The Church of all Worlds and Pagan Ecotheology: Uncertain Boundaries and Unlimited Possibilities
In the contemporary West Pagan and alternative religions frequently place emphasis on the importance of the environment at the centre of their theology. As Jon Bloch has argued ‘alternative spiritualities assert that all aspects of life are sacred… [they] argue that activities involving the protecti...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2010
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| In: |
Diskus
Year: 2010, Volume: 11 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | In the contemporary West Pagan and alternative religions frequently place emphasis on the importance of the environment at the centre of their theology. As Jon Bloch has argued ‘alternative spiritualities assert that all aspects of life are sacred… [they] argue that activities involving the protection of the earth should be conceptualized as part of one’s spirituality’.[1] Mainstream religion, exemplified in the West by Christianity, is perceived as allied with the advance of capitalist modernity, which has resulted in environmental degradation, rampant materialism and the alienation of humans from Nature. The Church of All Worlds (begun in 1962 by Lance Christie and Tim Zell, later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) is a Pagan religion inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in A Strange Land (1961). Core religious practices of the Church of All Worlds are derived from this fiction, in which Valentine Michael Smith, raised on Mars, attempts to teach humans Martian values, including the sacredness of water (kinship is established through the ‘water-sharing ritual’), the unity of all things (‘Thou art God’), and the evils of sexual repression, jealousy and violence. CAW has played a pioneering role in the development of Pagan ecotheology. The Pagan revival from Gerald Gardner onwards has focused on the Goddess and earth-based spirituality, but in the late 1960s and early1970s Tim Zell’s vision encompassed a religious organization where Waterkin (members) are based in Nests (coven-like groupings), and where the Goddess is a ‘single vast creature: Mother Earth Herself’.[2] CAW ecotheology is complex and highly developed; the boundaries are uncertain because Zell-Ravenheart (through the practice of grokking, from Heinlein) asserts the absolute unity of all in Gaia, which means that sexuality and social mores, as well as attitudes to deforestation or the extinction of species, all become ecological issues. Grokking literally means drinking, but ‘[i]n practice it means expanding one’s identity to include the whole being of another person or thing’.[3] CAW draws on Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, or planetary consciousness (to which humans contribute), and argues that the process of evolution, considered as a totality, is the maturation of the Earth as a ‘single vast living entity … the Great Goddess: Mother Earth, Mother Nature’.[4] |
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| ISSN: | 0967-8948 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Diskus
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