Chapter 16

Green Egg:
The Next Generation

and Mythic Images

(1988–1993)

Say!
I like green eggs and ham!
I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!
And I would eat them in a boat.
And I would eat them with a goat.

from green eggs and ham, by dr. seuss, beginner books, 1960

NARRATOR: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a PBS documentary mini-series, was broadcast for the first time in 1988. The Public Broadcasting Service was, at that time, an important source of news, culture, and entertainment for liberal-minded folks across the United States, and the response was very enthusiastic. Myth was shown over and over again, and a companion book, featuring transcriptions of interviews with Campbell by Bill Moyers, became a bestseller.

Campbell and Moyers talked at length about Gaea, the Earth, storytelling, ritual, shamans, Goddess worship, the circle of life, and other subjects that were familiar terrain to contemporary Pagans. (Paganism was, it seemed, reaching the “Public”!) Campbell tied it all together by explaining how these things could all be found in the mythologies of different cultures around the world. He was even able to examine Star Wars in mythology terms, and George Lucas himself said that an earlier book by Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) had been a big influence on him.

Campbell talked at length about “following your bliss,” which OZ had been doing already for quite a while—though he usually referred to it as “getting an assignment from the Goddess.” He continued to do so that same year when he once again began to publish Green Egg.

OZ: For years and years we kept hearing about our old magazine, Green Egg, and reading about it in books. Every new Pagan zine would be compared with the long-defunct Green Egg—and usually unfavorably! Periodically we’d get letters from people asking us to put it out again. At that point I had been working at the Green Mac for several years and learning page layout and desktop publishing, so the idea of reviving Green Egg started becoming a viable possibility. It crystallized at the point that I got my own computer. They upgraded at the office, so I was able to take a Mac 512 home with me. I set up a little office in one of our bedrooms. We started talking about how we would do it.

We got a $300 check as seed money from a generous investor. So I sat down and composed a letter saying that Green Egg was coming back. I put in a bunch of quotes from people saying how much they had missed it. On the back of the page I put information about advertising rates. The $300 paid for printing and postage to send out the letter. And people sent in their ads and money. It was just about the time that we were ending things with the store (Between the Worlds) that we were starting up things with Green Egg, so our main attentions were shifted from the store to the magazine. We let it go and moved on.

By this time we had brought the Church of All Worlds back from its long languishing when we were living up in the woods. There was now a board of directors. We went to them and said, “This is what we are going to do.” And they said that we were on our own—they weren’t going to bankroll it, but we could use the Church’s nonprofit status to get a mailing permit. (At that time there was a big savings for anyone using a nonprofit permit to mail. That has diminished in subsequent times, but it was a huge factor back then.)

At that time Morning Glory was adamantly opposed to the affiliation with the Church. She said, “Look, you guys are starting this on your own; you’re going to be doing all the work and putting in all the money. If you put the Church’s name on it, somebody might try to take it away from you.” I said that nobody would ever want to do that. The board had made it really clear they didn’t want anything to do with it. How naïve I was!

Morning Glory and I had worked together on the old Green Egg in St. Louis. Diane was a really good editor. And we pulled together a really cool first issue. It came out at Beltane, 1988, with issue #81. The previous fall a new TV series called Star Trek: The Next Generation had premiered, so we put a banner across the front cover proudly proclaiming, “Green Egg: The Next Generation,” with my artwork of a colorful rising Phoenix. I resurrected a two-plate printing technique from the ’60s called split fountain. And I found a guy named Verge Belanger, who used to run a printing press for the underground papers in San Francisco. He knew how to do it, and nobody else did. We found a friendly printing shop in Ukiah that was willing to let him come in and operate their press and do the split fountain colors.

What “split fountain” means is that you create little inserts in the fountain where the ink goes, and you put a different color ink in each one. So when the paper runs through, the colors blend together. If you do that just right, you can get some amazing rainbow effects. So we would do two press runs. We would do a background in rainbow colors, and then print a black ink over it in the foreground. And it was just spectacular. We used that technique for years, just to get it going, until we could go to actual four-color printing.

It got us off the ground. At that time we were the only Pagan publication that had a color cover. People loved it—we had to do a second printing of the premier issue.

Sadly, Robert Heinlein died on May 8, 1988, so he never got to see the new incarnation of the magazine he used to enjoy in the ’70s. In the second issue—#82, Lughnasadh—I wrote a tribute to him, and published some of our personal correspondence, especially his lengthy discussion of Stranger in a Strange Land, in which he’d written:

“Well, what was I trying to say in it?

“I was asking questions.

“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers.” (R. A. Heinlein to Tim Zell, January 20, 1972)

When we first started, MG, Diane, and I all worked together and did everything. But it soon worked out that I was the publisher—I ran the circulation and promotion of it, and was responsible for the overall mix and design and getting it out there. I also did the database and maintained the subscriptions and advertising. Diane was the editor—she contacted the contributors and did the typesetting.

A lot of people sent in art and articles. In the middle of each issue I put a section for Church of All Worlds stuff, but it was like pulling teeth to get anybody to contribute. Eventually I put in Church membership applications—I basically gave the CAW lots of free advertising and promotion. But it wasn’t just a CAW publication. I noted periodically that a very small number of CAW members actually subscribed to the magazine. But that was all right. It wasn’t intended as a propaganda device to promote the specific vision of the Church—I had my sights set on a bigger picture. I intended to use the magazine to forge and foster a global Pagan community.

Anodea wrote articles, but they weren’t about the CAW—they were about chakras and things like that. Primarily, Green Egg was about discussing issues, and presenting concepts and ideas to people. It was directed at shaping a global Pagan community and feeding into it the kind of information that I thought people ought to know about, or think about, or talk about.

To get it launched, we exchanged subscriptions with other Pagan publications. There weren’t many that were very professional at that time—most of them were just little newsletters. But a few of them became larger. In exchange for the subscription, we would run ads for their magazine, and they would run ads for Green Egg. This kind of brought us to people’s attention, and the subscriptions picked up. As we did that I looked through other publications looking for ads for metaphysical stores and got them to carry Green Egg. Eventually that became a substantial part of our circulation. We encouraged our readers to go into their local stores and get them to carry it.

And eventually we found some distributors for it. We had a lot of problems with that, but it was necessary to reach into new markets. Chain stores would not buy directly from us—they would only buy from distributors. If we wanted to get into Borders and Barnes & Noble, we had to deal with distributors. We were hoping that we would be introduced to new audiences, who would then eventually subscribe.

DIANE DARLING: I was working for a doctor, and I had that job for fifteen years. Originally I was recruited just to do some proofreading and to write a few articles. I’d never used a computer at all. But within a few months I found myself pretty much doing all the work.

That was back before we had email, so everything came in on paper and had to be typeset. Otter is a fast typist, and really accurate. He did a lot of the typesetting, and I did a lot of the editing. Over time we got to be quite a team in selecting what should go into Green Egg. He traveled a lot, going to festivals and stuff like that, and I stayed home and kept my fingers in the dike. So, eventually, as it became less of a thing that we were just kind of doing for fun and started to turn into a business, a lot of the nuts and bolts of it fell to me. I ended up working way too hard, doing both all the business and the editing.

Our review section gave a lot of exposure to Pagan musical artists and writers. Through our columnists, especially Denny Sargent and Diana Paxson, we were able to present a lot of still-practicing Pagan groups from around the world, such as Shinto (which was one of my favorites), to show that we are not alone in our Pagan practices. We were able to confront the ritual abuse community, who was constantly calling us Satanists. We provided places for very thoughtful articles on people like Robert Heinlein, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons.

We did a lot of important stuff while I was there. We created a showcase of Paganism as it was being practiced on the planet during those years. I thought Green Egg worked really well to invigorate and promote growth in the Pagan population.

OZ: Humor has always been an important element of our lives and work. Because we had a magazine called Green Egg, people kept asking us if we were gonna do another one called “Ham.” Though we hadn’t made the connection ourselves, many people immediately associated “Green Eggs and Ham” from the popular children’s book of that title by Dr. Seuss. So we decided that it would be a great idea to put out a companion zine for kids, and call it HAM, which we made an acronym for How About Magick? I talked Zack into editing it, and I did the layout. The first issue came out as an insert in Green Egg #86 (Litha, 1989). After that, it became an independent publication for many years, changing editors as each one outgrew the appropriate age (13–16).

ZACK DARLING: Green Egg was going really well, and Otter asked me if I wanted to do a kids’ magazine. And I was into it. So he taught me about layout and basic design. I was already a pretty decent writer at that point—I was fourteen. Starhawk later took one of the articles I wrote about youth and lovemaking, which basically was about sex education from one kid to another, and she reprinted it in her book Circle Round.

I learned page design on the computer, the old-school Macs. Otter got me into it and taught me how to do it. I started my own comic strip called “I Was a Teenage Son of a Witch,” about an apathetic teenager with a crazy Witch mom who kept making him do wild stuff. OZ encouraged me artistically.

Later on I went to Mendocino College, and after the first week I got put in the most advanced creative writing class that they offered there—I kind of jetted through the English department because they placed me based on my writing. After that I took over the job of the editor-in-chief of the Mendocino College newspaper, because of my experience having done publications and work with layout and stuff. And the guy who ran the journalism department was someone Otter had worked with at the Green Mac years before. He knew I was a good writer and had some experience in publishing, and the editor of the newspaper at the time was graduating. I had my own office with three computers and my own keys to the school, and I could come and go anytime I wanted. It was awesome, and it was all based on the skills that I had learned from Otter.

I ended up leaving and moving down to Santa Rosa, where I currently live, and going into the graphics department at Santa Rosa Junior College. I decided that was what I really liked—the art, layout, and design. Now I do graphics for a living—I’m an art director for a marketing company, and I have my own graphics company. I have had up to seven people working under me.

NARRATOR: Otter had worked at the Green Mac and taken care of the family finances the whole time that he was also working at Between the Worlds and then when he was beginning to revive Green Egg. Then the money that he was able to bring in began to decrease, and the family had to start looking for other sources of revenue.

OZ: Over time more and more people got computers and learned how to use PageMaker, so they didn’t need to come to me anymore to do their flyers and catalogues. Fortunately, my work was able to sustain us through MG’s ill health. Once she had recovered from that, she took a job at the hospital doing labwork. She worked there for a year or two during the early phases of Green Egg. So I was able to devote more of my time to the magazine. And Morning Glory kind of pulled out of the magazine and first put her energies into working in a lab to contribute financial support.

MG: We were up against the wall for money. Green Egg couldn’t afford to pay much and the Unicorn money was gone, so I started working at the Ukiah Valley Medical Center as a histology tech in the laboratory. It was a job I had trained for and was originally certified for, but I had not even looked at a rotary microtome for twenty years or more. Since Otter was spending all his time working on Green Egg, I figured I would take on the role of breadwinner so the magazine would continue to grow and prosper. He kept telling me how one of these days the magazine would be able to pay him a living salary, and then I could go back to working on my own life’s work.

It was difficult to go back into the mundane world after living in the Faery world at Greenfield and do a steady nine-to-five-type job. Actually, the hours tend to be a bit more extreme; since histology is basically about preparing slides of human cellular tissue removed in surgery so that it can be examined by a pathologist to determine whether there is disease present, especially malignant disease, it was mostly necessary to be at the lab around 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. This was not kind to the nocturnal creature I had become since I had last practiced this discipline. I immediately found out that many of my skills were not only rusty, but that my ASCP credentials had lapsed and they had recently upgraded the job definition, now requiring an A.S. degree that I lacked. So instead of taking a job as an actual histologist, work I genuinely enjoyed, I ended up being demoted to a pathology technician.

My job was basically to assist the pathologist in taking samples of formaldehyde-preserved organs and whatnot, for gross analysis (aptly named), then labeling and preparing those samples to be mounted on slides and stained so you could see the cellular structures and determine the presence of disease. This is not very pretty work (that’s putting it mildly!); the pretty part came at the microscope end. My job involved standing on concrete floors for eight hours with my hands up to the wrists in various toxic substances and diseased tissue. My immediate boss was an older woman who had been doing her job for twenty-five years, and was a very strict disciplinarian who didn’t like to explain how to do a task but wanted it done exactly right the first time. I was probably her worst nightmare, and she was certainly close to being mine, but I tried to look hard at her and see the Goddess within. That Goddess was definitely the Crone, and She did not suffer fools gladly.

One day I was standing on a stool and reaching up for a five-gallon jar full of cancerous breast tissue preserved in formaldehyde when my hand slipped and the jar fell on top of me. It opened up and I found myself covered in foul, greasy tissue, blinded and reeking with formalin fumes. I headed for the sink to wash myself off, and as I pulled off the sodden lab coat and flushed my face and body with soap and water, I kept thinking over and over: “This will be the death of me; I will end up in one of these jars if I don’t get out of this job.”

But, of course, Green Egg still wasn’t making enough money to pay a salary, and the bills had to be paid, so I kept at it. But I also had made up my mind that I needed to find a way out of this trap. I called on the Goddess for help, and she replied in the form of a new applicant for the job I had originally wanted as histologist. This new woman was completely qualified with years of experience so they sadly informed me that they were going to hire her instead of me. They explained that they would lay me off, which would entitle me to collect unemployment while I found new work. I managed to squeeze out a tear . . . and fervently thanked the Goddess.

I was determined that while I was on unemployment, I would devote myself entirely to creating a business that would support us financially, which neither Green Egg nor the Church of All Worlds was doing. I was also desperate to return to my own life work and make it somehow into a real career.

That summer I attended a very germinal series of workshops put on by CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies), featuring Marija Gimbutas, and it was a tremendous breakthrough for me as a researcher. I was able to dialogue with many other Goddess historians like Merlin Stone, Elinor Gadon, and Patricia Monaghan.

My life work as a Priestess has been teaching Goddess history and Goddess lore. I traveled around and told people wonderful tales of the mythology, lore, and practices of the ancient Goddess religion, and about ancient Goddesses and Gods and the cultures that worshipped them. I would teach at schools, bookstores, metaphysical shops, and Pagan gatherings. By then I had a fairly large collection of Goddess figurines from all over the world and throughout history. I would take some of these images with me and use them as tactile illustrations of various aspects of the Goddess.

One of the most fulfilling things about this work for me is watching women’s reactions to the wide range of body types portrayed in these statues. Far too many women have a pretty lousy self-image about their bodies from all the years of negative comparisons we are subjected to, so realizing that whatever type of body a woman possesses, at one time and place in the world, it was considered not only to be beautiful but to be divine—that can be a tremendously liberating and uplifting experience.

Otter had begun making me new Goddesses that were museum reproduction-quality images. He made Goddesses from the Stone Age and from the Bronze Age, one from Crete and one from Czechoslovakia. I also got involved and made a couple of pieces.

OZ: When the California Academy of Sciences opened an exhibit of “Ice Age Art,” I went down to San Francisco and spent two days sitting on a little folding camp stool in front of the case of Paleolithic Goddess figurines. I had my box of Sculpey and my clay modeling tools, and I shaped precise replicas, by hand and by eye, of each of the little Matrikas on display. I managed to buffalo the guards who tried to throw me out (“No photos allowed” says nothing about sculpture . . .), and I enjoyed the reactions of the people coming to view the exhibit. Many stopped to ask me what I was doing, and I got to speak to them of the Goddess and my devotion to Her service.

On the second day I met several women who indignantly challenged me: “What right did I, a man, have to be involved with the Goddess?” These women seemed to regard Her as their exclusive property, and me as an interloper. I patiently explained that men can love women, and that sons as well as daughters can love their Mother. I diplomatically refrained from calling to their attention the fact that women make up the vast majority of worshippers in the Christian church, with its all-male pantheon.

NARRATOR: With the help of some friends, the Zells were able to make some molds and start producing and selling copies of their statues. They would eventually name their business Mythic Images, after a quote from Joseph Campbell. In the beginning, for a trial period, they did this in connection with the CAW. Then MG decided she wanted to control the rights to the business.

MG: I filed the necessary legal paperwork to get a business license and tax ID, and Mythic Images was born. Of course I had a huge argument with Otter about this because he was determined to keep the statuary business as part of CAW. He wanted to set up another income stream for the Church and avoid paying taxes for what was essentially religious work. But I was adamant that I was not going to have another “Little Red Hen” scenario like the house in St. Louis play out with me as the loser. I would rather build a profit-making venture and pay my taxes than to see my business be crippled by people with lots of differing opinions, no experience, and no interest in seeing the thing succeed. I’d had my fill of people with their own agenda who didn’t want to support me or my work when push came to shove. So I finally told him, “If you don’t like it, you can’t have any” and set up MI as a sole proprietorship with me in charge. I figured OZ could run Green Egg any way he wanted and I would run Mythic Images the way I saw fit; then we would see which one survived the longest and actually supported us. In hindsight, I can never think of a more important argument that I actually won with him.

OZ: Once we were able to do it ourselves, we could do most of the work in our kitchen. So gradually our laundry room became a factory for hand-making statues. Soon we developed a product line, and advertised on the back cover of Green Egg. Our first ad (in the Samhain 1990 issue) included T-shirts with my artwork and the first nine of our statues. We were mostly doing everything ourselves. We weren’t farming anything out, but Morning Glory, starting with Rainbow and her friends, would occasionally hire the local teenagers as production workers. Many of them saved up the money for their first car by doing piecework for Mythic Images. We kept expanding and growing.

When we started Green Egg up again, we picked up the numbering where we had left off. So the Phoenix issue was number 81. When we got to issue #100 (Spring 1993), we were totally jazzed. We made it a double-length issue and had a full-color center spread. We did a retrospective on the history and an envisioning of the future of the Pagan community. It was an amazing issue. And the back cover was a full-page ad for our family business of Goddess figurines.

With every new issue, when it came back from the printer, we would look at it and go, “Wow, this is the best one ever!” There was such a sense of excitement, pride, and joy that we all had about it. The forum became great—every time we had an article, people would comment on it and go back and forth on it. It was everything I dreamed it would be. All the best artists were sending us their stuff—as an artist myself, I made sure that the reproduction of the art was top of the line. Eventually we got other people to come in and do other things around the office. But I had, for many issues, done all of it myself—from typesetting to art to photography to putting mailing labels on the magazines and hauling them off to the post office. Eventually that became all completely automated. But in those days it was all done by hand.

NARRATOR: Otter, Morning Glory, and Diane decided to get married as a triad in 1989. I asked OZ why they did this, because it seemed to me that by this point in their group relationship, they were having a lot of problems. And this is what he told me:

OZ: We had developed a deep triadic relationship with Diane for six years before we decided to have a triadic handfasting. We had been together all through the Great Unicorn Adventure, living on Greenfield Ranch, the Mermaid Expedition, Between the Worlds, the resurrection of CAW and Green Egg, college ceramics, and the beginning of what became Mythic Images, the Home Town Harvest Festivals, amazing rituals, several moves, and raising three kids together. We were a set—and a powerful team. Sure, Diane always had a streak of sanctimonious Puritanism in her personality—just as I have a strong tendency to OCD perfectionism and MG has severe ADD and is chronically late for everything.

But MG and I regard people as unique individuals, perfect with all their idiosyncrasies. We pretty much live unconditional love and acceptance, and we have a strong tendency for inclusive rather than exclusive relationships. So we indulge others the way we would like to be indulged, and put up with their difficult aspects as we hope they will put up with ours. Only when someone actively turns against us do we finally come to the realization that we can no longer include them in our lives.

So despite those difficulties with Diane that were appearing around that time (1989), we felt that we already had been with her six years (since the fall of 1983), and shared so much of our lives, Vision, and Mission that we wanted to make it a real commitment through handfasting. Mostly our ten years with Diane were really wonderful. Do I regret our time together? Certainly not! It was one of the best periods of our lives!

We created a beautiful ceremony and had a triad wedding on March 19, 1989. It was probably the first triad wedding that anybody had ever done or created, as far as I am aware. We came up with a symbol to represent our relationship: a triskelion, which is basically a yin-yang symbol with three parts instead of two. We decided that we were going to formally declare ourselves to be a family, and we took the name “Triskelion” for ourselves.

DIANE DARLING: We decided to get handfasted at Ostara (Spring Equinox). It was really juicy. We had a miniature Unicorn who was a baby then (born March 9), and he was just so cute. His name was Oberon. We had matching triskelions made by a friend of ours. We had a beautiful handfasting, a life-braiding of the three of us. It was really quite wonderful. There was a moment just before the wedding when we were standing with baby Oberon, kind of getting ready, and put the triskelions on a pillow like you would do with wedding rings. We took our eyes off of the Unicorn for like one minute, and turned around and he had pulled one of the triskelions off and was chewing on it. We pulled it out of his mouth, but one of the pins was missing. So we had to wrestle with the baby Unicorn and put our hands in his mouth to get the pin out. That got our adrenaline up for the ceremony. I was a physician’s assistant, so I drew blood from each of us and mixed our blood together in a chalice and put drops of it on each other’s foreheads.

NARRATOR: Whatever family unit Morning Glory and Otter were in was always open to change and experimentation. That was just a part of how they lived their lives, and always had been. So they decided to try and bring MG’s first husband, Gary, back into the family.

OZ: Gary lived in Eugene and rarely went anywhere else. Morning Glory visited him and Rainbow off and on, and sometimes we would both go up there and see him for the Oregon Country Fair. For many years that was an annual pilgrimage. Somewhere along in there it occurred to us that Gary and Diane might have a lot of potential together, and that we should introduce them to each other. And, if we could do it and make it work, it might bring the families together permanently, so it seemed like a good arrangement.

So in 1988 Diane and Morning Glory both drove up to Oregon for the Country Fair. They made a girls’ road trip out of it. And so Diane and Gary finally got to meet, and they fell in love. Before long he decided to move away from Eugene and in with Diane. Morning Glory and I did a spectacular handfasting ceremony for them on June 25, 1989. But Gary never really quite assimilated into the Triskelion family thing. When you add a fourth person, it’s no longer a triad! Four people have a tendency to break into two couples. Diane, Morning Glory, and I continued to have our relationship, and Diane and Gary developed their own relationship that was separate from that. It was complicated to try to describe it or make sense of it, but it all seemed to work. Gary and Morning Glory continued to be good friends and co-parents.

MG: Gary and I took a stab at trying to renew our old flame, but too much time and too much pain had passed between us, and so we decided that the deep and caring love we had managed to hang on to was enough as it was, so there was no need to try and turn back the clock.

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