The Magick Land
(1976–1979)
We wandered West and made a Home
With Unicorns and baby deer;
When round the country I would roam,
I knew I’d always find you near.
Adventures bold and Dreams we told;
We never knew just where or when.
I’d do that part the same again;
I’d do that part the same again.
—from “love of my life” by morning glory zell, 1993
NARRATOR: By 1976, when the Zells headed west in the Scarlet Succubus, a new age had dawned. Or, to be more precise, the New Age, which was a label used to describe all the spiritual/metaphysical/occult kind of activity that had sprouted up in the wake of the ’60s. Hippies weren’t a “counterculture” anymore—their haircuts and clothes had generally either gone away or been absorbed by mainstream society. The Dionysian ecstasy that had started at the Woodstock festival had become a part of the corporate music machine in the ’70s, and drugs and sexual freedom were there for anyone who wanted them, not just the young and rebellious. (And there was an even larger menu of drugs and sex to choose from.)
The draft and the war in Vietnam had both ended a few years earlier, not too long before Nixon had left the White House in shame. A Democrat (and peanut farmer) named Jimmy Carter was elected president. Everything just seemed kind of mellow.
The 1970s were nicknamed “The Me Decade” by journalist Tom Wolfe, and he was referring to the social change from political activism to personal growth. After working to do what they could for the world, people were starting to look at what they could do for themselves, and New Age activity was a part of that. Lots of different things were considered to be New Age, including stuff like pyramid power, crystals, astrology, and Tarot readings. The New Age was open to the public and becoming very commercial and popular. Pagans were still mostly underground, but as a result of the New Age phenomenon they had access to more resources, and eventually each other. The center of all this kind of activity was California, of course, and that was where the Zells stopped off on their way to Oregon.
MG: It was great to do a Circle with Ed Fitch in Southern California and then later on go up to Northern California to do a Circle with Gwydion. It was so exciting to see Witches and Pagans everywhere I went, in places where you would never think to find them—even in Orange County, where I went to high school. One evening my dad came to pick us up from a full-moon ritual; he was asked what he thought about having a daughter who was a Priestess and he said, “My old man was a preacher, and as far as I can tell, she’s just some other kind of preacher. Doesn’t matter what kind; they’re all the same to me.” But my mom was really happy to meet Oberon, since he was all I’d ever talked about from the day I met him. She always was happy to love the people I loved.
NARRATOR: Before they got to Oregon, the Zells went to a Solstice party at Greenfield Ranch. Tim fell in love with the land and decided he wanted to live there some day. And both Tim and MG met many new friends along the way.
CERRIDWEN FALLINGSTAR: I first met the Zells in 1976. Alison Harlow held a big Summer Solstice festival at Coeden Brith (“Speckled Forest,” her parcel on Greenfield Ranch). I saw Morning Glory dancing and was very attracted. After the festival there was an afterparty at Alison’s in Palo Alto that some of us attended. I saw them there and went up to Alison, suggested that I was interested in them, and she said, “Well, if you play your Tarot cards right, you could probably end up with them tonight.”
So I approached Tim rather than Morning Glory, because I was a woman who had never been turned down by a guy. I felt confident, even though in some ways it was Morning Glory that I really had eyes for. But they were a package deal, and so were my husband and I at that time (he was not with me at that party). The three of us did end up getting together and making love that night. When I went back to L.A., I told my husband about these fine people I had encountered. He met them later on, also liked them, and we embarked on about a five-year affair with them.
I became Rainbow’s honorary aunt and Goddess-mother. Even after I wasn’t romantically involved with her mother and stepfather, I continued to see her. They would send her down to spend time with us.
MG: The day we finally arrived back in Eugene, I was ecstatic! We pulled our bus into a parking place at my friend Lucy’s house, where Catherine was visiting. The other folks staying there were the Flying Karamazov Brothers—a traveling troupe of jugglers and stage performers that were regulars at the Oregon Country Fair. Everyone piled out of the house to welcome us and supervise while we parked the Succubus. Howard and Paul were using batons to guide us into place like an aircraft ground crew, and then more people arrived with musical instruments from a marching band. Talk about a real “Welcome Home”! I was so relieved to be back in my own town with my own people.
OZ: Later, we met Anna Korn, who lived in an all-women communal house with a long driveway next to it.
ANNA KORN: I was in graduate school in biology in Eugene. Right after the Zells moved there, they had put a notice up in a women’s bookstore. I guess most of the people in Eugene weren’t aware of Green Egg at that point, but I knew what it was. So I contacted them and invited them to my house for dinner. We all hit it off, and I invited them to join our collective household.
The next day, they parked the Scarlet Succubus alongside our house in the driveway, and ran an extension cord through our bathroom window. They would use the phone and kick in for the electric bill. And so we just shared things. If they got a phone call, we would go to the bathroom, lean out the window, and knock on the side of the bus. My roommates, even though they weren’t all Pagans, felt that it was peculiar and interesting to have them around.
One of the first things they did, as I recall, is they got a teaching position in the extension courses of the local Lane Community College, where they taught a course called “Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Pagan Religion” for three trimesters. It was really quite a good survey course. The students in the course would come to Circles that we had, and formed the core of a little group of Pagans in Eugene. We formed a coven called Ithil Duath, which is Elvish for “Moon Shadow.”
MG: I really was hoping that Gary, Oberon, and my daughter could all become one family, but too much water had gone under the bridge at that point. Gary was living in an apartment and didn’t want to give that up. I tried, but I couldn’t make my two universes come together.
GAIL SALVADOR: In Eugene I stayed with them sometimes in the bus, but I went back and forth. It was a bus! That’s not where you raise a kid. With my dad I had my own room. In the bus I had a bunk.
I would always have them drop me off blocks from school. I didn’t want them to come to school. But one time, though, my mom did come to my school on Hallowe’en. She was all dressed up as a Witch. And she told a ghost story to the entire school. And everybody thought I was the coolest thing ever after that. Sometimes they would bring the snakes to school for show and tell, and then it came in handy to have the freaky, weird parents. This was in the third grade.
For a little while as a pre-teen I did embrace the Witch spirituality. I guess I decided that a lot of people involved in that world are drama geeks, and I am not a drama geek. I don’t have a theatrical side to my personality.
I’m a very pragmatic, practical person. I like my reality. My therapist says that your personality is completely formed by the time you are three. So basically I was scrambling for stability as a child, because I didn’t have it at all.
Oberon was a fun guy, like a kid himself. I used to love the way he cooked, because he fried everything. When you’re a kid it doesn’t get any better than that. But he went through this really weird George Orwell–esque phase where he thought the world was going to end in 1982. We’d be staying up late listening to talk radio or something, and he’d be like, “Oh yeah, it’s all gonna end in 1982.” He had me convinced for a little while there that that was it, that I only had a few years left. This still pisses me off now, because I would never do that to my daughter.
OZ: I got very caught up on a 1974 book called The Jupiter Effect by astronomer John Gribbin. He proposed that on March 10, 1982, a rare planetary alignment of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto on the same side of the sun could trigger a series of geological events that might spawn devastating earthquakes and massive tidal waves. It was much like the later mythos around the year 2012, and I felt I needed to spread the word so that people would be prepared. But I deeply regret conveying these concerns to our kids, as it cast a Damoclean shadow over their lives for many years—much like the shadow of a seemingly inevitable nuclear apocalypse that had haunted my own youth. I learned a profound lesson from this: never promote a mythos that has no future, especially to the next generation,
NARRATOR: Along the way, Tim and Morning Glory had come up with their idea to raise Unicorns, which they eventually did, and we’ll learn more about that in the next chapter. So whatever plans they were making and wherever they were traveling, this was on their minds as their eventual goal.
MG: The hitch in all this was where we were going to do this thing with Unicorns. I desperately wanted to stay in Eugene with my family and my community, but we couldn’t seem to manage to find a real place to stay. My idea was to connect with some folks who had land that were looking for people to rent space or to work on a nearby farm where we could raise the animals, where there were barns and so forth. There were a fair number of properties of that nature still around the area.
Then we had a phone conversation with our friend Alison Harlow, who owned the 220-acre parcel called Coeden Brith on Greenfield Ranch in California. Gwydion and Alison had had a falling out, and he had moved off the land that he and Alison had originally talked about becoming partners on. She was offering to let us live there for free in exchange for being caretakers! We were friends with both Alison and Gwydion, and we thought, “Well, maybe if we move down there we could kill two birds with one stone. We could raise Unicorns, and maybe we can manage to patch up the rift between Gwydion and Alison.” We were very naïve in those days about these kinds of things!
MG: The idea was that Rainbow would come and live with us, and go back and forth. By that time she was seven, and I let her decide where she wanted to live. And she opted to stay with her father because he had electricity, running water, and television.
I wasn’t eager to leave behind my daughter again. But I felt that since Oberon had moved away from St. Louis to be with me, I had to move with him this time. I went ahead and caved in because I could not bear to be parted from Oberon. But I was pretty bitter, angry, and unhappy about it. I felt that he was making me chose between my child and him. I couldn’t verbalize my anger, or entirely even bring it up into consciousness. But it was there. A million times a day, all of our stresses of living in a school bus kept bringing these things up and out. We were both headstrong people, and we were always butting heads and constantly bickering. I can see that it wasn’t a very appealing thing for a child to want to live in a school bus on raw unimproved land with no running water or electricity with two bickering adults. But at least Rainbow decided to come and visit us in the summer when school was out.
OZ: So on July 4, 1977, we arrived at Greenfield Ranch, posting our old “Did You Remember to Dress?” sign at the gate. We told Alison what we were going to do with the Unicorns and got her involved in the project. To this end, the three of us formed the Holy Order of Mother Earth (HOME) as a monastic order of stewardship and ritual, and chartered it as a subsidiary of the Church of All Worlds.
ALISON HARLOW: The Zells and I were close friends. I loved them both very, very much. They were living on my land for free, but it was a benefit for me to have them there because they were taking care of things. Oberon had gotten his Unicorn idea some years prior. It seemed like an interesting thing to try to do. Nobody else was doing it. I had to advance them the money to pay for the livestock, but they did ultimately pay me back.
OZ: We pulled up to the parking spot on Coeden Brith and immediately shed all of our clothes. It was hotter than blazes. Ace, the Ranch caretaker, showed up in a pickup truck and said, “Let’s go up to the pond and take a dip.” We got as far as the Ranch House and the fire alarm was going off. There we were, stark naked in the back of a pickup truck, and the entire Ranch was mobilizing to go fight a forest fire!
We dashed into the Ranch House and managed to find something to put on in the free box of discarded clothes. We then spent the entire day and night fighting the fire. In the night, roots underground were catching fire and glowing. You’d walk around the landscape and it was like Dante’s Inferno. Many people became seriously sick from breathing the smoke of burning poison oak. That was our first day in our new home!
After the fire we got to meet more of the people who were living there. We were told by several of them that we should connect with Anodea Judith, as she was another Pagan, so we resolved to look her up. Several folks who owned a parcel together had a dairy, and they called it the “Udder Truth.” MG and I hiked on up there, and there was a cow with human feet sticking out from under it. We looked over the top of the cow, and there was a long-haired, blond Hippie girl down there milking it.
ANODEA JUDITH: One morning I was milking a cow, up in the shed, and Oberon and Morning Glory came up to visit and were standing on either side of me, and they said, “Anodea, we have come for you.” They took me up to their bus, and I think I came out three days later.
We became fast and furious friends. We really related on a metaphysical level. I was already doing rituals and things on my own before I met them, so things kind of linked right up. We started working together producing events, Circles, and magickal trainings. Before I met them I had mostly been doing rituals with women, because I hadn’t known any men that were into it.
OZ: We hadn’t been up on the Ranch for too long before Orion also moved there from St. Louis, followed soon by Michael (later Brendan) Hurley. Some of our closest Pagan friends on the Ranch in the early years were Bran and Moria Starbuck. Moria was (and is) a truly gifted graphic artist and sculptor, who turned me on to Sculpey (a kind of modeling material that could be baked hard in a regular oven) and thus helped launch my own eventual career in sculpting. They had moved up from Los Angeles shortly before we arrived, and settled on the parcel that had originally been “reserved” for Morning Glory and me. It was in part to accommodate them that Alison agreed to let us move onto her land instead.
Across the valley from us were Marylyn Motherbear and her family. Troll was her second husband and the father of four of her six kids. They became some of our closest friends. They were fundamental homesteaders, and had once worked with Stewart Brand on the legendary Whole Earth Catalog. They built a huge, sprawling farm and a vast house that was always being worked on. They had a bunch of kids, and that’s why she took the name “Motherbear.” Morning Glory and I became aunt and uncle to their kids (including LaSara Firefox). We often spent Thanksgivings and other holidays with them. It was quite a hike across the valley, through the creek, and up the ridge to get there from where we were. Getting around the Ranch was not always easy.
One of the things Greenfield Ranch was famous for was rattlesnakes. Gwydion wanted to rename the place “Rattlesnake Acres,” because he felt that Greenfield sounded too attractive. One of his favorite songs that he used to sing at parties was “The Last Resort” by the Eagles. There was a line in it about how if you call a place paradise, you can kiss it goodbye. The idea being that if you make it sound really attractive, everyone wants to move there, and before long it is overcrowded and polluted. So Gwydion was always agitating to emphasize the less desirable aspects of country life.
MG: Gwydion had a gift for what we sometimes call “toxic nomenclature.” He named a meadow on Coeden Brith “the Battlefield” after a dream he had about a Native American testing ground, and he and Alison fought over it for years. He named his truck the Red Dragon and it blew up and burned a piece of his land. And of course he named his land Annwfn, the Celtic Underworld, and now he’s buried there. But we were all into naming everything and everywhere—it’s a very animistic thing. Oberon and I most often drew our nomenclature from Tolkien and Greek mythology.
MG: Rainbow spent summers with us, and in the winter she would go live with Gary and go to school in Eugene. We developed this rhythm of the seasons, sort of like the story of Demeter and Persephone. I would go spend Christmas, birthdays, and spring break with her in Eugene. After a year or two of that, she did stay with us for one year and went to the Ranch school.
She had a bunk bed inside the vehicle, but she couldn’t take the crowdedness, so we built her a treehouse fort outside to go to when she wanted to get away; we fixed it up with cushions, blankets, and dishes so she could even spend the night there if she wanted to, but she was not too keen on sleeping alone in the woods. I never understood the idea of being scared in the woods because I loved it so much even when I was a little kid. I was always wandering off and getting lost because I didn’t worry about that sort of thing. The forest always seemed like a safe haven to me, but I came to realize that’s not how many folks think of it.
GAIL SALVADOR: When I went to visit them, I had to take the Greyhound bus by myself. I hated that stupid bus. I never had any bad experiences, but it just stunk. People could smoke cigarettes on the bus back then. And for some reason, the bus always left at three in the morning, so we had to get down there in the middle of the night. I tried to go to school on the Ranch, but it was a Hippie school and it was not working for me. I had dyslexia, and I needed more than what was being provided.
MG: Actually, in spite of both the public schools and the private school that Gary sent her to, when Rainbow was ten years old she still could not read, so I finally put my foot down because I did not want to have an illiterate child who would suffer for it her whole life. So I told her that she was going to spend the next winter with us, and we would make sure she learned to read. She didn’t like it, but it worked. There was no TV or mall or other distractions through the long winter months of rain, and the only other kids lived miles away on twisted muddy roads.
But what we were rich in was books, lots of books—and especially lots of comic books. OZ is a comics collector, and he turned her on to ElfQuest comics by Wendy and Richard Pini, which was a turning point in her life in many ways. The pictures told the story, but it made her want to learn to read the words and find out more. Then we would work with her sounding out the words until she got it and something clicked in her head and the words finally made sense. After that she never looked back, and she started reading for pleasure: first comics, then kids’ books, and finally full-length novels. She once told me years later that was the point at which she became a time-binding being; she learned to judge duration by the six-week intervals she had to wait for the next installment of ElfQuest.
GAIL SALVADOR: Oberon and Morning Glory had a really intense relationship. They fought very intensely for years. The whole time they were on Greenfield, they fought like cats and dogs. They had screaming matches that would go on for days. They moved to the woods because they thought it was going to be all groovy and harmonious, and all they did was try to kill each other.
CERRIDWEN FALLINGSTAR: Oberon and Morning Glory fought constantly. It was distressing to my husband and me to see them fighting, and they kept trying to pull us in. So we would talk to them and try to give them a different perspective, and then they would get back together and do it all over again. There was no commitment on their part to learn to be responsible with their emotions, to treat each other and their kid responsibly.
They never fought with us. We didn’t have those kinds of conflicts with them. But it became more difficult to be around them. I think that part of it was that life on Greenfield was hard. They were living in a very small bus on a remote piece of land. I’m sure they got on each other’s nerves, and that their circumstances were very challenging.
MG: OZ and I were both strong, independent personalities, and we both had a stubborn streak about always having to be right in any argument. Part of it was that we were so much alike in so many ways that when we came upon a real difference, we just couldn’t abide it. Also both of us tried to always have the last word in any conflict. Talk about “cabin fever”! Cooped up in a school bus all winter long for many years was more propinquity than we were prepared to deal with. But at the same time we had a personal mythos that we were an ideal couple of soulmates. Gwydion joked around that he would not be surprised to visit us someday and find me cooking Tim for dinner.
OZ: We loved each other desperately and had worked so hard to carve out a life where we could be together 24/7, but once we had that ideal life it didn’t seem so ideal, especially to Morning Glory. She really missed her family and friends in Eugene and resented me for leaving there to come to Greenfield. I kept trying to do things to make her happy, but you can’t “make” another person be happy. They have to do that for themselves, and at the time I just didn’t get it.
MG: There were lots of wonderful things about living on the Ranch so close to Nature that I loved, but it was a very hard and uncompromising existence. It might have been a lot easier if we had enough money to buy some basic amenities like a hot water heater or a refrigerator. But we arrived with just the bus and its contents. We didn’t even have a second car, so that anytime we wanted to go grocery shopping, we either had to catch a ride with someone else or we had to drive the twenty-five-foot school bus down the mountainside to town.
NARRATOR: The Zells didn’t have any money and had a hard time surviving on Greenfield Ranch, just as they’d had in Eugene. They kept expecting that they’d get some cash from the sale of the house that used to belong to Tim in St. Louis, but there had been some major changes in the Church after they had left town. Tom Williams had taken over as editor of Green Egg, but within a year he quit and moved out to California, too. There was one more issue after he left, and then the magazine folded. Tim’s house was sold, but after paying off the remaining debt on the loan for it and other fees, there was only about $2,000 left, and that was then controlled by a newly elected CAW board of directors, only two of whom were personal friends of the Zells. Half of that money was used to pay off bills that had been accumulated by publishing Green Egg, and the rest was eventually sent to California. All the remaining back issues of GE got taken to the dump. The whole CAW in the Midwest ended up crumbling in the next year or two. A couple of outlying Nests survived because they were family-based and continued to meet. But the foundational infrastructure of the central Church itself collapsed.
OZ: Bryan was still in St. Louis. We weren’t really in touch with him. That is one of the things I regret. During the final months in St. Louis and while we were putting the bus together, we tried to phone him many times. But every time we were told that he didn’t want to talk to us. So eventually we just gave up. I wasn’t in contact with him for a number of years. After we moved to the Ranch, we didn’t even have a phone. I could have written, but I didn’t. I kind of dropped off the map. Just disappearing was somehow part of the whole thing of going to live in the woods. And since Green Egg was no longer being published, I didn’t have any way to keep in touch with all the people I used to know.
MARTHA TURLEY: I think the worst thing Tim did in regard to Bryan was having nothing to do with him once he left St. Louis. I don’t know why he did that. He always loved Bryan so much when he was younger. It was like he just gave up that whole world when he moved out there. Bryan was upset. Tim never wrote to him or sent him any cards.
BRYAN ZELL: I didn’t hear from my dad for years. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. I believed that Dad didn’t want to pay child support. My stepfather wanted to have the law pursue him for that, but my mom refused. She didn’t want that to happen.
But I don’t think my dad should feel guilty about not being there. There were times I didn’t want him to be there. I was afraid of change, and I needed some stability in my life. After knowing what he went through after leaving St. Louis, I feel I made the right decision. So I forgive him for that. But I often wonder where I’d be now if I’d gone with him; that’s something in the back of my mind all the time.
NARRATOR: With help from some Pagan friends in California (including Gwydion, who had previously worked for the IRS), Tim was able to get the CAW incorporated in California on September 14, 1978, but they had no money to do anything with it. It would not be until 1985 that the church would truly come back to life again.
But OZ has never been the kind of person who would let finances stop him from pursuing a dream. While the CAW was inactive, and before he got totally absorbed in raising Unicorns, he and MG hooked up with some people in the Bay Area who were forming a group called the Covenant of the Goddess. It was going to be an umbrella organization that would provide a legal structure for little groups that were not legally incorporating to join underneath it for legal protection. The Zells would take trips away from the Ranch to work on that, which led them into an unexpected adventure.
OZ: Throughout my life I’ve been involved in every effort I could possibly get involved in to form associations and alliances to try to create a game that everybody could play in. I’ve always felt that there needed to be someplace that all the different Pagan groups could come together. Most of these—like the Council of Themis—were short-lived. But the Covenant of the Goddess was destined to become a significant one.
This involved a lot of trips to different places. One of the first ones was down in L.A. Allison and Gwydion went with us on our bus. One of the people down there was Poke Runyon. At one point, Poke came up to me and said he wanted to make an apology for having been such an ass many years before when we were both involved with the Council of Themis. I accepted, and we smoked a peace pipe together. It was quite nice. We’ve gotten along ever since.
A few months later, in February 1978, we were doing the same thing up in Seattle, continuing to recruit people for the Covenant of the Goddess. While we were up there, Morning Glory got a call from her mom. Her dad had had a serious heart attack and was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to live. She left and flew to L.A. That left me all by myself on the Scarlet Succubus.
Driving back home through the Pacific Northwest, I was looking at postcards of things in the area, and one of them showed Stonehenge. It was restored—not the ruins that you normally see. I turned the card over and read that it was quite nearby, in Maryhill, Washington.
So I went to check it out. It was amazing—a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge as it had originally looked before it fell into ruins. It was out in the middle of nowhere. I was able to find out that it had been built by railroad executive Samuel Hill as a memorial for the people who had died in World War I. He had this notion, which was popular among people in those days, that Stonehenge had been built by the Druids as a temple where human sacrifices were conducted. Of course that is not a true account of what happened at the original Stonehenge, but it gave him a justification to do it. He picked the location because it was the only place in North America where two paths of solar eclipses would ever cross. They would form an “X marks the spot.” The first crossing had been in 1921. And the next one was due in 1979, on February 26! The altar stone in the center of the ring of the Stonehenge had been laid into place for the eclipse in 1921. Subsequently everything else—trilithons, heelstone, menhirs, portal stones, and the great outer ring of lintel-capped stones—was built around it. It was all prepared for this coming eclipse—just a year away!
I was blown away by the whole idea. It occurred to me then that we ought to do something about it. Shortly afterwards, two events occurred. One was the Oregon Country Fair, which was the weekend before the Fourth of July, followed by the Rainbow Family Gathering, which was happening in Oregon that year. I went back to Greenfield Ranch, and Morning Glory returned from Los Angeles. MG was sick with the flu and didn’t feel like going to Oregon, so Rainbow and I hitchhiked up to Oregon together.
We went to the Oregon Country Fair and were hanging out with the Flying Karamazov Brothers and their friends, many of whom were performers. I decided it would be a great time to trip. There was a huge tree with a multilevel treehouse built in its branches, like the flets of Lothlorien. I was up there for quite a while, and I had an amazing vision. I saw a black sun over a trilithon, and heard the following words: “The prophecies will come when shadow mates with sun. Be there. You know where.” This burned itself into my brain. I came down from this and started drawing pictures with the date and verse on it and putting them around places. Shortly after that, Rainbow and I went to the Rainbow Gathering, and I handed out cards with the image and date on it.
After the Rainbow Gathering, I continued to print up flyers and send them out to people. Of course this was in the days before email. But it still got around a lot. We started making plans for going up to the Maryhill Stonehenge and doing a ceremony for the eclipse.
At that same time, MG and I were on the land, planning on raising Unicorns. We were building pens and barns and looking for suitable livestock and setting everything into place. During that time we were mostly engaged in that process. But we were also preparing for the eclipse ceremony. We contacted other Pagan leaders we knew—mostly people from the newly formed Covenant of the Goddess. The Stonehenge was on the property of the Maryhill museum—we contacted them and got their permission. They were enthusiastic and cooperative in every way.
The following February, up at Maryhill, the museum curators talked to the local media about the upcoming eclipse and the plans for a huge Pagan ritual there, and set up a press conference for a few days before the event. When we all got there, we explained to the media what we were going to do. They said that we were crazy. It was the middle of winter, and in that part of the country you can rarely see the sky at that time of year because it’s so rainy and cloudy all the time. So Isaac popped up and said, “We’ve got a bunch of weather workers with us. We’ll just clear the clouds out of the way.” We realized that we had to actually deliver on that!
On the day of the ritual, people started showing up. The museum had put out port-a-potties. The police were there to direct traffic. More than three thousand people drove up and started setting up camp.
The night before the eclipse some folks built a fire in the middle of the Stonehenge circle. They began to play drums and dance. As people danced around the fire, they cast shadows on the stones. The size of the shadows exactly matched the size of the stones. It was as if the stones had been built specifically to be screen backdrops for shadows of dancers. We recalled that one of the obscure and odd names of Stonehenge was “The Giants’ Dance.” And that was what we were seeing—the stones themselves appeared to be dancing. The energy was incredible. At one point the energy was so intense that we all lifted our hands up to the sky and screamed. There was a clear sky up above us, and nothing but stars. Not a cloud. We looked at each other and said, “Okay, we’ve done our work here.”
We got up at dawn, put on our ritual robes, and processed through the morning mist. The crowd parted as we approached the altar stone.
As the sun rose and the edge of it started being eaten away by the moon, we began chanting the most effective, universal weather chant: “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day.” And the clouds parted. The sky went completely clear. It was an utterly blue, clear sky. We looked off towards the distant horizon and we saw, heading towards us, the shadow of the moon rippling across the landscape. And then we were engulfed in shadow. The sky went completely black, and stars came leaping out. All the birds that were flying squawked and dove for cover because they thought night had suddenly fallen. You could hear cows mooing and lowing as they went to lie down to sleep. There up in the sky above us was this great eye. Because when the surface of the sun was completely covered by the moon, what leaped out from behind it was the corona. It looks like the iris of an eye, with the pupil at the center of it. And we suddenly understood the image of the eye of God that you see on the back of a one dollar bill and in all kinds of Masonic and ancient art. It’s the image of a solar eclipse.
ANODEA JUDITH: We did a Nature ritual inside the Stonehenge. It was early in the morning, and I played the Element of Air. What an eclipse is, is that the moon goes in front of the sun; that is what is literally happening. So for our ritual we had a woman carry a big Venus of Willendorf statue. She was playing the moon, and we had somebody playing the sun. So it was the Goddess coming in front of the sun, and the feminine kind of eclipsing the masculine and getting some notice. And I think at that time the feminine was really starting to come back alive. People were starting to rediscover the Goddess, and we were bringing notice in the world to the feminine. Not that the feminine is better than the masculine, but it had been so repressed and hadn’t been seen. So for a short time it got to stand out in front of the masculine.
OZ: It was at that same time that the planet Pluto moved into the solar system, inside the orbit of Neptune. Normally it lies outside of it—it has this long elliptical orbit. For a twenty-year period it would be inside the orbit of Neptune and therefore inside the solar system. That twenty-year period would end in 1999, and on August 11 of that year, the last total eclipse of the sun in the millennium was due to fall over southern England, where there are numerous ancient stone circles. Stonehenge would be just outside of the range, but there were others inside it. So that was pretty exciting. We set the first piece of a twenty-year working into place as the beginning of an Awakening. What we wanted to do was infuse the shadows that moved across the face of the Earth with an energy field that would carry with it a sense of awakening among the people, which would eventually lead to a planetary Awakening of Gaea.
MG: After it was all over, we gathered up our stuff, and people broke camp and headed off in their different directions. That evening we went back to our hotel and turned on the news to see if it had anything to say about us. We saw satellite photos of the shadow moving across the face of the Pacific Northwest. And there was nothing but solid clouds until it got to right where we were. And the clouds opened up like the iris of a camera for the length of the eclipse. And when the shadow moved on, it closed again, then a little further down it opened up again at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon. In the Pacific Northwest, those were the only two places that the eclipse could be seen at all.
OZ: Commenting on this phenomenon on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, Terry Drinkwater reported, “Nearby, at a replica of Stonehenge, Druids, Neo-Pagans invoked their Gods, Mother Nature, and Father Time, to ensure cloudless skies. And, generally, the heavens were clear for eclipse viewing. [. . .] As the totality of the eclipse approached, the Druids at Stonehenge seemed almost spellbound. And finally, at the moment the moon passes between the sun and this spot on Earth—total darkness.” The next days we were in all the newspapers. They wrote about how the Druids cleared the sky so that the people could see it. And all the good photos came from the Maryhill Stonehenge.
MG: Right after the eclipse we had to go down to Berkeley to spend a few days with Isaac Bonewits. It was the beginning of March 1979, and the weather was bitterly cold. We had our snakes, Ananta and Tanith, who needed to be taken care of, but Ananta weighed nearly one hundred pounds at this point, and so this time we decided to leave them behind because we were hitchhiking down to the Bay Area. Oberon had made a box for them that they could be kept in. It had a shielded light bulb in it to keep them warm. But it had to be plugged in somewhere, so we took them and the box down to the auto shop where Orion was working, in the small, nearby town of Calpella. All he was supposed to do was keep them warm for a couple of days.
We were in Berkeley with Isaac and Anodea, when Orion showed up on their doorstep. He said, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your snakes are dead.” Apparently just after we left, there had been a heat wave. Nobody had thought about the snakes—out of sight, out of mind. Because of the temperature change, they had baked to death in their box. We were totally stricken by this.
We returned to the Ranch and buried them next to where we were building the barn for the Living Unicorns. That was quite a blow. We were wondering what it all meant. We had just been through this incredible eclipse ritual, and then we had the backlash of losing the snakes that we had been so bonded with. And now we were about to embark on our venture with the Unicorn.
OZ: So we walked down to the stream that ran through the land. Called Eldritch Creek, it was one of those Northern California creeks that in the summertime is just kind of a loosely connected sequence of stagnant puddles, but in the winter it becomes this raging torrent because of all the rain. We wanted to check on how the erosion-control work we’d done during the summer was holding up. And, most importantly, we needed to talk about our lives and our plans for the future.
One of the things that I wanted to discuss with MG was my name. Many people who moved to Greenfield Ranch just took another name, a mystical or magickal name.
Now, I am fundamentally an aquatic creature. I had grown up by a lake, and in my youth I spent much of my summers swimming—mostly underwater. When I come up for air I roll around. I swim like an otter, and Morning Glory had taken to referring to me as an “Otter in the water.” It had sort of become a nickname, but only in the context of swimming, and not a name that I had taken seriously. She suggested that I take that name, and I said it wasn’t really dignified enough. If all went according to our plans, I said, in a year we were going to be out in the world with our Unicorns, and media people would be talking to us, and I would need to have a really cool name to go by. I needed something mystical and arcane—appropriate for a Wizard.
We were having this conversation on the high bank overlooking Eldritch Creek. Below us the stream was roaring by in full flood. Morning Glory said, “Why don’t you ask the Goddess for a sign?”
So I did this little invocation: “Oh Goddess, Mother of all living, give me a sign for a name in which I may continue to do your work and be known in the world.” No sooner had the words left my lips than a wild otter popped out of the foaming water. It was the first one I had ever seen. It climbed up onto a rock, looked right at us, spun around in a little pirouette, and disappeared back into the froth.
Morning Glory and I turned and looked at each other. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I hear and I obey.” So after that whenever people asked about my name, “Otter,” I would say that it was the name my mother gave me.