Drawing Down the Moon (54 page)

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:

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:

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

Most CAW members did not see themselves as “political”; many defined themselves as “apolitical” or even “antipolitical.” Zell has been known to assert that all “real” revolutions are concerned with changes of consciousness rather than shifts of power.

 

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.

How important
Green Egg
was to the Neo-Pagan community is a matter of controversy. There are some who welcomed its death with a sigh of relief. But others, including myself, believed that it was a key to the movement's vitality.