Cosmic Convergence
(1973–1976)
We took our vows to never part
We pledged for Life and then for more.
You kissed my lips and stole my heart
In front of people by the score.
In velvet green, our wedding scene
Was filled with portent now and then.
I’d do it all the same again;
I’d do it all the same again.
—from “love of my life” by morning glory zell, 1993
NARRATOR: Morning Glory and Tim did not have a lot of time to prepare for their wedding. MG was traveling back and forth between Eugene and St. Louis, where Tim was still a very busy man. The Church of All Worlds had invested in a real printing press, and Green Egg had gone “semi-pro”: there was a wrap-around cover and articles by people like Robert Anton Wilson, and they were publishing a lot of advertising. So Tim Zell, as editor, publisher, and typist, had to do what basically became his second full-time job. Though Green Egg was doing a fantastic job of connecting Pagans with each other and nurturing the growth of earth-based spirituality, it was not a financial success. Tim and everyone else who worked on it were doing it voluntarily.
The relationship between Morning Glory and Tim was tumultuous from the start, and not helped by the environment Morning Glory suddenly found herself in. It was difficult for her to trade the lifestyle and mild climate she was used to for harsh winters and a rough, inner-city neighborhood.
MG: I was totally unprepared for living in a hard, cold, big city. I had been living in Hippie communes and a liberal college town. Here I was in a situation where I was with the person I was supposed to be with and this church that I loved. But his whole universe was wrapped around this organization that was embedded in this really awful big-city environment. Some people thought the city was great, but for me it was a nightmare. It wasn’t safe to go out on the streets after dark. Two of the women in our community had been raped and brutally beaten. I grew to love most of the people in the church, but they were all part of this toxic environment and some of them were not at all supportive of Tim and me. They saw me as a self-righteous interloper; and to be perfectly frank, they were pretty spot-on about the self-righteous part. I just didn’t get how people could deal with the noise, the pollution, and the violence; I was so homesick for Eugene that I was miserable and made other people around me resent me.
NARRATOR: And from the moment that they had first met, OZ and MG had had almost no privacy. Tim’s house in St. Louis was a center of activity, and there were always people coming and going. That was the way he had lived his entire adult life. Finally, right before they were to be married in the spring of 1974, the couple had an opportunity to be alone together.
OZ: Some friends of ours who had a summer cabin in the Ozarks offered this to us for a weekend to go have a retreat and get ourselves together before the ceremony. We went down there, and it was beautiful—spring was springing forth all over the place. Flowers were all in bloom. We made a little fire in the fireplace, and we tripped on acid. In the process of this, we bonded in an amazing way.
Strongly in our minds at that time was the whole vision of the Awakening of Gaea, and the coalescence of planetary consciousness. We still hold that as a central myth in our lives and in our work. And one of the concerns that was going around among ourselves and our friends, who were also caught up in the Gaean mythos that we were developing at that time, was, “What happens when Gaea really does achieve consciousness? Do we all just get lost like drops of water in the ocean?”
Because we were so focused on this stuff (and the Magick, and our impending marriage), we became One. We were able to look out through each other’s eyes, and completely be within each other. We had this epiphany that in the emergence of planetary consciousness we would not be lost as individuals, but rather our individual consciousnesses would expand into the larger awareness. So that rather than just seeing out of only one pair of eyes, we would see out of everyone’s eyes. And everyone else would have that same experience.
We found that, in our combined essence, our general magickal capabilities were vastly expanded as well. We were sitting in a clearing in the middle of the woods. At one point we reached out to the sky and called out, and a hawk started circling around above us. We reached up and looked out of the eyes of the hawk, and we were able to look down and see ourselves and the forest all around us. We reached out and called butterflies, and swarms of butterflies came flying in from all over the place and landed on us. We called the wind, and the wind started picking up and whistling through the trees. We kept on doing that till the intensity got to be almost like a tornado, so we had to stop and slow it down. The wind slowly receded back to normal.
We picked violets to make violet jam, and it was the only time in our life when we were in a place where there were enough wild violets to do that. At the end of this retreat, when it was time to return home, we felt, “Okay, we know who we are.” It was one of the great romantic high points of our life. We were totally bonded—forever.
NARRATOR: The Gnosticon in Minneapolis, where the wedding was scheduled to take place, was also being promoted as a “Witchmeet” where the newly formed (and short-lived) Council of American Witches was to create and adopt what is now known as “The Principles of Wiccan Belief,” which were later incorporated into the U.S. Army’s chaplains’ handbook, in 1978.
But the real center of attention for the weekend was on April 14, 1974, when Morning Glory and Tim were handfasted and legally married in a huge Pagan ceremony.
MG: It was the very first public Pagan wedding ever; we wrote and created the entire ritual ourselves, and it was really stressful. Partly because I was trying to handle things at a convention that was hundreds of miles away from St. Louis, which is where I was living, plus I was still going back and forth to Eugene. I had brought Rainbow to live with us for a while, and she was only four years old and was very confused about the changes in our lives. Then at the con we had to set up a CAW booth, plus we were both keynote speakers. I wrote an article and did a speech about my own understanding of what being a Witch was, which was that it was a form of European shamanism. This was a very controversial idea at the time.
And it turned out that the date that we had picked, unbeknownst to us, was Easter Sunday. Just try and find flowers or a wedding cake on Easter Sunday! Plus I had friends flying in from all over the country. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to fly in my parents.) The wedding went off without too many hitches, pretty much. Tim and I both had tears streaming down our faces, but our voices were still strong enough that you could hear the words of our vows. We got all the way through it, and it was wonderful.
OZ: The story and photos appeared on the front page of the local paper, and they upstaged the Pope’s Easter message to the world. Bryan was the ring bearer, and even my father attended it. Rainbow wore this little pink faerie gown and was the flower girl. She was given a basket of petals to scatter on the pathway for us to walk on. Not having any experience, or been given any instruction, she plucked the petals out of the basket one at a time and very carefully placed them on the carpet. Margot Adler sang Gwydion’s “The Witches Coven Dance” song. Isaac and Carolyn performed the ceremony. Both of them had long hair down to their waist, and in the process of leaning over the altar, both of them set their hair on fire from the candles. That was very impressive and everybody applauded. Fortunately, neither of them were hurt.
At the dinner after the wedding, my dad sat with Morning Glory, the kids, and me. At one point I went off to the restroom, and one of the other people at the table asked my father how he felt coming to this thing and seeing that his son was such a prominent figure in the community. He said, “I feel like I’ve given birth to the anti-Christ.” But he said to me that he thought it was a very nice ceremony.
And then Morning Glory ended up getting quite ill.
MG: At the time I had a condition called abdominal epilepsy. And it was a seizure disorder that affected my stomach, bowels, and uterus—all my plumbing. So I would lose urinary control and bowel control and start vomiting. I had that disorder from the time I was a teenager. I had always had problems that were sort of like that from childhood, but it got worse when I hit puberty. I was on Dilantin, but I did not like to take it. That really screws up your red cells, and it has a lot of negative mental side effects also. I had heard about new research about alpha and theta waves, and that you could reprogram your brain out into a healthier pattern of rhythms and prevent seizure patterns from recurring. When I told my neurologist about this research, he didn’t want to have to deal with it. He told me to take my medicine and not argue.
It just so happened that when Oberon and I got together, he had the right kind of biofeedback headset. So I was in the middle of the process of learning this new technique of seizure control, and I had also chosen, foolishly, this time to get the meds out of my system. So I was loaded down with all the stress of the wedding weekend, and on top of it Oberon and I had done some deep inner work and he had this whole vision that when we got together something really significant was going to happen. But we didn’t know exactly what it was going to be.
After the ceremony and dinner were over, we went back to the hotel suite. It was time for the consummation of the wedding, and Wham! I felt the beginning precursor wave of a seizure. And I thought, “Omigod, what am I going to do?” So at that point I took some of the women who were part of our intimate circle and already in our room aside, and I said, “I need you take over for me, and be my proxy. Are any of you willing to help me with this?”
There were three women who happily volunteered and were in bed with Oberon, and so I lay down there next to them. I used the energy that was generated by them all to block the seizure and stop it from happening. So towards the end I was able to be a part of it. And that was my wedding night!
OZ: Morning Glory and I had spent months creating the ritual. We published it in Green Egg and it became the template for Pagan handfasting and wedding ceremonies throughout the community. Decades later we would encounter Pagan groups who pulled out their ancient, passed-down-through-the-ancestral-lines Book of Shadows—and we would discover that it was our ceremony they were using!
After the wedding Rainbow came back to St. Louis to live with us for a while. Morning Glory and I gave each other snakes as wedding presents. I gave her a baby male Burmese python, which she named Ananta, and she gave me a baby female boa constrictor I named Tanith. They grew up together.
Over the following months Morning Glory continued her studies towards ordination as a Priestess in CAW. We counted all the previous stuff she had done before, so she moved ahead pretty quickly and ended up being approved for ordination in about nine months.
At Lughnasadh, on the first of August, MG was scheduled to be ordained. Several of the folks in our community knew people with rural land, so we found ourselves with access to new sites. One place had a cave, a pond, and a marsh. In preparation for the festival, Michael Hurley’s wife, who had a kid Rainbow’s age, said she was going to be going back to that farm where we had held previous events and spend some time out there, and she invited Rainbow to come along. We said okay—we knew her, we knew her kids. Rainbow really wanted to go, and we thought that would be a lot of fun for her.
MG: The following weekend we went out to the place where we were having the ordination ceremony. Gary, who had come all the way from Oregon to be at my ceremony, went with us to the site of the gathering, and Orion drove to the farm to pick up Rainbow. When he got there with her, it was a shock. Her hair, which had never been cut in her life and had been down her back, had been cut short. She and all the other kids there had been dosed with LSD. This phony guru had shown up on the scene, and unbeknownst to any of us, the women we knew had become his followers. He was calling for people to bring their kids so that he could begin a new order and purify the kids with drugs. The guy’s name was Gridley Wright. He believed that all children belonged to him, and that they should all be dosed with acid, and that the fathers should all bow out and acknowledge him as the alpha male, and of course the women should all be subservient to him. He had all the women shave their heads. I had no idea of any of this. The woman with whom I had trusted my daughter had been a strong feminist. But she had joined that cult. She had shaved her head and given my daughter as well as her son over to the cult.
GAIL SALVADOR [formerly Rainbow]: At first I was happy to be there. It was fun. There were other kids, and it was a communal, collective feel, but very rugged as well. The house was stripped down to a bare floor and cots. We were there for a few days, and then it changed. I went for a walk one day, and all of the foliage started dying. I kept walking, and I ended up down at the river. I was really afraid. There was another little girl who was laughing and having a good time. Then I started hallucinating even heavier. Giant anchors started falling out of the sky and into the water. Later I was on a blanket with a woman who was supposed to be my caregiver, and Gridley was on a blanket next to us. I think he was giving us the acid in Kool-Aid. He said, “Do you want to come with me?”
And I said, “No, I don’t like you. You’re a bad person.” Then the whole earth cracked open on both sides of us. I said, “I want my mom, I’m scared.” And he told me that my parents were dead and that I belonged to God.
MG: When Orion brought Rainbow to me and told the story, Gary and I went off with her alone in the woods, and we just held her and told her she was safe now and we weren’t going to let those people ever come near her again. I was in a quandary, because on one hand I just wanted to take my child and leave but on the other, I did want to complete the ordination ritual that I had worked so hard for. So I asked Rainbow if she wanted to leave right now or stay for the ceremony, and by that time she was starting to have a good time with us and some of the other kids so she said that she wanted to stay. And that was my final ordeal before I went through my ordination ceremony; the symbolic ordeals that were part of the ritual were just that: symbolic. The real ordeal had torn my soul into pieces, and I was furious at myself and at the universe but most of all at this Gridley-monster and the women I had trusted. I took deep breaths and got myself centered and then made myself get through the ceremony, but then we packed up and left. We went back to the farm and confronted the guy.
OZ: I was absolutely livid. He had two biker guys who were his guards. I went into complete overdrive, in full warrior mode. At that time I had the ability to morph into incredibly fast, reflexive moves. I could snatch bats, butterflies, and hummingbirds out of the air, and catch striking snakes behind their heads. So as I charged in, I took two guns away from two different guys—a rifle, which I broke over my knee and threw into the swamp, and a pistol, which I tossed to MG. Once these guys had been disarmed, Gary was able to hold them at bay. I landed on Gridley, slammed him to the ground, and sat on his chest.
MG: I was haunted for years because Oberon took the guns away from two of the bikers, and I had the pistol and held it at this guy’s head, and I could have pulled the trigger. I stopped and I didn’t do it, because I knew that if I did that I would go to prison, and my daughter wouldn’t have a mother. At that point I backed away and instead I called a curse down on his head—I asked the Mother Goddess to take him down for what he had done in his arrogance and madness.
You have to understand that our attitude about psychedelics was that these were sacred medicines; they were magical allies. No one should ever be forced or tricked into taking them; they were not tools for brainwashing, and to do this to a child was the ultimate betrayal of trust and profanation of the sacraments.
OZ: We tried to file charges against Gridley and got nowhere with that. You would think that the child protection agency or the police would want to do something. But they just figured that we were a bunch of Hippies, and we had left our kids with him, so we had no case. We were quite astonished by that. One cop actually said that they could prosecute us for trespassing and assault.
GAIL SALVADOR: After that I was really depressed. A lot of my parents’ friends told me that I was never the same after that, that I wasn’t the same happy-go-lucky kid. My innocence was gone. My dad took me back to Oregon. We hitchhiked back together. I hated hitchhiking. It used to terrify me. I felt insecure about the whole process.
MG: Years later we heard that Gridley Wright had fled the country and gone to India with his followers. He declared that none of them would be allowed to have any vaccinations or Western medicine; they were in a primitive commune. The children all got serious illnesses and died. A father who had been tracking him down got there a week after they buried his children. When he found out what happened, he pulled out a big knife, carved Gridley up (twenty-two stab wounds, the report said . . .), and left him. And because of the orders Gridley had given, his followers let him die slowly and painfully of septic poisoning. So it was Kali who took him in India, but it was at the hands of Shiva, the avenging father.
In retrospect, bringing my daughter to live with us in St. Louis was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. There were a series of tragedies that happened when she was staying with us, such as the whole Gridley Wright thing. Partly that was because I was a new parent and my natural approach to child rearing was to shower my child with everything I ever wanted when I was a child, which was lots of freedom and adventures. I didn’t understand until years later that you have to give a child what they want to have, not what you want to give them. In Rainbow’s case, what she wanted was security, and that has never been important to me so it wasn’t even on my radar.
I do need to say that my experiences in St. Louis were not all negative. It is important to remember and celebrate the good times, too. It was wonderful meeting all the people, making new friends, and learning about the hodgepodge of bio-theology, science-fiction mythos, complex ritual creation, family celebrations, Cheez-Its eating, magazine printing, and bad-pun-telling traditions that formed the Church of All Worlds in those days. Nest meetings were homey and down-to-earth, and since they changed with whoever was in charge of it that week, you got a large variety of experiences, a real communal spiritual smorgasbord. A Nest meeting could be anything from an all-out formal Wiccan-style Circle to a Tantric group meditation, or a trip to the zoo. It was and is a marvelously flexible way of worshipping, and when it is really practiced, it becomes the backbone of a strong spiritual community.
OZ: Don Wildgrube and Tom Williams started taking turns holding Nest meetings at their places. A gradual mitosis happened, and we ended up with two Nests. Don’s Overland Nest was largely an entry-level group, with classes and teachings. The group that met at Tom’s was the Dog Star Nest—the joke was that we were the Sirius group. That was mainly for the inner-circle people who had been around for a long time. We tried to schedule things in a way that they didn’t conflict with each other, so some people could go to both. But there still arose a certain inevitable tension.
DON WILDGRUBE: I took over the central Nest. We would have an open house every Tuesday. Then on Friday or Saturday we would get together for our Nest meetings. The open house was for anybody who wanted to show up—that way we could weed out the people that we wouldn’t invite back for the weekend meeting. For example, one guy was there and we were talking about nudity, because at our Nest meetings most people were nude. And this guy said, “If I have a problem with nudity, I’ll just make loincloths for everybody.”
NARRATOR: There was nothing else happening anywhere else in the world that was quite like the scene in St. Louis (and there still isn’t today). Writer Margot Adler was doing research for what would become her book Drawing Down the Moon and visited the Nest to check the facts in person. The cutting-edge style of journalism at that moment was called “gonzo,” which meant that the reporter became a part of the action that they were writing about. When Hunter S. Thompson was working on his groundbreaking book about the Hell’s Angels, he got on a motorcycle and rode with them. So when Margot checked out the CAW, she didn’t just watch and take notes.
MARGOT ADLER: CAW and the Zells were very into sexual experimentation. When I went to interview them in the fall of 1975, I spent a week living and sharing their life with them. I remember going to a CAW Hallowe’en party in St. Louis. I remember being very aware that there was a lot of sex going on, people pairing up and going into corners and stuff like that. I will confess that I was fairly prudish, and I found myself very uncomfortable. I was single, and at that point my response was to take the one person there that I really liked and disappear with him into a bedroom so I didn’t have to deal with the all the other stuff that was going on.
At the same time, truth be told, I thought Tim and Morning Glory were beautiful, loving people: loving towards each other and towards me. I thought, “This is definitely not what I normally do, and I am not really comfortable, but I’m just going to throw myself into this and see what a threesome is like.” I’m not a very sexual person. Now, in the present day, I’ve been living in a monogamous relationship for the past thirty-three years. So this was definitely not typical for me. But I remember they had a mirror on the ceiling of their bedroom. I would look up and feel that we were all in some Renaissance painting.
When I returned home I was very freaked out. I felt that I would have gone completely crazy if I’d lived their life for more than a week. It wasn’t only the sex; there was a level of intensity that was hard to deal with. So, I went to a psychologist and said, “I don’t know what I’m feeling about this. Should I have felt more comfortable? Is there something wrong with me?”
And she said, “You know, there are some people who are champion skiers. And there are some people who are champion tennis players. And these two people were champions at sex. And that doesn’t have to be who you are.” And I laughed with relief. So I ended up thinking: they were really good at sex, and incredibly open, warm, loving, and inviting. It was easy to get swept into their lives. But for me what was most important was realizing that their life was not my life. I had to make my peace with who I was.
MG: At the time I just thought everybody was like that. It’s not that I thought everybody was like me, but I thought that most Pagans took this kind of Hippie/poly/sexuality thing as a matter of course. After all it was straight out of Stranger in a Strange Land and Island by Aldous Huxley. I guess because I was a Hippie Witch and Priestess of Aphrodite, I didn’t see why we shouldn’t be living the way the people were in the books. That was where I was coming from. I didn’t think about other people having—I hesitate to use the word hang-ups, so we’ll just say inhibitions about it. Because I just didn’t have any inhibitions. A lot of the sexual adventures that I had around that time were kind of all joy and enthusiasm, and “Welcome to my bed,” and “Welcome to my life,” and “We’re all gonna be lovers and friends, and it’s gonna be a wonderful world.” And I didn’t realize that some people weren’t comfortable with that. It never would have occurred to me in a million years.
NARRATOR: The Church continued to evolve. The individual members were also evolving, but not all at the same pace and in the same direction. MG tried her hardest to go with the flow, but, in spite of her best efforts, it didn’t work out.
MG: One night I went to a laundromat and I took my snake with me—a six-foot Burmese python named Ananta. It was cold out, so he was tucked inside my clothes. While I was in the parking lot, two carloads of inner-city teenage boys pulled up, jumped out of the cars, and started heading my way and talking trash to me. After what had happened to the other women in our community, I could see my death looking at me, and every single pore in my body just squirted adrenaline. When that happened, Ananta smelled my fear, came out of my clothes like he was shot from a gun, and started making these loud hissing sounds like letting air out of a truck tire. The kids yelled, “Holy shit, man, that chick’s got a snake!” and jumped back into their cars and rolled out of there. I got back in the car, locked the doors, held Ananta, and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You saved my life!” I couldn’t have been better defended if I had been packing a gun.
At that point I told Oberon, “I love you, but I can’t live in this environment. I’m going. I’ve given you two years of my life, but I can’t do this anymore. You can come and join me, but I know you have a whole life here. You have to choose. If you choose to stay here, I can’t live here.” It was the hardest decision I ever made.
OZ: At that point I would have agreed to anything to stay with her. I started telling people what was going to happen. This produced a reaction against her. When she had first arrived in St. Louis, Morning Glory had been welcomed and embraced. And she had made an effort to connect with people in the Church. She understood the value of the bonds that form between lovers and the levels of trust that occur. There is a certain loyalty and commitment you have to people you have slept with that you don’t have with other people. But when it became clear that she was going to take me away from them, it created a backlash.
MG: It was hard on OZ. He was working full-time at a regular job, publishing the magazine, and running the Church. Even at that time I was quite amazed by the lack of respect he was routinely given by other members of the organization. Maybe I just didn’t understand their personal style or their interpersonal history, but it seemed as though he was constantly fighting an uphill battle with these people who claimed to love him so much.
NARRATOR: At least one person that I interviewed said that there was talk about Morning Glory’s relationship with the Church being comparable to the one that Yoko Ono had with the Beatles: Yoko got the blame for the band breaking up after she married John Lennon. (In this scenario, Tim Zell and Tom Williams were considered to be the CAW equivalent of Lennon and McCartney.) But listening to the later Beatles recordings, now it’s clear that they were already in the process of going their separate ways before Yoko entered the picture—in fact, it’s amazing that they stayed together as long as they did.
The same might be said for what happened with Tim Zell and the Church of All Worlds. After all, this was a group of people that had partly modeled themselves after a spaceship crew that was on a five-year mission. More than five years had passed since the Nest had gathered in front of a TV to watch Star Trek every week. It was, for Tim, time to prepare for his next mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one had gone before!
OZ: November 30, 1975, was my thirty-third birthday. Thirty-three is a significant year in many men’s lives. Both Jesus and Alexander the Great died at that age! On my birthday, I resigned from my job as director of social services at the Chouteau Russell Center of the Human Development Corporation. They threw a great big going-away party for me. After nine years on and off, I had been there longer than anybody.
But at that point I’d had enough of that kind of work. I was working more and more with abused women through the family-counseling program. I would try to help them get out of the bad situation, and I had a huge emotional investment in that. Being a man, I felt a personal responsibility to redress the suffering they had experienced at the hands of other men. But invariably, after we had put all this energy and resources into getting these women away from the abusive bastards, they would go back to them. They’d be back in my office a month later covered with bruises again. And then one of them was murdered by her ex-husband whom she’d taken back. I didn’t have any real training in how to deal with this. I just didn’t understand why they did it. It cost me a lot emotionally, and when it was time to leave, I didn’t ever want to go back.
Now there are recovery programs and whole institutions set up to deal with these situations, but there wasn’t any of that stuff at that time. In my entire background and years of study in college and special training seminars, I never got any information about abuse, childhood sexual molestation, alcoholism, drug addiction, or recovery programs. Today most of the field of social psychology is about addiction therapy and abusive relationships, but at that time these situations were treated as individual anomalies, not as a widespread phenomenon or syndrome.
As part of our plan for leaving, we started liquidating things. Most of my vast library I donated to the Church. I started training Tom Williams to be my successor as editor of Green Egg, and by the time we left, it was completely in his hands. In December of 1975 we rented out my house, leaving the furnishings, and moved out of it. For a while we crashed with Tom and had our stuff in storage. Bryan continued to stay with Martha and go to school. He entirely cut himself off from us, refusing even to talk to us on the phone. This really hurt a lot, but it was his choice, and I had to accept it.
BRYAN ZELL: I purposely avoided my dad and stepmother during the time of transition when they were getting ready to move out to the West Coast in the school bus. Morning Glory would call and ask for me, and I would refuse to talk to her because I was afraid they were going to kidnap me.
OZ: We bought a used school bus (a 1954 Chevy), about twenty-five feet long. It had a five-foot-nine-inch ceiling, and I’m 5' 10", so that made it difficult to walk around inside. We started fixing it up to put it on the road. I designed, cut, and constructed an elaborate RV-type interior. I made seats that converted into benches and beds, tables that would fold up and down, a ten-foot-long kitchen, a toilet, a closet, and a whole side for bookcases and animal cages. Since it was already painted red, we named it the “Scarlet Succubus.” It’s one of those magickal things—you give a name to virtually everything that has any investment of energy. We refer to it as “animating inanimate objects.” The bus had previously belonged to a fundamentalist church, and we left the name of the church painted on the side. It was a great disguise. Later, as we traveled, we were able to stay overnight in church parking lots, and nobody bothered us.
In June 1976, we left for good. I settled up with Martha. We got together and figured out what she would want for her equity in the house, which I then gave to her. Then I put the house into the name of the Church. The idea would be that after we left they would sell it, and then the money would be transferred into the branch of the Church we were going to set up in Oregon. We would then have a foundation for whatever we were going to do. It seemed like a perfectly good plan to me. Money itself has never really been particularly important to me. Maybe it should have been more so.
MG: A number of people who loved him dearly tried to talk him out of this. They said, “This is your life savings. Suppose the board of directors changes, and they’re not your friends? You could lose everything.”
And Oberon was like, “No, no, that could never possibly happen. We’re all in this together.”
NARRATOR: From the beginnings of modern Paganism, and continuing on up to the present, there seems to have been an unwritten rule within the community that the “clergy,” in whatever way the people involved care to define that term, are not to be paid. People in positions of service to their Pagan groups are more often than not expected to somehow take care of themselves and their own finances—even if what they’re doing is full-time work, and they have duties that would be properly compensated for in some other religion. There are those who have been performing services at births, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage for decades who now have no retirement funds, insurance, or any place to live out their old age that is connected to the spirituality they’ve dedicated their lives to.
Which is not to say that they are not loved or in or other ways rewarded. People do these things voluntarily. But their lives can be tough. Tim Zell was not paid for his years of service in St. Louis, and as we have seen, he in fact personally helped finance the Church and its publications. He made a lot of sacrifices, not thinking about what might happen to his own security. The decision to donate his house to the Church was just one more sacrifice, and not one that would work out as he hoped it would after he left St. Louis.
OZ: After paying off Martha, most of the money I’d saved went into the bus itself. It was a matter of completely cutting loose and casting myself into the unknown. I had no idea of what I would do to make a living once we got to the West Coast.
On our last night in St. Louis, we stopped by our old house, parked the bus in the driveway, and went to sleep. We were going to get up the next morning and leave. But it turned out there was still a warrant out for my arrest.
The first week when Morning Glory moved to St. Louis, one night the police showed up at the doorstep and hauled me off to jail. That was not a good way to start things off. Orion, who was crashing with us at the time, had been working on his car and had a bunch of parts spread out in the driveway. He went into the house to make himself some lunch. When he came back he put the car back together, and we thought that was the end of it.
But I was under continual harassment by an ex-fraternity “brother” who had become a city prosecutor. He really hated me because I had rebelled against the fraternity system. When he found out I was living in his town, he kept having me arrested on one trumped-up charge after another. One time, when my iguana, Gryf, got loose, I was charged with “harboring a dangerous animal”! I’d go to court and the charges were always dismissed. I didn’t even have to hire a lawyer. In this particular case I was charged with littering—in my own driveway! This one was also dismissed, but somehow some lingering echo of it remained.
So there we were, sleeping in the bus, and there was a knock on the door.
MG: The police were beating on the door and trying to get in. They had another warrant for his arrest. The door was locked. We didn’t have any curtains on the windows, so they could look in. So we just pulled the covers over our heads and lay verrry still—because the monsters can’t get you when you’re under the covers! They finally gave up and went away. At that point we jumped up, put our clothes on, and hit the road for Oregon.