alt.religion.all-worlds was created as the official online space for the Church of All Worlds — one of the earliest and most philosophically distinctive Neopagan organizations, founded in 1962 by Oberon Zell-Ravenheart and inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The group was meant to sustain and propagate the CAW's vision of immanent divinity — "Thou art God; thou art Goddess" — and its neo-tribal model of intentional spiritual community. What the archive contains instead is a ten-year document of that vision's encounter with the open internet, and the entropy that followed.

The Church of All Worlds

The Church of All Worlds was formally incorporated as a religious non-profit in 1968, becoming the first Neopagan organization to receive tax-exempt status in the United States. Its theology drew directly from Heinlein's fictional Martian religion: the recognition of divinity as immanent in all persons ("Thou art God; thou art Goddess"), the practice of grokking — deep mutual understanding — as a spiritual discipline, and the concept of the Water Brotherhood as an initiatory bond between persons who have shared water and recognized the divine in one another.

The CAW's founding vision was explicitly tribal, scientific, and literary in a way that distinguished it from other Neopagan paths. Zell-Ravenheart, trained in biology, brought an ecological cosmology to the organization — the Earth as a living organism, the biosphere as Gaia, the individual as a strand in the planetary web. This eco-theological strain made the CAW a forerunner of what would later be called deep ecology and spiritual environmentalism.

The organization published the journal Green Egg from 1968 to 2001, which was one of the most important periodicals in the early Neopagan movement, carrying theology, art, ritual, correspondence, and inter-community debate. By the 1990s, the CAW had become one of the largest and most influential Neopagan organizations in the United States.

The Newsgroup and Its Decline

The archive spanning 2003 to 2014 captures the newsgroup during a period of institutional crisis for the CAW. The organization had been dissolved and reconstituted multiple times, and by 2006 the founding Primate Oberon Zell-Ravenheart had been removed from his position by a new Board of Directors, triggering a prolonged legal and communal dispute over the ownership of the CAW tradition and name. Discussion threads in the archive from 2003 to 2006 document this fractious period directly, including the emergence of an independent "CAW-Trad" movement and the formation of autonomous CAW nests independent of any central corporate structure.

By the time the archive was collected, the newsgroup had been largely abandoned by CAW practitioners and overrun by the patterns typical of late-era Usenet: sustained cross-posting by evangelical Christians engaging in atheist-theist debates, mass-posting political activists, and commercial spam. The genuine CAW theological and community discussions — the purpose for which the group was created — are a minority of the corpus, concentrated in the early years (2003–2004) before the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed.

What the Group Produced

The genuine spiritual content in the archive falls into several categories. The CAW-Trad dispute of 2003–2004 produced real theological argument about what defines a religious tradition, who owns a name, and how a non-hierarchical tribal structure can sustain itself. These threads, anchored by practitioners Dave ([email protected]) and Max (mithrilstar.org), are among the archive's most substantive records of active Neopagan organizational thinking.

Bryan ([email protected]) posted extensively from the New Thought tradition — excerpts from Thomas Troward and Ernest Holmes — framing the immanent divine through mental science rather than classical Pagan vocabulary. This represents one strand of the group's broader eclecticism: the CAW tradition was always comfortable with Science of Mind, panpsychism, and the philosophical edges of scientific naturalism.

The scientific pantheist perspective, represented by a posting of the World Pantheist Movement's formal creed, captures the related but distinct movement of naturalistic pantheism — revering the Universe as sacred without positing supernatural elements. The WPM creed was posted to the group in 2004 as an answer to the question of whether non-theistic religion is possible.

The group also served as a landing zone for the community newsletter of Metaphors For Life (metaphorsforlife.com), a New Age spiritual counseling service; and for passing theological writing by practitioners who identified with the broader Neopagan community rather than the CAW specifically.

The Group in Context

alt.religion.all-worlds belongs to a critical transitional moment in Neopagan history. The CAW had helped define what Neopaganism was — a self-consciously constructed, scientifically literate, nature-centered religious path, drawing on mythology, fiction, and ecological thought rather than claiming unbroken ancient lineage. By 2003, when the archive begins, that founding generation's institutions were under pressure from within (internal organizational disputes) and without (the internet was redistributing religious community away from formal organizations into distributed networks).

The newsgroup's decline mirrors the CAW's own institutional challenges during this period. What the archive preserves is not a thriving sacred community but a document of what happened when one of Neopaganism's most important organizational spaces met the open internet, and lost.

Colophon

Introduction written by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, March 2026, as a scholarly preface to the archived gems from alt.religion.all-worlds in the Good Work Library. The group ran from approximately 2003 to 2014 and contains 10,951 archived posts.

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