slow transformation of the church. He had joined in 1968, after stumbling across a sign advertising a meeting that read: “You may be a Pagan and not know it.” Having considered himself a “Pagan” (as opposed to “Christian”) for many years, and having a deep love for Greek mythology, Williams was interested. “I found out that there were other people who called themselves Pagans, but it took a while, because CAW did not accent its connection with earth religions in the beginning. Since the church came out of a conglomeration of Heinlein and Rand, it had to evolve.”

Williams remembered that CAW’s original attitude toward occultists was uniformly negative; Williams even remembered pulling a few harmless practical jokes on local occultists and ceremonial magicians in the area. “In the beginning,” he said, “one might have been justified in calling CAW a science-fiction Grok-flock, but things began to change. We began to work with the Coalition for the Environment in the community. We began to meet people who were into Witchcraft, the modern Craft. At first I did not understand what the Craft was all about. I had more or less lumped it together with spiritualism and ceremonial magic. But then, gradually, we began to realize that there was something here, involving a connection with the ancient and modern earth religions. I think exposure to these things awakened something within us that apparently had been there for quite some time without us knowing it. I think it was a process of discovery. We had always felt we were the outcasts, the dispossessed. Of course, we had some of this feeling in the beginning, as the title Stranger in a Strange Land implies. But when we recognized that our emotional feeling lay with the planet; that there was a real distinction between the path of things and the path of the heart, these feelings went further than they had in the beginning.”

In 1970 Williams wrote that the church was placing a greater emphasis on ecology and on the idea of a reverent identification with nature. “We are basically life-affirming and nature oriented as opposed to the anti-life, spirit oriented, anti-nature religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. . . . Hence the only word for us is Pagans—the lovers of trees, the mad dancers in moonlit groves, the reverers of our beloved Earth for the mere fact of her immediate intoxicating existence.”

The idea of linking a number of Neo-Pagan groups was not merely “to flee the smokestacks, stifling gases and filth that man has surrounded himself with in his ‘pursuit of happiness,’” but to build in a positive way, “to create the dream of eco-psychic-land-sky-love-body-Wilderrealm,” a time when all would “walk the Green Hills of Earth [a reference to another Heinlein novel] as Gods in the paradisal garden of Great Nature!”²⁷

Another CAW priest, the late John McClimans, of the Chicago nest, also talked to me about the church’s growth and evolution. He said, “When CAW was started, we used the word Pagan to mean non-Christian, even anti-Christian.” But as the group spread out and came into contact with other groups, that changed. “The next thing I knew, I was a real Pagan instead of an anti-Christian type of Pagan. . . . There was a change of attitude, a change of value. I remember I felt it inside my head. I suddenly felt we were in the midst of the creation of something entirely new, something that offered us a way out of all the shit around us.”

These transformations ended CAW’s relationship with Atl. Many Atlans had no wish to involve themselves with the church, objecting to CAW’s relationship with the occult—tenuous though it was—as well as CAW’s unconventional tendencies. While the church was never officially interested in conversion, some Atlans objected to what they felt was its missionary zeal. Zell’s hair and beard got longer. Occasionally, he would carry his lovely pet boa constrictor, Histah, around his shoulders when speaking in public. In 1972 Zell, Histah, and Julie, the woman he lived with, took the part of Cerridwen and Cernnunos and won a prize at the Costume Ball of the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles. Two years later Zell and his present partner, Morning Glory, won another prize at the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington (Discon) for their portrayal of two characters in Philip José Farmer’s novel Flesh. Both Morning Glory and Zell had their pet serpents with them and they both looked quite dazzling. It was episodes such as these that led a number of Atlans to dissociate themselves from the church on the grounds that they did not want to be involved in a “public spectacle.” As McClimans observed, “Most of the people in Atl were confirmed agnostics. They had no use for anyone who could even conceive of a theistic universe.” He remembered once trying to explain Neo-Pagan philosophy to a former Atlan who had a Ph.D. degree in philosophy. McClimans said his friend didn’t want to hear about it. “If it wasn’t Kant, if it hadn’t made the big time, it was worthless. My friend only wondered how I could be so stupid.”

I asked if Atl still existed. “Yes,” he said, “in a small way.” McClimans told me that in the last two years he had been accepted by total strangers in another state simply because he possessed an Atl tiki. Some members of the original Atlan group left Missouri and settled elsewhere. They purposely chose a state with low population density, one that might prove fertile ground for innovative political and social changes. There are still Atlan nests, but they do not wish to be publicly known. Apparently, the goals remain the same.

As for the Church of All Worlds, during the next few years it began to evolve its own philosophy, which is quite distinct from the philosophies of Feraferia and other Neo-Pagan groups. Zell began writing about the planet Earth as deity, as a single living organism, and this became the Church of All World’s central myth. Since 1971, the myth has been revised constantly and has become a unique eco-religious perception.

In the first article, “Theagenesis:^v The Birth of the Goddess,”²⁸ Zell wrote that all religions should be considered subjectively “true,” as should all opinions. Personal reality was necessarily subjective, so a belief was “true” by definition. He observed:

A Voudou death-curse is as real to its victim, and as effective, as being “saved” is to a Christian fundamentalist, or the kosher laws are to an Orthodox Jew. A flat Earth, with the stars and planets revolving around it, was as real to the medieval mind as our present globe and solar system are to us. Hysteric paralysis and blindness are as real to the sufferer as their organic counterparts. The snakes and bugs of alcoholic and narcotic deliria are real to the addict, and so is the fearful world of the paranoiac. From the standpoint of human consciousness, there is no other reality than that which we experience, and whatever we experience is therefore reality—therefore “true.”

Only when we compare our subjective experiences with the experiences of others and come to a consensus of reality, Zell wrote, do we arrive at a more objective truth, although even the consensus of a community is often subjective. While all religions are subjectively “true,” their objective truth depends on how much they themselves depend on blind faith, dogma, tradition, and authority. A religion that could accommodate itself to new discoveries and changes, hold dogma and creed to a minimum, and encourage curiosity and questioning would stand a good chance of holding up under objective scrutiny. With this idea as background, Zell described the ancient Pagan religions:

The Paleo-Pagans, diversified though they were, held among them certain common viewpoints. Among these were: veneration of an Earth-Mother Goddess; animism and pantheism; identification with a sacred region; seasonal celebration; love, respect, awe and veneration for Nature and Her mysteries; sensuality and sexuality in worship; magic and myth; and the sense of Man being a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm of all Nature. These insights, however, were largely intuitive, as science had not yet progressed to the point of being able to provide objective validation for what must have seemed, to outsiders, to be mere superstition.

These attitudes, Zell wrote, take on entirely new implications in the twentieth century. He took the reader on a long tour through biology, cell division, reproduction, and evolutionary theory. The central idea of this tour was that all life had seemingly developed from a single cell that divided and subdivided, passing its cellular material on and on. All life was interconnected, part of a single living organism.

“Literally,” wrote Zell, “we are all ‘One.’ The blue whale and the redwood tree are not the largest living organisms on Earth; the entire planetary biosphere is.” This organism Zell called “Terrebia” (later changed to Gaea). He began to make analogies between her and other living organisms. Like all organisms, Terrebia, or Gaea, was composed of many organs; she had her own forms of specialization. Each animal and plant was “the equivalent of a single cell in the vast body of Terrebia.” And “each biome, such as pine forest, coral reef, desert, prairies, marsh, etc., complete with all its plants and animals,” was the equivalent of an organ. And, just as in a human being each organ contributes to the total coherence of the being, similarly, in Gaea, you cannot “kill all the bison in North America, import rabbits to Australia, cut or burn off whole forests” without disrupting the integrity of the whole. To anyone viewing the earth as a living being, ecological principles became obvious.

Unlike the views of many evolutionists, Zell’s was not open-ended but progressive. At first, he saw humans as the nervous system of the planet, among the last to evolve and the most complex. Human beings were the stewards of the planetary ecology of Gaea. But Zell soon changed this view. He concluded that all sentient life functions collectively as the nervous system of the planet, and that the primary “brain” function may well belong to the cetacea, and not to human beings. Zell saw modern humans as a cancer on the planet, cells multiplying out of control. At one point he even postulated nuclear war as a kind of ghastly radiation treatment that he hoped could be avoided.

The ultimate potential of Gaea was the telepathic unity of consciousness between all parts of the nervous system, between all human beings, and, ultimately, between all living creatures. Evolution to such a point would be similar to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s emerging planetary consciousness, “the Omega Point,” although without Teilhard’s Christian trappings. The evolutionary goal was a total telepathic union, a destiny like that described by Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood’s End, but without the loss of individual consciousness and sense of self. When the Omega Point or Apotheasis was reached, the planetary organism Gaea would truly awaken.

In this context, Zell redefined divinity and deity as the fulfillment of potential, as “the highest level of aware consciousness accessible to each living being, manifesting itself in the self-actualization of that being.” Thus, the cell was God to its components; the tissue was God to the cells, and so on. And a human being manifested a wholly new level of awareness, organization, and “emergent wholeness.” Of this level of organization, Zell wrote, “We find it appropriate to express recognition of this Unity in the phrase: Thou art God.”²⁹ And since all beings were connected biologically, all eco-systems expressed a new level of awareness. Mother Earth herself could be seen as God. Zell wrote:

Indeed, even though yet unawakened, the embryonic slumbering subconscious mind of Terrebia is experienced intuitively by us all, and has been referred to instinctively by us as Mother Earth, Mother Nature (The Goddess, The Lady.)³⁰

God became Goddess, as had so intuitively been understood for centuries. In a later article Zell noted:

Countless mystics, poets, shamans and children the world over have through all ages had their lives uplifted and transformed by the appearance or vision of She whom they have named Isis, Ceres, Rhea, Dana Gaea, Oestra, and in the Christian lands, Mother Mary. She whom we know as the All-Mother; The White Goddess; The Great Goddess; Mother Nature, Mother Earth. She is a real living Being, and like all living Beings, She too has a Soul-Essence which we can perceive, although “translated” into images familiar to our limited imaginations. . . .

And just as every cell in our own bodies contains the essence of the Whole in the genetic code imprinted within the intricacies of the double helix DNA molecule, and as indeed each cell in my own body is Tim Zell, so does every living plant and creature share in the essence of the Whole of Mother Earth. To each we can rightly say, “Thou Art Goddess.”³¹

The publication of “Theagenesis” was followed by a number of other articles. In “Biotheology” Zell wrote that, since we are all Goddess, deity should be conceived of as “immanent,” not transcendent; deity is within. He wrote:

We see that the Humanists are right; God is Mankind. Also correct are the Pantheists in their recognition that God is all Nature. Even the Christians touch upon the truth when they realize that God is “revealed in the forests, the glens, the meadows. . . .” The “religious experience” of mystics, which seems to show them “the naked face of God,” is actually an experience of coming into complete attunement with this highest level of aware consciousness. . . .

Such an experience could be brought about by fasting, religious or sexual ecstasy, or hallucinogens. In all cases, “the experience itself appears to be identical, an experience of total beingness, of ecstatic revelation.” To anyone having such an experience, Zell wrote, the phrase, “Thou art God” becomes obvious. Heinlein’s idea of “groking” was “a kind of total empathic understanding in which identity of subject and object merge into One.” Thus, “to grok something,” wrote Zell, “would be to relate to it with one’s full potential.” This, he said, was something that happened naturally with plants and animals. Only human beings seemed not to know who they were and to act accordingly, and this human failing was perhaps at the root of all human suffering. It is why, he wrote, there is so little species awareness, life awareness, and environmental awareness among human beings today.

This awareness was known to many ancient celebrants, the Pagans, the “naked dancers of moonlit groves” who were put to death by monotheists. “Monotheism,” wrote Zell, “is a synonym for genocide,” and yet, the new Pagans emerged in “the midst of the most monolithic, monotheistic state ever erected,” rejecting transcendent deities and finding deity where it was all along, within each person.³² The cosmic purpose of Neo-Paganism was to facilitate that increased awareness—to work for it by supporting all ecologically oriented movements, establishing alternative communities, demonstrating alternate possibilities for survival on the planet, and ultimately, awakening Gaea, the Goddess, the planetary mind.

Zell’s articles had a strong influence on the development of the Church of All Worlds. Lance Christie wrote of them:

You’ve begun the creation of a myth, and a most livable one at that. It is a myth which defines a role for man and answers a lot of mystic questions. It seems to fit very well within the total tradition of man’s symbols and myths, expressing in clearer and expanded form a theme as old as consciousness can remember.

Christie viewed the myth as a beginning, adding, “I still think we need to explore Jung et al. to get the whole concept within a full psychological/ anthropological perspective. . . . Be that as it may, the world view you are creating is compatible with objective consciousness and science in a way no other religious myth is. . . .”³³

Several years after the articles were written, Newsweek magazine, as well as a number of less popular journals, mentioned the work of British scientist James Lovelock, who had posited the “Gaia hypothesis”: the living matter on earth, air, oceans, and land was all part of a system that Lovelock called after the Earth-Mother Goddess, Gaia. He said that this entire system seemed to “exhibit the behavior of a single organism—even a living creature,” and argued that the biosphere was able to exert control over the temperature of the earth’s surface and the composition of the atmosphere. Newsweek stated that the “Gaia hypothesis” was, in the main, “an elaboration of general ecological notions of close relationships between living things and their environment,” but that Lovelock had carried this idea further, saying, “in man, Gaia has the equivalent of a central nervous system. We disturb and eliminate at our peril. Let us make peace with Gaia on her terms and return to peaceful coexistence with our fellow creatures.”³⁴ Zell entered into a short correspondence with Lovelock, comparing their world views.

The concept of Gaea was never, officially, a dogma of CAW. There were, and still are, no dogmas. But the effect of “Theagenesis; The Gaea Hypothesis” on CAW’s history and on the thoughts and goals of church priests, priestesses, and members was extraordinary. All the CAW members I interviewed felt that the goals of Neo-Paganism were enormous, involving a total transformation of Western society. In contrast, only half the other Neo-Pagans I interviewed thought in such sweeping terms.

Tom Williams once told me that CAW’s goal was to change the world. “After all,” he said, laughing, “why be petty?” Another time he said that one goal of Neo-Paganism was to learn to see ourselves “as a total entity—rational and irrational at once, within a total environment, and with a total identification with all life.”

Carolyn Clark, a priestess in CAW, told me, “If there is an ultimate goal or purpose, it has to be the purpose of achieving Chardin’s Omega Point, the union of consciousness with all living things.” And Zell, as might be expected, said the ultimate goal was “totally and completely to transform human consciousness and planetary consciousness.” When I asked if he had anything less ambitious in mind, he smiled and said, “Anything less is not quite enough.”

“It is a choice between Apocalypse or Apotheasis,” Morning Glory said to me. “The purpose of Neo-Paganism is to put us back on the track; we took a wrong turning somewhere around thirty-five hundred years ago. But our purpose is not to compromise, to rework, to integrate ourselves back into the culture, but rather to be a viable alternative to it. Now that it is a challenge that many of us are not going to be up to. I myself have nightmares about it. Still, that is the challenge. That is where it lies, because there is no way to reform the system.”

Most people find the idea of a religion without creeds difficult. Many within the Church of All Worlds have thought about a new definition of religion. They confronted the problem from the very beginning, particularly when describing Neo-Paganism to people who they felt were their kind of people, but who were hostile to the idea of all religions. As Zell explained, “Most of the people who think in ways similar to us, have been turned off by conventional religions. This is the greatest problem we have. Ten years ago, if someone had presented me with Neo-Paganism and put it in terms of a ‘new religion,’ I would have had nothing to do with it. And yet here I am. We had to get a new definition of religion. Because everywhere else religion is defined in Judeo-Christian terms; it means belief in a supreme being, heaven, hell, and so forth. And none of us believe in any of that, yet we consider ourselves deeply religious. We slowly came to understand that religion is a form of relinking, of increasing consciousness and communication. Worship is a form of communication, of communion. And communication can only be between equals. It can’t be abasement, a bowing down before something greater. When I make love with a woman, when I sleep under the trees, when I compost my garbage, all these things can be acts of worship.”

With this different understanding of religion, the Church of All Worlds began to formulate a concept of its relationship to Neo-Paganism and to the Pagan religions of the past. CAW members saw themselves as a family, a kind of tribe. The ancient Pagan religions were seen as tribal religions, based on custom and tradition rather than on dogma and belief, grounded in what one did rather than in what one believed. Zell made a distinction between what he called philosophical religions (taught by prophets and formulated into creeds) and natural religions (the evolving, indigenous folk or Pagan religions of particular peoples). The former, he wrote, were artificially constructed; the latter emerged out of the processes of life and nature, and continued to evolve organically.

Philosophical religions are like buildings: an architect (prophet) gets an inspiration (revelation) and lays down his vision in blueprints (prophecy; scriptures). Then contractors, carpenters, masons, etc. (disciples and followers) build the building more or less according to his specifications. It is made of non-living materials, and does not grow naturally; it is assembled. When it is finished, it cannot grow further, and begins to deteriorate, until it is eventually so outmoded and rundown it is demolished to make way for new buildings. A world of philosophical religions is like unto a city, with all the problems (hunger, war, hatreds, crime, pollution, disease) of a big city, and for much the same reason: unnaturalness.

A Pagan religion, on the other hand, is like a tree: it emerges alive from the Earth, grows, changes (both cyclically in seasons, and continually in upward and outward growth), bears flowers, fruit, shares its life with other living beings. It is not made, or designed according to any blueprint other than genetic. And when, after many thousands of years, perhaps (for many trees are potentially immortal, never dying of old age), it should come to the end of its time, it does not pass from the world entirely, for its own progeny have, in the interval, begun to spring up all around, again from the Earth, and again, similar yet each unique. A world of Pagan religions is like a forest.

Included in natural religions would be animism, totemism, pantheism, much of Witchcraft, all indigenous religions of Africa, Australia, and America and the old religions of the Celts, the Gauls, the Norse, and the fairy faith in Ireland. Zell wrote:

The old Pagan religions were never “created.” . . . What little we can trace indicates a descent from Paleolithic and Neolithic fertility cults, hence the common symbols of the Earth Mother Goddess and the Horned God, representing, respectively, the vegetable and animal life of the Earth. We find them therefore unanimous in their veneration of Nature and their sensual celebration of life, birth and death as expressed seasonally in aspects of sexuality.

All the Great Festivals of Paganism, wherever they may be found, correspond in common with the Solstices, Equinoxes, and other natural annual cycles of life (animal mating seasons, planting, harvest). Most of these remain with us today in more or less disguised form as the so-called “Christian” holidays of Christmas (Yule), Easter (Ostara), May Day (Beltane), Thanksgiving (Harvest Home), Halloween (Samhain) and even Groundhog’s Day (Oimelc). In addition to these six, there are two others, Midsummer and Lugnasadh, comprising a total of eight Festivals (or Sabbats as they are known, under different names, in Witchcraft).³⁶

Another CAW member who sought to describe the nature of Neo-Paganism was Lewis Shieber, who divided religions into two categories—those that functioned from a base of “Tribal/Tradition” and those that functioned from a base of “Dogma/Belief.” The latter, said Shieber, were, more often than not, based on a “universal” idea. Such religions were often large, evangelistic, and based on a powerful but closed system. The religions based on “Tribal/Tradition” were usually small ones, functioning out of a local “cultural matrix.” In such religions participation in tribal actions was emphasized; it was never that important to believe in the myths and legends of the tribe. In Judaism, for example, Shieber noted that one could disbelieve in God, as long as you followed the tradition. “All primitive Pagan religions have this [Tribal/Tradition] base,” Shieber wrote, adding, “Thus many sometimes contradictory beliefs may be held by individuals without harm to the religion as long as the identification with the Tribe and tribal practices is strong.”

Tribal/Tradition religions stressed social and personal interaction. The governments in these societies were often “basically anarchistic,” tribal order being maintained by “conventions and discussion leading to consensus.” The Church of All Worlds fell into the Tribal/Tradition category. While “there are some practices and ideas which have been associated with CAW,” he wrote, “all these associated things are unofficial and not even accorded the name of tradition.”

CAW’s antipathy toward dogma is typical of many but by no means all Neo-Pagan groups. Feraferia, for example, has, as we have seen, definite beliefs and creeds, and even with CAW there was a temptation to “require belief in the poetic and useful vision of Tim Zell’s ‘Theagenesis’ theory.” Shieber concluded that CAW as “tribal religion” could never claim universality, and therefore would always be small. “We must assume,” he said, “that we are a guest people in a possibly unfriendly nation and act accordingly.”³⁷

Many people in CAW talked about the strange position of being a priest or priestess in a church that stressed lack of dogma. John McClimans told me that those who remained in CAW were usually people who didn’t want someone in the middle—between themselves and the discovery of their own God/Goddess within. “You’re the Goddess. I’m the Goddess. When a person becomes aware of that idea; when they begin to conceive that this might even be a tentative possibility, they’re hooked. They don’t need someone else to tell them how to touch “god” or “goddess.” They may need someone to give them the impetus to put their hand on the pulse; but once they’ve felt it, they don’t want you there anymore. Once their hand is there, they are going to say, ‘Get away, so I can feel it without you interfering!’”

Besides a tribal/tradition base and lack of dogma, most members of CAW felt that all the new Pagan religions, from Feraferia and CAW to the Witchcraft covens, held certain other values in common. To describe this common thread, Zell used Fred Adams’s term, “eco-psychic.” As we have seen, it was Feraferia that first put forth the idea of a life of religious ecology and Fred Adams worked out elaborate rituals to complement such a life. An early statement from the Council of Themis put the idea this way:

Everything we encounter in the Biosphere is a part of Nature, and ecology reveals the pattern of this is-ness, the natural relationships among all these things and the organic unity of all of them as a Biospheric Whole. . . .

Of all man’s secular studies, ecology comes closest to bringing him to the threshold of religious relationship to his world. Ecology not only confirms the wonders of form and function that other secular studies have revealed, but it brings these into organic union with each other as one dynamic, living Whole; and it points out the conditions for the well-being of both this overall Unity and the parts that comprise it.

An intensive realization of these conditions, and of one’s own immediate role in their sustainment and development, brings one to the threshold of religious awe.³⁸

The Church of All Worlds, like Feraferia, saw Neo-Paganism as a response to a planet in crisis. And if science fiction provided the myths and vision for CAW, ecology was the supreme religious study. A Pagan religion meant a life of harmony with the earth, not a set of rituals. The ritual was nothing less than a truly integrated life.

Carolyn Clark put it this way: “It has to become second nature. So that when you take the garbage out to your compost heap, there’s this moment of awareness and attunement between yourself and the collective unconscious of the Earth; so that as you throw it on the heap, you think, ‘Say there, Mom, I’m feeding you.’” But unlike Feraferia, CAW’s support of ecology was coupled with support for sophisticated technologies, as long as they were based on an understanding and respect for eco-systems. As might be imagined, CAW also consistently supported space exploration.

In keeping with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous remark that any highly developed technology is indistinguishable from magic, I often heard church members quote a remark made by Tom Williams: “You gotta admit, any magic that can erase an entire city from the face of the Earth in a single instant, well—that plenty big Ju-Ju, B’wana!”³⁹ Similarly, Zell observed to me, “Magic is the science you don’t understand, the science you don’t take for granted. Science and magic are both approaches to understanding the universe. If you have a theory to explain something, it gets called science. If people don’t understand something, or lack a theory to explain it, they label it ‘magic.’” In general, members of CAW saw Neo-Paganism as a religious philosophy that combined intuitive and rational modes of thought.

Lance Christie wrote in Green Egg that the problem with modern technology was not the inventions themselves but a “mechanical world picture,” a mechanistic view of the universe. He noted that against this picture many people such as Mumford and Dubos had opposed an “organic world picture.” CAW, according to Christie, was uniquely able to combine “a scientific skepticism and rationality with an acceptance of that which is non-analytic and non-rational in human experience.”⁴⁰

Since most members of CAW have been visionaries, anarchists, and religious ecologists, they have naturally gravitated to “alternative” forms of energy—solar, wind, and so forth. But they have always supported scientific inquiry in order to broaden and enrich our ways of thinking, not to obliterate them. Scientific inquiry has never been seen as contradictory to psychic development or magic. The ancient Pagan peoples were seen as sources of skills that could be learned to advantage by modern Neo-Pagans. CAW has always had its eye on ancient dolmens, as well as civilizations light years away. The Church, Ellwood noted, had become “a lively meeting of an old Pagan world view, the provocative images of some modern novels and biophilosophic reflection, and a group of vigorous, socially experimental young adults.”⁴¹ CAW has had a history of attempted communes, group marriages, Heinleinian sex experimentation, and even vows of poverty, all in an atmosphere where the only sin is hypocrisy (sin is an act against God, and Thou art God) and the only crime is “that which infringes against another.”⁴²

The Church of All Worlds was set up with a nine-circle structure. One advanced through the levels by progressive involvement and participation, as well as study and getting through CAW’s long reading list, as interesting and filled with contradictions as any I have ever come across. For example, to move from the fourth to the fifth circle, a person had to read seven books listed in the basic bibliography, including one on perception, one on Native American religion, and one from a section called “Homo Novus.” In addition, the person had to begin some form of psychic training (anything from Arica to Akido would suffice) and write a long paper comparing three different religions, one of which should be Neo-Paganism. The process of advancement was conceived of as continuous and never-ending. No one, not even Tim Zell, had ever made it to the ninth circle.

Groups within the church were called “nests”—another practice taken from Stranger in a Strange Land. Each nest was autonomous. Most decisions were arrived at by consensus. I visited meetings of two of the St. Louis nests in the fall of 1975. At each one there were twelve to fifteen people. The Dog Star Nest met in the nude. The meeting I attended concentrated on shamanism. I participated in a beautiful Native American ritual, followed by CAW’s very simple ritual of watersharing, the clearest reminder of CAW’s Heinleinian origins. A goblet of water was passed from one to another. All shared this cup and said appropriate phrases to one another: “May you never thirst,” “Drink deeply,” “Thou art God,” “Thou art Goddess.”

The other nest, led by Don Wildgrube, met clothed and was experimenting with sensitivity awareness techniques. Most CAW members were in their late twenties and early thirties. But there were members in their late teens, and at least one member in his sixties. Members included psychologists, engineers, bus drivers, salesmen, and students. Most were white, middle-class, and college educated. And, unlike many Neo-Pagans, the vast majority came from Protestant backgrounds.

One scholar of Neo-Paganism, the Reverend J. Gordon Melton, a Methodist minister from Chicago who had been studying new Pagan religions for many years, said that the majority of Neo-Pagans are ex-Catholics, followed by ex-Jews. The abundance of ritual in Neo-Pagan groups may appeal to Catholics and Jews, whose religions included much ritual. Protestants, however, have little experience with ritual, according to Melton, and do not seek it. He has described CAW as the Neo-Pagan group with the most ex-Protestants, the least ritual, and the greatest tendency to proselytize, even to the point of having religious tracts. His perception of this one group seems accurate, but in my own experience in the Neo-Pagan movement, there are equal numbers of ex-Catholics and Protestants, with a smaller number of Jews. I also found many who had been deprived of any religious ritual as children.

It was clear that one of the most important reasons for CAW’s existence was a response to a need, a lack, a longing. The bond that united past and future visions within the church was a yearning for a real culture. “A common thread in Neo-Paganism,” said priestess Carolyn Clark, “is nostalgia, a yearning to get back to a time when people seemed more in control of their own lives, and societies, while complex, had a definite cultural pattern, not this weird shifting kaleidoscope that’s called American culture.”

Morning Glory Zell expressed it this way: “We’re orphans, we’re bastard mongrel children in a beautiful land that isn’t really ours. We’re grafted and transplanted, saddled with a tremendous guilt for everything from strip mines and city dumps to the death of the people who lived here before. One of the reasons for CAW’s success is that everyone identifies with being a Stranger in a Strange Land. The only people who have a real tradition here are the Native American people. There is much to identify with them. But it is not our tradition. We were never chanted the chants and rocked in the cradle and told the working rhythms and rhymes. Most of us were raised in concrete and steel, totally removed from the seasons around us. Some of us smiled when the air would get a certain taste from burning leaf smoke and we felt that stirring inside of us. But nobody else noticed it; they walked on past. Some of us are attuned to the same rhythms as indigenous people, but we have no traditions. We live in an impoverished culture. We have to create our culture from scratch.”

By 1978 much had changed in the Church of All Worlds. There were CAW nests in Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. There were other nests in Indiana and Illinois. New priests and priestesses had been ordained. But CAW’s role as catalyst for the Neo-Pagan movement receded after the Green Egg stopped publication in 1976. The journal was revived in 1988. It remained a vibrant publication until 2001.

In each issue fully a third of its pages were devoted to letters from various types of Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Witches, occultists, ecology activists, anarchists, and libertarians—among others. The writers of letters ranged from Neo-Nazi James Madole, head of the National Renaissance Party, to advocates of Timothy Leary’s theories of space migration and life extension.

Unlike most mainstream intellectual magazines, where issues become narrowly defined by a more or less reigning ideology, Green Egg, both in its Forum and in its articles, had maintained a hands-off, free-for-all policy. Debates raged on the merits of Velikovsky’s theories, the place of technology, the teachings of Aleister Crowley, the evidence for ancient matriarchies, and hundreds of other issues, with emphasis on ecology, ethics, tribalism, magic, science fiction, and the relationship of human beings to the planet. Green Egg served to create the sense that hundreds of diverse and even contradictory groups were part of an eclectic movement with certain common goals.

But the goals of many of these groups were diverse, even contradictory. To those with a conservative lifestyle, CAW seemed to be a bunch of crazy anarchists. The Green Egg’s hands-off policy created controversy. Increased contact between groups led at times to an increase in internal bickering. When Green Egg first ceased publication at the end of 1976, a number of Neo-Pagans and Witches told me they were glad because now there would be more tranquillity in the movement. And perhaps there was. Many groups began “sticking with their own” and with those others they felt close to. They simply ignored the rest of the movement.

Tom Williams and the Zells left for the West Coast. Those who stayed in St. Louis, at least the majority, remained loyal to their CAW nests and friends. Many felt that Green Egg had never served the CAW community as well as it had the Neo-Pagan community as a whole. No other Pagan publication has ever filled quite the same role. Today, perhaps the Witches’ Voice on the Internet (witchvox.com) comes the closest.

Meanwhile, Tim (Oberon) and Morning Glory Zell converted a school bus into a home for themselves, their two snakes, a possum, a tarantula, and a rat colony—food for their snakes and spider. They spent a year in Oregon writing, lecturing, and teaching. They formed a coven called Ithil Duath. Morning Glory was quoted in a local Oregon newspaper as saying, “We realize that we don’t have ‘The Way.’ After all, that’s been done. . . . We want to restore the role of the shaman (or witch) in our culture. . . . We really must return the Goddess to the earth if we are to keep a balance and avoid ecological apocalypse. . . .”⁴³ Tom Williams moved to Palo Alto. Don Wildgrube founded several covens and became a Wiccan priest.

In 1977 Oberon and Morning Glory moved to northern California. In the spring of 1978 they wrote to me: “We are living in a pioneer community comprising twelve square miles of Sacred Wilderness somewhere in the mountains of Ecotopia.” They lived in their converted school bus with Tanith, a six-foot-long Boa, Ananta, an eleven-foot-long Burmese python, and two tarantulas—Charlotte and Kallisti. They conducted seminars in the local community and they began to earn some money by making ceramic figures. They described their life as simple, with almost no expenses other than food and fuel.

Recent Notes