Between the Worlds
(1986–1987)
We shared our lovers, shared our Hope;
We shared our household with a zoo.
We learned from others how they cope
But no one could be like us two!
With kids and cats and snakes and rats,
Mistakes we made and lives to mend.
I’d do it with you once again;
I’d do it with you once again.
—from “love of my life,” by morning glory zell
NARRATOR: After Gerald Gardner died in 1964, the contents of his Museum of Magic and Witchcraft were sold to the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” organization. They put some of the stuff they’d bought on display in their museum in the Fisherman’s Wharf area of San Francisco, which was not too far from the Ranch where the Zells were raising their Unicorns in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president and religious conservatism was sweeping the country, the Gardner collection was moved around and then was eventually sold to private collectors.
Though tourists were no longer able to gawk at Gardner’s ritual tools, his influence in the Pagan community continued to increase. In 1986 Raymond Buckland, an initiated Gardnerian who had started his own tradition, published his Complete Book of Witchcraft. This was a step-by-step course of instruction that became a major resource for aspiring Wiccans. It was authentic, packed with information, and it was widely available. By then, multiple bookstore chains were in operation around the United States, including Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble, so just about anyone had a place nearby where they could walk in and buy Buckland’s book.
OZ was, of course, an old friend of Buckland’s, and he didn’t need a book to tell him how to cast a circle. His magickal circle already covered the whole planet, and his Pagan education would continue to take him all around it in some unexpected ways. He took one such trip in 1987.
OZ: During the summer of 1982, when MG and I were estranged from each other and spent four months apart traveling around the country with the Unicorns, both of us had some interesting romantic encounters. At the Texas Ren Faire I met a woman named Belladonna. She had a booth at the faire also called “Belladonna.” She made beautiful metal-framed mirrors of all shapes and sizes, with postcard pictures on the backs.
In camping at the Faire, you spend all day while the Faire is open with the tourists. But in the evening, after the Faire closes, people start campfires and drift around and get to know each other. I ran into Belladonna at such a fire, where we were talking and telling stories. She invited me back to her place for coffee and a nightcap. One thing led to another, and I ended up spending the night—and many more to follow. One of the things that she was attracted by were my stories of ancient times and legends of far-off places. She said that if she could ever possibly afford it, she would love to take a trip to places like that with me as a tour guide. There she was, a Hippie living in a little trailer. And the idea of her having enough money to take a trip to Europe was sort of amusing.
Well, a number of years later she contacted me, and she said her father had just died and left her an inheritance. And he said, “You should take this money and travel. Go see the world.” She offered to buy airline tickets for both of us, so in March of 1987 we went off to Europe together.
Belladonna and I flew into Madrid, took a train up through France, spent a glorious time in Paris, and then went down to Italy, where we visited Florence, Rome, Etruria, Parga, and Pompeii. We concentrated on ancient ruins and temples—as well as museums. Then we took an overnight ferry over to Greece, where we made pilgrimage to sites in western Greece such as the Necromanteion, Dodona, Delphi, Mycenae, and more. After visiting the Parthenon in Athens, we took another ferry to Crete, where we explored Knossos, then back to Athens, from whence we flew home.
A large focus of our trip became journeys through the Underworld. We visited tombs, catacombs, and other Underworld places. There were thousands and thousands of years of it, going back to the painted caves at Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne Valley of southwestern France. I saw stuff that I’d never imagined, because you just can’t get it from words or books or photographs. I had seen pictures of the deer and buffalo painted on the cave walls. But the photographs don’t convey the three-dimensional qualities.
I read that the Cro-Magnons took advantage of rounded projections to paint the images. What they don’t tell is that natural hollows were also used, and a lot of images were painted in those hollows in a way that reversed them. When something is painted like that, and you move past it, it appears to be moving and to follow you, simply because of the way the shadows move and the way our brain interprets it. A lot of them were done that way, so it was really eerie. The images of the animals were all moving from the depths of the cave facing towards the entrance.
So we imagined people would be blindfolded and taken in for an initiation. We saw lots of little shelves that had been used for clamshell lamps, with bear fat and a wick or something in them, and that had been the lighting. If you were an initiate you would have carried one of these lamps to find the way back out. And while doing that, you would see on the walls around you these images of animals moving in the same direction that you were, moving out of the womb to be born. Some of them are simply flat pictures, but if you go through holding a single point of light like you would get from a lamp, the hollow ones would appear to be coming alive and leaping off of the wall.
We discovered the Catacombs of Paris with their hundreds of thousands of skeletons and skulls—some of them not entirely human, with divided frontal bones. Just going through that was amazing. And climbing down into the Tarquinian tombs of Tuscany, and walking the once-buried streets of Pompeii—it brought history alive. We even traveled to the recently excavated Necromanteion at Ephyra, overlooking the Acheron river in northern Greece, where Odysseus had been sent by Circe to consult the ghost of Tiresias. We don’t have any places like that here, that are part of our legends and stories. In America you can visit Mesa Verde, and it’s an ancient ruin where somebody used to live once upon a time, but you don’t have any names or stories to associate with it. When you go to Mycenae, you know that it was the citadel of Agamemnon, and you know the story of the Trojan War and the heroes who fought in it.
That trip was a life-changing experience. It formed the foundation for my eventual work with the Eleusinian Mysteries. To go into the Underworld like that means to go through a passage from life to death to rebirth. It’s the rebirth part that is the crucial element. All of these places were not places of death; they were wombs from which new life would be born. That was the essence that permeated all of this over thousands of years, from the caves to the tombs. It was a constant theme. There was no sense that the Underworld was the final destination. It was a transitional phase, a place to enter into the Mysteries and then be born again.
In many ways my whole life has been a succession of lives and symbolic deaths and rebirths into new lives. I have reinvented myself on numerous occasions, which is part of what has made this possible—the sense that it is a cycle, that there is a continuum; there is a series of phases, and our lives are like beads on a string. There are so many metaphors. But the point of them all is that you begin again. You come to the end of a phase; you go through a transition; and then you start over again with something new.
This was the first time I really got that sense of being able to go through that transition and come out the other end and create a new life. I think many people can’t do that. They get to the end of a phase of their life and they think, “Well that’s it. It’s all over. I’m done.” They don’t have that sense that, “Okay, I can come back again and do a new life. This is an opportunity to create a whole new existence.” I think that is an important thing in life and magick.
I have what I call “the attitude of gratitude.” Every day I would go down to the Rushing River at the Old Same Place, and I would say to myself, “This is just wonderful. This is beautiful.” I wouldn’t put things down by saying, “This isn’t quite good enough” or “Gee, I wish this was better.” I never look at things that way. I’m not comparing them against something that they’re not. Ever. Whether it’s people, or a place, or a situation, I say, “This is really great. And someday, I may not be here, I may not be a part of this. For this too will pass. So I want to fully appreciate it while I’ve got it.” So I look at every bit of it as if it’s brand-new and I’m falling in love.
NARRATOR: OZ returned to his job at the Green Mac, in Ukiah, California, and began a foray into a new business venture alongside it.
OZ: After a full year of my working at the Green Mac, another storefront next to it went vacant. The owners of the Green Mac asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do with it. I said that Morning Glory and I had an idea for a store that would carry all this really cool stuff that we liked—magickal, environmental, and science-related, and also things like comic books and plastic models. The name that we had for it was “Between the Worlds.”
NARRATOR: Stores such as the one the Zells dreamed of had, by the late ’80s, become an important strand in the web of Pagan activity. Thanks to Buckland’s instructional manual and others like it, there were growing numbers of Witches who were working alone. They were called “solitaries,” and Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, published a couple of years after Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft, went on to become a hugely popular resource for them. And once these people got comfortable with their books, they then had to find the tools of Magick for their home practices.
New Age and occult stores had evolved into one-stop shopping destinations for people like them, who were stocking their home altars with candles, statues, incense, wands, athames, and the like. For those interested in doing ritual with other human beings, and lucky enough to find some to do them with, these kinds of stores became a regular stop along their path in between the times when they’d be getting together with their group. Since rituals were often only held eight times a year or on full moons, having somewhere to just drop in anytime was a nice option. (And stores were indoors, and not dependent on the weather to determine if they’d be open or not.)
OZ had already tried to reach the public with a magazine, a coffeehouse, a storefront temple, and a nest in his living room, and none of those had lasted. Likewise his dream of a permanent rural home for his Church had not come true either. But when he got the opportunity for a retail store, it was another assignment from the Goddess, and he jumped right in.
The Zells’ idea of a friendly neighborhood Pagan shop was different from what other stores were doing, because their neighborhood was unique. They did have a “Magick” section with books, Tarot decks, candles, crystals, incense, oils, tools, and dolls. And they had a back room, which they reserved for meetings and gaming—Dungeons & Dragons was very popular. But there was a lot of homegrown Paganism in the area, including many people who were involved in the activist group Earth First! (EF! had been co-founded years earlier by OZ’s original water-brother, Lance Christie, as part of his plan to create change from behind the scenes.) So when the store was set up as a cooperative, Gary and Betty Ball were brought in with T-shirts and a lot of environmental things.
BETTY BALL: Ukiah, and all of Mendocino County, was just full of back-to-the-landers who came up there in the ’70s. And so there were a lot of Hippies, Pagans, and people doing alternative kinds of work. I think everybody thought that kind of business would really make it there. There is a huge environmental community up there. We were doing a T-shirt booth at fairs and festivals at the time, and we were looking for something more stationary, something where we could be part of a business every day instead of just on weekends.
GARY BALL: We were pretty involved in Earth First! We had a lot of shirts from environmental organizations, literature, petitions, bumper stickers, and handouts. The store was a bigger version of what we could carry on the road with us. The redneck community wasn’t that pleased about it, but I think they all thought it would fade away soon enough. But the progressive community welcomed us with open arms.
BETTY BALL: We just loved getting to know Otter and Morning Glory, Diane, Zack, and all of their friends who were in and out of there. It was great to get to meet Polly. She was a wonderful, joyful person. She was all-encompassing and loved everybody and always welcomed everybody. I don’t think there was a person on Earth that Polly didn’t love.
OZ: For several years in the early ’80s, Marion Zimmer Bradley and her Berkeley clan put on annual “Worlds of Fantasy” conventions in the Bay Area. MG and I attended all of these as long as they were happening, and we became good friends with many of the sci-fi and fantasy authors who were guests of honor. So when we had the store, we’d invite them to come up for special book signings, which were a big hit with everyone. And then, of course, we’d take them home for dinner and an evening of conversation.
DIANE DARLING: It was fun for a while. I loved doing the windows and having events. One of the events that we had was for Easter. We wanted to have an Easter-egg-decorating contest. But since we weren’t Christians, it wasn’t going to be obviously Easter. So the theme was “Life springs from Mother Earth.” And we invited kids from all over Ukiah to decorate eggs, and we had prizes: Otter made bookmarks that were threaded with Unicorn hair.
GARY BALL: We all worked at both places. I did typesetting, databases, and computer operations, basically. Betty typeset a book. I did lists for movie rental places, spreadsheets, mailing lists, and that kind of thing.
NARRATOR: OZ was actively rebuilding the CAW during all this, and doing regular rituals with them at the Old Same Place and Annwfn. And as a well-known citizen of Ukiah, he got the chance to create a ritual for the entire community where he was living and working.
OZ: One of our friends was Richard Johnson, who published the Mendocino Grapevine. I started working for his newspaper as a journalist, staff artist, and editorial cartoonist, doing art and writing articles. I also did layout and pasteups. One day I was sitting down with Richard and talking about stuff, and he said that the town really needed some kind of special event. I said, “Morning Glory and I have done all these Renaissance Faires, and we have a pretty good idea of how such a thing could be put together. Why don’t we start a hometown festival? It can be in the fall, around harvest time.” The grape harvest was a big thing up there, and in the counterculture it was time to harvest marijuana. So it meant a lot of people had money, and they had reasons to celebrate.
Using the newspaper and my contacts through the chamber of commerce, we started building it up. And the city of Ukiah became the sponsor of our Home Town Harvest Festival, which we kicked off in September of 1986. It involved a parade, closing off the streets, and having bands and performers, big decorations, and sidewalk vendors. It was all happening downtown. The idea was to bring people down there instead of to the malls and big-box stores that were opening up. They were on the edge of town by the freeway, and the downtown area was drying up.
Morning Glory and I led the parade down Main Street in our full Ren Faire regalia. We were the Wizard and the Enchantress, and we marched with our Unicorn. We continued leading the parade every year we were there. Behind us would be the Shriners and the marching bands and floats. Our Unicorns had become so popular that one local artist even produced a comic book featuring “Ukiahcorn,” a superhero Unicorn with a spiffy uniform and cape. So of course eventually I had to make such a uniform for Lance when we marched him in the parade, and everyone loved it.
NARRATOR: Another cultural change that had happened while the Zells were off in the woods, and that he was still catching up on in Ukiah, was the rebirth of the comic book industry. In the 1970s all the major superhero characters were owned and published by corporations. They weren’t doing anything very interesting, sales were dropping, and comic books didn’t appear to have much future. Then a new batch of writers and artists appeared on the scene and revitalized everything. They created new characters, published independently, and all sorts of fun stuff was happening. The mid-1980s were an exciting time—it was possible to walk into a comic book store and find new issues of titles like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets.
OZ and I are both comic book fans, and we agree that comic books are not only updated versions of ancient myths, but that they also can become modern mythology themselves. OZ tried to make comic books a part of Between the Worlds, where, in theory, they could have fit right in. But, in mythology past and present, there are Gods and Goddesses of both love and war, and they don’t always get along.
OZ: Between the Worlds began to pick up business from a wider spectrum. When Morning Glory and I set up the store, what we wanted it to be was this place where we had different kinds of stuff brought together. Like our whole life’s work, we were trying to weave together disparate elements into something new and neat. One of the things that we had in there was comic books. We had the only comic book store in Ukiah. We had a guy named Ron Grossi, who was really into comics, set it up.
After we got it launched, we brought Diane in as a buyer for the store—we operated on the principal that nepotism begins at home. We always try to bring the people who are closest to us into whatever we do. Most of these projects have been ones that we actually initiated—that is a crucial element in all of this. We initiated many projects, then we brought in our friends. We haven’t had a lot of experience with other people initiating projects and then bringing us in, but every now and then something like that does happen. And our attitude has always been that whoever initiated it is pretty much in charge. That is something that we have always taken for granted, but that has not necessarily been shared by everyone who has been involved.
Diane’s job was to look at all the catalogues that we got, and bring her recommendations for new products that we should carry to our meetings. She wasn’t involved in the comic book stuff—that wasn’t her department. She didn’t read them or care for the medium. But that didn’t keep her from thinking that she had to have a say in that department. That was our first real conflict in all the years that we had been together. We tried to make it work, but we just couldn’t.
One of the things that Morning Glory and I were not prepared to deal with in other people—and it took us years before we were finally able to get a handle on this—is that we operate from a position of inclusiveness. We look at what can we include in whatever we are doing. Whereas we find ourselves occasionally with people whose whole attitude revolves around exclusiveness. They’re coming from a place of: “What can we keep out of this?” What they want is to have something that is pure and uncontaminated by extraneous or incompatible factors. Morning Glory and I do not consider purity to be a value. Our idea is: “What can we bring into the mix that will make it more interesting?”
Anodea eventually wrote an insightful article about this phenomenon of inclusivity versus exclusivity for The Scarlet Flame, our Church newsletter, called “Innies versus Outies.” It became a thing that haunted us for years and eventually was at the root of the total destruction of the Church and Green Egg. But the “comic book war” at Between the Worlds was the first time it really got specific.
Diane didn’t particularly like any comics. She accepted some of them, like ElfQuest, and a few others we tried to turn her on to. But she simply wanted to keep out of the mix certain things that she did not approve of, particularly comics that had violent or warlike themes. The comic book that she most objected to was G.I. Joe, which at that time was the single most popular title. She just absolutely hated it. She thought it glorified war and military stuff. I of course was not even remotely interested in war comics, so I didn’t read them. But if that was what the customers wanted, it was our job to sell it to them. I didn’t see it as a moral issue.
Ron was in charge of the comics, and he wanted to stock the ones that were the most popular, so as to make the most sales. We never had a conflict with him. Our feeling was that it was his department. The point was to get customers into the store, and if we could get people who were in there to buy comic books, maybe they’d look around and buy other stuff too. Maybe they’d even buy other comics that were more obscure and that they might not have known about. But if we only carried the more obscure comics, those people wouldn’t even come in.
This became a serious clash, and Diane simply would not give it up. We went round and round with it, and Ron just got more and more fed up. He couldn’t get along with Diane, and eventually we couldn’t either. He was the one who understood the comics business, and he couldn’t understand why someone was trying to interfere with him trying to make it work.
From Diane’s point of view, she had some kind of principle that she felt was really important. We felt like we were dealing with Republicans who didn’t want people to have sex that they didn’t approve of. Our feelings were: “If you don’t like it, don’t do it! But don’t try and tell somebody else what to do or not to do.” I never have understood people who wanted to be puritanical about things.
DIANE DARLING: My bottom line was that I didn’t want any comic books in the store that were just going to be off-the-wall violence. I just wanted to have comic books that portrayed the world that we wanted to live in. Well, that was fine for a while. But then the guy who was running the comic book end of things felt that we were losing business. So basically they would have these meetings, and I wasn’t there because I worked. I had a job. And then they called a meeting at a time when I was going to be there, and they told me that they were going to have a full line of comic books, and that I could either take it or leave it. And I left it.
OZ: Eventually the conflict escalated to the point where Ron quit. He took the comics and started his own store. It was a very successful store. And when we lost that section, we lost the youth market. Word got out to a lot of our customers who thought we were being stupid and petty—and MG and I had to agree with them.
The problem was, of course, that we kept trying to operate on some kind of consensus basis, where we could sit down and work things out and reach an agreement. Consensus doesn’t really work with people who have a different agenda on a fundamental level. Eventually the whole store collapsed.
NARRATOR: There is a happy epilogue to all the brouhaha in this chapter: Betty and Gary Ball moved on to start the Mendocino Environmental Center, where they worked for the next ten years.
BETTY BALL: It was just wonderful. The Green Mac and Between the Worlds were pretty much steppingstones for us to what we really wanted to be doing. And it provided us with the opportunity to get acquainted with the community, connect with the environmental community, and start doing environmental work and getting the word out about environmental issues. When we opened the Mendocino Environmental Center, a lot of people came to us and said, “We know you’re starting with nothing, whatever you need, just tell us and we’ll get it.” And that’s just an amazing response from a community.
GARY BALL: The Mendocino Environmental Center still exists. It’s a nonprofit. We had a tremendous number of people from the community helping us make the MEC go. That certainly didn’t happen with the commercial ventures. We wanted to do environmental work all along. We were doing it at Between the Worlds, and it just expanded into the Environmental Center, which sort of was our dream all along anyway.
NARRATOR: The Zells remained active in local culture and politics, and a few years later Earth Firster Darryl Cherney became an official Bard of the Church of All Worlds. And the revival of Green Egg, which will be covered later in the book, came about directly as a result of OZ working at the Green Mac.