Tribulations and
Transformations, Part 1—
The Shadow Side of a Sex-Positive Religion
It’s the sovereign state of confusion
When She shows Her darkest Face.
Where’s the One who loves us?
Who’s this bitch that’s in Her place?
The shit flies thick and heavy,
We cry and clutch our breast.
It’s only Mamma Kali come
To shake us out of our nest.
—from “a greeting to old friends—the kali yuga song,”
by diane darling, 1987
NARRATOR: With great freedom comes great responsibility. Oberon and Morning Glory had consciously unmoored their sexuality from the constraining mores of the mainstream, and while it was joyous for their family, it caused far more problems within CAW than any of them could have foreseen. They were about to come into close conflict with the shadow side of a sex-positive lifestyle and spirituality.
So far this book has had many twists and turns, but none quite like these. The events that you will be reading about in this chapter were spread out over many years and happened concurrently with what was going on in previous and following chapters. Perceived improprieties among Hippies who just decades before had all lustily embraced free love became a wedge that began to drive people apart, eventually destroying Green Egg and even the Church of All Worlds itself.
Let’s back up a bit. The first time the compost hit the fan was in 1992 on the V-M Ranch. This was where the Ravenhearts would end up living years later, but at the time Orion was calling it home, and OZ and Morning Glory had not yet even met Talyn, Wolf, Liza, or Wynter. The CAW decided to hold their thirtieth anniversary Grand Convocation and annual meeting there.
OZ: The V-M Ranch at that time was not well known to many of us, but it seemed like a good place to hold a larger gathering because Annwfn is too small, with a more fragile ecosystem; consequently, it has a ceiling of around a hundred people. But the V-M Ranch was ninety-four acres of gentle, rolling grasslands dappled with lovely mixed deciduous and pine forest; it even had a huge pond. It was around the first of August. We had rituals, workshops, entertainment, and music. We swam in the ten-acre pond. We had a campground. We built a big stage.
For the main ritual, Lance and I came into the center of the Circle and shared water, in commemoration of our first water-sharing ritual thirty years earlier. Then we invited the next people who had shared water with us, and the next, and we kept on doing that, inviting people from subsequent years to come forward, until everybody was in the center. And we did a working that this beautiful land would come into our hands and become a new home for us. We had all fallen in love with it. We had such powerful energy that there was a great magickal working for that.
We also scheduled a “tea dance.” The idea was that everybody would come in lingerie and have a big dance party. That was something that Diane’s long-lost cousin, Andy Conn, came up with. He had a lot of interesting ideas. He had been involved in the edgy, men’s group kind of stuff, so he was bringing a certain other kind of energy into the thing that hadn’t previously been much a part of our traditions. But as far as I was concerned, everything was welcome. And evidently, tea dances had already been held successfully at both Pagan Spirit Gathering and the Ancient Ways festivals, nudist camps, and elsewhere, so there was precedent.
A lingerie party seemed like a cool idea. Most of the time we would just be naked. We had a skinny-dipping pond and mudbaths. But dressing up seemed like fun, and everybody brought stuff. There were whole boxes full of lingerie that people brought so that everyone would have something. The kids especially really got into it—they thought it was fun to dress up. And everyone had a real blast, strutting their stuff on the little stage to a great mix of music.
ANDY CONN: I was in a polyamorous relationship with Anodea Judith and Richard Ely, and I was pretty active in the Church of All Worlds. I was asked to do an event for the convocation. I had been involved for a long time in the all-night dance movement, including the early rave movement, going all the way back to 1975 when it was primarily gay and bisexual men and women. So what I decided to do was put on what was sort of like a rave, but the ultimate object was to get everyone into a trance state through dance and movement. There was another member of the Church who went by the name of Mongo, who was an aerobics instructor and a beautiful gay man. He and I decided to put on this trance dance together.
The mix of music was created by Rick Hamouris, along with Mongo and me. Rick had a recording studio and was also in the CAW. Rick had written the all-time classic Pagan song “We Are a Circle,” so he had a divine place in the Pagan community. We choreographed a number of different songs where there would be costume changes. We also enlisted Zack, Diane’s son, and this was his first actual encounter with the rave movement. I had sort of taken Zack under my wing at about that time. My son Nick was also involved. They were both about fifteen or sixteen. They were sort of enlisted to do art projects during this—do paintings and create sculptures along with a lot of the other Pagan kids.
Now, the whole theme of it was “Come as Your Favorite Fantasy.” And, in the typical way that the Church of All Worlds puts on events, Tom Williams put in the flyer, “Come in Lingerie.” Well, the flyer wasn’t changed.
NARRATOR: There was also some confusion as to the timing of the dance; Morning Glory and Andy Conn both remember the tea dance as having been scheduled after the main ritual, but they were swapped, with the dance occurring under the blazing sun of a hot August day, and the main ritual occurring closer to dusk, which was not optimal for either event.
ANDY CONN: So I put on the tea dance with music that was primarily from the early rave culture. And I began to put people into a trance through music, through sound, through dancing, and through the outrageous costumes that we were using. People started coming up on the stage and dancing; people started losing their inhibitions, and I brought everyone into a sort of Dionysian state.
But it was broad daylight. Now it should have been done at night. People did things that I believe they probably wouldn’t have done if they weren’t in a trance state. There was an incredible energy that went through this. So the rave went on for I would guess about an hour and a half. Once it ended, and people started coming out of the trance, they said, “Oh my god, there were children around.” But there was no blatant sexuality, with the exception of my son and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend making out onstage.
For god’s sake, sixteen-year-olds make out in public! There were little kids all dressed in ribbons and things like that. They all seemed to be having a good time. There was certainly no inappropriate behavior between anyone that was a minor and anyone over eighteen.
OZ: Some people apparently felt that if word got out about it, their children could be taken away from them. Morning Glory and I found this utterly baffling. It seemed to be a problem only for the adults and not for the kids. We talked to the kids about it, which nobody else was doing. They said they had loved it. Everybody had a good time. There was nothing that we considered to be sexual. But a few people did, including Orion and Tom Williams—Tom didn’t even have any kids, but Orion had a daughter.
At the CAW annual meeting on Sunday, which was very large, the question of whether or not this was moral became the central issue and bone of contention. At that time Tom Williams was president of the board. He started shouting at me, and accusing me of not having appropriate boundaries. I shouted back at him that my boundaries were around not doing harm, and there was no harm done of any sort. Who was harmed? It degenerated into a shouting match, and it became really horrible.
ANDY CONN: Cerridwen Fallingstar got quite upset that there were children present at this. And the next day they decided to have this huge town meeting, where they sort of tried to pillory Mongo and me. It was right out of The Crucible. It was a wonderful sham sort of mock court, and they made Mongo cry. The two people who came to support us, in their old truck pulling up the hill to get to this meeting, were Jack and Ace, who were both in the early Pirate movement. And so those guys stood with me and said, “Get over it. It was a successful ritual.”
I stand by that, by the way. Quite frankly, I was absolutely thrilled with the outcome of the ritual. It achieved everything I possibly wanted to achieve. It put everyone in an altered state, and everyone had a blast while they were in that altered state. No one was harmed. And probably the only mistake was Tom Williams putting “Everyone Come in Lingerie” rather “Come as Your Favorite Fantasy” in the program book. The tea dance was a grand success. Twenty years later, people are still coming up to me and telling me they were there.
OZ: The odd thing was that nobody had objected to it beforehand. It was in the program. And people had been walking around naked all weekend. During the event nobody had come forward and said, “Stop! This can’t go on!”
NARRATOR: Perhaps the backlash had something to do with their fears of how Pagans would appear to the outside world. A photographer on assignment from National Geographic magazine was attending and photographing the convocation that weekend as part of a larger project; he was asked to surrender the roll of film he’d taken of the tea dance because certain CAW members realized it could appear fairly scandalous, and he complied. His piece ultimately never ran in the magazine.
DIANE DARLING: People were pretty upset that lingerie-based dancing was publicly exposed, because we all knew the photographer was there. It was a little bit more risqué, I think, than what a lot people expected. Accusations were hurled, and so on and so forth. I’d say it was at that point that the integrity of the convocation started to fall apart. It was stupid to have an outdoor event in Laytonville in August. People were getting way too hot. I don’t think anybody actually went to the hospital, but we had people who were fainting from the heat and from not having enough water. Things were kind of tense after that.
OZ: Another thing that happened that set a tone at that time was that Joi Wolfwomyn came to the convocation. I don’t remember what prompted this, but she came forward at this meeting and made an appeal for the acceptance in our community of BD/SM. But at this time, BD/SM was really a bone of contention. Morning Glory in particular just came down on Joi like a ton of bricks. She was an outraged feminist, and questioned how BD/SM could possibly be justified in our community. She equated it with abuse. It was quite intense, and became an awful shouting match between them. There were a lot of tears and a lot of anguish.
MG: The reason I reacted so badly to Joi Wolfwomyn’s statements was that seeing her bruised body being proudly flaunted brought up all my unresolved anger at my father for abusing my mother and at my mother for letting herself be abused. It was a visceral, automatic reaction from someone who had experienced that sort of pain involuntarily. Later I came to understand that BD/SM is the arena that a lot of people use to work through their trauma and desensitize themselves to their own memories of suffering. Eventually I began to experiment with it myself, and I came to see what a valuable tool it could be. But changing my tune in this department led to the loss of a number of friends and lovers who had the same reaction to me that I had to Joi. Later, at an Ancient Ways gathering, I literally got down on my knees and begged Joi to forgive me for my nonconsensual verbal abuse of her in public. Happily, she forgave me and reminded me that when you venture into dark waters, you become a mirror for people’s fears. So I ended up becoming as much of a projection screen for many of the CAW folks as Joi had been for me. Ain’t karma a bitch?
OZ: It was one of the very few times I have ever seen Morning Glory on the other side of that particular line. Ultimately this led into some incredibly transformative stuff for her. She ended up coming around full circle on this subject, eventually making a public apology to Joi, guest-editing a whole issue of Green Egg devoted to the theme, and becoming a major advocate of it.
That transformation also widened the gap. The same people who had been opposed to the tea dance remained on the opposite side from us on this issue. The fact that Morning Glory and I eventually came to accept something this outrageous became another reason why we were considered so immoral and reprehensible, and that we had no business being in charge of the CAW. This was the key event that had started the rift. It was the beginning of our disaffection.
It never occurred to me that the decision on whether or not somebody was being victimized would not be up to the alleged victim, but rather up to some third party to decide on their behalf—and over their objections. My feeling is, if somebody is not complaining about something that’s happening to them, then there is not a problem. And if you don’t like it, you can’t have any! But the parents of underage children feel that they have to be the overriding opinion about what is right and wrong for their kids, regardless of their kids’ opinions. Of course parents have to teach their kids these things from the time they are born, and where are you going to draw the line? Different people draw the line in different places.
ANDY CONN: Everyone always liked to shake their fingers at Oberon. I know that Oberon was the one who was always set up to take some sort of fall, or to be blamed for something, because Oberon always thought everything was a really good idea. “Hey, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that.” If anything, Oberon probably got scolded because he put his seal of approval on the tea dance.
OZ: I think it had to with the fact that we had a second generation of kids growing up in the Church. Suddenly, behavior that had been acceptable to the first generation of people, many of whom had come in themselves when they were young—now suddenly when they were parents and had teenage kids, they took a whole different attitude about it. And this is not an uncommon phenomenon in the world.
MG: I believe that the Feminist Revolution brought a spotlight on an aspect of human behavior that had destroyed many people’s lives and souls—and that is childhood sexual abuse. I believe that was the “elephant in the living room” in the brouhaha about the tea dance. We were in a phase in the social revolution where many people were examining their childhoods, and finding that they remembered being sexually abused as children, and were working on coming to terms with it.
I guess we were going through a period that was kind of a backlash against the whole sex-positive, free-love era of the ’60s. I found out that I was totally unique among most of my women friends in that I had never been molested as a child or raped as an adult. I was one of the few lucky ones. So my attitude that sex is a wonderful thing was really an off-key song to be singing at that particular time and place. I understand now that I lacked empathy with people who had experienced these traumas; I had certainly been physically abused, so I figured that I understood where they were coming from. But it is another whole territory that sexual abuse takes a person into—a territory of guilt and shame and obsessive needs for secrecy. Many of the people at the tea dance who had issues around sexuality and children had the same sort of visceral reaction to that experience as I’d had to Joi Wolfwomyn and the BD/SM issue.
This whole viewing of sex as a negative thing was the direct antithesis of what I have stood for all my life. I have always been loudly pro-sex and extremely critical of the American sexual double standard: “Do what I say, not what I do.” I have always felt that sex was a natural part of life, and that it was a healthy thing, and that parents should allow their kids to see the positive side of sexuality as well as educating them about the negative things. By this I don’t mean having sex with the kids, for heaven’s sake—just being open with them and allowing them to hang around where that kind of energy is happening and talking in positive ways about it.
I’ve always believed passionately that what is wrong in our society is that it is okay to expose your kids to gory violence, but if you expose them to even positive examples of sexuality, you can go to jail. I think it says a lot about how twisted and deformed the average American’s sense of right and wrong is. But then, on the other hand, I guess I was pretty much of a failure myself at that sort of thing with my daughter, since she was decidedly put off by my ideas and I definitely was out of the majority opinion in this circumstance.
NARRATOR: The 1992 “Tempest in a Tea Dance,” as it came to be called, seems to have set the stage for what happened later on in the decade: discord and uncomfortable feelings regarding the younger generation and their interactions with sexuality. But at least for Diane’s son, Zack, the tea-dance ritual turned out to be a very meaningful and influential experience. He is he now a popular Bay Area DJ, and he is also involved in theater and stage production and management.
ZACK DARLING: I’m one of the board members of the Health and Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa. That’s a 30,000-person music festival, and I’m in charge of the nighttime event called the Mystic Beat Lounge. The whole experience of growing up with Pagan gatherings warmed me up for what’s happening now, and it pretty directly tied into Otter.
The Earthdance Festival is an international festival for world peace. It happens in 350 cities in sixty different countries. The main one happens up in Laytonville. They’re huge, and the central event happens here in Northern California, and I do all the artwork and design for it. For me, I love the fact that this is ritual, this is ceremony, and it’s accessible to anyone. You don’t have to subscribe to any particular theology to be able to have a profound, enlightening experience.
NARRATOR: Sadly, the Tempest in a Tea Dance was not the only sexual scandal to rock the close-knit community; two more developed in this decade, one involving a man known as Red Daniel, and another involving a man known as Adam Walks-Between-Worlds.
It all started out innocently enough, as these things often do. Morning Glory began taking fencing classes in the early 1990s as a way of getting back in shape when she was recovering from her neck injury. She got involved with a group of people who got together regularly to practice the sport.
MG: One of the major players, in every sense of the word, in my life came into it through the fencing club. His name was Daniel Bloomfield, but we all called him Daniel the Red, or Red Daniel. He was a tall, tawny fox of a man with a lighthearted laugh and a cynical smile. He was kind of a guttersnipe, but he had his own funny sense of pride and strict code of honor. He was a superb artist and he was surprisingly literate, being self-educated about the same kind of science and history stuff that fascinated OZ and me.
He was brought to our Ostara Sabbat in 1992 by a mutual friend who owned our favorite pizza parlor in Ukiah. But he really started registering on-board when he showed up at the Old Same Place for fencing bouts. He connected easily with most of our gang. One day he and I had fenced several bouts together and worked up a lot of juicy energy, and then a bunch of us ended up over at Diane’s house watching old Conan movies. We had built up quite a charge, and so I invited him over to my house to play. I explained that Oberon and I had an open marriage and that we both had other lovers and that we liked to know the person the other one was with, but that it was okay.
He looked pretty dubious, but allowed himself to be drawn into the house. And then I introduced him to OZ and asked if it was convenient for us to use the bedroom for a while. OZ just grinned at us and said, “Sure.” So we disappeared into the back room and had a wonderful romp, and I discovered he was a very talented fencer in more ways than one. Later, OZ came in and joined us, and we all ended up having a great time and talking late into the night.
Over the years, Daniel and Oberon became quite good friends, though Daniel and Wolf never trusted each other. OZ and I got up to all manner of mischief with Daniel, and I came to love him dearly for his high-hearted romanticism that clashed with his world-weary cynicism—but, above all, for his roguish charm. Daniel, however, had some fatal flaws. It’s not that I was unaware of them; rather, it’s that with some I sympathized and others I thought he could learn to outgrow. Many a woman has wrecked her ship on a similar set of rocks. He was exactly the dashing and dangerous sort of scoundrel that appeals to a certain sort of woman regardless of her age. I was one of them, and there were several others. However, one of Daniel’s problems lay in that he was not concerned about age when it came to the women in his life. He liked them whether they were young or old—and nobody cared much when he liked them old, but when he liked them young, it created no end of problems.
The “age of consent” is a thorny problem that has no set answer. The age even varies from state to state, with some being as young as fourteen and others being as old as twenty-one. Of course, the problem with all this is that chastity is a kind of Pandora’s box, and no matter how many rules society makes, when it comes to the power of the force of sexuality, most of these rules are pretty unenforceable. If they were not, there would be no teenage pregnancy. But the laws that have been written on this subject can be extremely draconian if you happen to step over the wrong line in the wrong state. Many a young man languishes in jail not because he forced a young lady, but because her parents caught them having a good time together. The fact that she may have even been the instigator has no force whatsoever in a court of law when it comes to the crime of statutory rape.
I grew up asserting my sexuality at a pretty young age—fifteen, I believe it was, when I happily flung my virginity to the winds. I suppose it might have been quite a scandal if I had ever been caught, but I wasn’t, so it wasn’t, if you take my meaning. I have always enjoyed the company of older men and women; I found them wiser and more caring than most kids my own age. I learned about life and about love from these people in my teens and I was never molested, coerced, or harmed in any way. I never got pregnant or was given a disease, and I learned a lot about compassion as well as passion. So I was very much in the minority of most women’s experience in that arena. I felt strongly that young women past the age of reason should have the right to choose their lovers and it was nobody’s business but theirs with whom they chose to share their bodies and their hearts. This was the strong and somewhat rebellious stance of an Aphrodite Priestess, and the Goddess Hecate herself couldn’t have said it in a more straightforward manner.
Of course, the world is littered with the broken hearts and ruined lives of women who did not have my good fortune and who were terribly abused and taken advantage of by men who were old enough to know better but who didn’t really care. Of course, just as many girls have been taken advantage of by guys their own age too; so this is why there is such a tremendous negative charge around teenage sexuality, especially where girls are concerned.
The word sex is a neutral word; it is biological in nature. It does not have any positive or negative moral or emotional attachments by itself. But no other word in the English language is so fraught with both positive and negative associations for people. Americans in particular are obsessed with sex—perhaps because of our Puritan background. We are either engaged in decrying rampant sexuality or else furiously indulging in it. Sometimes people do both at the same time, in the sense that they like to indulge their own sexuality while decrying other people’s. This is usually done in a very hypocritical fashion, but it can also be done from a place of care and concern. Sometimes these things overlap and it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
When sexual abuse became such a huge national cause within the women’s movement and the psychological communities, the laissez-faire standards that I had grown up with in the ’60s changed radically. The ’60s radicals had become the parents of teenagers, and they did not want to see their daughters abused the way so many women had been. Our community had grown quite a crop of lovely young teenage girls, and since they had been raised Pagan in a sex-positive community, they were raring to go. In fact, it was a disaster waiting to be unleashed upon the community, and Red Daniel was going to be the spark that would blow everything to hell.
A number of the young women sought Daniel out and let him know that they were available, and he was only too happy to oblige them. He had a devil-may-care attitude and a naturally rebellious streak, so he felt that if these Pagans believed in the glories of sexuality and in women’s freedom of choice, then where was the problem?
Well, the problem was that the parents of the teenage girls had loved them since they were babies and did not want to see their daughters hurt or taken advantage of by a guy who didn’t really love them but only wanted to have sex with them. They felt that they were in charge of their daughters’ well-being until they were eighteen, and they were going to do everything they could to protect them from would-be scoundrels. They felt, in fact, pretty much like their parents had felt about them . . . if they were girls. There were boys in the community who had had liaisons with older women, and it generated little or no comment because, unfortunately, the double standard is just as present in the Pagan community as it is in the world at large.
At any rate, several of these young women looked up to me as a role model since I had such an “out there” and positive relationship with my sexuality. So when the girls started getting involved with Daniel or with other guys, they would often come to me as a Priestess to confide in me about the relationships. It was a somewhat awkward situation for me, because on one hand I was friends with some of their mothers and fathers, and at that point in their lives the girls frequently found themselves in an adversarial relationship with one or more of their parents around issues of sexuality.
But young people desperately need a reliable confidant at this time in their life—someone who will not judge them for their thoughts, feelings, or actions and who can validate their positive experiences, while at the same time giving them some necessary advice about how not to get in over their heads. In order to be a successful confidant, you have to have the credibility that comes with walking your talk.
So I became the Sister Confessor for a number of girls who were starting to experiment with their burgeoning sexuality. I listened and I advised, but mostly I listened. Often I counseled them to open up a dialogue with their parents, but under the Clergy Code of Confidentiality I could not convey any of these confidences directly to the parents. This is a difficult position to be put in, but it is strictly necessary to allow a confessor the right to be heard by a Priest or Priestess who absolutely will not violate their trust. This right to privacy has been upheld time and again by the courts of the United States and other countries all over the world. It is a sacred trust that holds even when someone confesses that they are engaged in a crime. All rules about mandatory reporting of crimes do not apply to Clergy Confidentiality, period.
Now, as I have said before, everyone has strong opinions on underage sexuality and almost everyone is convinced that their opinion is the one, true, right, and only way to view the subject, and anyone who disagrees with them is somehow morally defective. So I found myself sitting on a powder keg. Perhaps I should have refused to counsel the girls as a Priestess because I was involved with a man with whom some of them were also involved. But at the time, it seemed to me and Oberon and also to them that this gave me a unique insight into their situation—both the good parts and the problems. So I went ahead and took this on. Word soon spread about it, and at first some of the parents welcomed the situation because they agreed that I seemed to handle my sex life in a happy and responsible way. At one point, I even set up a sex-education evening where the young women who were coming or had come of age could learn more about the positive as well as the negative aspects of sexuality.
At first everything seemed to go well, but girls will be girls, and, as we know from the song, they just wanna have fun. So stuff was said and done after I had gone to bed alone in my room that created a huge brouhaha, and a number of the parents decided that I was no longer a trustworthy confidante for the girls. The firestorm started to pick up steam, and before long I found myself up before a meeting of the Clergy Council to explain my behavior or to be impeached. During that meeting, I was denounced by several people for my strict stance on Clergy Confidentiality, but attorneys were consulted about the laws and to everyone’s great surprise but mine, I had in fact acted impeccably and well within the letter of the law as well as its spirit. You might think that would end it, but it did not by a long shot.
Both Oberon and I sincerely advised the parents who were so violently upset to talk to the police if they felt they had a case. There was a Clergy vote, from which we abstained due to conflict of interest. The outcome was that Red Daniel was banished from attending Church functions, especially ones that took place on Annwfn.
OZ and I were pilloried for our friendship with him, and we were put in a very conflicted position. Though at that time we were both ready to cheerfully strangle both him and a couple of the girls, we both felt very strongly that there were principles of loyalty, friendship, and individual freedom of choice at stake. Also, the majority of the young women vigorously defended both us and Daniel at some of these CAW meetings, insisting that no harm had been done to them, and since we all gave credence to the Wiccan Rede—“An it harm none, do as thou wilt”—we found ourselves having to ask exactly what harm had been done.
As it turned out, the harm that had been done most dramatically was done by our compassionate support of the girls, which drove a wedge between them and some of their parents and the Church. This whole affair lasted for just a few years, until the girls turned eighteen, but it served to tear the Church apart and to bring a lot of discredit on us through a concerted campaign of rumors throughout the Pagan community. OZ and I were accused of everything from collusion in improprieties to out-and-out child molesting. We were appalled! Once a thing like that starts going, it’s like an avalanche, almost impossible to stop because people love to gossip and they especially love to hear terrible things about well-known people and eagerly pass them on without bothering to check whether or not they are true.
I did a lot of soul-searching before I made the decision to rake over these old coals in this book; and though I have made my peace with many of the people who disowned me at the time, I felt that there were lessons I learned from those experiences that needed to be shared lest others make the same mistakes. Ultimately, although your right to swing your fist ends at the place someone else’s nose begins, challenging the dragons of accepted traditions can be a painful and sometimes fatal game to play.
Red Daniel was a consummate player at that kind of dragon tag. He danced on the edge all the time. He flaunted his sexuality and his kinkiness, and he was a magnet for rebellious teenage girls. He also had some seriously damaged parts of his personality. He was so much into arguing with everybody about everything that he could never hold down a job for more than a couple of weeks at a time. He was so lacking in personal discipline that he could never succeed as an artist, in spite of considerable talent. And he sometimes liked to play around with more dangerous drugs than pot or acid. He romanticized the sleazier side of society much like a lot of modern rap artists and old blues singers. He was never happier than when he was running hell-bent-for-leather five feet away from the lynch mob. In short, he was what we call a “Weenie Wagger.”
Now, Oberon and I also have a certain amount of weenie-wagging tendencies—more so when we were much younger. It is a very typical adolescent attitude that took us a long time to grow out of, and some people like Daniel never grow out of it. Maybe the reason why he got along so well with teenagers was that fundamentally he still was one. He was an adolescent Peter Pan—the darker, scruffy one in the books, not the cleaned-up Disney version. This is a quality that can be somewhat endearing when one is young and dashing, but much less so the older one becomes. Eventually it can settle into middle-aged stubbornness and intractability, and much later into a grumpy old-manhood.
NARRATOR: The other controversial character was a talented Bard in their community.
OZ: Other significant conflicts arose in the fall of 1996, the most serious concerning one of our Bards, Adam Walks-Between-Worlds Rostoker, who stood accused of numerous improprieties around sexual manipulation (“Sleep with me, baby, and I’ll make ya a High Priestess!”). Unfortunately, those few of his victims who dared to break his imposed vow of silence to complain to members of the Clergy did so individually and in strict “Clergy confidence.” It was only when a few of us (MG, me, and Anodea) began to hear more than one complaint that we broke confidence and consulted with each other, leading to a big hearing and extensive, heated debate concerning the issues raised on all sides. At the hearing, nearly twenty victims showed up, and letters were read by that many more who could not attend in person. Due to the severity of the concerns, Adam resigned his position of Bard and was banished from the Church.
LIZA: Oberon and Morning Glory made a point of befriending people who were controversial. It was never their own behavior; it was the behavior of these controversial friends and Oberon and Morning Glory’s defense of them that really got them into trouble. Part of what so enraged the Clergy was that they virtually sacrificed themselves, and their reputations, in order to defend a few dubious characters, while neglecting people who perceived themselves as having been faithful and true to them for many, many years. I used to say to Oberon, “Why don’t you take Orion out and buy him a hamburger?” I doubt it would have made a difference, but he never did.
MAERIAN MORRIS: When people behave in this way, and they are the face of a minority, whether they are polyamorous people or members of a religious minority like Paganism, it really does not serve the community well. When you put in as much time as I did, breaking your bum to try to be of some service to something that you heartily treasure—the ideas of water-brotherhood, the ideas of the sacredness of the Earth and our responsibility to the Earth as a living creature, of which we’re all part—to have this happen is just demolishing to one’s sense of hope. I became conflicted over the use of the word Pagan; for one thing, it carried a lot of connotations that people didn’t even understand. And for another thing, if this was the way Pagans behaved, was I Pagan? What was I?
OZ: On February 20, 1997, Adam Walks-Between-Worlds was found shot to death in the home he was visiting in Orange County, California. Investigating detectives regarded the case as a homicide—a crime of passion. To this date, his murder remains unsolved.
NARRATOR: All of these personal incidents relating to their core values alienated OZ and Morning Glory from many of their closest friends and fellow CAW members. As you’ll see in the next chapter, the members of CAW and Green Egg were no longer simply small groups of friends and lovers doing ritual and a magazine together. Both had grown into something much larger, and increasingly they nudged Oberon and Morning Glory to the side.