A Bouquet of Lovers
(1991–1994)
Of all my Lovers that I love;
Of all my Friends I’ve ever known,
We go together hand in glove;
We fit together flesh and bone.
For twenty years of joy and tears;
For best and worst, through thick and thin.
I’d love you better now and then;
But I’d choose you all the same again!
—from “love of my life” by morning glory zell, 1993
NARRATOR: Another sea change that the Zells had missed while they were living in “Faerie” was the beginning of the Pagan festival movement across the nation. These festivals were, and still are, rural gatherings where Pagans of diverse traditions manage to find common ground together for several days of celebration. Since festivals are held on private land, attendees can just be themselves and not have to worry about the outside world—there is usually even the option of not wearing clothing during the entire event. (This is called being “skyclad,” a practice that seems to have been picked up from Gerald Gardner’s lifestyle, though OZ had already been doing ritual, and living, without clothes on whenever possible since college.) There are a variety of daily activities to choose from, including rituals, classes, music, and shopping. (No Pagan festival would be complete without a big selection of dealers selling jewelry, art, and even clothing—which can presumably then be worn somewhere else.)
As soon as OZ and MG had a home phone again, they started getting invitations to attend various festivals around the country. They were both well known on the Pagan scene, though not as well known as some—they had, after all, disappeared for almost ten years, and they weren’t allowed to talk about the Unicorns. The stars at Pagan festivals, at least in the beginning, were generally those who represented a specific system of Magick, often some kind of Witchcraft, and were there to teach something about it. And that wasn’t what the Zells were doing.
Morning Glory would go to festivals as a Goddess historian, and Otter would go as a living piece of Neo-Pagan history, in the flesh. He was nearing fifty, and though for some fifty is the new forty, OZ was ready to be the wise, mature sage with gray starting to appear in his beard. And while some of the other featured festival guests would do their thing and then go spend the rest of their time away from the crowd hanging out with just the other presenters and VIPs, OZ would spend the whole weekend mingling with the multitudes. After his moment in the spotlight, which would usually be Gaea-oriented, he’d spend the rest of the festival making himself available to anyone who cared to talk. In the daytime he’d set up a table in the dealers’ area where he’d have his statues and copies of Green Egg. At night he’d roam from campfire to campfire, joining the random festivities till it was time to go back to his tent—or maybe someone else’s.
The Zells weren’t, at first, getting paid to make these appearances, but they’d get their transportation and other expenses covered, and it was a chance to promote the magazine and statue business. It was also a chance to meet new lovers. In the Beltane 1990 issue of Green Egg (#89), Morning Glory’s epochal article “A Bouquet of Lovers” was published. In seeking for a good term to describe people who were into having multiple simultaneous lovers, MG combined Greek and Latin roots to coin the terms polyamorous and polyamory, meaning “having many lovers” (in contrast to the term polygamy, which means “marrying many”). With this terminology to describe it, another entire movement was catalyzed, and doors were opened to even more interesting adventures.
OZ: Over Labor Day weekend of 1991, Deborah Anapol and Ryam Nearing of PEP (Polyfidelitous Educational Productions) and IntiNet co-sponsored a PEP-Con in Berkeley. The Church of All Worlds was invited to be a major participant—not only presenting workshops but also conducting the opening and closing rituals. This was the historic first contact between the poly-sexual community and Pagans. Many of us in CAW—inspired by Stranger in a Strange Land—had been polyamorous all along, but we’d never made an especially big deal about it. But when Morning Glory coined the terms, we suddenly found ourselves the center of considerable attention!
We set up a table directly across the hall from the oldest and most famous poly organization around—Kerista, a utopian visionary cult that had been started in New York City back in 1956 by John Peltz “Bro Jud” Presmont. Kerista was premised on the ideals of sexual polyfidelity (“faithful to many”) and creation of intentional communities centered around a very rigid concept of group marriages of twelve partners. Never more than a couple dozen people, they had moved to San Francisco in 1971, forming the Kerista Commune, in which the terms polyfidelity and compersion (i.e., “taking pleasure that your partner is experiencing pleasure, even if the source of their pleasure is other than yourself”) were coined.
Throughout the conference (which Jud did not attend), people kept coming over to the CAW table after gathering literature from Kerista. They’d ask, “What are your rules?”
Somewhat nonplussed, we’d reply, “Rules? Um, ‘Be excellent to each other’?”
And they’d say, “Well, the Keristans have eighty-seven rules, and 111 standards.”
And all we could say to that was, “Wow. That’s a lotta rules! How do they keep track of ’em all?”
NARRATOR: Kerista had an active public profile in the late eighties when they, like OZ, got involved early on with Mac computers, which they also sold and repaired. They published a free newspaper that helped spread the word about open relationships to the general public. It was distributed in San Francisco in sidewalk newspaper boxes throughout the city, where anyone who was curious could pick up a copy.
The Kerista commune broke up in 1991 as the discussion of polyamory was beginning, and MG and OZ took the ball and ran with it. Their Pagan spirituality and their poly lifestyles were a good match, and here’s why: in theory, at least, a person of any faith could fall in love with more than one person at once. It’s happened a lot in the past and there have been difficulties—in a monotheistic religion you only get to have one God, and you only get to have one partner. But if you have a polytheistic religion, then you can have as many Gods and Goddesses, and as many partners, as your heart desires. (The same monotheistic argument is currently being used in the battle for the legalization of same-sex marriage—fundamental Christians argue that not only can you have just one God and one partner, but also you can only choose your partner from one sex.)
OZ: As Morning Glory and I started getting out into the world more, we found our “Bouquet of Lovers” rapidly expanding. We saw it as a kind of invisible network permeating the growing Pagan community, and connecting all these divergent groups through bonds and relationships among their members with those in other groups. Much like “The Force” in Star Wars, which “. . . surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” MG and I in particular made it a joyous practice to cast our nets as widely as possible—and we were able to do so more than perhaps anyone because we were getting all these invitations to travel all over the country (and even to Australia) to give workshops and presentations.
In June of 1991, I went to the Midsummer Gathering of Tribes, which was held at a Renaissance Faire site in Georgia. I presented a plan for a new ecumenical alliance to be called the Universal Federation of Pagans—my model for this was the United Federation of Planets on Star Trek. And I did a knock-out presentation of my slide show of the whole history of Gaea. It required a musical soundtrack and two slide projectors that alternate back and forth.
One of the people who was there was a sweet and precocious little girl who was about three years old. She kind of danced around and then we talked. Her name was Tam Songdog. Her dad, Talyn Songdog, was also there.
For the closing ritual of that festival, everybody formed a big circle and the guests were asked to call the Quarters and invoke the Gods and Goddesses. I did an invocation to Fire. There was a woman standing right next to me—a little tiny woman—and there was some kind of connection between us. It gathered during the ritual. We didn’t talk much or anything, but there was electricity. When we hugged at the end, there were sparks jumping between us! It felt totally cosmic.
It would have been nice if the Circle had opened and then we could have had some time to talk and find out about each other and exchange addresses. But the car to take me to the airport showed up just as the Circle was ending, and the driver said, “We gotta go right now or you’re gonna miss your flight!”
As we were driving away, all I was able to call out was, “What’s your name?”
And she hollered back, “Kadira!” That was it. There was something awesome there, but I had no way to pursue it. I didn’t have any other information. I didn’t know where she lived, whether that was a magickal or mundane name, or anything!
Some of the most significant and life-changing relationships we developed during that period began the next year, at the 1992 Gathering of the Tribes, where Morning Glory and I were both brought in as guests. It was held at Lady Hecate’s wolf farm in Georgia over the Autumn Equinox.
MG: It was the year I turned forty-four. I was still recovering from that major injury four years previously where I’d ruptured a disc in my neck, and I was still in a lot of pain much of the time. I was trying to get myself back together but I still wasn’t very happy with where my life was going.
Oberon had been working with various people from around that area; he had gone there the year before. They wanted both of us to come this time, and for me to do a Goddess presentation. So I agreed to do it. The deal that Oberon had cut was that we didn’t get paid, but we got free booth space and at least they were going to put us up in a motel. Because I said, “Look, I have this neck injury and I really can’t sleep on the ground on an inflatable mattress that always goes flat in the middle of the night.”
The night before we left, OZ had a conversation with the guy putting on the event and he reported that they were not putting us up in a motel room after all, but that they were going to get us a really good tent! At that point I just lost my basket. All I could see was hours and days of misery lying ahead of me. Out of my state of pain and fear I was also being an insufferable jackass about it. At one point Oberon said, “Don’t forget to pack plenty of condoms.”
And I said, “Go ahead and pack them in your suitcase, because I am never going to meet anybody in the Deep South that I would ever have sex with in a million years!” (Remember I grew up there . . .)
Never name the well you will not drink from, because at that point Aphrodite went, “Oh yeah? Let’s just see about that!”
OZ: The Gathering was focused around the Universal Federation of Pagans, which had grown from the seed that I had planted the previous year. We had created a structure, incorporated it, and gotten a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Part of my longtime dream has been to have some kind of a Pagan interfaith alliance, like the World Council of Churches, that all Pagan groups could be a part of. And something like a hundred groups were already interested in signing up for the UFP. I worked hard that weekend helping to hammer out articles and bylaws and map out the concept.
MG: Oberon had said, “Watch out in your workshops because you may see a special little girl here, and she is really quite extraordinary.”
So I show up for my workshop and start my discussion, whereupon this little girl around four years old comes in and plops herself in the center of the Circle. I said to her, “Honey, would you like to come and sit with the rest of us around the circle instead of right in the center?”
And she said, “I’m not Honey. I’m Tam. And I’m happy where I am.”
And I said, “Oh, okay!” So she continued to sit there; she kept pretty quiet except when she asked very cogent questions.
OZ: After a day of UFP meetings I came back into the festival campground and saw Kadira. I hugged her, and she said, “I’ll set up my tent and see you later.” Well, later never happened because it started to rain. By the evening it was a downpour and everybody was huddled under their tents, which were all set up along the creek bank.
MG: Oberon and I were supposed to perform a handfasting. Right about the time when it was due to start, all of a sudden the sky opened up and started coming down like it can only come down in the South, or maybe someplace like New Guinea. You practically had to have gills. We were hiding underneath the marquee where all the booths were. And the young couple that we were supposed to do the handfasting for said, “We put a lot into getting this together. Even our parents are here.” And there was no tent big enough for them to hold the handfasting in. Everything was out-of-doors.
It kept getting more and more tense. The little girl was there riding on a man’s shoulders and steering him by the ears. And the man came up to me and said, “I hate to bust your bubble, but this rain isn’t going to stop. This doesn’t look good to me. There is a creek right down here. We are in a valley. If this floods, it could be really bad. And I don’t want my family here.” There were a couple of women with them, and one of them was holding a young baby around four months old.
TALYN: I offered Oberon and Morning Glory a dry place to sleep. My oldest daughter really liked Oberon, and we go by our intuition in these things.
MG: We all loaded up into assorted cars, because these people—the man with the little girl and the two women with the baby—were the best friends of the couple that we were going to do the handfasting for. So Oberon went with the handfasting couple, and I went with the other people.
OZ: Well, down in that area the ground is red clay. And driveways that go downhill tend to have gullies and ruts and erosion like miniatures of the Grand Canyon. So we’re driving out of there and the car was slipping and sliding and getting stuck in these ruts, and we kept having to get out of the car and push to keep it going.
MG: We forded a stream that was rapidly rising. We tried to drive up a hill, and the rain was coming down in sheets and the mud was just like liquid peanut butter. We were in a big, old American eight-cylinder car, and the guy who was driving was flooring the gas pedal and it was spinning its wheels and was not going up the hill. The car was skidding sideways and we were about to go over a cliff.
I was sitting there thinking, “Oh, shit, I don’t believe this. Here I am in a car with people I don’t even know. And Oberon is in another car and I don’t even know where he is. And he and I had a squabble and now I’m gonna die! And I’m not even gonna be able to tell him how much I love him!” It was just one of those moments where you go, “Please, if I ever get out of this I’ll do better, I promise!”
At that point the guy who was driving said, “Okay, women and children out of the car!” So we get out and he guns the engine and starts fish-tailing the car up the hill in the sheeting mud.
I was standing there in the driving rain and watching this big old car going up the hill, sometimes sideways, but still going up, and thinking, “Who is this guy?” Because I’m a pretty good driver; my dad who was a mechanic taught me, and hell, I lived on Greenfield Ranch! I have driven on some incredible roads in incredible conditions, and the idea of trying to drive up that slope through those sheets of liquid mud was just astounding to me. But he did it!
So I and the other two women carried our stuff and the kids, trudging up the hill like refugee Russian peasants, slipping around and wading in the Georgia red clay mud, but we made it to the top of the hill and got back in the car. We were soaking wet all the way through to the skin. We drove along for quite a ways over a lot of back roads and then we stopped off at a little convenience store, and they told me, “Be cool and don’t say anything, because this is major Ku Klux Klan territory.”
And I’m like, “Okay, great! Welcome back to the South.”
TALYN: We brought them to our home and gave them food and a place to stay. That’s part of who my lady, Maggie, and I are. We create a haven for people to come and be safe. It’s part of our personal juju to try to always have a place to share.
MG: We got showered and cleaned up, and they loaned us spare clothes ’cause ours were covered in mud, so we went on ahead and did the handfasting inside the house. After that we were all sitting on couches, and I was next to the man who was the driver, and he put his arm around me. I was thinking, “Okay . . . so far.”
We talked some more and he was playing with me a little bit, kind of petting me. I was looking towards the two other women and wondering which one of them was his wife. I didn’t want to get in trouble because it definitely seemed like the guy was coming on to me and the women were just talking. I was trying to catch one of their eyes to find out, “Is this okay?” And they were just totally acting oblivious.
Finally they took pity on me, and the guy said, “Well, I’m really glad to be able to get you guys here so that we can have a private talk because your life has been very inspiring to us. We have a polyamorous relationship.”
And then it all went click, and I thought, “Oh, got it! A man, two women, a baby, and a little girl—it’s a poly family!” So I relaxed. We went out and rounded up what luggage we had with us—there wasn’t a whole lot—and we were taking it up to where we were put for the night. And the man in question was helping me carry stuff upstairs. Just as we got the stuff up and put it into the bedroom, he turned around and I turned around and we looked at each other and he stepped up and gave me this little friendly kiss, like “I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad everything is okay—here’s a hug and here’s a little kiss.”
And at that moment it was like both of us stuck our fingers in a light socket. We looked back at each other in surprise because neither of us expected anything like that at all. I was literally shocked: “Ohmigod!” We had both got bitten badly from that very moment; it was two irresistible forces on a cosmic collision course.
OZ: The next morning we returned to the festival, and the place was total devastation. All the tents, all the booths, all the merchandise, even the wolf pens—everything that had been below the level of four feet was washed away. We came back to a sea of mud. The wolves were wandering around and putting their noses into people’s stuff. Things were totally lost forever. People’s cars that had been parked down at the bottom were simply gone. But nobody was injured or killed, and that was a miracle.
KADIRA: Most of us, including me, were naked when it hit because we were in the skyclad area. We were only allowed to be skyclad down by the creek. We were sitting in this tent when we noticed that it started raining. The next thing we knew, the water was around our ankles. A young man who was one of the security people carried me, naked, on his shoulders across this raging flood to get my purse and car keys out of my tent. Some woman who had managed to be camped up on higher ground had some dry clothes that she passed around to people. I spent the night holding these older men who were freezing.
MG: The tents were all swept away. All the booths were completely strewn around. There were condoms and paper money and Pagan literature plastered all over the trees for miles downstream. Meanwhile, the guy who had booked us into this festival, and then changed his mind about letting us stay in a motel, was still up in his motel and didn’t even know what was going on.
It was a disaster, but at the same time what did happen is that people really came together for each other. But I’m glad I did not have to go through that because I might have been seriously injured or caused someone else to be injured trying to help me—I was still in a physically vulnerable place at that point in my recovery. Oberon had a certain amount of guilt for not staying there and helping with the rescue, but it was what it was.
NARRATOR: Unlike the Federation Starfleet in Star Trek, the Universal Federation of Pagans never got off the ground. Due to some unfortunate problems in the Pagan community, the project was abandoned soon after the Gathering of the Tribes.
MG: For me the whole experience had imprinted itself indelibly on my soul. I could barely contain myself after I got back to California. I wrote reams of poetry, I wrote songs; I drove all my friends nuts talking about it. Talyn and I wrote to each other and had long, soulful phone conversations. I returned in January and that really cemented it. Talyn and I had this powerful chemistry. The magick between us, the current, was so strong, there was almost nothing that we couldn’t do. You could see sparks flying off of us. And we would have all kinds of incredible visionary experiences when we were doing magick together. It was like every touch was a miracle.
I kept thinking how lucky I was: “This has happened to me twice in my life, first with Oberon, and now here comes yet another intense and completely overpowering love affair!” I felt so blessed by the Goddess—Aphrodite had rocked me in her arms and given me gifts the likes of which I should be grateful for the next ten lifetimes, even while she made a fool of me over my rash proclamation about Southern boys.
TALYN: Physically, if you saw pictures of her when we first were together, and then a few years later, she actually looked about ten years younger. She regained a whole burst of youthfulness. She lost weight. Her skin started glowing. Her hair even stopped graying. She became more beautiful physically. And it was an amazing aspect of the relationship.
Oberon was really happy with it, too. Because I think some of the stuff that had been kind of fallow in their relationship blossomed again. They love each other hugely, and they always have. But I think their relationship had quieted down a bit, and this rekindled some of what they had going.
MG: And I pursued this, and Talyn pursued it. He introduced me into some juicy, kinky stuff that I had never gotten into before. He very lightly introduced this as part of the romantic connection, and I jumped in. I’m never one of these people who just sticks her toe in the water. I plunge right in.
TALYN: I expected it to be playful. I did not expect it to go to the dark, intense, magickal levels that it went to. There is sex, there is sex-play, and then there is sacred sexuality that can be expressed that way too.
MG: And that was a gift to me, to introduce me to a whole side of my personality that I had not been in touch with. I learned that the warrior woman had a vulnerable, submissive side. And I was able to teach him to release and channel the Magick that was bubbling so close to the surface in him. Maggie, who is his wife and primary partner, was always a terrific magickal woman. But she never could manage to break through his stubbornness and share this with him. With all that they shared, they just weren’t on the same wavelength to make that breakthrough together. Sometimes it just happens like that; there were things that OZ and I couldn’t teach each other also.
TALYN: When I met my wife I was pretty much an atheist. She started studying Wicca. Her group had no male energy, so occasionally they would drag me into the Circles to play the God part. So I looked at the basic rules of the setup. One of them was recognizing that you are part of an ecosystem. And I consider that to be very important. I liked the ethics of personal responsibility. And I liked the fact that they were divorced from a lot of sexual hangups. So, frankly, I was able to get sex and not feel guilty about it.
At that point I did not believe in either Magick or God/Goddess energy. I rationalized most of those things as the placebo effect. But I got along with it, and I got along with the community. So I was able to play along quite comfortably. When I met Morning Glory, a number of things happened that my scientific mind had to look at and go, “Hmmm, that wasn’t very likely.” We did some rituals that were unbelievably powerful and not explainable through normal, rational means. So I had to set aside some of my logical brain and accept that magick stuff was happening. I realized that she had some real stuff to teach me.
MG: I said, “Yes. It’s going to be a daunting thing to give you magickal training when we’re at opposite ends of the country, but we’ll find a way.” And as it turned out, that was really good. I had to create focused lessons and unique ways of communicating.
Eventually, after some long-distance lessons, Talyn came out here and I gave him a magickal initiation. He died symbolically and was reborn as a different person. He was reborn as a Priest. And he is now one of the most powerful and wonderful Priests in the magickal community. So that relationship really flowered and was one of the major moving and shaking things in both of our lives for many years.
All of the erotic loveplay aside, the other important parts of this whole thing are my relationships with Talyn’s daughter, Tam, and his wife, Maggie; and as time went on, the baby grew up into another magickal child. I connected to Tam’s sister Tir as well. I wrote Maggie a poly love song—a song from one woman to the other woman in the relationship, honoring her and praising her relationship with the man.
And Tam—I made so many mistakes with my daughter, Gail. I never got to really be there for her as much as I wanted to when she was little. There are lots of happy memories that I have of when she was growing up. But there were big pieces of her childhood that I missed. You can’t ever go back again, but with Tam I tried to do some of the things that I never really got to with my daughter.
TALYN: After Morning Glory left, we had to debrief the kids a little bit. We taught our kids fairly early what things they could share with the kids in school and what to hold back. We had to teach them both how to hide being Pagan, and how not to talk about our sexuality. The sexuality is actually the bigger issue. Our religion is quite legal. But polyamory, in a lot of areas, would be cause for taking your children away.
We’re very open with our kids about our sexuality. But at the same time, everything that we do that is sexual is always behind closed doors. Still it’s sort of obvious when two people go behind closed doors—kids are smart, they figure things out. They know when either I or my wife take a lover. So we had to explain that that is not normal, in terms of regular society, and that it is very private. Then we had to explain why—that some people don’t like it when you don’t play the game the same way they do, and they can be pretty mean.
Both Morning Glory and Oberon didn’t understand about being in the closet. They’re in a pretty nice place in California. How nice is it to be able to create a whole chunk of world and community where you can live exactly the way that you want to? Where you can have sex with multiple partners and not even think about it as unusual, and you can do ritual right in public and no one bats an eye. If we did ritual in public parks here, it could be trouble. You could end up with a cross burning on your lawn. So we had to coach the kids on how not to spill the beans.
MG: I would try three or four times a year to go and spend two to three weeks with them. I could always manage to get a gig out there doing a presentation or a Goddess talk. Their whole family came out here to visit us in California.
OZ: Our families became very close. Tam became Morning Glory’s and my Goddess-daughter—it was agreed that should anything ever happen to her parents, we would be the next in line to raise her and her sister. Every time when we would be back East for festivals, we would stay with them and renew our connections. So that relationship has continued over all these years. We’ve had the privilege of watching both the girls grow up into beautiful and brilliant young women.
NARRATOR: While at a Samhain festival in Tennessee in 1992, OZ was taken on a side trip to see the full-size replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, which includes a forty-two-foot-tall statue of Athena. He got the idea to hold a pageant and ritual and a Panathenaic games there, just like they had been held in ancient Greece. At the first Panathenaea, held in 1993, OZ and Kadira finally hooked up. MG continued her long-distance relationship with Talyn, and in October 1993, at the Highlands of Tennessee Samhain Gathering, he was there with a man named Wolf.
Talyn and Wolf were old friends from Texas. At one point they had been in a triad relationship with Maggie, the woman who eventually married Talyn. After Talyn went to Germany for grad school, Wolf got involved with another woman who wanted a monogamous relationship. When she got pregnant, they got married. They had a daughter together, but their marriage did not last very long. When Talyn and Maggie returned to the United States and settled in Georgia, they eventually reconnected with Wolf.
MG: I’d been hearing nothing but all these stories about this legendary Wolf person from both Talyn and Maggie, and he had been hearing stories about me and seeing the pictures I had sent plastered all over the house. So sure enough, he shows up at our booth. I swear I could practically hear a drumroll as I watched Wolf and Talyn walk across the field towards me and I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, I am in trouble now!” They were both wearing their black leather jackets and had black hair and beards. Wolf has green eyes and Talyn has brown eyes. Neither of them smiled ’cause they were looking bad; as they got closer and closer, I was just standing there and shivering.
When they got to the table, Talyn finally grinned. He didn’t say a word. And Wolf looked at me and said, “Hi. I’m Wolf. And we’re going to be lovers.”
And yes, I was easy; some of my lovers have told me it’s one of my sterling qualities. “Okay!” was all I managed to get out. It isn’t often that I get tongue-tied, but there are occasions, and this was certainly one of them.
NARRATOR: Later that evening they ended up in a borrowed tent together.
MG: We went into the tent. Wolf pulled out these silk cords and he bound my hands and we had this delicious, rapturous connection. There’s nothing like the first time! Our union became even more special when he took a gorgeous cherry opal earring out of his ear, put it in my ear, and said, “Now you’re mine. I claim you.”
That little claiming was a lot more powerful than he knew. It was one of those things that you do on impulse, that you think is very sweet love-play—he meant it from the heart, don’t get me wrong—but sometimes you do things and you have no idea what the consequences of that action are gonna be down the line.
NARRATOR: After that, MG and Wolf went to the cabin where OZ and Kadira were.
MG: Wolf and I got all snuggled up cozy together and tried to sleep. But it didn’t last very long—suddenly, sleeping was the last thing on our minds. So we were playing around, and then Oberon joined in, so we had a three-way thing going. And then Oberon and Kadira got back involved with each other again. Finally we all collapsed. And at that point Oberon and I looked at each other and went, “Ohmigod—we forget to even introduce these two guys!”
And so Oberon took Kadira’s hand from her side of the bed, and I took Wolf’s hand from his side of the bed, and stretched them both all the way across to the middle and shook them together and we said “Wolf, meet Kadira. Kadira, meet Wolf!”
KADIRA: Oberon and I were lying there cuddling, and Morning Glory came in with Wolf. I wasn’t too freaked out about it because I so trusted Morning Glory. I knew she wasn’t going to bring anybody into the bed who would do anything inappropriate with me. And I could tell that she and he were really focused on each other. I’m really shy at first, and I’m really respectful of other people’s relationships and their space. But once somebody lets me know that something is okay with them, and I really sense that they’re sincere about it, that their actions back up their words, I’m not an inhibited person at all.
OZ: We then proceeded to have a night of lots of sex and keeping everybody else in the cabin awake. We were trying to be quiet, but we were giggling and having a lot of fun. The other people who were in the cabin with us certainly weren’t having nearly as much fun as we were. They stayed in their bunks and tossed and turned and muttered a bit. But they were mostly pretty indulgent about the whole thing. It wasn’t a surprise to them—it must have been our reputation! We just take it for granted that this is how it is with us. But I understand that not everybody operates the way that we do . . . even in the Pagan community.
MG: We did the festival one weekend, then we all went back and spent the next week at Talyn’s in Georgia; OZ had to go back to California, but I stayed on. And one of those nights, Wolf, Talyn, and I spent the night together. I used to have this fantasy of being able to be with two very special but different men, and I’ve been privileged to have that experience several times in my life—it’s been very powerful, wonderful, and moving, but this left it all in the dust. Talyn has a phrase he uses: “I’m over-meeting your needs.” That’s when your wildest fantasy is about a 5, and the actual experience is like about a 20.
Since Talyn had been an SCA, Society for Creative Anachronism, fighter, we also made swashbuckling-style fencing sessions part of our regular foreplay whenever we would visit each other. Wolf and I tried out a couple of bouts, but he staunchly remained more of a lover than a fighter. A number of folks from our fencing clan also had connections to the BD/SM communities, and sometimes it was hard to tell just where you managed to get that particular bruise. Still, it was all in good fun, and we were working hard on learning ways to explore the experiences of conflict, passion, power, and partnership along with the dynamics of dominance and submission that are hardwired into all animal species. Taking turns winning or losing, being on top or on the bottom, practicing good sportsmanship, and practicing safe and consensual sexuality were all part of our lives at that time.
The experience that Wolf, Talyn, and I shared together is an example of how people can use sexuality—especially when there is a magickal component and the people are magickal people—in a way that isn’t just about sex, it’s about initiation. You can push past the boundaries of erotic fantasy and into the realm of sacred sexuality. I’m always such an active and outgoing, take-charge type of dominant woman, and so it has been a revelation and a wonder to me to experience the power of surrendering that dominance, of letting go and just being able to receive pleasure until you can no longer hold on to consciousness. I think I fainted three times that night, the pleasure was so exquisite!
When Oberon went to Italy in 1987 and he was touring Tuscany, where they have the tombs of the Etruscan kings in Tarquinia, he took pictures of paintings that were on the tomb walls. One of the tomb paintings depicted a woman having sex with two men. The men were wearing ritual masks, and it was clearly an amazing initiatory experience. I’ve often wondered: was that the tomb of the woman, or one of the men? I’ll bet it was her tomb, and she was an initiate of that Mystery. It had to have been one of the high points in her life as it was in mine, and if I ever have anything painted on my tomb, it will be that—like the Tarquinian priestess.