Meet Oberon Zell

We recently connected with Oberon Zell and have shared our conversation below.

Oberon, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
The key element is competence. Since my earliest days I have always been able to create anything I could envision–whether artwork (drawing, painting, sculpture), writing, construction or invention. Even complex organizations and systems–such as a church, religion, social movement, school, magazine… Even living Unicorns! Also I have generally been smarter than anyone else in the room. I have always known that I could do or create anything I set my mind to. So I have never lacked confidence and self-esteem.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I have often been asked: “What do you want to leave as your legacy to the Pagan Community?”

I truly hope that Morning Glory’s and my life and works will be a treasured legacy to the Pagan community we have loved so much. From its founding water-sharing on April 7, 1962, the Church of All Worlds was my first and most spectacular creation, but by no means my last. The intention there was to create an inclusive religion that I and others like me could believe in and be proud to be part of. The Mission Statement of our initial water-brotherhood, ATL, was simply “To make the world safe for people like us.” 62 years and three “Phoenix Resurrections” later, I’m pleased to see that CAW is still going strong, and becoming more beautiful all the time with the beautiful people who are drawn to it.

“The Sacred Mission of the Church of All Worlds is to evolve a network of information, mythology and experience to awaken the Divine within and to provide a context and stimulus for reawakening Gaea and reuniting Her children through tribal community dedicated to responsible stewardship and the evolution of consciousness.”

CAW was the first fully-incorporated church in modern times to claim the identity of “Pagan;” to legally ordain women as Priestesses; to sanction and perform same-sex and multiple marriages; to sacralize entheogens, ritual nudity and sacred sexuality; and to revive and restore the ancient Cthonic Mysteries of Beltaine, Samhain, and Eleusis. We were also the first (in 1970) to articulate and develop the “Gaea Thesis” as our foundational theology, reconciling science and religion.

History Professor Ronald Hutton, author of Triumph of the Moon, has said:

The Church of All Worlds has been one of the three most important and influential expressions of Paganism in America, the others being Pagan Witchcraft and Druidry, and it has been primarily developed and sustained by Oberon Zell and his late partner Morning Glory.

Of course, I can claim the entire Pagan community as a legacy, since I was the first to claim the term as a self-identification, way back in Sept. of 1967, and to promote it through the pages of Green Egg. For that matter, after 183 issues so far, I hope that Green Egg will continue to serve the Pagan community as a major interfaith journal for many years to come.

In March of 1968, the Green Egg appeared. From its inauspicious beginnings as a one-page ditto sheet, it grew over 80 issues into a 60-page journal, becoming the most significant periodical in the Pagan movement during the 1970s and made Tim [Oberon] Zell, its editor, a major force in Neo-Paganism (a term which Zell coined).
—Rev. Dr. J. Gordon Melton
Director, Institute for the Study of American Religions

I am pleased that Morning Glory’s coining in 1990 of the terms “polyamory” and “polyamorous,” and our lifetime of successful open relationships and two 10-year group marriages have inspired a vast movement of expanded relationships involving multiple partners. We were both very active in the early days of the Poly movement (the 1990s), and helped get it off the ground.

And we brought Living Unicorns back to the world in 1980!

Wiccan Priestess and teacher Valerie Voigt says:

Without Morning Glory and her husband Oberon, both the face and the depths of modern Paganism would look very, very different. It is largely thanks to them that the Pagan movement in the USA embraced the Goddess as Mother Nature.
The Zells articulated the Gaea Thesis and spread the word about it in GREEN EGG in the early 1970s. Back then, GREEN EGG, published by the Church of All Worlds, was the only real pan-Pagan publication, and it was the one place where regularly-published unfettered and uncensored discussion and debate occurred among many different individual practitioners and paths of Pagan practice. GREEN EGG was the lifeline that let us connect to each other.

I am particularly proud of my networking efforts in the Pagan community, and I feel that they, too, are a significant legacy: I have founded, co-founded and/or been a major player in the Council of Themis (1968), the first Pagan ecumenical council; the Council of Earth Religions (1972); The American Council of Witches (1974); The Covenant of the Goddess (1976); Bay Area Pagan Assemblies (1980s); the Universal Federation of Pagans (1990); The Papal Apology Petition (1999); the Pagan Leaders Summit (2001); the Grey Council (2002); the Coalition of Scholars in Pagan Studies (2013); and the Office of Wardens (2013). While living in NorCalifia, I was privileged to have served on the Board of the Sonoma County Pagan Network (SCPN) and helped to found a local chapter of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS).

Vying for importance among my legacy accomplishments is the Gaea Thesis—the proposition that the entire biosphere of Earth constitutes a single vast living creature—an entity we have known intuitively since time immemorial as “Mother Earth.” She whom the ancient Greeks called Ge or Gaea—from whence we derive all our terms for Earth-related subjects: Geology, Geography, Geocentric, Geodesic, Geode… In a Vision on Sept. 6, 1970, I saw that all life had developed from a single original cell that divided and subdivided, passing its DNA and cellular material on and on. All life is interconnected, part of a single living organism. What we call “evolution” is embryology on a planetary scale.

My initial “TheaGenesis” paper was followed by a number of other articles which had a strong influence on the development of the Church of All Worlds and Neo-Paganism. CAW Co-founder Lance Christie wrote of them:

“You’ve begun the creation of a myth, and a most livable one at that. It is a myth which defines a role for man and answers a lot of mystic questions. It seems to fit very will within the total tradition of man’s symbols and myths, expressing in clearer and expanded form a theme as old as consciousness can remember….the world view you are creating is compatible with objective consciousness and science in a way no other religious myth is…”

Several years after my TheaGenesis papers were published, Newsweek magazine, as well as a number of less popular journals, mentioned the work of British scientist James Lovelock, who had posited the ‘Gaia Hypothesis:’ the living matter on Earth, air, oceans, and land was all part of a system that Lovelock called after the Earth-Mother Goddess, Gaia… I entered into correspondence with Lovelock, comparing our world views.

After 20 years of sculpting dozens of votive figurines and museum replicas of Goddesses and Gods for the Mythic Images Collection (another significant legacy), I finally turned my attention to sculpting a figure of Mother Earth as I saw Her in my Vision. “The Millennial Gaia” was completed on May 1, 1998, and became my magnum opus, and the flagship of our family business. In 2021 I published Song of Gaea: Paean to the Soul of Nature (a full-color children’s book) with Kiri Johnson and art by Sage Lampros & Pratima Sarkar. And finally, in 2022, my most important book, GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth.

Oberon Zell was the first person to conceive and publish the biological and metaphysical foundations of what has become known as the ‘Gaia Theory’—the unified body and emergent soul of the living Earth. Oberon’s profound reconciliation of science, mythology and spirituality inspired and infused a worldwide neo-Pagan, panentheistic movement. His visionary sculpture of the ‘Millennial Gaia’ is a three-dimensional revelation, an artistic masterpiece that fuses evolutionary biology with sculptural elegance. For over 50 years he has been writing and lecturing on Gaian consciousness, and it is high time that he put it all together into a book!
~ Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.
(Professor Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies
Founder-President, The Green Earth Foundation)

I am also particularly proud of my Grey School of Wizardry, which I founded in 2004. With more than 500 classes in 16 Departments, I hope GSW to be a valued educational resource for the entire magickal community. In Nov. of 2022, I ceremonially passed the torch of Headmaster on to my esteemed apprentice and protégé, Nicholas Kingsley.

I have written 18 books to date–with many more in the pipeline. All of my books and some of my statues are available on Amazon.com. For more info, see my Wikipedia entry and my personal website: www.OberonZell.com

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
What do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey?

1. A boundless curiosity to learn everything about everything.
2. An obsessive love of reading, assembling a well-read library of many thousands of books.
3. An innate ability to create (draw, sculpt, build, construct, invent, design, found…) anything I could want and imagine–from objects and ideas to institutions.

What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Be curious about everything! Learn from everyone and everything! Read widely! Travel the world! Explore the unknown!

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A, Heinlein (1961)

SISL introduced us to the ideas of Immanent Divinity (“Thou Art God”), Pantheism (“all that groks is God”); Sacraments (water sharing); Priestesses; sexuality as divine union; social and ritual nudity; intimate extended families as a basis for community; and open, loving relationships without jealousy. By defining “love” as “that condition wherein another person’s happiness is essential to your own,” SISL affected forever the parameters of our relationships with each other (and, I believe, was enormously influential in laying a philosophical foundation for the sexual revolution of that decade). And all this in the context of a legal religious organization—a “church”—which could have all the rights and privileges granted to the mighty Church of Rome!

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Mark Berry Ron Kimball Ringling Bros/Barnum & Bailey Circus

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