ABSTRACT
Yet the breadth of activities that the Church of All Worlds has engaged in ranges far beyond Heinlein’s text. Tim Zell (later otter G’Zell and now oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and lance Christie became passionate environmentalists and their vision of the divine became Gaia (or Terrebia, Zell’s original term), the earth as a living being. Paganism, with its strong focus on the divine feminine, which redresses the gender bias of the Judeo-Christian tradition, has a long history of environmental activism. This chapter argues that the Church of All Worlds is a sophisticated and self-reflexive invented religion, chiefly due to the visionary leadership of oberon Zell-Ravenheart, lance Christie, and Morning Glory
Zell-Ravenheart (b. Diana Moore, 1948), among others. CAW is constantly in dialogue with the discourses of late modern culture. These include science fiction, the realization of human potential, and libertarian politics; the pagan revival, environmentalism, and subcultural publishing; and polyamory, non-traditional family structures, education, and the place of children and the younger generation in Paganism.2 It will be demonstrated that all these aspects of CAW are interrelated, and that the overall holistic vision first articulated by Zell and Christie was both remarkably prescient and flexible enough to accommodate far-reaching social, political and religio-spiritual change.
