Drawing Down the Moon (53 page)

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:

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

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:

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:

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.”

“For me,” John McClimans told me, “the idea of theagenesis is
it!
But I don't want CAW to be enclosed by it. As long as we truly stay open for others to come in and show us other ways, the theagenesis idea is sure to be modified, or someone will show us something that seems better entirely.”

While many members of CAW see their church as “a total, holistic, cultural alternative to the entire fabric of Western Civilization,”
³⁵
the Gaea hypothesis remains hypothesis. The Church of All Worlds has only one real dogma—its belief that it has no beliefs.

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.