Drawing Down the Moon (52 page)

How, we might ask, did this word
Pagan
come to include newly emerging nature religions? Until the late 1960s the word had been used to designate either an ancient or indigenous tribal religion or an irreligious, immoral approach to life.
^u

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:

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 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:

CAW and Feraferia jointly founded the Council of Themis, a Neo-Pagan ecumenical alliance. They invited all groups working for “the realization of the eco-psychic potential” of human beings and nature to join. The council was short-lived, dissolving after a dispute involving questions of philosophy, organization, and leadership.

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:

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: