The Church of All Worlds is a Neo-Pagan religious group that took its inspiration from a work of fiction. The founders of this church looked at the religion that Robert Heinlein created in his science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land and decided to make it a reality. This puts them squarely in the company of what Carole Cusack has termed “invented religions.” These are religions that seek validity in works that are accepted as fiction. The Church of All Worlds, now over fifty years old, has grown beyond its science fiction roots, adopting practices and beliefs that have made them an influential part of the modern Pagan movement. Though fiction no longer plays as strong a role in their practice, they have remained dedicated to an ethic of invention. Through ethnographic research with Church members in Northern California, this paper explores how this ethic of invention manifests in official Church history, the personal relationships of members, and the creation of public rituals.

This research asks how modern practitioners of magic approach ideas of reality and truth in their lives and magical practices. Specifically, this work focuses on a loosely connected group of magic users referred to in this text as the “magick tradition” in the greater Los Angeles Area. This is a population who identify as Witches, Wiccans, Pagans, and Thelemites among other names. While there is great variety among these different groups, they all share a common lineage as well as many practices and beliefs. They draw on this lineage to create their own forms of scholarship, theology, and ritual with the goal of building new realities and ways of life. Though primarily an ethnography, this dissertation begins by tracing the history of the magick tradition from Renaissance alchemists to modern TikTok Witches. The rest the dissertation relies on participatory fieldwork with three Los Angeles magickal institutions. Two of these are storefronts with associated Witchcraft covens and one is a local body of the international initiatory order Ordo Templi Orientis. Fieldwork with these three locations showed that these magicians move easily back and forth between a reality that is fixed and one that is mutable. This is as true when they are explaining their magick’s effectiveness as when they are conducting their spells and rituals. Their magick works explicitly by moving back and forth across these extremes, instrumentalizing the tensions inherent in a modern world where both reality and truth are often unstable and precarious subjects. These magick users provide examples of how to embrace the uncertainty of unstable truths. Instead of existential dread or political doom, they find beauty and possibility in reality’s pliability.