Drawing Down the Moon (55 page)

In each issue fully a third of its pages were devoted to letters from various types of Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Witches, occultists, ecology activists, anarchists, and libertarians—among others. The writers of letters ranged from Neo-Nazi James Madole, head of the National Renaissance Party, to advocates of Timothy Leary's theories of space migration and life extension.

Unlike most mainstream intellectual magazines, where issues become narrowly defined by a more or less reigning ideology,
Green Egg,
both in its Forum and in its articles, had maintained a hands-off, free-for-all policy. Debates raged on the merits of Velikovsky's theories, the place of technology, the teachings of Aleister Crowley, the evidence for ancient matriarchies, and hundreds of other issues, with emphasis on ecology, ethics, tribalism, magic, science fiction, and the relationship of human beings to the planet.
Green Egg
served to create the sense that hundreds of diverse and even contradictory groups were part of an eclectic movement with certain common goals.

It is popular today to talk about “synergy”—a combination that has a greater effect than the simple addition of its components—and that perhaps best describes the effect of
Green Egg.
It connected all the evolving and emerging goddess and nature religions into one phenomenon: the Neo-Pagan movement.

But the goals of many of these groups were diverse, even contradictory. To those with a conservative lifestyle, CAW seemed to be a bunch of crazy anarchists. The
Green Egg
's hands-off policy created controversy. Increased contact between groups led at times to an increase in internal bickering. When
Green Egg
first ceased publication at the end of 1976, a number of Neo-Pagans and Witches told me they were glad because now there would be more tranquillity in the movement. And perhaps there was. Many groups began “sticking with their own” and with those others they felt close to. They simply ignored the rest of the movement.

Tom Williams and the Zells left for the West Coast. Those who stayed in St. Louis, at least the majority, remained loyal to their CAW nests and friends. Many felt that
Green Egg
had never served the CAW community as well as it had the Neo-Pagan community as a whole. No other Pagan publication has ever filled quite the same role. Today, perhaps the
Witches' Voice
on the Internet (
witchvox.com
) comes the closest.

Meanwhile, Tim (Oberon) and Morning Glory Zell converted a school bus into a home for themselves, their two snakes, a possum, a tarantula, and a rat colony—food for their snakes and spider. They spent a year in Oregon writing, lecturing, and teaching. They formed a coven called Ithil Duath. Morning Glory was quoted in a local Oregon newspaper as saying, “We realize that we don't have ‘The Way.' After all, that's been done. . . . We want to restore the role of the shaman (or witch) in our culture. . . . We really must return the Goddess to the earth if we are to keep a balance and avoid ecological apocalypse. . . .”
⁴³
Tom Williams moved to Palo Alto. Don Wildgrube founded several covens and became a Wiccan priest.

In 1977 Oberon and Morning Glory moved to northern California. In the spring of 1978 they wrote to me: “We are living in a pioneer community comprising twelve square miles of Sacred Wilderness somewhere in the mountains of Ecotopia.” They lived in their converted school bus with Tanith, a six-foot-long Boa, Ananta, an eleven-foot-long Burmese python, and two tarantulas—Charlotte and Kallisti. They conducted seminars in the local community and they began to earn some money by making ceramic figures. They described their life as simple, with almost no expenses other than food and fuel.

They continued to share their dream, a longing to expand possibility and potential, or as Oberon once told me, the desire “to eat the fruit of both trees, to recover the sense of the Home.”

The Zells' saga has taken amazing twists and turns since
Drawing Down the Moon
was first published; their journey has included creating and patenting a process for creating unicorns—the unicorns that were exhibited at the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus were their creation—a search for mermaids which took them to the South Seas; and the opening of a school of magic, The Grey School of Wizardry.

In the late 1970s, the Zells came across the work of W. Franklin Dove. Beginning in 1935, Dove, a biologist at the University of Maine, wrote several articles in scientific journals describing various attempts to create single horned animals and documenting his own efforts. It is not generally known that during the first week of a horned animal's life, the horn buds are only attached to the skin; they have not yet attached themselves to the skull. Dove observed that all unicorns have been developed by a surgical procedure (a very minor one—since it only involves the layers of the skin) in which the horn buds are moved to a central position.

The Zells began looking at the ancient pictures of unicorns; they noticed that the earliest depictions were more goatlike than horselike. They theorized that unicorns may well have been produced, an ancient process once known and lost, and they speculated that ancient herders might well have found a one-horned creature useful in protecting their flocks. They also believed that creating a unicorn would be a powerful magical symbol that would say to millions: “If a unicorn exists, why then anything is possible. I can even change my own life.”

The Zells created a number of unicorns from various breeds of white goats. For several years, Otter and Morning Glory made the rounds of renaissance and medieval fairs with several of their adorable creatures. Children were photographed with the unicorns, and the animals were treated more lovingly than 99 percent of male goats on this planet. In the winter the unicorns roamed on Coeden Brith, the same magical land in Mendocino where Nemeton was founded, adjacent to Annwfn, where Gwydion lived until his death, and where Forever Forests still makes its home. To see the unicorns wandering around seemed miraculous, even if in humorous moments one might find oneself calling them “unigoats.” But on a magic morning on the land, they did seem to have wandered in from faerie.

Attitudes among Pagans differed. Most people took the unicorns Lancelot and Bedevere, and the five or six other creatures who appeared, to their hearts. And the Zells continued barely to eke out a living despite unicorn postcards, the Living Unicorn Calendar, and various public appearances.

A few Pagans were disturbed by the unicorns. Does making a unicorn “real” destroy the power and romance of the myth, some asked? Is it appropriate for members of a Pagan religion to alter surgically an animal—even if the operation only involves cutting flaps in the skin and moving the horns toward the center?

In 1984, the Zells signed an agreement with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. The circus bought four of the unicorns. Under the terms of their contract Otter and Morning Glory were not allowed to talk to the press for three years. The Zells received $150,000, although by the time lawyers, agents, trainers, and debts were paid, less than a third of the money was left.

Once the circus had the animals they proceeded to shroud them in mystery. They never admitted there was more than one but claimed the unicorn had mysteriously “appeared” in Texas. They showed the unicorn with pomp, glitz, and ceremony but refused to tell its true history. At a New York press conference, when a reporter pointed to evidence of the Zells' existence, the question was ignored. Almost none of the many news accounts, fueled by protests by the ASPCA, ever got the story right.

In April 1985, Alison Harlow came to New York and we decided we would go to the circus and see an old animal friend. As glittering human butterflies swung from high wires, the unicorn Lancelot appeared on a movable cart, a woman in a pink gown standing by his side. He was followed in the procession by eager children who rode in white carts. His hair had been oiled. It had been kept long—making him seem more goatlike than usual. I don't know the reason, but I would surmise that they wanted to hide his genitalia. As the procession advanced, Alison started giggling and whispered to me, “To think, that's the same little fellow that once pissed on me,” and we all broke up. But one row down, a five-year-old boy told his mother, “It really
is
a unicorn—it
is!
” So, perhaps, the Zells' magic was working.

The Zells started a new organization called the Ecosophical Research Association. ERA, they said, would study and explore the territory of the archetype, the basis of legends and the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. One prime area of research would be cryptozoology—the identification of unknown animals such as the Loch Ness Monster, Unicorns, Bigfoot, and Mermaids.

Taking some of the money from their first cryptozoological adventure, and convincing other backers to put in the rest, they planned an expedition to New Ireland in Papua, New Guinea, to look into stories of possible mermaid sightings. They chartered a boat and assembled a group of fourteen adventurers to look for the mysterious “ri.” “You doubt?” wrote Otter in a Pagan journal, “O ye of little faith . . . remember the lesson of the Unicorn.”

But when they arrived in New Guinea, they quickly found out that the indigenous word for mermaid,
ri,
was the same word as that used for the aquatic creature called the dugong. The mermaid was a dugong.

After 1985, the Zells, along with Anodea Judith and others, undertook the resurrection of the Church of All Worlds. The Church expanded and established new nests, as well as an international presence in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Israel, France, Greece, South Africa, and New Zealand.
Green Egg
returned in 1988, edited by Diane Darling, and soon it again became a leading Pagan journal. The Zells traveled widely to Pagan festivals and re-created several ceremonies based on the ancient Greek Elusinian Mysteries and the Panathenaia.

But as the century neared its end, CAW and
Green Egg
became embroiled in convulsive internal conflicts and power struggles. Diane departed, and Oberon Zell-Ravenheart was ousted from control of
Green Egg.
Four years later, the magazine folded. Zell was excommunicated from the church he'd founded; he was formally impeached, and the board of directors was shifted to Ohio.

Then, in 2004, following the resignation of nearly all the long-term clergy, the Ohio board dissolved itself. In 2005, Oberon regained control of what he has called “the ashes of CAW,” transferring its legal corporate status back to California, and becoming the new president. He is now working to help resurrect the organization yet again, “the 3rd Phoenix rebirth,” as he calls it.

And as this rebirth comes about, some of the old Atlans are joining it. Atl does still exist. It was incorporated twenty-five years ago into the Association of the Tree of Life. Lance Christie says that both CAW and Atl were always joined in their effort to substitute a holistic ecological paradigm for “the reductionist paradigm which underlies the industrial growth culture.” If CAW used ritual and spectacle, says Christie, Atl members were science nerds and computer types. Their goal was to look at “the renewable techniques of energy production, agriculture, hydrologic management,” and so forth. CAW was designed to bring into consciousness certain eco-spiritual values; Atl was designed to do the engineering that would permit people to engage in “right livelihood” within an ecological paradigm should they seek to do so.

Christie says he stayed on the sidelines during the first and second incarnations of CAW, and he says both he and Oberon “wandered into a few blind alleys.” But both of them, he believes, have not wavered from their commitment to right action and they have both been committed to an understanding of the ecological paradigm. Christie hopes to be involved in the third generation of CAW, which he hopes will take stands on public issues and their ethical dimensions. He also hopes that Atl can help create the communities that will allow a renewal paradigm to come into being.

Meanwhile, Oberon and Morning Glory have been involved in a host of other activities. Together with several other friends and partners, they started the Ravenheart Family, which some have called the “first family of polyamory” (a term that Morning Glory coined). They also continued their “Mythic Images” business, which produces and markets a line of Pagan statues and art. One statue comes directly out of Oberon's 1970 “TheaGenesis” vision: a statue called “The Millennial Gaia.”

In 2003, Oberon began a new and ambitious effort: The Grey School of Wizardry, an online school of magic with courses on subjects ranging from healing and wortcunning, to divination and nature studies. Oberon has written a course book for the school,
Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard,
which he describes as both a handbook (something like the
Boy Scouts Handbook
) and a textbook. As one teacher at the school told me, “We're sort of the real Hogwarts.” Who knows where the next adventure will take Oberon and Morning Glory.

“LARGE PARTS of the Neo-Pagan movement started out as jokes, you know,” Robert Anton Wilson, author, Witch, and a former editor of
Playboy,
told me one day. “Some of the founders of NROOGD will tell you their order started as a joke; others will deny it. There is a group that worships Mithra in Chicago which started out as a joke. The people in many of these groups began to find that they were getting something out of what they were doing and gradually they became more serious.”

There have always been spoofs on religion. But religions that combine humor, play, and seriousness are a rare species. A rather special quality of Neo-Pagan groups is that many of them have a humorous history. As we have seen, the Church of the Eternal Source, a serious attempt to revive the ancient Egyptian religion, began as a series of yearly Egyptian costume parties. The Reformed Druids of North America began as a humorous protest movement against a regulation at Carleton College requiring attendance at chapel. The Elf Queen's Daughters, a network of “elves” located mostly in the Far West, sent out each week three pages of quite beautiful poetic prose, most of it composed by automatic writing. “Most of it's nonsense,” they told me. “We don't take it too seriously.” In Minneapolis a group calling itself the First Arachnid Church began to publish hilarious leaflets calling for the worship of the Great Spider and the True Web.
¹
It was pure satire and a great parody of fundamentalist Christian leaflets. But it was also pure Neo-Paganism. And, most preposterous of all, there is the worship of Eris, goddess of chaos and confusion, popularized in the science fiction trilogy
Illuminatus.
²