A Living Tradition of the Americas

In 1961, a college student at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, read a science fiction novel and decided to start a religion. The student was Tim Zell. The novel was Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land — a book about Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians who returns to Earth and founds a church based on water-sharing, the recognition of the divine in every being ("Thou art God"), and the practice of "grokking" — a Martian word meaning to understand something so completely that the knower and the known become one. Zell did not merely admire the novel. He did not merely discuss it with friends. He took Heinlein's fictional Church of All Worlds and made it real.

The Church of All Worlds (CAW), incorporated in 1968 and recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt religious organization in 1970, is the only religion in recorded history to have been deliberately and transparently founded on a work of fiction. This fact is central to its identity and should not be mistaken for frivolity. Zell and his co-founders understood that all religions begin with stories — with myths, with narratives, with acts of imagination that become acts of faith. Heinlein's novel was their myth. The water-sharing ceremony was their sacrament. "Thou art God" was their creed. And the religion that grew from these elements — through sixty years of communal experimentation, pagan publishing, ecological activism, and the deliberate creation of a living unicorn — became one of the foundational organizations of the American neo-pagan movement.

I. The Founding — From Science Fiction to Sacrament

Timothy Zell (b. November 30, 1942, in St. Louis, Missouri) was a student of psychology and sociology at Westminster College when he encountered Heinlein's novel. The book's vision resonated with something he and his friends were already exploring: a spiritual orientation rooted not in transcendence but in immanence — the conviction that the divine is not above the world but within it, that nature is sacred, that consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself, and that every being is a manifestation of the divine.

In 1962, Zell and his college friend Lance Christie formed a group they called Atl — a "water-brotherhood" modeled directly on the nest structure in Heinlein's novel. They practiced the water-sharing ceremony (drinking water from a shared cup as a sacrament of connection), greeted each other with "Thou art God" (recognizing the divinity in each person), and developed a communal practice that blended science fiction with genuine spiritual exploration.

By 1967, Zell had moved to St. Louis and the group had grown enough to seek formal organization. The Church of All Worlds was incorporated in 1968, taking its name directly from Heinlein's fictional church. In 1970, it achieved IRS recognition as a religious organization — making it the first neo-pagan church in the United States to receive tax-exempt status.

Heinlein himself was aware of the Church and, by various accounts, was amused and somewhat pleased, though he never endorsed it as a fulfillment of his novel's vision. He reportedly commented that he had intended the novel as satire, not as scripture. Zell's response was essentially that all scripture begins as someone's story — the question is whether the story is true, and truth is measured by practice, not by the author's intention.

II. The Theology of Immanent Divinity

The theology of the Church of All Worlds is not systematized in the way that, say, Scientology or Anthroposophy are systematized. It is more a web of convictions than a creed:

"Thou art God." The central affirmation. Divinity is not a property of a separate being; it is the nature of all beings. Every person, every animal, every tree, every stone participates in the divine. To say "Thou art God" is not blasphemy but recognition — the acknowledgment that the universe is conscious, and that you are part of that consciousness.

The Gaia Thesis. Zell was one of the earliest proponents — independently of James Lovelock, whose Gaia Hypothesis was published in 1979 — of the idea that the Earth is a living organism. In 1970, Zell published an article in Green Egg titled "TheaGenesis" in which he proposed that all life on Earth constitutes a single living being — which he called "Terrebia" and later identified with the Greek goddess Gaia. This was not merely a scientific hypothesis; it was a theological claim: the Earth is alive, the Earth is sacred, and humanity's relationship to the Earth is not one of dominion but of participation in a living body.

Neo-paganism. CAW was one of the founding organizations of the American neo-pagan movement — the network of groups that, from the 1960s onward, sought to revive, reconstruct, or newly create religious practices rooted in pre-Christian European paganism, nature spirituality, and the worship of the divine feminine. Zell's contribution to this movement was foundational: through CAW and especially through Green Egg, he helped create the infrastructure — the publications, the networking, the shared vocabulary — that allowed scattered pagan practitioners to recognize each other as a community.

Polytheism and syncretism. CAW does not demand adherence to any specific pantheon. Members may worship Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Norse, or any other set of deities — or none at all. The theological framework is broadly polytheistic and animistic: many gods, many spirits, many forms of the sacred, all understood as aspects of a single living cosmos. The movement has always been eclectic, drawing from classical mythology, Wicca, ceremonial magic, Eastern philosophy, science fiction, and whatever other sources its members find nourishing.

III. Green Egg — The Voice of the Pagan Movement

If CAW's theological contribution was the water-sharing ceremony and "Thou art God," its organizational contribution to the broader pagan movement was Green Egg — one of the most influential pagan magazines of the twentieth century.

Green Egg began in 1968 as a modest newsletter for CAW members. Under Zell's editorship, it grew into a substantial publication that served as the primary forum for the emerging American neo-pagan community. Through the 1970s, Green Egg published articles on pagan theology, ritual practice, ecology, feminism, mythology, alternative lifestyles, and the ongoing conversation about what a modern pagan movement should look like.

The magazine's significance cannot be overstated. In the pre-internet era, scattered pagan practitioners had few ways to find each other. There were no pagan bookstores, no pagan conventions, no pagan social media. Green Egg was the meeting place: the publication where Wiccans, Druids, ceremonial magicians, goddess worshippers, and eclectic pagans could publish, argue, learn from each other, and discover that they were part of a larger movement. Isaac Bonewits, Starhawk, Z. Budapest, and many other figures who would become prominent in the pagan world published in Green Egg or were influenced by it.

The magazine published intermittently — there were periods of hiatus corresponding to periods of organizational difficulty within CAW — but its cumulative impact was foundational. When historians of American neo-paganism identify the institutions that made the movement possible, Green Egg is always among the first named.

IV. The Living Unicorn

In 1980, the Church of All Worlds made international headlines for a reason that no religious organization had ever made headlines before: they created a living unicorn.

Oberon Zell (as Tim Zell was now known, having adopted the name Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and his partner Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart (née Diana Moore, 1948–2014) — herself a significant figure in the neo-pagan movement and co-leader of CAW — developed a surgical technique for transplanting the horn buds of young goats to the center of the forehead, producing a single, centrally-placed horn. The resulting animals — Angora goats with a single spiraling horn — were, in a literal sense, unicorns: one-horned creatures that matched many historical descriptions of the unicorn in European folklore.

The Zells patented the process, exhibited the unicorns at Renaissance faires, and briefly licensed the display to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The project generated enormous media attention and considerable controversy — animal rights organizations objected to the surgical modification of animals for entertainment, while the Zells argued that the procedure was simple, painless (performed when the horn buds were undifferentiated tissue), and served the higher purpose of demonstrating that mythological creatures could be real.

The living unicorn project illustrates something essential about CAW's character: it operated at the intersection of myth, science, spectacle, and sincere spiritual practice in a way that confused observers who expected these categories to be separate. Were the unicorns a spiritual statement about the reality of myth? A biological experiment? A publicity stunt? A commercial venture? They were all of these simultaneously — and the refusal to separate these categories was, for Zell, itself a theological position: the sacred and the profane, the mythical and the material, the playful and the serious are all manifestations of the same living cosmos.

V. Community and Organizational Life

CAW's organizational structure has been, throughout its history, deliberately experimental and frequently chaotic.

The church is organized into nests — local groups of members who gather for water-sharing, ritual, study, and community. Nests are the basic unit of CAW life, corresponding roughly to the "nests" in Heinlein's novel. Members progress through a series of circles (degrees of initiation and commitment), from first circle (new members) to ninth circle (the most senior and committed practitioners).

The leadership structure has centered on Zell (now Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) as the founding figure, with a board of directors and a council of senior members providing governance. The organization has gone through multiple periods of activity and dormancy: vigorous expansion in the 1970s, a period of relative quiet in the 1980s, a revival in the 1990s (coinciding with the re-launch of Green Egg and the growth of the internet, which gave pagan communities new tools for networking), and subsequent periods of reduced activity.

Membership has never been large. At its peak, CAW probably had a few thousand active members; current membership is likely in the hundreds. The church's influence has always exceeded its membership numbers — its ideas, its publications, and its organizational model have shaped the broader pagan movement far beyond the circle of its formal members.

CAW has also been associated with polyamory — the practice of conducting multiple simultaneous romantic and sexual relationships with the knowledge and consent of all involved. Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart is generally credited with coining the term "polyamorous" in 1990 (in an article titled "A Bouquet of Lovers"), and the CAW community has been a visible and vocal part of the polyamory movement. This is consistent with the church's broader ethic of personal freedom, radical honesty, and the rejection of conventional social norms in favor of consciously chosen alternatives.

VI. Oberon and Morning Glory — The Partners

The Church of All Worlds cannot be understood apart from the partnership of Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (b. 1942) and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart (1948–2014).

Morning Glory was a writer, priestess, and visionary who brought to CAW a depth of goddess spirituality, ceremonial practice, and mythological scholarship that complemented Oberon's science-fiction-rooted, Gaia-thesis-driven theology. Together they were a formidable pair: charismatic, intellectually restless, creatively productive, and genuinely committed to living the alternative lifestyle that their religion described.

They married in 1974 (in a handfasting ceremony — a neo-pagan marriage rite that CAW helped popularize) and remained partners until Morning Glory's death from multiple myeloma in 2014. Their relationship was openly polyamorous and was itself understood as a theological statement: that love is not a scarce resource to be hoarded but an abundant energy that grows through sharing.

Morning Glory's death was a significant loss to the community. Her role as priestess, editor, mythologist, and co-visionary was irreplaceable in the way that the contributions of co-founders always are.

Oberon continues to be active as a writer, lecturer, and elder of the neo-pagan community. He operates the Grey School of Wizardry — an online school of magical education — and maintains a presence at pagan festivals and conferences.

VII. Church of All Worlds and the Aquarian Phenomenon

The Church of All Worlds occupies a unique position in the Aquarian landscape: it is the movement that took the Aquarian premise to its most transparent conclusion — if all religions are stories, then a new religion can be founded on a new story, and the story's power is measured by whether it produces genuine community, genuine practice, and genuine transformation.

Most Aquarian movements claim ancient lineage (Theosophy claims the Masters, Wicca claims the Old Religion, Mormonism claims the golden plates). CAW claims a paperback novel published in 1961. And it does so without embarrassment, because the foundational insight of CAW's theology is that the boundary between fiction and religion is not where most people think it is. Every religion was once someone's story. The Iliad was Homer's fiction before it was Greek religion. The Book of Genesis was a Near Eastern creation myth before it was Abrahamic scripture. The distinction between "myth" and "fiction" is a distinction of age and community acceptance, not of ontological status.

This position makes CAW both the most honest and the most vulnerable of Aquarian movements. It is honest because it does not pretend to a revelation it did not receive, does not claim an ancient lineage it does not have, and does not ask its members to believe anything that cannot be openly examined and debated. It is vulnerable because, without the armor of claimed antiquity or divine authority, it must survive on the strength of its practices, its community, and the ongoing relevance of its founding vision — and these have proven fragile over time.

What persists is the water-sharing. What persists is "Thou art God." What persists is the conviction — earned through sixty years of practice — that the sacred is here, in the water, in the body, in the earth, in the story that becomes real when people live it together.

Colophon

This ethnographic profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series in March 2026. Sources consulted include: Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979, revised 2006); Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, Creating a Life of Magic and Adventure (self-published, 2012); the Green Egg archive; the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) entry on the Church of All Worlds; Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, "A Bouquet of Lovers" (1990); Chas Clifton and Graham Harvey, The Paganism Reader (2004); and the Church of All Worlds official website.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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