The Ravenhearts
(the 1990s)
We are more than one, we are more than two,
We are more than the sum of our parts.
So we cherish the old and rejoice in the new;
And we meet in the haven of our hearts!
—from “the haven of our hearts” [ravenheart family theme song] by liza gabriel, wynter, and morning glory, 1996
NARRATOR: This events that are in this book aren’t all in chronological order—what happens in one chapter may be taking place at the same time as something that is happening in a previous or following chapter. I have tried to group together related events rather than sticking to a timeline (but if you ever get lost, you can refer to a very abbreviated timeline at the end of this book). The Zells always have a number of balls up in the air at once, and though, of course, everything is connected, some things are also easier to explain when looked at on their own.
This chapter, and the next few that follow, all mostly take place in the 1990s, and those were exciting times for Pagans. 1992 was the year the Church of All Worlds became the first non-Christian church to be legally recognized in Australia. William Jefferson Clinton, a Democrat, was elected the forty-second president of the United States in 1992. He seemed like a politician who could do a good job, and there were a lot of things about him that were likeable: he played saxophone; he named his only daughter after a Judy Collins song (“Chelsea Morning”); and he was the first Baby-Boomer president (four years younger, in fact, than OZ). His vice president, Al Gore, had written a bestselling book (Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit) that any Pagan reader could find things in to agree with.
It was the decade that PBS brought Canadian director Donna Read’s trilogy of Goddess documentaries to American viewers (a lot!). The first, Goddess Remembered, prominently featured the Goddess history theories of Marija Gimbutas and interviews with Merlin Stone, Luisah Teish, Starhawk, and other prominent Pagans. This was followed up with The Burning Times and Full Circle. So, with the help of the Public Broadcasting System, more information about Earth-based spirituality reached the masses.
The decade was a momentous one for Oberon and Morning Glory as well. Two major developments played out in their lives simultaneously: the vicissitudes of Green Egg magazine and the building of a loving, polyamorous family.
DIANE DARLING: As Green Egg got bigger and bigger, there was more and more nuts-and-bolts stuff that had to be kept together. And Otter is like totally not a nuts-and-bolts guy. He is all right-brain. I felt like I was doing a huge amount of work on it: keeping all the books, editing all the articles, soliciting new articles, and dealing with bookstores and distributors. Otter managed the art, layout, and subscription lists. It got to be harder and harder. When you’re just fooling around with a couple of Macs, that’s one thing, but when you’re running $150,000 to $200,000 a year through an account, you have to keep some records, and that was me. I didn’t like doing it but I am capable of doing it, so I did, and maybe I did too much of it.
NARRATOR: OZ and Diane Darling had a major disagreement about whether or not to publish the work of a particular artist. OZ and Diane both agreed, and they told me so in separate interviews years after this happened, that the artist was talented but that he was not a very likable human being. For Diane this was reason enough to not put his art into Green Egg, but OZ felt differently.
DIANE DARLING: He was a very good artist, and a real shithead in person. Otter is not really a good judge of character. I had the distinct feeling that he was trying to insinuate himself between me and Otter with a mind to getting some control over the magazine as a vehicle to promote his art. He was presenting himself as being part of a team of a man and a woman, but actually it was just him. So he was being disingenuous from the start, and as I got to know him better I decided that I didn’t want him to be part of anything that I was part of, and I had good reasons at the time.
OZ: I felt that I was the one who determined that—after all, it was my magazine. I conceived it and designed it. So her attempts to censor out stuff that she disapproved of were ones that I just utterly resisted. I told her that she was the editor, and I was the publisher, and I was the one who ultimately made the final decisions about what went into the magazine. That’s what a publisher does. I took her feelings and opinions into consideration, as I did with everybody, but I reserved to myself the right to make the final decisions.
DIANE DARLING: In retrospect I can see why he felt he was being excluded increasingly, and he was. He was calling himself the publisher, and he wasn’t doing any of the publisher things. He wanted to do what he was not good at, instead of sticking to what he was good at. And I’ve seen so many people make that mistake over and over again.
In the spring of 1994, I decided I was going to turn the editing responsibilities over to our friend Maerian, a CAW Priestess and two-time Queen of the May, and then I was going to turn the bookkeeping and business end over to her partner, Orion.
The stress of trying to do Green Egg together broke us up. It got to be harder and harder. Morning Glory and I kind of drifted away from each other, and then Otter and I had this blowup at one point that put an end to it forever. But when it was good, it was very good.
NARRATOR: Morning Glory and Oberon ended their ten-year relationship with Diane in April of 1994. They had a formal handparting, cutting the cord of their handfasting and burying it on Annwfn on Beltane. But these kinds of losses often lead to new beginnings; and in OZ’s case, he was about to get a new name, a new family, and then another new name.
OZ: In the fall of ’94 we held the Eleusinian Mysteries again, and that year, for the first and only time, I was selected to take the role of Hades. That was a major change in my life, because, ever since the blowup I’d had back in ’73 with Jodie, I had totally turned away from the dark, shadow side of my existence. Morning Glory and I created this whole series of mystery play–type rituals, and in the cast of characters we would often have something like the “Dark Lord,” and I would always assign that role to someone else. And I would always take the role of the kindly, wise old Wizard, who advises the heroes on what they need to know to go off on the quest, and that kind of thing.
But the way we had it worked out in the Mysteries was that one of the pilgrims who made the journey, and received initiation, would come back from it with the sense that she had been tapped to take the role of Persephone in the following year. This always happened, year after year—we just accepted it as part of the Magick. So we would then build up the rest of the cast of characters around her. So the first thing we would ask when planning the next year’s cycle would be, “So, if you are going to be playing Persephone, who would you chose to be Hades?” They had to in some way manifest being the King and Queen in the Underworld.
What happened in 1993 was a woman named Serendipity, who came back having been tapped to become next year’s Kore, was asked who she would choose to be Hades. And she chose me; that was quite a shock. I couldn’t refuse this, but it was definitely not something that I was comfortable with or ever would have sought. When I immersed myself in the ritual and the Magick, I had to deal with all these things inside of myself that I had suppressed—all these aspects of myself and my life that I had denied and buried and pushed away.
Morning Glory did not attend the 1994 Eleusinian Mysteries, as she wasn’t taking any active role that year. Instead she went to a sex symposium in San Francisco that was on the same weekend. She met some folks there; they hit it off; and she invited them to come up to the Old Same Place. I came back from the Mysteries quite overwhelmed from the experience. Within days, for example, I had to deal with the death of a man in our community. Serendipity was living in an apartment above his house and helping with his care, and he died of AIDS. So she called me and I drove down there. It was the first time I had ever even seen a dead person, yet in a way it was all part of taking on this role as Lord of the Underworld.
The following weekend these folks that MG had met came up. Their names were Devaka and Kai—they were New Age Tantrikas, and these folks were really into the sexuality scene. So that’s where they intersected with us. At that time we were very active in the polyamory community, from the CAW/Pagan perspective. We attended a lot of workshops and conferences around sacred sexuality, and there would be these other folks coming from the opposite side of the world from us, from this Hindu-based mythology.
So, they showed up and I met them. We went down to the river and were hanging out. Devaka is one of these people who names other people. It was a big thing in their own community to give new names to people. Nobody could keep the name they came in with. A new name would be given to them as a part of some kind of initiation ritual. So, when she was introduced to me, she said something remarkable: “Well, I don’t really see you as an Otter. When I look at you, I see . . . Oberon.” She laid it all out with a magickal intensity.
And I felt it. I felt this mantle of an identity settle over me like a cloak on my shoulders. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon was the King of the Faeries, and the whole mystique of that fit in with the Hades aspect that I’d been given—and I had to hold that energy for the next year.
I’d given the name Oberon to a cat and a Unicorn, so I liked the name, though I’d never thought about claiming it for myself. But the way Devaka laid it on me was something that I found irresistible. So I asked Kai, who had experience with this sort of thing, to baptize me with the new name. And so there in the Rushing River, Morning Glory, Devaka, and Kai submerged me under the water, then raised me up and bequeathed on me the new name of Oberon.
MG: It was just the weirdest time for both of us. I was spending a lot of my time traveling around the country and promoting Mythic Images as well as being involved in my relationships with Talyn and Wolf. Our relationship with Diane had imploded, and it seemed like OZ and I hardly had any time together anymore. I had brought up a couple of interesting people to visit us from the International Sex Symposium where I had been on a panel about polyamory. Oberon and I still made the effort whenever possible to bring new people into each other’s lives. But I must admit that I was somewhat taken aback when he just totally went along with the renaming thing that Devaka had put out to him. I was sort of hornswoggled into the role of helper in this baptism rite, but I just figured it would be sort of a special magickal name that he would use in special ceremonies or whatever. When he announced that he was permanently changing his name to Oberon, I was utterly flummoxed.
For one thing, he had no real background in Faerylore, and to take on a name of power like that without doing your homework seemed like rank folly to me. I had been doing quite a lot of research on the Fey since I had gotten into this Fairy partnership with Talyn and his family. One thing I learned right away is that the “Gentry” can really resent hubris, so someone with no previous experience in their universe turning up and taking the name of a famous King seemed the height of hubris. The last thing you want to do is to piss off the Faeries. I felt like there was so much chaos in our life at that point, it was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
Then of course everyone seemed to expect me to change my name to Titania! That was ridiculous; no woman in her right mind with a forty-eight-inch bust names herself Titania unless she is a porn star or a stripper. Not that I have anything against either of those professions, mind you, but I had spent most of my life as Morning Glory; I had put a lot of energy into building my reputation as Morning Glory. Why in the world would I ever want to risk angering the Gentry by taking the name of a Queen?
I guess I was so amazed that OZ would just up and do something this important and irreversible without even talking it over with me. We always step aside and consult with each other before we make some life-changing decision. But he was completely adamant. I came to believe that he felt so beleaguered with Diane and the Green Egg and CAW problems that he had just decided he was not going to listen to any more criticism from anyone about anything, myself included. The way he went about taking this name for himself seemed like he was drawing his line in the sand; he came to equate it as “taking back his power.” Now as a woman and a student of Goddess lore, I know how important that process can be, and so in the end I just shrugged my shoulders and said it was his life and his choice.
OZ: But the new name did affect my life in a very significant way, as things like that do. It set my feet on a different path. From that point things really changed in nearly every aspect of my life—both positive and negative. And where I am now is a place where Oberon is, but Otter could not have been.
NARRATOR: Morning Glory continued her cross-country relationship with Wolf, and began to look for ways to continue to see him without having to travel so much.
MG: My relationship with Wolf was absolutely wonderful. We had a ball together. He and Talyn just drove me nuts. Between the two of them I was living in a state of peak experiences all the time. I wrote more poetry and was more creative and really present and just happy and wildly productive during that period of my life than I have been probably at any other time period—except for the time when I first met Oberon and fell in love with him. New relationship energy is powerful stuff; the oxytocin pheromones are pretty psychedelic.
OZ: Morning Glory made several trips to Texas to be with Wolf. Up to that point I hadn’t had a chance to get to know him. He had been hanging out with her entirely, and they had just been in their own little world. They were having this big, mad fling. I just stepped back and watched the fur fly. They were corresponding and calling each other all the time and having these long, passionate phone conversations. But I wasn’t in on any of that, though quite often MG would drag me off to the bedroom for wild sex after one of these sessions. She was pretty hot most of the time, and I certainly enjoyed the benefits of that state of mind. Our erotic relationship went into some wild and wooly territory during that period.
MG: When I met Wolf, he was living in Houston. I started courting him, and he and I formed this powerful, passionate relationship. I said to Oberon, “Look, we’ve done it your way. We’ve had the two-women-and-one-man situation. Let’s see if I can’t find you a co-husband here. I want it to go my way for a while. Let’s try two husbands.”
And he went, “Well, I’m game. Good luck!” Because he’s always been more of a woman’s man. He’s always gotten along better with women than with men. But Wolf and I had this powerful sex-magick thing going on—a dark, kinky energy, and a lot of juice.
OZ: The crucial thing is that all of us were open in not resisting in any way whatever connections might be made. And so we simply found them by allowing them to emerge. We don’t have any kind of built-in limit on how far we’re willing to go. We’re willing to go however far somebody else is up for going. So if somebody is really ready to ride it all the way, well, we’ll ride it all the way too.
NARRATOR: Wolf was able to get a transfer within the company that he was working for from Texas to San Francisco, and so he made the big move to the West Coast. When he first arrived, he lived in the city itself and, for a while, shared an apartment with Morning Glory’s daughter, Gail. (Wolf’s own daughter remained behind with his ex-wife. After that he continued to pay child support, but would only see her when she would come out from Texas in the summer to visit.) On his days off, he would ride his motorcycle up north to see MG.
OZ, now Oberon Z, was not left alone while his marriage to Diana was breaking up and MG was with Wolf—he always had someone else to be with. But then someone new entered his life that completely surprised him, and her name was Liza. She lived on the East Coast at the time.
LIZA GABRIEL: Oberon was in love with one of the other members of my community. And she set us up. The particular situation was they were supposed to do a presentation together at an East Coast Pagan festival. And my friend called up Oberon and said, “I can’t make it to this thing. I’m really sorry. But I know someone who’ll do a great job—you’re gonna love her.”
OZ: We started corresponding. In our correspondence we planned workshops we could do together so that we would have a presence at the con. It was like a blind date, but a little bit more involved.
LIZA: Before Oberon ever got there, we were already aligning magically, and our values were coming to the fore. We were planning to meet at Craftwise in Waterbury, Connecticut, and do some workshops together. So we concocted the Pool Water-Sharing Ritual by phone. And then we met at the house of the people who ran Craftwise, the night before the festival began. I was coming from Massachusetts, where I lived then.
OZ: I flew out to Hartford, and was picked up and taken to a farmhouse out in the country. It had a huge kitchen, but the rest of the rooms were small. There was already quite an interesting crowd of people there, including Janet and Stewart Farrar. They lived in Ireland, and it was their first visit to America. I sat on the living room floor—there were only so many sofas and chairs and there were a lot of people—and began telling stories with Stewart and having a fine old time. My back was to the front door. And the door behind me opened, and suddenly I just felt a presence. It was like a psychic thing. I rose up in a spiral from where I was sitting and turned around, and there was Liza right behind me. We locked eyes and embraced.
That night all the guests were stacked like cordwood around the farmhouse. Wall-to-wall bedrolls like sausages. Liza and I managed to squeeze in. We didn’t have sex—it was just a nice cuddle-pile.
LIZA: The next night we stayed in a hotel; we consummated our relationship (we didn’t even know we were going to be lovers), and then we did the ritual. It was a powerful magical working for us personally, because we really became a Priest and Priestess as we were becoming lovers.
OZ: Liza and I did other workshops—some together and some individually. But we put on a full slate of stuff. After the weekend was over, we went back to her place and we tripped on acid and got connected on deep levels.
LIZA: The center of my attraction to Oberon, and probably the center of his attraction to me, was that we were both intoxicated by serving community, and by being Visionaries. It wasn’t simply personal, although there was definitely a lot of personal erotic passion there. It was fueled by this greater Vision. That was why I went to such extraordinary extremes to enhance and preserve our relationship. It wasn’t just a relationship. It was a Vision and a Calling.
My roots were always in yoga, energy, Kundalini, and all of those kinds of things. Oberon and I were so intoxicated by the vision of planetary consciousness that we barely noticed that we had very little in common personally. These kinds of relationships are so unusual. They don’t fit into a pattern that allows people to understand them easily. I was already deeply immersed in magical and sexual work, and I was already leading erotic ritual very successfully. It wasn’t that I became that way when I met him. I saw him as a partner in that. I saw him as my Priest. When a true Priest shows up in her life, a Priestess doesn’t squabble. She says “yes” in whatever way she can. During our first Ecstasy trip, at the most intimate, intense moment when the first rush of the drug was coming over us, he asked in a magical voice of command, “Are you ready for me in your life?” I said yes. And that was before I visited his home and met Morning Glory.
Entering the Zells’ home for the first time, already madly in love with Oberon and knowing he returned that passion, I inwardly wept. Later when I helped Oberon and Morning Glory move out of the Old Same Place, I witnessed that the corner where their long-deceased great horned owl, Archimedes, had perched had never been cleaned and there were years of owl poop soaked into the bookcase and magazines beneath. Also their possum, who slept in the bottom of the linen closet, had never been entirely housebroken.
Presented with this scene and the chaos it implied, I did what any red-blooded American girl would do. I went on a ritualized LSD trip with the two of them, had sex with Morning Glory on short acquaintance, and acted as if all that was happening was normal. In short, I swept an enormous pile of excrement under the rug from the very start, just as my hosts were doing.
Morning Glory was warm, welcoming, and met me at the airport with roses, yet the atmosphere that unfolded was one of vivid magick, erotic play, intimate psychedelic ritual, and the beauty of the river and surrounding wooded hills, coupled with grinding poverty and entrenched conflict.
The morning after I arrived at the Old Same Place, the caretakers at Annwfn called. A bear and her cub had been breaking into people’s homes. The caretaker had to shoot them both. Oberon and Morning Glory were the only ones in the tribe who knew how to skin and butcher a bear and harvest its magical parts. They never succeeded in passing this messy art down to any of the young people.
So off we went in their little old Toyota to the sacred land to butcher the bear. On the way, Morning Glory began to scream at Oberon. I do not remember the content, but even with her vast experience, and the fact that she was so in love with Talyn, it can’t have been easy for her to see Oberon so besotted with a person who didn’t seem to her like quite the right match.
When she left the car for a moment, I said to Oberon, “Don’t say anything, just let her go on.” And with those words I entered into codependent entanglement. There was no way I could have understood at that moment how deep and karmic their bond went. They had vowed at their handfasting to be bound in this and all future incarnations. To be tangled up with the two of them was a level of challenging complexity that I am still working out.
Oberon told me he loved me completely and yet, at the same time, the kind of relationship he could have with me was entirely dependent on how well I got on with Morning Glory. Yet I think it was evident to Morning Glory that the train had already left the station and the wreck was already well under way. Both Morning Glory and I were in impossible positions, and we proceeded to make the best of it with discomfort and yet mutual deep respect for a decade.
At the time, I was alarmed by some of the rancor of Oberon and Morning Glory’s conflicts, and over time I came to witness a number of women in Oberon’s life come completely unhinged. I guess I might have seemed a bit unhinged myself occasionally, although I did not exhibit the dramatic breakdowns I saw in others. What would it be like to bind yourself eternally to Oberon as Morning Glory had done? I might scream myself under those circumstances. I am not sure what it is about him that inspires women to madness, but if I had to guess, I would say the talent for holding an irrational position unswervingly under any and all circumstances.
I dove headfirst into certain disaster. That was something Morning Glory and I shared. You can say whatever you want about psychological health and self-esteem, but no one and nothing trumps love—not even death, as the Song of Solomon reminds us. This seems like a romantic cliché from the outside, and it is. At the same time, from the inside, it’s a doorway into Mystery.
Then I came back again for like six weeks. It was not just me who was in this obsessive state. Oberon was there too. Every time he could get a ticket back East paid for by someone else, he would come and spend a week at my house with me, and then we would lead workshops and rituals together at East Coast festivals like Rites of Spring and Starwood. I remember Oberon saying to me at the time, “I never thought that at fifty I would have this kind of experience.” In other words, being so completely immersed in another human being. We were totally enamored of each other. When he met me, he said, “When I dive into you, there is no bottom.”
We both fell all over ourselves and made many sacrifices in order to spend time together. Oberon continually found excuses to go to the East Coast, which I think contributed to his problems at Green Egg and CAW, because he was somewhat distracted from his responsibilities. He met them, but if he had been more on his watch he would have seen some of those problems coming in a way that perhaps he didn’t.
NARRATOR: And there were more surprises in store for everyone when a young woman named Wynter joined the ever-expanding circle of lovers that centered around MG and OZ. (And it did indeed center around them—they were the primary couple, and no matter how many other people each of them would be involved with, the Zells always knew that they would remain together.)
OZ: In February of ’96—right after her seventeenth birthday—Wynter showed up at our house. She had been one of the kids who had sort of hung around the edges of the Tribe. Her family was not part of the Church of all Worlds, but many of her teen girlfriends were. She wasn’t known as Wynter at that time. But then she went away for a while—she just disappeared.
When she showed up again, she had undergone such a complete transformation that many people didn’t even realize that it was the same person: she was totally different from the awkward little girl who had been around before. She showed up on our doorstep and told Morning Glory, “I’ve been hanging around this group for years, and I’ve been watching all the grown-ups. And you’re the one that I most wanna grow up to be like. So I wanna be your apprentice and your protégé. And I wanna learn to be like you. And I won’t go away!”
WYNTER: When I was nine, my parents got divorced. After that I went back and forth between my parents. When I was thirteen, I lived with my mom and went to school in Laytonville, California. In school I met another oddball, and she introduced me to her parents, who were Pagan and members of the Church of All Worlds. I started getting into trouble with this young woman—just basic teenage girl stuff like going out, getting drunk, and staying out all night with boys. She and I went to a Brigid festival and had a lot of fun with other Pagan kids. At this particular gathering, by choice, I lost my virginity. In my opinion it was the best place in the world to have done that—it wasn’t like I was on the couch in the basement watching Jeopardy! And my first experience was really awesome.
I was fourteen, going on fifteen. I ended up moving in with that young woman and her family. So I went away and didn’t have any contact with the Church of All Worlds for about two years.
After my seventeenth birthday I returned—at that point I had changed my physical appearance so much that nobody recognized me. I was a new person and had assumed a new name to go along with that. I had dyed my blondish/reddish curls black and returned as a Goth girl. I wore all black all the time.
MG: Wynter was a young woman who had grown up near us and had wanted to be part of the Church of All Worlds, but her mom got cross-ways with some of the folks and kept her apart from us. But Wynter had still admired us and longed to be part of the community the whole time. Finally, it turned out that she and I had a lover in common. She asked him to bring her over to my house, and so he dropped her off. She showed up on my front doorstep and told me that she wanted to be my apprentice. I was busy trying to pack to go back to Georgia for a Goddess presentation and for a visit with Talyn and family, and I really couldn’t afford to spend time visiting with anyone just then, but she asked me to tell her all I needed to do. Then she said if I let her come in and visit with me that evening, that she would help me pack my Goddess collection and iron some of my silk shirts. What could I say! Here was this adorable Gothy gamine begging to be part of my life! We visited and worked at packing and whatnot and found that she and I totally clicked, even though it turned out that she really didn’t know how to iron silk at that point. When I found out how old she was, I kept the visit as platonic as possible, but we still ended up talking until late into the night and beginning the process of a long, slow fall into love.
This new relationship with Wynter was just the most unlikely Autumn/Spring–type thing, and Talyn was extremely wary about it when I told him, mostly because of her age, I think. But various folks’ reservations notwithstanding, I hired her to work for me making statues for Mythic Images, and later that same month we got her mom’s permission to let her move in with us in the spare room.
Talyn may have had his doubts about the situation, but Wolf was another matter. When I told him about Wynter, he just lit up like he had a premonition, so I told him that I would be happy to introduce them at Beltane. Wolf and I had a wonderful partnership. We were lovers and just all kinds of co-conspirators. But that very special kind of soul relationship that I have with Oberon was not something Wolf and I had together. I knew that he was going to be looking for a woman that he could have that with. I hoped it could be with a woman who got along with me, too.
OZ: But at that time Wynter was seventeen. And we were very concerned about the whole underage thing. So before they began a serious relationship, Wolf went to her mother on Mother’s Day and basically asked for permission to begin a relationship with her daughter. It was all beautiful, romantic, and totally cool.
WYNTER: I met Wolf at Beltane, which was the week before Mother’s Day. Then Wolf and I went to my mom with a bouquet of roses and took her out to lunch, where he formally asked my mother’s permission to be with me romantically. She really grilled him. And he was as charming as he could be, and Wolf can be very charming. So he won her over.
OZ: So we talked about different possibilities for extending our family. And the one that was the most exciting and promising involved the V-M Ranch, where we’d held the CAW Grand Convocation in 1992. The V-M Ranch was ninety-four acres; it had woods and a ten-acre pond; and there was a huge house that had been built by Chester Van Atta. He had been an aerospace engineer and an inventor, and worked on the Van de Graaff high-voltage generator. Originally V-M stood for Van Atta and another owner. But since the lead character in the book that had inspired the whole CAW, Stranger in a Strange Land, was named Valentine Michael Smith, these initials seemed auspicious to us; and so, in our typical fashion of renaming things to suit our own mythos, we called the place the “Valentine Michael Ranch”—which allowed us to retain the original initials.
LIZA: Oberon and I had this period of long-distance romance which was about a year and a half in length. And then there was this period when I had decided to move to the West Coast. I almost pleaded with Oberon, “Can’t I just move to Marin County and live in my own apartment?” But he wouldn’t have it. He was fixated on us all living up on the Ranch. I became a willing accomplice to that determination.
In 1996 I drove cross-country and showed up on his birthday. I had already given the Van Attas the deposit. I already knew where I was going to live. And so we all moved to the Ranch together and into that house. And they presented me with Wynter. I had no choice. I was never asked about Wynter. They simply presented me with the fact that Wynter was also moving in. So I tried to get to know her. I remember saying to Wynter at the time, “These people can’t take care of themselves; how can they take care of you?”
OZ: So we moved into the V-M Ranch. There was an enormous garage that we set up our statuary business in. Originally designed to accommodate two entire families, the house had essentially two wings. There was a central area that had a living, dining room, and kitchen, all of which were very spacious, and there was a huge fireplace. Then at opposite ends of it there were these two bedroom wings, which each had two huge bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, and stuff like that. So Liza and I took one end of it, and Morning Glory and Wynter took the other end. And so there we were, all cozy! The offices of CAW Central and Green Egg, along with about five other CAW members, also moved onto the V-M Ranch.
LIZA: Mythic Images was a cottage industry before any of us came on the scene. And Morning Glory had founded it. At the Old Same Place they molded statues in the kitchen, so the kitchen was sometimes full of noxious chemicals. (It wasn’t always like that—they didn’t pour molds every day.) Friends would come over and they would pay them by the piece to sand down the statues and detail them.
That business continued when we went to the V-M Ranch. Imiri was the head production person and worked on the statues. At one point the power went out in our all-electric house for four days in the middle of winter. And it was a very bad winter, and it rained practically the whole four days. We ran out of firewood, and there was none to be obtained in the county. So we were walking around in the rain, picking up pieces of dead trees that were soaking wet, bringing them into the house to set by the fire until they were dry enough to go into the fire. Because it was the only place that was warm enough to dry out the statues, the whole Mythic Images assembly line was happening in the living room of the V-M Ranch House. It was quite a scene. We had to make statues because it was right before one of the big festivals we sold at, and we had to have merchandise.
It was the formation of TheaGenesis LLC, the actual legal corporation, that Wolf and I had a part in. This was the Clinton era, and we were optimistic.
Wolf was living in San Francisco. He was Gail’s roommate at the time. He didn’t live with us. But both Morning Glory and Wynter were commuting down to see him. So I made an offer to Wolf. I said, “How much child support are you paying? What are the monthly expenses that you absolutely cannot do without?” I said I would loan TheaGenesis the money so that he could move to the Ranch and make it into a legitimate business, which he did.
Actually that was not in my best interest. Wolf and I never got along. But at that time I was a creature of the group energy. I saw the group’s well-being as more important than my own.
WOLF: When I met Morning Glory and Oberon, they were kind of doing the stuff with the statues, but they weren’t doing it real well. They weren’t making very much money on it. After their move to the V-M Ranch, the business was in limbo; it was out of money, out of stock, and with no orders. So I helped generate orders, modernize the bookkeeping, and put it together as a legal, straightforward business structure.
OZ: Since we had created this intentional family and were all living together, the obvious thing to do was to come up with a new last name that we could all adopt simultaneously rather than people just taking mine or something. So we started trying to come up with something that would be suitable. We tossed around a lot of ideas, but nothing really came to the fore.
MG: Then, all of a sudden, we were visited by ravens. There was this huge colony of ravens that you saw everywhere flying around. They were quite prominent. But at first we didn’t really take them too seriously in that regard. They were just part of the landscape.
OZ: We were driving to Las Vegas and stopped to have a lunch at a picnic ground in Death Valley. While we were sitting at the picnic table, this raven flew down and landed on the table right in front of us and started “talking” to us, and asking for handouts. That was pretty trippy. We had a box of Cheez-Its, which is one of the little snacky things that we like. (It’s a snackrament in the CAW!) So I took a Cheez-It and held it out to the raven. And she took it out of my fingers very delicately. She put it down on the table in front of her. And then she looked up at me and cocked her head as if to say, “How about another one?” So I handed her another one. And she carefully stacked it on top of the first one.
I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” So I handed her another one. When she had a stack of about four Cheez-Its, she carefully put her beak around them and flew off. We figured that she must have a nest and babies that she was taking them back to. A few minutes later she flew back again. We kept giving them to her and she didn’t fly away. She kept stacking them until she had quite a big stack, all neatly piled on top of each other. She could barely open up her beak wide enough to contain them. But she did. And finally she took the whole stack of Cheez-Its and flew away.
MG: Back home again at the V-M Ranch, we started looking up the mythology of what “Raven” was about. Who is Raven? I knew him as the North American trickster bird and as the Norse God Odin and the Celtic Goddess Morrigan’s companion. But then I found out that in many traditions he is a conveyer of Magick! He is the shadow that steals the sun, and is the messenger that carries the Magick from the place where it’s conceived to the place where it needs to be delivered and dropped off. He is a very important character in many cultures. And if tricks and humor are part of it, that’s because he’s a communicator. Humor is a great lubrication for communication. Sometimes you have to play tricks and amuse people to get your point across.
OZ: We looked more into ravens and came to realize how cool they are, and how incredibly intelligent. They are regarded in many cultures in different parts of the world as birds of wisdom and intellect. So we thought, “Ravens would be a pretty cool totem animal for us.”
MG: And Liza was doing a lot of heart chakra work. So she was talking about, “Well, whatever the name is, it’s got to be about the heart because that’s what we are: a bunch of hopeless romantics who have ended up together. We’re as different as can possibly be. And yet we’re coming from a place of Love. Because Love is the only universal solvent that will dissolve the boundaries and allow us to manifest our dreams and our hearts’ desires.”
Finally I had an epiphany. I said, “I understand what it is. We are Ravenhearts. Raven is about communication, and about Darkness and Magick. And we are beings of the Heart and of Love. And this Family is about Love and the Heart. We’re about communicating what Victor Anderson always called ‘the Dark Heart of Innocence.’ We’re about communicating the Secrets of Love, and being able to transmit and translate the Mysteries of the Heart into the world.”
OZ: At that point we all agreed to adopt Ravenheart for the Family name. And so it was.