can’t recall a time in his childhood when he didn’t feel like the odd duck in his own family. “My father was Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager for his first presidential bid. That gives you an idea where my family was on this stuff,” Zell says. They weren’t quite sure what to do with him. As a kid, Zell would talk about memories that were his late grandfather’s, and that he would have no reason to even know. Looking back, he now says that he is his grandfather reincarnated. “I remember dying very well. It was a very big deal when I was a kid. I used to have nightmare about it. Many kids’ nightmares, if you talk to kids about nightmares—really look at the story—it’s memories of their former death.” When Zell became a pagan leader (he appointed Don Wildgrube as ‘high priest a few years later, giving himself the title of “Primate”), his father couldn’t accept it. At his marriage with Morning Glory in 1975, where 500 people attended, including a film crew from Japan that showed up to document it, one of Zell’s friends asked his dad if he was proud of everything his son had achieved. His response was: “I feel like I’ve given birth to the anti-Christ.”
Morning Glory had a profound impact on Zell and the Church’s happenings. Zell and his fellow pagans were always interested in fostering a women-empowering organization, and her partnership made that all the more real. Her focus, and even workshops on goddesses through the years would help Church of All Worlds, and even the pagan community alone become a place where women held leadership positions and were viewed as equals within the structures of power. Originally from Long Beach, Morning Glory moved to Eugene, Oregon a few years before she’d gone to the third annual Gnostic Aquarian Festival. Like Zell, she was different from other people around her. But her friends appreciated her
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in 1975. When Zell and Morning Glory moved in next door in 1977, they saw Genzoli and his dad fairly frequently. “He and his wife had this idea of accepting what it is people are into and what it is they are about, even when—especially when—it contradicts your own [beliefs],” Genzoli says. “He’s a much better person than I am. I try to be as good as him, and sometimes, I think of him looking over my shoulder, to correct the choices I’ve made. You kind of appreciate him ’cause it leaves you a little less jaded about the world. We can use a few more dreamers out there.” The Church of All Worlds was more to Zell than just an expression of his philosophies and ideals for how people could live in harmony together; it was a family of like-minded weirdos. Zell
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