Drawing Down the Moon (51 page)

It was easy to be swept up by the intense struggles of Rand's artists and creators, who stood larger than life, battling government and bureaucracy. The late Karl Hess, the former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who later became an anarchist on the left, once observed to me, “At a time when no one made arguments, when intelligence was undervalued, when smart kids were looked down on, Ayn Rand seemed to say to them, ‘You're important.' She seemed to have a philosophical system with a rigorous structure at a time when no one wanted to talk sensibly at all. She scratched that peculiarly American strain—ironically, the same strain scratched by Emma Goldman. She was appealing, even if her philosophy was better expressed by others, such as Max Stirner, and her writing style seemed to come straight from Jack London.”

The novels of Rand were seeds that sprouted and bore many strange fruits, most of which must have horrified her. CAW is certainly such an example. It is a religion, and Rand has consistently been intensely atheist. It has long considered ecology the supreme religious activity and study, and the harmony of human beings in the biosphere the goal of highest priority. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, has praised pollution as a sign of human progress. Her heroines have wept with joy at billboards and saluted smokestacks, regarding them as a sign of the human struggle against nature. She called people concerned about ecology “antilife” and “antimind,” and condemned Native Americans as “savages.” She even called smoking cigarettes a moral duty that aids the capitalist system.
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The ironies of life are many, I thought, after speaking to Karl Hess, a renegade from Rand as well as from Goldwater. He was building, by hand, a solar-heated house in West Virginia. I wondered about the founders of CAW, some of whom voted for Goldwater in 1964, the same year I was arrested on the steps of Berkeley's Sproul Hall. CAW can only be understood within a broad libertarian framework, but one that is hard to define within our traditional political notions of “left” and “right.”

CAW began in 1961 when a young group of high-school friends, including Lance Christie, later a priest of CAW, began discussing the novels of Ayn Rand. Six months later, now college students, they began to explore the self-actualization concepts of Abraham Maslow. In the beginning, as Christie described these discussions, they were “dialogue/ fantasies over the ills of the world,” and, much as in the plot of
Atlas Shrugged,
these friends fantasized “a withdrawal of creative, unenculturated people to a remote place to await Armageddon.” Christie wrote, “After Babylon had fallen again, we saw ourselves as coming forth to rebuild the world along rational lines.”
¹⁰

After Christie entered Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he began ESP experiments with a new acquaintance, Tim Zell, who later played a key role in the formation of CAW.
^t

Maslow's attraction stemmed from his theories about the characteristics of those he called “self-actualizers”—people who perceived reality more clearly than others. They accepted themselves without unnecessary guilt or shame, and tolerated—even gravitated toward—the new, the ambiguous, and the unknown. They were spontaneous and natural, with a sense of humor that was neither hostile nor sick. They tended to be independent and at ease in solitude; they were ethical; they had social feeling; they had a wide perspective, a sense of wonder, and a sense of the mysterious. But Maslow's “self-actualizers” were, he found, alienated from ordinary convention. They felt detached from the values of the culture. Maslow referred to such persons as “aliens in a foreign land,”
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a phrase that struck a deep chord in Christie, Zell, and their friends.

Combining Maslow with Rand (some might think it a most unlikely combination), Christie envisioned an educational institution that would produce “Ayn Rand heroes, alias Maslonian self-actualizers.”
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In Rand's capitalist utopia of
Atlas Shrugged,
brilliant industrialists, creative artists, and pirates against the poor waited until the dross of civilization killed themselves off, or, more correctly, became so weakened that a takeover was possible. But at Westminster College, with the introduction of Maslow, Rand's right-wing utopia got turned on its head: change the system, educate for intelligence, and Randian heroes and heroines can be the norm.

In the next year the group read Robert Heinlein's
Stranger in a Strange Land.
Christie later wrote that reading the novel, he was “seized with an ecstatic sense of recognition. It is as if I had found in completed form the ideas which I was trying to jell on my own.”
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The novel tells of Valentine Michael Smith, who was born of Earthparents on Mars and raised there by aliens. When he returns to Earth as an alien, Smith looks at the planet with amazement. For example, he wonders if the grass minds being walked on since, after all, “these live.” In general, he expresses the philosophy of someone in tune with the universe.
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Only one writer, Robert Ellwood, Jr., has written well about the subtleties of the Church of All Worlds. His book,
Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America,
devotes a chapter, “The Edenic Bower,” to modern revivalist Neo-Pagan groups. He is, incidentally, Eliade's one source. Ellwood writes of Heinlein's novel:

Ellwood wrote that
Stranger in a Strange Land
was one of the bibles of the youth of the sixties, for in a real sense they felt they were Martians on Earth. . . .

In
Stranger in a Strange Land
the most profound ceremony is waterbrotherhood, the sharing of water, during which each person “groks” the other's godhood and an empathic bond is formed between them. In April 1962 Zell and Christie shared water together, and during the next fall the concept of a waterbrotherhood, called Atl, emerged among this group of friends now living in Fulton, Missouri.

In a sense, the waterbrotherhoods seemed to create Maslow's self-actualizers, and the statement “Thou art God,” used in Heinlein's novel, expressed what Christie and his friends had sensed in the works of Ayn Rand. They began to criticize Rand's philosophy at the many points where it conflicted with Maslow, and decided that intelligence was more important than doctrine.

The name
Atl
was said to come from an Aztec word for water that also had the esoteric meaning of “home of our ancestors.” The closeness of Atl to words like
Atlas, Atlantic,
and
Atlantis
was also noted. Water was seen as an appropriate symbol of life, since the first organisms came into existence in water and water is essential to life. Atl had its own emblem, the
tiki,
based on the Caribbean water god Ruba-tiki. One Atlan called the tiki “a not-for-sale sign” to hang on one's life. Atl soon had a logbook, an inside journal called
The Atlan Annals,
and a student paper called
Atlan Torch.

But Atl was never a formal, rigid organization. Lance Christie said the relationship of Atlans to one another was like “the ties between siblings” in a large family. They were “a group of friends around the country who shared a desire to explore human potential and social structure and to give each other emotional support”—an extended family in a world of nuclear families. “When the chips are down,” wrote Lance, “the family defends and shelters its own,” but there are, he added, “no ‘parents' in Atl. One's own judgment maintains in their place.” Atl was conceived to have no leaders and no followers. Besides being a family, it was also a dream, and Zell wrote: “We do not ‘belong' to it. . . .
Atl
belongs to us, the dreamers.”
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The small group of Atlans, never greater than a hundred, saw themselves as the promoters of alternatives that would lead to the creation of human beings with godlike potentialities. Atlans attempted to infiltrate Mensa. They concerned themselves with educational experiments, studying the Montessori system and the works of A. S. Neill. They had a strange fascination with IQ and personality tests. Just when these tests began to be adversely scrutinized by radical critics, the Atlans were using them experimentally in their search for new Atlans. Still, tests were not primary; Atlans became Atlans by the same process we have seen in regard to Pagans generally, a process of coming home, an intuition.

Atlans were, above all, survivalists. They encouraged their “members” to learn such diverse skills as “speedreading, memory training, karate, yoga, autosuggestion, set theory, logic, survival training and telepathy.”
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Atlans saw themselves as brighter, more active, more creative, more in need of stimulation and interaction, and more able to make their own rules than other people. They often considered themselves outcasts, a “leper colony,” dangerous because they were uncompromising and refused to fit into the general “sociological matrix.”

Politically, they were hard to define. One Atlan described himself as a “left-wing-type democrat”; another said he favored “dictatorship without oppression”; a third said she hated “the NAACP, ban-thebombers, farm subsidies, and social ‘sciences.'” Zell wrote that his dislikes included the military, missionaries, isms, labels, commercials, atomic annihilation, and “original sin.” His greatest wish for the world was for the “full and controlled use of all the powers of ESP and PK for the entire human race.”
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Atl was not revolutionary in the ordinary sense of the word; it did not proselytize, and one Atlan wrote that “the happiness of this group can be assured without harming the rest of the world.” Still, Atl's reading list was filled with visionaries of diverse and contradictory stripes: Neill, Maslow, Fromm, Leary, Huxley, Heinlein, Rand,
The Realist.
Some Atlans, like Zell and Christie, had visionary goals. They had short-term aims like establishing a press, a school, a nudist colony, a coffee house. In the long term their goals were, as Lance wrote, “to work toward a world along the lines seen in those books, a world where the children of Man may walk the hills like Gods.”

Others disagreed and felt Atl should have no real purpose “except to maintain communication” between friends. As Lance observed:

The Church of All Worlds grew out of Atl in 1967. It was conceived, according to Christie, as a “living laboratory” to work out problems in communal living, philosophy, and communication. As in Heinlein's novel, the Church had a structure of nine circles, each named for a different planet. The Church was “Tim Zell's baby,”
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Christie wrote at one point, and much of what came to pass was the evolution of Zell's own vision, with which not all Atlans sympathized. Nor was sympathy considered obligatory.

From the beginning, Zell's description of Atl was “a society dedicated to the maximal actualization of human potential and the realization of ultimate individual freedom and personal responsibility.” Within a few years the Church of All Worlds would only slightly rephrase that to proclaim that CAW was, in fact, a Neo-Pagan religion “dedicated to the celebration of Life, the maximal actualization of Human potential, and the realization of ultimate individual freedom and personal responsibility in harmonious eco-psychic relationship with the total Biosphere of Holy Mother Earth.”
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The real story of CAW is how contact with the ecology movement and other groups and research into the history of ancient and “primitive” peoples (the worship of the Mother Goddess, etc.) transformed into a Neo-Pagan religion an organization originally based on the visions of a science fiction writer, a psychologist, and a right-wing philosopher who hated with a passion all forms of reverence for nature and all forms of religion. And the transformation revolved around the word
Pagan.

In 1967 Tim Zell was using “Pagan” to describe the idea of CAW. In 1968 Paganism, as expressed in
Green Egg
(then a single-page newsletter), was a “life affirming religion without supernatural elements, such as were the Dionysians, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Druids, the Transcendentalists, the Existentialists.”
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