Drawing Down the Moon (50 page)

On the other hand, Ben Waggoner says there is a debate within Heathenism: “What, exactly, should the relationship be between Heathenry and the wider Neo-Pagan community?” He says that from a Heathen perspective, “Wicca, or Wicca inspired Neo-Paganism, is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla.” Heathens often feel stifled by the assumption that they are simply a part of Neo-Paganism. And Waggoner says many Heathens are “baffled, if not offended, by a lot of what they see in the Neo-Pagan community.”

In an article, “The Pentagram and the Hammer,” written back in 1994 by Devyn Gillette and Lewis Stead, but considered by many to be “on the money” still today, the writers say that Wicca and Ásatrú have a few things in common: a respect and reverence for the earth (Nerthus to the Ásatrúar, Gaia to the Wiccan), but Nerthus plays a less dominant role in Ásatrú than the Earth Mother plays in Wicca and Paganism. Both rely on a romanticized past—and both have a belief in and use of magic. But Gillette and Stead argue that all similarities end there. They argue that Wicca—while nominally polytheistic—is more pantheistic, seeing the divine in everything, harmonious and in balance. In contrast, Ásatrú is more polytheistic, seeing the gods as separate and distinct and sometimes in conflict. They write, “The overall theological message in Wicca is essentially one of keeping attuned to natural cycles, while the overall message in Ásatrú involves continual vigilance and struggle for the same spiritual development.” So, they write, many Heathens do not like it when Pagans use Norse gods as archetypes, since they regard them as distinct entities whose minds and wills are separate from their own. Gillette and Stead also argue that Wicca tends to see itself as a mystery religion, with as much attention devoted to magical practice as religious devotion. The opposite is true of Ásatrú, which they describe as a votive religion, based on veneration of the gods. Magic is distinctly secondary. In addition, there is no belief in Ásatrú of a direct lineage to ancient times. We have seen that most claims of such a lineage in Wicca are questionable, and today many Wiccans understand that, but Gillette and Stead argue that Heathens have been up front about this from the beginning—that Ásatrú is the re-creation of a religion that did exist in history, but has been “re-created through modern research.”
⁵³

Today, Heathens are forging ties with many other traditions: Native American tribes and Hellenic, Celtic, and Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Reconstructionists. Volkhvy writes:

Northern European Pagan groups are also struggling to establish the right to hold ceremonies in prisons, and many prisons have Heathen groups that meet for Blot. One prisoner has been writing to me for years from a federal prison in the Midwest. At one point he sent me a photograph of a ritual—eighteen Heathens at the prison holding Blot in a tiny grove—three trees—right next to the Native American sweat lodge.

There is no question that Heathenism is one of most important and creative parts of contemporary Paganism today.

Many of the organizations described in this chapter were influential in creating a Neo-Pagan consciousness. Feraferia and the Church of the Eternal Source, along with the Church of All Worlds and the Reformed Druids set the terms of much of the early debate and led the discussions that developed in Neo-Pagan journals. The leaders of these organizations developed key concepts and theories that are now common within Paganism as a whole. Although there is a tendency for many people to assume that Neo-Paganism and Wicca are synonymous, with the exception of unusual Wiccan groups like NROOGD and Nemeton, many of the most interesting ideas in contemporary Paganism came from these Pagan reconstructionists, as well as from the creators of futuristic religions like the Church of All Worlds.

—TOM WILLIAMS, priest, Church of All Worlds

 

 

MY FIRST MEETING with the Church of All Worlds took place on a cold day in late October 1975 in a small house in a predominantly black suburb of St. Louis. Eight or nine people sat around a long low table that was covered with large stacks of freshly printed pages. The house was decorated simply—beds and sofas covered with Indian print spreads, cushions on the floor, posters on the wall.

In a large enclosure of hand-carved wood and glass, four reptiles (rock pythons and boa constrictors) reposed quietly. A yellow flag lay draped over the top of the cage. “Don't tread on me,” it stated, with its coiled serpent below. On a shelf, toy dinosaurs stood amid a collection of fossils, seashells, rocks, and bones.

The sound of friendly chatter mingled with the rustling of pages, the steady firing of a staple gun, and the occasional crunching of popcorn, which was being passed around in a large bowl. On the inside of the doors of the house, only a few feet from shelves littered with books and records, a sign read, “Did you remember to dress?”

The sign was quite appropriate. Only one person in the room was wearing any clothes, a fact that didn't seem particularly noticeable after a few minutes. The house was very warm, and undressing seemed to be one way to be comfortable. But everyone—dressed or undressed—was engaged in the business of the day, which was sorting, collating, stapling, and mailing the seventy-fourth issue of
Green Egg.
This peculiar journal had become one of the most important sources of information on Neo-Paganism, and until recently it played a key role in facilitating communication among Neo-Pagan groups.

The
Green Egg
Mailing Party was an eight-times-yearly event of the Church of All Worlds. This particular party lasted for two days, with people wandering in and out for a few hours here and there.

Now, describing a religion founded by a prophet or under the leadership of a central charismatic figure is easy. The words of the founder and the praises of the followers are the story. But since most Neo-Pagan religions—certainly the most interesting ones—are leaderless groups with multiple voices, even contradictory positions, it is difficult to describe them without leading readers down an easy path where they can all too quickly slip on their own assumptions. By starting out with a description of a nude gathering, even a businesslike one, I may already have led you in a wrong direction.

Almost every time (and there is one notable exception to this) an outsider has attempted to write up the Church of All Worlds (CAW), he or she has misunderstood and misrepresented it, probably because CAW refuses to fit into any easy set of boxes. Mircea Eliade refers to CAW briefly in his essay “The Occult and the Modern World”:

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:

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.”