The Return of the Unicorn
(1975–1991)
Now not so long ago a Wizard looked round;
He said, “All the people of the Earth seem down.
It’s too beautiful a world to look so forlorn—
I think I’ll bring back those Unicorns!”
Well he sat down to thinking and it gave him a pain,
Readin’ and researchin’ in the sun and rain,
Until he learned the secret of the ancient Unicorns:
That the lovely creatures were made, not born.
—from “the unicorn—part 2” by orion stormcrow, 1986
(for Oberon on his forty-fourth birthday—November 30, 1986)
NARRATOR: The story of the Zells and their Unicorns takes place over many years and overlaps with many of their other adventures. It started off when Morning Glory and OZ, who was then still Tim Zell, were living together in St. Louis.
OZ: In 1975 or thereabouts, we were sitting around our living room with a bunch of folks and talking about myths, legends, and different mythical beasts and creatures. Somebody asked, “What’s the difference between a basilisk and a cockatrice?”
We pulled out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and found a fascinating discussion relating the basilisk, cockatrice, and Medusa to the Egyptian spitting cobra, which is a real live animal that can spit its venom in your eyes and blind you and then kill you. But as people got further and further away from the source, it became a creature whose gaze would paralyze you or turn you into stone. (The venom would cause paralysis, which is close to being turned into stone. And snakes have no eyelids—they have an unblinking gaze that can seem very intense and hypnotic.) So stories about a real, actual creature can build up into an entire mythos.
MG: We then thought that we could write a book about what was the grain of truth behind the fantasies and fairy stories. For unicorns, dragons, phoenixes, and all different kinds of creatures—what is the story behind the story?
OZ: For years I’d been collecting news clippings; some of my folders were several inches thick. There were files in my cabinets going back to the ’50s that I’d kept for future research. With this whole new vision of a project in mind, we started gathering more stuff together. We went to libraries and looked for accounts, records, reports, drawings, bas-reliefs, sculptures—anything we could find.
NARRATOR: When they relocated to Eugene, Oregon, they began teaching an extension course in “Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Pagan Religion” at the local community college. This gave them access to the school library, where they were able to continue working on their project.
OZ: Morning Glory and I did research in the college library. And there I came across an obscure reference to some experiments that had been performed in the 1930s by a veterinary physician named Dr. Franklin Dove. At that time everybody thought that animals’ horns just grew straight out of the skull. But he discovered that horns were precipitated and stimulated into growth by a node in the skin, not in the bone. They were pulled out of the skull, rather than pushed out, stimulated by a node known as the horn bud that releases enzymes that cause a horn to be produced.
Dove discovered that you could move these buds, and wherever they were they would cause the horn to grow from that spot. You had to do all this, though, within a very few hours after the birth of the animal. But it seemed to work on all horned animals, including deer, cattle, goats, sheep, and antelope. Dove decided to see if he could create a unicorn by causing the buds to be brought together and fused. He used a calf, which is part of why his discovery was pretty much unregarded—it didn’t strike anybody’s fancy.
MG: Franklin Dove’s unicorn was the very first unicorn of modern times. It was a beautiful white and brown unicorn bull with a horn in the middle of its forehead. Dove described the animal as being unusually assertive; it used its horn as a tool and seemed more adept at problem-solving. It also appeared gentler and more intelligent than the other cows and bulls on the farm.
OZ: Shortly after that, World War II happened and people didn’t pay much attention to what Dr. Dove had done. I Xeroxed this article and brought it back to Morning Glory. We pulled out our “Unicorns” file and started looking at all the articles and images we’d collected. The earliest images date from about 4,000 years ago, and depict the unicorns as bulls. In old Persian bas-reliefs they appear identical to Franklin Dove’s animal, and they’re depicted fighting with lions. In fact “the Unicorn vs. the Lion” became a motif all the way through history; it’s still on the contemporary British royal coat of arms.
The popular images in the Cloisters tapestries from medieval and Renaissance Europe were clearly based on goats—they are cloven-hoofed and have the giveaway little beard. We speculated that unicorns were a deliberately created phenomenon, like a bonsai tree, a mule, or a beefalo. It seemed possible that the unicorn had always been a product of deliberate human manipulation.
The unicorn was not a natural animal, for he can only come into being by deliberate intent. Therefore unicorns are magickal! Because the essence of Magick as we understand it is coincidence control and probability enhancement—intentionally redirecting natural forces and energies to the purpose of a creative will. Planting a garden, irrigation and erosion control, and cross-breeding for diversity are all magickal acts, and it was in this context that we understood the creation of the Living Unicorn.
MG: So we asked ourselves, “What is involved in this?” Dove’s procedure was apparently very simple. Both OZ and I had a fair amount of basic veterinary and barnyard medical skills. We realized that with a little topical anesthesia, we could probably do what he did ourselves.
OZ: We looked at each other and said, “Wow! We might be able to produce a real live Unicorn—we could bring Unicorns back into the world! What an incredible magickal act that would be!”
And I said, “This is what we’ve been looking for—this is clearly our next assignment from the Goddess.”
NARRATOR: The synchronicity of getting an assignment from the Goddess is something that OZ likes to explain in terms from 1960s popular culture: at the beginning of every episode in the TV show Mission: Impossible, which ran from 1966 to 1973 and was quite different from the Tom Cruise movies of the same name, the leader of a team of secret agents would go to a different surprise location where a tape recorder would be waiting for him. He would start playing the tape and hear a message that always began with “Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is . . .” (At the end of the message the tape recorder would self-destruct!) And OZ has pointed out to me on numerous occasions that if the character in the show didn’t accept the mission, then the series would have been cancelled, because then there would have been no stories to tell. So whenever OZ received what he perceived to be his next mission, then he too had to accept it for similar reasons.
And then, as they were trying to figure out just how to do this, they got the offer from Alison Harlow to be caretakers on Coeden Brith. After moving there they were able to raise some money for the project. It came from investors, who expected what they were doing to be a profitable as well as magical—for them the Unicorn project was comparable to a venture capital start-up. (For many years this money from the investors was the only source of income for OZ and MG, and eventually the money all had to be paid back.)
The Zells began building a barn before they even built a place for themselves. (They continued to live in their bus until they were able to build and move into a yurt.)
MG: We did some research and decided to use Angora goats as our Unicorn breeding stock. They have beautiful, white, fleecy hair that can be groomed and trimmed into an artistic mane, with tail and fetlocks resembling the classical unicorns in the tapestries. There’s a bronze medallion by Pisanello to Cecilia Gonzaga, from the fifteenth century, of a unicorn that is clearly an Angora goat with its head in the lap of a young virgin.
We ended up driving to Calaveras County, buying four pregnant does, and bringing them back. This was just before Hallowe’en 1979. Now, our research had indicated that it’s almost impossible to make a Unicorn out of a female goat, and our first goat baby, born on Groundhog Day, 1980, was female.
OZ: We named her Milkmaid. This was our first birth, so we were quite green at parenting. We took turns sleeping in the stall all night with Milkmaid’s mother, Amalthea. A month later our first male was born. When I discovered him in the stall with his mother, I scooped him up in my arms (he was no bigger than a housecat) and carried him to the bus to show Morning Glory. Tears were streaming down my face as I said, “Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.”
We named our first Unicorn Galahad as an indication of our high hopes (we had already decided that we would name our Unicorns after the Knights of the Round Table).
It was then time to perform the operation. I had plenty of skills and experience to prepare me for doing it. When you live on a farm and take care of animals, you have to routinely do things like de-horning, de-clawing, dis-budding, castrating, and tail docking—it’s a completely different way of life that people who live in the city and just have animals as pets don’t understand. I’d had experience on farms as a kid, and when I was an Eagle Scout I learned how to hunt, trap, and fish. In biology class I became really good at dissection of specimens and continued my education on my own with roadkills for years. Then in college I was a pre-med student and was so good at anatomy and dissection that I became the teaching assistant and instructed other people in how to do it in lab class.
So I had the necessary background. All I needed was a final bit of information that hadn’t been in the article by Franklin Dove, and I had figured that out by dreaming it. I used the same technique that Crick and Watson used to find the model of the DNA molecule. They basically put all the information and all the electron-scanning things out there and got obsessed with “What pattern could explain this stuff?” Watson then dreamed of two snakes intertwining, and correctly intuited the structure of the double-helix spiral.
Well, I put out everything I could find about this and I asked the question, “How can this be done, exactly?” I knew that I had to perform a manipulatory operation that would take two separate horn buds, on opposite sides of the skull, and somehow fuse them together in the center without interrupting the blood flow or the continuity of the skin. It meant a rearrangement of tissue in a complex way that minimized any potential damage.
When I woke up in the morning, I had it. This complex little design, like a sigil, had appeared in my dream. A sigil is a magical sign or symbol—usually a unique, special design. I realized that if I cut that sigil pattern I could then rearrange the components. And that was the answer.
ALISON HARLOW: The newborn goat is completely anesthetized and doesn’t feel a thing. It isn’t traumatic. There is no way Oberon would ever hurt an animal. Working with any animal creature is one of his big strengths. I remember one time he found a turtle that somebody had run over. The shell was completely cracked. After months of nursing that turtle back to health, it was totally fine again. That’s one of his great gifts.
MG: We were advised to neuter him. Experienced goat raisers told us “no one wants a male goat that is intact!” So we neutered the animal almost immediately after it was born, then we did the Unicorning procedure at the same time. But to our utmost chagrin, the little guy never grew much of a horn. You have to have that testosterone on board, or else the horn doesn’t grow! After that didn’t work, we went, “Hmmm.”
We realized that in order to get maximum horn growth, it has to be an intact male. Of course there is some phallic symbolism there. The whole point of the Unicorn experience for us was how much all the things we found out utterly fell into place and dovetailed with the legend.
So often, legend is truer than the modern world would have us believe. Mainstream science is very frustrating to deal with because they ignore things the size of elephants sitting right in their living room. The Unicorn was actually an exercise to point this out to the world. One of the things was to say, “Look! Ta-da! Everybody said this can’t be. There is no such thing as unicorns. But here is one. So what else is there that you’re saying can’t be existing that might be there, too?”
OZ: In March 1980, Morning Glory went to San Francisco for a big Spring Equinox parade. I was up the hill working in the orchard when I heard the now-familiar cry of a doe in labor. I dropped everything and ran down the hill, arriving just in time to discover a wet and wobbly newborn male goat. I snatched him up right away and carried him to the bus, where I performed the operation. For the next two weeks I slept with him in my arms every night and kept him with me in the orchard and garden all day. Morning Glory returned to find a cute, adorable little baby Unicorn. The following weekend, on the full moon, another one was born.
MG: He performed the surgery on the baby boy, whom we named Lancelot. Then another one was born two weeks afterwards and we named him Bedivere. Orion helped with the third surgery, but unfortunately he had a bad cold. Even though he was wearing a mask, Bedivere got a terrible infection. I spent many days and nights caring for him: treating the infection with antibiotics, hot packs, and frequent changes of the dressing. Both animals’ horns sprouted up just like Dove’s bull, but on Bedivere one side partially died in spite of all my care, so at first his horn was much thinner. Lancelot grew a great, prominent central horn, and eventually so did Bedivere.
ALISON HARLOW: They never mistreated the Unicorns. They were never lazy about feeding the Unicorn babies. They took them away from their mothers and nursed them, and that’s very important. Here, again, is something that Otter was really smart about. When you do the Unicorning process to a goat, it actually stimulates their pineal gland, so you get a creature that is a lot stronger and a lot smarter than the average of the species. He was convinced, and I think that he was absolutely right, that if they just let them grow up as goats, by the time they were adults they’d be much too dangerous to have around. A billy goat that can impale you with a sword, and is smarter than a dog, is a dangerous creature.
So what they did was, from the time they were born and they’d done the Unicorning process on them, they took them away from the mothers, and when they were really tiny they lived in the house with the Zells. They milked the moms and fed the babies with their own mother’s milk from a bottle, holding them themselves so that they bonded with people. The Unicorns were then completely oriented towards people, and that is why they were so trainable. Because then you could use all of those smarts to get them to do what you wanted.
NARRATOR: Alison talked the Zells into getting an attorney. His name was Matthew Eberhard, and he and his wife Bernice were both fantasy and science fans. They became friends and supporters of OZ and MG, who ended up staying in the Eberhards’ Los Gatos house for several months and using it as a base of operations. Together they created a corporation, The Living Unicorn Project, to own the Unicorns and provide funding, and began the process of putting together a patent application for the Unicorning process.
The Eberhards set up a “coming out” party for the Unicorn at their house on Mother’s Day 1980 and invited the media. After that the Zells began doing interviews, and there was a lot of publicity, but they didn’t reveal the secret of the Unicorning process—they wanted to write that story themselves and sell it to a science magazine. A professional animal trainer was hired, and Lancelot learned how to perform in front of an audience.
OZ: Matthew arranged for Lancelot to be exhibited at Marine World/Africa USA, an amusement park with animal shows in the Bay Area, where a whole special pen was built so that people could come see him. They built a castle house for him, and a photograph of him standing in front of it ended up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, identifying him as a genuine Unicorn. Marine World had a huge billboard up next to the highway with a picture of Lance on it. The billboard said “Come to Marine World and See the Living Unicorn!”
NARRATOR: When OZ called up his dad and told him about the Unicorns, Charlie, who was in the gift and card business, asked him to make some Unicorn figurines and jewelry designs that he could put on the market. This was the first time Charlie had ever asked his son to create something for his company, and it was also the beginning of OZ’s career as a sculpture artist.
In the fall, OZ got a new opportunity to promote the Unicorn when Matthew and Bernice Eberhard booked a gig at the Renaissance Faire in Novato, California.
MG: We told the management at the Ren Faire, “Wow! We’ve got this Unicorn!”
And they were like, “Yeah, yeah. You’re just another act.” To them it was all just theater. But at least they reluctantly decided to bend their rules a bit to allow us to have a photo booth.
They just didn’t get that it was a real Unicorn. And we couldn’t imagine that they couldn’t get it.
OZ: At that point we had to come up with an appropriate way to present ourselves. You don’t do the Renaissance Faire in street clothes—you have to dress up in costume.
So we came up with the idea of the Enchantress and the Wizard and made the appropriate costumes and adopted the personae. But when we were out in the rest of the world doing interviews, we had adopted the personae of “naturalists.” Unlike a scientist, you don’t have to be accredited to be a naturalist. So in the mundane world we were naturalists, and in the magickal world we were an Enchantress and a Wizard. It was a perfect segue. After all, Wizards (“wise ones”) were also called Philosophers (“lovers of wisdom”), and early scientists were initially referred to as “Natural Philosophers.” So it all worked perfectly.
That was when I fully adopted the identity of Wizard; before that, MG and I had been a Priestess and a Priest. At that time my concept of a Wizard was based entirely on stories and myths. In these, the Wizard is a lore master. I grew into a deeper appreciation as it unfolded, much like the Unicorn thing itself. Ever since then, I’ve been exploring that role and now that is pretty much the best way of explaining who I am.
So we did the Novato Renaissance Faire. We set up a corral for Lancelot and a photo booth where people could have pictures taken with the Unicorn in front of a big tapestry background.
ALISON HARLOW: The first year they were doing the Ren Faire with Lancelot, I went for one weekend. The kids just loved the Unicorn. But I don’t think people really got it. They didn’t understand.
And Oberon would explain and explain to people, and they still wouldn’t understand. That was one of the areas in which he has always been really naïve: the feeling that if you explain something carefully to somebody, then they’ll understand. But people don’t, necessarily. They think what they want to think, no matter how carefully you explain it.
Oberon really believed that when the world saw that there really were Unicorns, that there would be a general mystical turning back to magical ways. He had, and has, a very strong mystical streak. I did not believe that it would automatically transform the world, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea.
Actually, much to Oberon’s disappointment, the world did not change itself instantly on the reappearance of Unicorns. Realism has never been his strong suit, let me put it that way.
NARRATOR: During that time, the Zells were generally not in touch with the growing Pagan community. When they left their Nest, and Green Egg folded, they lost contact with most of their old friends. The international Pagan scene was changing rapidly, and they had very little awareness of the many newcomers, new publications, and new developments. OZ and MG were following their own path: attempting to do ritual and Magick not just for themselves or a Circle, but for the whole world.
So they then traveled all over, presenting the animals wherever they could, and their experiences were not unlike those of a rock band on the road. They were featured in parades and they were the guests of honor at the Luckenbach “World’s Fair,” where the Unicorn was named the official animal of the state of Texas. They hooked up with the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggling troupe and became part of the “The New Old Time Chautauqua” traveling entertainment and medicine show caravan.
But OZ, by any name, has always been good at getting attention, and not so good at making money. And such was the case with the Unicorns. Even with all the publicity they got, there wasn’t much income generated. Raising Unicorns was an expensive and ongoing activity that was unable to pay for itself, and there were additional expenses like legal fees for getting a patent on the Unicorning process. They weren’t able to sell the Unicorns or the story. (They eventually did get the patent, but it took years and by then didn’t do much good.)
I heard lots of talk about what could have been done differently and why things didn’t go as hoped for. The consensus seems to be that everyone did the best they could, but, well, since no one else had raised unicorns in modern times, they just weren’t sure what to do with them. And who would have known? Matthew and Bernice Eberhard decided they had spent enough money and gave up.
And then, in 1981, someone new entered the picture.
JEFFREY SIEGEL: I was the art director of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. A little context for you: Renaissance Faires initially burst onto the scene in California. The Minnesota Renaissance Festival was the first serious expansion of the concept outside of California, and it actually became the hub for most of the expansion of the concept nationwide. The Minnesota Renaissance Festival had a unicorn in the Festival’s logo, and it had a life-size unicorn puppet as part of the daily performances. I was a voracious reader of newspapers and publications, and I found this obscure reference to these “naturalists” in California who claimed that they had solved the riddle of the unicorn, and had a unicorn. So I contacted them and made an arrangement for them to come to Minnesota to do a personal appearance. And we had a very successful experience with that.
The Zells then asked me if I would consider representing them. At that point in my career, I had already been reasonably experienced and successful in several aspects of the entertainment business. But I also had an extreme interest in circus, carnival, sideshow, vaudeville, and all those related crafts. I had turned down artist management my entire career. I wasn’t interested in managing anybody else’s career but my own. However, as a circus enthusiast, it occurred to me that I would probably have no other opportunity in my life to have, literally and figuratively, a P. T. Barnum experience in modern history. So I agreed to represent them. I took it on because I felt it was going to be a total carnival experience.
I spent a good amount of time shuttling back and forth between Minnesota and Greenfield Ranch to meet with them, and to meet with people in California who purportedly thought they had some rights to the animals, or various images or whatever. I had to extricate them from a variety of situations, and then once we consolidated that, my next task was to put together branding, marketing, and packaging.
Then I started knocking on doors everywhere I could go, in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and elsewhere, to convince people that there was some great potential idea there to take this Unicorn and achieve a great deal of attention for a product, a concept, a movie, or whatever. I put together a nice, organized little roadshow, with our merchandise program, presentation, and displays.
I would typically call a very high-powered agency, or product marketing manager, or Hollywood studio or office, and start with a telephone answering person, typically a female receptionist. Almost invariably, the receptionist would find it incredibly interesting, want to see this for herself, and would convince her employer to make the appointment. Once I got a foot into the door, everybody was interested. But at the end of the day, nobody could exactly put their finger on what to do with it.
We flew them to several Renaissance Faires, sometimes two shows at once. Trotting the Unicorns around the United States for a couple of years was a really great experience.
OZ: With Jeffrey as our booking agent, we basically lived for two entire summers (1982 and 1983) at Renaissance Faires, sleeping in the stalls with the Unicorns in tiny dome tents. In 1982, we did twelve Faires, with three different Unicorns! Rainbow went with Morning Glory, and Bryan accompanied me.
From that point on, at every Faire we did, we became a major promotional attraction. Often we would stay for the entire time of the Faire, which would be several weeks. On weekdays we would do promotion. We would do local TV shows and newspaper interviews to promote the Faire. We would remain in costume and in the personae constantly. Then on the weekends we would be doing the Faire.
So for at least four months out of each year in 1982 and ’83, Morning Glory and I didn’t even see each other. It was the first time we’d been separated from each other since we’d gotten married. Suddenly we were on the road at different Faires with different Unicorns. From 1975 until 1982, Morning Glory and I had been almost always in total physical proximity. Towards the later part of that time, there came points where we had really intense conflicts. It was almost because we were so alike, and so much almost clones of each other in so many ways, that whenever there was some minor disagreement about something, tiny things would seem to be monumental because they stood out above this totally smooth surface. We had these insane arguments, and since we were out in the middle of nowhere, we could yell and scream.
Some of the people who were close to us at the time were frequently urging us to break up. But these people never really understood that we were utterly bonded. It didn’t matter what kind of conflicts we were in—we could not separate because we were so connected. So we had to work it out. Whatever we have done, it has been with such intensity and passion that nothing else can stand in the way of it.
Then we went off to separate parts of the country with different Unicorns. For four months we were apart. It was really quite intense. During that time each of us met other lovers who became important parts of our lives. This was not because we were estranged; we just do that anyway. But the other lovers we met had to put up with hearing us spilling out our hearts about the grief we were experiencing with our soulmates! So the kind of people with whom we connected were never intended to be replacements or anything like that. They almost ended up being counselors and sympathizers to unburden ourselves to, and that became the basis of some of the relationships.
MG: It was a rough time for us. We started out being really together around the Unicorn issues, and then he and I had a really major falling out about the issues around secrecy and credibility and all of that. We were just getting pulled along by other people’s advice when they were only in it for the money and we were just “going with the flow,” but we were losing our credibility and our focus and were in danger of selling out our values. I’m afraid that, in the long run, I was probably right about this particular thing. Unicorns are a function of innocence and a magickal belief system, and that is fundamentally incompatible with the hard-headed business world, which is all about corporate secrets and one-upmanship. There were a whole lot of real mistakes that I kind of saw coming and tried to talk him out of. It became a real bone of contention in our relationship, and we ended up almost breaking up.
By the end of that summer, I actually had no intention of getting together with Oberon again. I also didn’t have a clue as to how we were going to make it without each other, but I’d just had it with the whole scene. Perhaps I had become hyper-acute to anything that felt like a lie by omission, and not telling the whole story—that Unicorns are created by a surgical process—just felt false to me. Yet all the lawyers and agents insisted that we must keep this part of the mystery until we could write a book or publish the truth in a reputable scientific journal. They felt, perhaps correctly, that once the secret was out, the mystery would be gone and nobody would be interested anymore.
OZ: After the summer of 1982 was finally over, she finished with her tour somewhat before I did. She drove to the airport in our pickup truck to pick up Lancelot and me. On the way back home, in Richmond, a city in the East Bay, our truck broke down. It was nighttime, and we managed to get it into an empty parking lot.
MG: So there we were, with all of the camping gear from a summer tour, boxes full of brochures, and a Unicorn in a pickup truck, in the worst possible part of town. It was 3:30 in the morning in a neighborhood that the Mafia wouldn’t go to for a short-order pizza. We were right next to this junkyard.
I was furious, because I knew that my pickup truck, Helva, was on its last legs. I was angry that I’d had to come pick him up, because I was afraid that the truck was going to break down. I had tried to explain to him, “Look, I don’t think that Helva is going to make it. Can’t you find somebody else to come get you?”
So I was really angry. “Oh, well, here we go!” I was thinking to myself. “I’m back involved with Otter again, and the first thing that happens is this!”
OZ: And so now here we were, broken down in the middle of the night. What could we do? We had no way to protect ourselves from anybody who wanted to mug us or rob us. That was the first time we had been back together in four months. We still didn’t know what our first meeting was going to be like. Were we going to get back together only to file divorce papers, or what? We’d had no contact at all for four months.
MG: Oberon was like, “Well, now what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to have to wait here until dawn,” I told him. “There’s nothing else we can do.”
It started off with us being in this incredibly adversarial headspace. We both vented for a while. Lancelot was hanging out in back, and I’m sure he was glad that he didn’t have to listen to us fight.
Then we talked, and it was more like, “Well, how was your summer?”
“Okay. How was your summer?” So we explained about each other’s summers. He was telling me about all these things that he had seen, and I was telling him about all these things that I had seen.
And both of us kept saying, “I wish you could have seen this thing I saw,” or “I wish you could have heard this thing.”
Suddenly, I had this epiphany. In spite of the good times and the good people, I had just spent the most miserable summer of my life. I was being mad and pissed off at Oberon for things that certainly were not all his fault, and that were really rather minor in the scope of things. I had spent the whole summer missing him and seeing all of these wonderful things, and all I could think of was that I wanted to be able to share it with him. That summer I hadn’t had a person in my life that could share those things with me.
I had my daughter and that was wonderful, but she was still a child, and Oberon was my soulmate, who just shared so many things in common with me! When I came to that conclusion, we both broke down and cried. We embraced and hugged each other and forgave each other and reconnected.
OZ: We held each other, and it was a deep and moving experience. Because both of us knew that we would rather be together, sleeping in a junkyard on the side of a road in a broken-down pickup truck, than to be apart from each other and be the king and queen of the Renaissance Faires. Our whole life and relationship turned around from that moment, and our partnership got into a new kind of synergy. And that was the last time we ever really had that kind of estrangement.
NARRATOR: The Zells went back to the Ranch for the winter, and in 1983 once again split up to go to separate Ren Faires with different Unicorns. Jeffrey Siegel continued to try to get a deal for the Unicorns. Jeffrey had a circus background, and early on he had approached the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, asked for a lot of money, and hadn’t gotten it. In 1984 he decided to lower the price and try again, and the second time he was finally able to work something out. The negotiations took place at the circus winter home in Florida. OZ flew there with Jeffrey but was not present for the actual meeting. When the deal was sealed, Oberon was waiting outside and for the first time met Irvin Feld, the owner of the circus, and his son Kenneth.
OZ: I had dinner with them and we got along famously with Irvin. We had a great time. He told me all these stories about his life, and I told him stories about mine, and we really hit it off. We signed a contract for a four-year exhibition lease for four Unicorns, which was the number that we had available at that time.
We made the transition in the summer of 1984, right around the Fourth of July. We flew down to Texas, where the circus was currently showing, with four Unicorns. We got the sealed contract and we made the deal with Irvin Feld. The circus was scheduled to shut down in October and go back to Florida for the winter season. Irvin assured us that then they would have us come down and talk to their people about the lore and the legend of the Unicorns. He also wanted us to show them the training stuff and go over the grooming procedures and teach them Lancelot’s performance signals.
Our contract said that we could not do anything independently. Anything we did we had to do with their permission. We had to work with them and promote it through them. We were supposed to go there in November of 1984. But in September we got the word that Irvin had died.
The promotion came out and it totally ignored us. The circus spokesmen would go around and tell people, “The unicorn just appeared on our back lot.” They wouldn’t acknowledge our existence or that we had anything to do with it. Kenneth just cut us out and wouldn’t mention us to journalists. So what happened was that journalists started thinking that it was a fraud, because it was clear that they weren’t being honest about it.
But they wouldn’t talk to us. All this stuff that we had set up never went anywhere. The whole thing was tied up with them because we had this contract, and we couldn’t talk to anybody. We couldn’t talk to the media, and the circus wouldn’t use any of the validating materials we provided for them. This went on for four years, and it was enormously frustrating to us.
JEFFREY SIEGEL: Otter thought and assumed that when the Unicorn landed with Ringling, that he too would land with Ringling, and that he would spend time with them and the Unicorn and that he would be a big part of the attention. But in reality, they wanted the Unicorn; they didn’t want the Zells. Keep in mind, we’re talking about an organization filled with exotic animals. So they have trainers, groomers, and veterinarians. They didn’t want the story to be about the Zells; they wanted the story to be about “Come see the magic! We have found a real live Unicorn!” We were selling exclusivity. That was the product.
I’m not saying that I supported that idea. If they had wanted Otter, I would have been just as happy. Did they lead him on? Not exactly. Everybody was back-slapping them, and “Who loves ya, baby?” and “This is gonna be great!” and then they bought the Unicorn; they didn’t buy the Zells.
Otter is correct, though. His assumption was that he was going to be a part of it. But I don’t think it was ever Kenneth’s intention, and quite frankly Kenneth was really running the show at that point. His dad was pretty much retired.
If the father hadn’t died, he would have seen his son have the biggest publicity coup in modern circus history. Kenneth Feld was quoted in Time magazine talking about the Unicorn, and the increase in business that it generated in Madison Square Garden. New York City is, I think, their longest run of the year—it’s one of their biggest markets. And in that one city alone, the Unicorn generated so much press and attention that it increased their sales from 20 to 30 percent, which translates into millions of dollars. I think it’s safe to say that it was probably the biggest circus publicity coup since the passing of P. T. Barnum, when he presented Jumbo the Elephant, Jenny Lind, and on and on. I think it’s the first time in modern circus history they had anything quite close to that P. T. Barnum–type of experience. The press went worldwide. The story was covered on the front page of the New York newspapers multiple times. Johnny Carson talked about it. Saturday Night Live did skits about it twice.
When protests arose in New York City about animal welfare and abuse, somebody was called in to investigate. And that individual said, essentially, the animal was not abused, and that it was in fact a unicorn, because it is a single-horned animal. He didn’t say how or why it became single-horned. That was the golden ticket for Ringling, because they had all this controversy and were getting all this attention.
They didn’t want the discussion of Franklin Dove. They wanted to purchase this exotic animal; they wanted to exhibit this exotic animal; they wanted to draw attention and sell tickets; and then they wanted to move on the next idea. They used it for two years as an attraction, and retired the idea when it had played out its performance value to the circus.
OZ: They paid us in bits and pieces, spread out over four years. Stretched out over that amount of time it wasn’t such a lot, but it was sufficient to take care of our needs at the time. Having the money coming in from these things allowed us to survive and make the next few moves in our lives. Mid-America Festivals took most of the money that we got from the initial payment. They claimed all these expenses and stuff for promotion and setup that they were to be paid back.
JEFFREY SIEGEL: Did they get ripped off? Not in my opinion. Did they get as much as they wanted? No. Did I get as much for them as I wanted? No. I literally went in there and was asking companies for millions, because everybody thought it was worth millions. And that’s one of the reasons it didn’t go very far. It wasn’t quite worth as much money as they hoped. But I do think they were treated fairly.
I equate this to a check you would have gotten back in the eighties if you had a hot new rock band that was getting some buzz, and somebody wanted to take a chance on you. They’d give you a certain amount of money, some studio time; they’d give you some touring money, and they’d give you a record deal. If your record made money, they’d take back a reimbursement for the studio time, and they’d take back money for the touring expenses.
NARRATOR: To make matters worse, in 1985 Leonard Lake, a former resident of Greenfield Ranch, was arrested. He committed suicide while in police custody, and it was soon discovered that he had been a serial killer. At the time of his arrest and suicide it had been several years since he had lived on the Ranch, and he hadn’t started killing people until after he left there. He had moved to Calaveras County, where the remains of more than twenty victims were found buried near the survivalist bunker that he had built.
Leonard had helped the Zells in the early days of breeding Unicorns. After it became known that he was a murderer, a picture of Lake (and the woman he eventually married) with a Unicorn that had been taken at the Renaissance Faire was published in national newspapers.
OZ: After that, Leonard became known as the “Unicorn Man.” And people began to confuse him with me. The name I was going by then was Otter, which obviously was not a birth name. So they figured my real name must be Leonard.
That was devastating. And it happened in the summer of 1985, just when the circus was doing big shows with the Unicorns. And there was a picture in a lot of papers around the country of Leonard with the Unicorn! Our contract with the circus prohibited us from talking about this without their permission. And they weren’t about to give in. It was quite a blow. We didn’t suffer physically; he didn’t kill any of us. But our whole vision, plan, life, and everything involving the return of the Unicorn was completely blindsided by this event. There was even a set of “mass murderer” trading cards that was put out. Leonard Lake was featured on one of them, and identified as the creator of the Unicorns!
MG: The whole Unicorn visionary thing came to a wild careening halt with the Leonard Lake fiasco. It was bad enough that the circus had blown off the scientific credibility of the animals, but now their images were being dragged through the mud and blood of a mass murderer. I felt like I was living in a waking nightmare, that all trust and everything good and innocent had been ravaged and wrecked beyond all salvation.
NARRATOR: While Morning Glory and Oberon had sold two of their Unicorns to the circus, who were never returned, Bedivere was never sold or leased, and his brother Lancelot was leased and then returned to the Zells by the circus at the end of their contract. The situation only proved to add anguish to their already troubled hearts.
MG: Lancelot we refused to sell, yet when we got him back, he was never the same. Lancelot’s horn had collapsed, hanging down practically onto his nose; it was hard for him even to eat that way. The circus folk wouldn’t listen to us when we tried to tell them about all the special attention that it took to keep a Unicorn’s horn in proper condition. I guess they felt that he was just a “property” to them that they didn’t even own. He seemed pretty sad and tired. He left us all happy and excited to be performing for people, and when he came back he was a broken-spirited creature. I felt like we had sold one of our children for thirty pieces of silver. I cried for a week.
NARRATOR: Lancelot stayed with the Zells until he died in 1991. At that point they had long since left Coeden Brith and were living in a house by the Russian River in Mendocino County.
MG: I would go out to the barn that we had built for Lance; we called it Fort Unicorn. It was huge and totally overbuilt because we thought Lance would be coming back strong and full of piss and vinegar. Instead, of course, he wandered around the huge corral like a wraith in a castle.
We would bring him in to watch television sometimes like he used to do when he was a little kid, but even that didn’t seem to bring him out of his funk. We did persist for a while in trying to re-socialize him, but every time OZ would look at him, he would get so upset that he would just leave.
The circus, however, for all its harm, did further one aspect of our agenda: millions of children saw the Unicorns, and even though many adults told them, “No, it’s not a real unicorn,” they saw it with their own eyes and it became part of their personal reality. We have tried to bridge these universes our whole life long and in all our workings, and we’ve seen that there are lots of magickal things that the world does not want to believe are so. People wanted the Unicorns to be all sweetness and light; they wanted ethereal, white horses with sparkly horns. They didn’t want to have to see that a live Unicorn was an animal who eats and craps, that it is a sexual creature, that it is a real thing with its own needs and desires. Most people really don’t want their fantasies to become real, because there might be some work or disillusionment in it.
It’s a lot like the difference between fantasy magic and real Magick. With fantasy magic you just wiggle your nose or wave your wand, and the television or movie special effects make it happen. The real Magick is stuff that involves the living world, and it’s often a grubby, messy, sticky, organic kind of a thing with lots of prickly wild plants and animals and cold, rainy weather. It involves a lot of effort. You don’t just become a magickal person by—well, you do become a magickal person by believing you are one. But from that point on if you want to actually practice a discipline, you have to become disciplined, and most people resist that. They would rather wiggle their nose and have their wishes come true . . . as if. When they find out that real Magick isn’t like that, then they usually lose interest or become disillusioned and are quick to proclaim, “See! That proves magic isn’t real.” The truth is that real Magick isn’t about illusions as much as it is about a deeper reality; we discovered that with the Unicorns and we found the same phenomenon in all the years we’ve worked on bringing Paganism, Witchcraft, Wizardry, and magickal worldviews into the world at large: we’ve tried to get the world to acknowledge that Witches are real just as Unicorns are real. But that reality is very different from the one in fairy tales.
Our observations about the Unicorns showed us that even kids seem to break down into two categories, and, barring some miracle or catastrophe, they pretty much grow up to be adults who are in those same categories. I hate breaking people into categories, but just bear with me a moment. The first category are kids who want to debunk everything, and thereby prove that they are cooler, because they’re not going to be fooled by anything. You’ve got to be the coolest thing around, and anything else that’s cooler than you detracts from your coolness. Therefore, you can only be cool if you don’t think anything else is cool. So you have to debunk it; you have to cut it down to your size and disprove it. Unfortunately, too many of those kinds of kids use this tactic to gain the alpha status and grow up to be scientists, politicians, and parents, with that particular egotistic attitude in mind: “If there is anything around bigger than my ego, I want it hunted down and killed!” I guess it’s a way of thumbing your nose at the universe somehow. Perhaps it’s because they are really insecure inside themselves. Perhaps they think that in order to survive, they have to make themselves bigger and better than everything else, and they do it by tearing down rather than building up. It’s a sad but common story.
But the second category are the kind of kids who saw the Unicorn and would recognize it for what it was—not a fantasy creature made of moonbeams, just a small white animal with its own kind of beauty and heart and horn. A creature somewhat like themselves, with its own charm and uniqueness but something real to touch and hold. You could watch it happening in their eyes. Those kids would make the connection and see that Magick was possible and then go on to create their own contribution to that unique world-view. Those kind of kids grow up to be people who really are empowered, who really know that they can make their life be whatever they want it to be. They realize that they don’t have to just believe what they see on television or read in the papers; they don’t have to blindly believe what the government or churches tell them. They have seen that when it comes to the amazing and miraculous versus the dominant paradigm—grown-ups can be wrong.
So I guess the Unicorn was somewhat subversive, and millions of kids saw it. What we hope for is that all those kids who saw the Unicorn and knew it was real will grow up to be different kinds of scientists and politicians and teachers—as well as parents who will believe their kids when they say that they saw a Unicorn in the garden.
Though Oberon and I were often upset by the vagaries of the mundane world, Lancelot and Bedivere themselves never took it to heart whether the mass media believed they were real Unicorns or not. They knew what they were, and they only cared that they had lots of love and attention and good things to eat. Both Lance and Bedivere outlived all the male goats that were born in their generation by a long shot, and they had amazing adventures and very rich and exciting lives. Yet ultimately not even Unicorns are immortal; sooner or later we all grow old, and life can be pretty harsh at times. The question is: “Would we do it all over again?” The answer is blowing in the wind . . .