The Valentine Michael Ranch
(1997–1999)
and Shady Grove
(1999–2005)
We’ve jumped gaping chasms, done impossible things;
Where there were walls we’ve somehow made open doors.
And I know that whatever the future may bring,
We will Love ever deeper than before!
—from “the haven of our hearts” [ravenheart family theme song] by liza gabriel, wynter, and morning glory, 1996
NARRATOR: From 1996 through 1999, during some of the most difficult times described in the previous chapter, the Ravenhearts lived on the V-M Ranch. As OZ became less active in the Church, and, eventually, not active at all, he put more and more of his energy into the Family business.
It was also during those years, in September 1997, that Morning Glory led an expedition sponsored by CAW’s Ecosophical Research Association (ERA) to ancient sacred sites in Greece and the Aegean Islands. She stayed in Greece for six weeks.
MG: My journey to Greece felt like a homecoming. I paid my first visit at Eleusis to the Plutonion where Hades made his entrance into the Underworld, and all the hairs on my body just stood straight up. There were several little cave openings, but you couldn’t really get inside any of them. However, in one entrance it was clear that the Dark Lord still had his worshippers, because there were offerings of bread and pomegranates and other things lying inside the opening where the cavern got bigger. We made our offerings of bread to Demeter in the Telesterion, and the guide pointed out that a little church that had been built on the hill above the ruins still received the gift of the first loaves of bread baked after the harvest and had done so for the last two thousand years. So the customs were still being observed though the altars had changed places.
NARRATOR: After the group tour ended, she stayed in Greece and went back to Eleusis with a local Pagan named Sirius.
MG: I felt that I had unfinished business with Hades. So we went back to Eleusis. I went to the opening of the cave and sat on the stone, putting my head and shoulders inside the opening. I made an offering of a pomegranate that I had brought all the way from Crete. As I sat on the cold stone gazing into the cavern, I felt an electric thrill travel through the stone and up through my body. And before my very eyes one of the stone formations in the cave shifted shape into the face of the God, and He spoke inside my mind. His face looked like a composite of all the lovers I have ever had who carried dark energy, and His voice had the quality of a knife slicing through black silk. He told me many things that were private, but in the end I cried and asked Him not to leave me.
He laughed: “I am always here, I never leave; it is you who always comes and goes.” I felt a lightness and comfort in my heart and was grateful for that and all the other insights I received. Then He told me before I left that Hecate wanted to speak to me and gave me precise directions how to get to Her precinct. I didn’t want to leave; it was orgasmically wonderful just gazing on His face like that. His image never wavered before my eyes until I forced myself to tear them away. I heard His voice say in farewell, “Don’t worry, you will see Me again, everyone always does sooner or later . . .” So I arose and stretched the kinks out of my back and followed His directions to find Hecate’s shrine.
I entered Her precinct and found an altar of broken stone near a twisted fig tree. I placed an offering of a ripe prickly pear smeared with my own blood on the stone and listened inward; almost at once I heard Her voice in my ear: “We used to be such good friends.” And then I remembered how I used to love to go out in the dark when there was no moon and listen to the night.
Hecate continued, “But once you took up with Aphrodite you never came to Me anymore.” I felt consumed by guilt and shame.
“That’s all right, I hold no malice; such are the ways that mortals dance to Nature’s tune. Besides, soon you will be Mine.” I felt an icy needle prick at my heart—what exactly did She mean by that? Considering who She was, that statement could have a variety of meanings.
“Lady, what do You mean?” I asked, trembling inside.
She laughed. “Don’t be in such a hurry; you’ll find out soon enough.” It was the same answer that I had gotten over thirty years before from the woman who had died on my shift in the ER. I asked Hecate if She had any other messages for me, but Her voice was silent and the sense of Her presence was gone.
NARRATOR: When she returned to the States, Morning Glory, Wolf, and Oberon were joined in a triad handfasting. Liza and Wynter participated as “ladies-in-waiting.”
OZ: We felt that since Wolf had been the first to come into our relationship, he should be the first to be handfasted to us. Next would be Liza and then, finally, Wynter. But despite our impeccable intentions in handfasting each partner sequentially by seniority, this apparently didn’t go down well with Liza and Wynter, who evidently thought we should do it all together. The whole issue of seniority in relationships, which is fundamental to the way MG and I operate, was always difficult for them to accept.
MG: OZ and I had proposed to Wolf long before we all moved in together, and so it felt like this would just be part of the unfolding of the natural sequence of events. The three of us seemed to take it for granted that we were sort of the founding triad, but that did not set well with Wynter and Liza. On the other hand, they did not really talk to me about it much, but there was a certain amount of moping about. I did everything I could to include them in the ceremony.
LIZA : Oberon and I were quite deeply involved at the time of that handfasting, and he was handfasting with someone who was hardly speaking to me. That did not seem like honoring our connection. I’m not complaining about this. I had to deal with what I had, because I was in that kind of a state of passion where you don’t turn back because it’s hard—no matter how hard it is, you just do it. Part of that was because of the impersonal nature of my relationship with Oberon, because of the vision. The vision trumps everything—it trumps any kind of irrational weirdness that goes on. No one ever dragged me kicking and screaming; I always had the option to leave. But one becomes more and more invested.
Wynter and I were both maids of honor dressed in black. It was a charade from our point of view.
WYNTER: Partly we wore black to the wedding because that’s what Morning Glory wanted. She was wearing red, and she wanted something to complement that. But partly we wore black because we were both really distraught over the wedding. We were both coping the best we could. It was hard on both of us for different reasons. For me, it was like I was falling in love with Wolfie, and his response to falling in love with me was to marry another woman. As open-minded and out there as I am, that threw me. I had two of my best friends and lovers marrying each other and not me. I was young and pissed off.
MG: I never understood what the problem was, because for me when you love someone, you want them to be happy; and when the people you love are in love with each other, it should make everyone even happier. It is from such assumptions when they are not equally shared that idyllic faerie castles fall into ruins.
WYNTER: Wolf was my principal primary partner, and he came first in all things—second only to me! We shared a lot of triad experiences. On specific nights I slept with Morning Glory or Wolf—we tried to keep it fair as much as is emotionally possible.
But sometimes I would sleep with Wolf just so he wouldn’t sleep with Morning Glory, and this kind of behavior affected my relationship with both of them. Another thing: Morning Glory had to go from being his primary partner—the only woman in his life—to being the secondary. And I was none too gentle about claiming my position and my emotional turf as primary partner with Wolf.
NARRATOR: As the Ravenhearts’ interpersonal relationships grew difficult, they continued to perform handfastings among the various members, almost to try to patch things up when the going got rough. The next couple to handfast were Morning Glory and Wynter because, in Morning Glory’s words, their relationship “was the one that needed a boost.” At this handfasting in 1998, it was Oberon and Liza who were left feeling excluded from the decision.
Meanwhile, their family business continued to blossom. After working on her for two years, OZ finally finished his sculpture called the Millennial Gaia in 1998, which became one of their bestsellers.
WOLF: I introduced the color catalogues, and we started going to trade shows and doing a lot of promotion. Oberon did a lot of sculpting. Our inventory was growing. We had the new Millennial Gaia, which was a really big deal. That was possibly the single most important piece that they ever did. It provided the majority of sales.
NARRATOR: The plans to buy the V-M Ranch did not work out, which was partly another consequence of the conflicts described in the previous chapters. So the Ravenhearts had to find another place to live and to continue the Family business in 1999. As usual, their new household included other friends and lovers in addition to the Ravenhearts.
MG: We packed up and moved to Sonoma County, to a house we called Shady Grove that we found in Penngrove. Liza’s mother took out the mortgage; Liza made the down payment; and we divided up the $2,000-per-month mortgage payments in the form of rent to be paid on the various dwellings and offices on the parcel.
LIZA: It was a very happy, perky family in some ways when we first moved there. Wolf and Wynter were all romantic, and they were happily ensconced in their apartment. Oberon and Morning Glory were living in the main house, and so was I. [Oberon’s lover] Ariel was living in a downstairs apartment in another building; [MG’s lover] Alejandro was living upstairs; and Jon was living in the back cottage. [Jon was Liza’s lover at the time.] It took a while for this all to take place. We had no idea, but as soon as we moved there our friends wanted to live with us. It quickly became a wonderful, warm kind of environment where we really liked all of the people we were living with. Then things began to decay a little bit, as things will. We had business meeting after business meeting after business meeting. No matter what we talked about, no matter what we decided, it didn’t seem to make any difference to the outcome. I shouldn’t say nothing was accomplished, but very little. Wolf just never, ever got along with me.
NARRATOR: The final handfasting of this group was between Wolf and Wynter in 2000.
WYNTER: I think that both of us always assumed that we’d get married, because of the depth of our relationship. Not only did we assume that we’d get married, but our community and our families also assumed that we’d get married. And we didn’t take the time to step back and say, “Is that where we really are now in our life together?” We were both caught up in “this is what we must do.” Not that there wasn’t love and desire there, and strength in our relationship. But if we had taken the time to step back and look at the situation, I think we might not have gotten married. And that’s not to say that I didn’t want to marry him. But we were two very different people by the time we reached the altar. I felt like it was more of a celebration of the relationship that we’d had than the relationship that we were going to have.
And during that time, right around the time we moved to Shady Grove, I was developing a deep relationship with a couple. I was spending a lot of time with them. There was a lot of stuff going on there that I won’t go into.
OZ: August 11, 1999, was the long-awaited final total solar eclipse of the millennium, with the path of totality crossing the entire Eurasian continent from Cornwall, England, to the Bay of Bengal. Ariel and I flew to London right after Starwood, carrying magickal talismans from many people. Of all the dozens of Witches, Druids, Magicians, Priests, and Priestesses who had worked together twenty years before, creating the first phase of this Millennial Eclipse ritual, only I was able to complete the final component at the ancient stone circle of Boscawen-ûn in Cornwall.
I got home just in time for the Eleusinian Mysteries, which our whole Family was putting on this year. Morning Glory was Priestess; Wynter was Persephone; Wolf was Hades; Liza was Hecate; and I was the Poet. The entire all-night ritual went fabulously, with perfect timing, culminating at sunrise. It was exactly the ritual that MG and I had been envisioning from the beginning, so many years ago.
MG: I had wanted to Priestess the Eleusinian Mysteries for many years. My research and my poetry were germinal in creating the original script; I had undergone initiation and then participated actively, taking many different roles over the years. Then several times I had put my name in the hat to be the Priestess of the Rites. It was largely a role that Anodea had made her own, and as long as she wanted to keep doing it, no one else wanted to stand in her way because she was doing a great job. But the Mysteries were evolving and moving into directions that I felt took it away from the intent of its original creators and its ancient focus, so I really was itching for an opportunity to do a cycle that refocused them back into an earlier direction. Finally it came down that Anodea no longer wanted to handle the Mysteries, so at that point I just swept in and said, “Look, I’m doing it this year. I have the cast, I have the script, I have the props, and that’s that.” At that point I had gotten pretty fed up with asking permission and being told I wasn’t worthy to be Priestess, especially when I had been a major part of the creation of the thing in the first place.
I had already gotten the ball rolling by the time I went to Greece, so I was able to really use my time at Eleusis to bring in some very powerful magickal connections to the ancient rites. For a number of years Wynter and Wolf had been working with the Persephone and Hades archetypes in their relationship, and it just seemed like the Fates had stirred all these things together into a Ravenhearts’ Eleusinia. The last piece in the puzzle was when Liza said that she wanted to take on the role of Hecate.
LIZA: The year that the Ravenhearts did it, I was in charge of providing breakfast. I wasn’t careful enough, and the whole thing was eaten by feral pigs in the night. They were huge. Not quite the size of Volkswagens, but they looked like black Volkswagens. You did not want to argue with these guys.
We held these archetypes the entire year and invited all the initiates of the Mysteries to our home. Hecate is the Goddess of Death, of the crossroads and of divination. I performed a divination with the Tarot that day for every initiate who wanted one.
MG: We had a great group of pilgrims that year, and Talyn decided he wanted to be initiated so that he could bring the Mysteries back to his part of the country. The all-night ritual is always somewhat of an ordeal and it is intended that way, but this year we had an additional crisis in that one of the pilgrims injured his ankle. But he decided to tough it out and continue through until the dawn. When the dawn came and the rite reached its climax, it was almost as though it was the moment of greatest triumph and cohesion for our Ravenheart Family as well. It was a moment that in spite of pigs and sprained ankles and exhaustion transmuted all the lead of our exertions into pure gold. For one single, shining moment we were all united in something ancient, powerful, and greater than all of us combined—and we had worked together to co-create this miracle of transformation. I think we all felt the Gods move through us and within us, and regardless of whatever else was to come, for that one moment we came together as One entity.
LIZA: The most extraordinary thing [because the Eleusinian Mysteries were cancelled in 2000 due to a crisis, and no Mysteries were held in 2001] was that during our reign as the Archetypes of the Underworld, 9/11 happened. The evening of September 11th we spontaneously performed what was in my memory the most powerful magical working we performed as a family. We gathered, dressed in our ritual costumes, and with very little preparation we said, “Okay, we’re taking on our archetypes.” We called a few people who circled with us often and were local there, and we said, “Do you want to come?” A few people joined us, but it was basically us and our lovers and friends who happened to be onsite at the time, and Wynter’s two large boas.
We each spoke spontaneously, from our archetypes, our blessing, and our reassurance and guidance for the souls who had died and were dying. The towers had fallen less than twelve hours before. In that ritual we were able to use the sense of being in these archetypes to help these souls cross over to another place. It wasn’t a sense that the souls were going to be Pagans and opt into the Underworld as we saw it. It was more a sense that people had died in terror, and that we could help ease their journey. Now, whether we eased anyone’s journey or not I have no idea. But I do know that it was a meaningful ritual. And that it can be helpful, when you’re dealing with horrors, to feel like you have some contact with death and the Underworld to help mediate an experience like that.
NARRATOR: In spite of their magickal compatibility, in the real world people drift apart and relationships change. In the early years of the new millennium, the Ravenheart Family structure continued to morph. Oberon, Morning Glory, and Wolf left on a business trip that was also meant to rekindle the spark and reconnect with each other as a triad. Unfortunately, they all got the flu and it was a disaster. While they were gone, their home was broken into.
WYNTER: I was home one weekend by myself. I had gone out briefly and I came back, and my house had been broken into. The door was broken and the house was open—I was just violated. All of my grandmother’s jewelry had been stolen. At the time Wolf was in Florida with Oberon and Morning Glory on a trip that he didn’t want to be on, because he was really sick. It was supposed to be some kind of getaway, and the whole time was very miserable for all of them for different reasons. Liza was away for the weekend at a sacred sex workshop. So I put the house back together as best I could, and I hightailed out to the home of the couple that I was in a relationship with.
There was something about my relationship with Wolf that kind of broke during that time. He was so caught up in whatever was happening in his relationship or whatever was going on with him and Morning Glory and Oberon that he couldn’t pull away and come take care of me in my time of need. It was a situation that created depth in one relationship and distance in another.
There was me finding out what I needed, and what was happening in my life and where I wanted to go. I looked at the future and thought, “If I’m doing this for the next ten or fifteen years, where will I be?” And I didn’t want to be in the same place. I didn’t want to be in my thirties and making statues and living hand-to-mouth and overdrawing the checking account because we’re not bringing in enough. There were a lot of wonderful things about living with Oberon and Morning Glory, but they have a difficult time with reality, with the world at large as it is now.
WOLF: Anytime you’re dealing with any kind of relationship, whether you’re dealing with multiple or single relationships, whether it’s poly or monogamous, there are always issues of people simply going in different directions. The major thing that went on is that Morning Glory and Oberon were really pretty much headed down one particular path, and all of us kind of shared that path for a while, but it really wasn’t ours. Wynter left first, going off and doing her own thing, having more of a young person’s life; the thing about life is it changes.
NARRATOR: During the years that followed, Wynter spent more time away focusing on new relationships and less time at the house with the Ravenhearts, until finally she was gone. Morning Glory’s life became further complicated when she realized that she was going into menopause.
MG: Then I had a flash of insight about my visit with Hecate in Greece. When She said, “You’ve been spending all your time with Aphrodite, but that’s all right because soon you will be Mine”—suddenly I understood what She meant. She is the Goddess of Transformation, and I was on the threshold of one of the major transformations in a woman’s life. So I decided that if Hecate had spoken to me about this, it meant that She intended to be my guide through this transition. And if that was so, then I needed to do a Hecate vision quest and find out what She intended for me.
NARRATOR: On her vision quest, MG got her assignment: to create a Hecate statue, and to spend more time with her mother to learn what it means to grow old.
MG: In honor of all the wisdom that the Goddess shared with me during that time, I created a statue of Her that was to be my masterwork the way that the Millennial Gaia is Oberon’s masterwork. I asked Her what She wanted from me and She said, “Many people need me in their lives as much as you do. You are an artist; put me on their altars.” So Hecate is now on many altars all over the world because of that Vision and my efforts. There are times in your life when you can be satisfied with your work and proud that you have done the right thing, and this was one of those times for me.
And I started visiting my mother, Polly, more often. It had been hard for her when I left to move from Ukiah to Laytonville and then again down to Sonoma County. But she was deeply involved with her church and its community of friends, and so everything seemed to be going along on cruise control for a while. But one of the things I found out when I spent more time with Polly was that her precarious health was going downhill, and it was becoming increasingly hard for her to maintain her separate life alone. First I got her a housekeeper and cook, but then just getting around the house was too hard, so her doctor recommended that she be put in a rest home. I was appalled because I knew that a person without an effective advocate in a rest home usually does not last very long, and I lived too far from her for that.
What Polly needed was assisted living, but we certainly couldn’t afford that. After calling every single elderly assistance program in the county and visiting every possible facility, I reached a point of complete despair. I was sitting in the living room with my head in my hands when Liza walked through and asked what the problem was. I explained it to her, and she thought about it for a few minutes and then she said, “Well, why don’t we move her in here with us? She could move into Jon’s apartment since he moved out.”
I was flabbergasted at her suggestion. It would never have occurred to me to ask Liza to even consider moving Polly into our community because I knew how she valued her privacy and how involved she was with the Sacred Sexuality community. I couldn’t imagine how we could make something as disparate as an old Christian lady and weekend sex seminars somehow coexist in the same backyard. But Liza said that Polly was a very special person with a very special point of view about love; so if anybody could manage to pull it off, we would be the ones. I just broke down crying, and I hugged her and thanked her and then went around to everybody else and asked them all if they were open to the possibility of having Polly live at Shady Grove. And to my deep relief, Polly had found her way into everyone’s heart. I called Polly and told her that everyone had invited her to come and live with us and to have her own space and that I would be her caregiver. Polly tearfully agreed, but it was hard for her to leave behind all her friends and her Christian church and move to a new place where the only people she knew were her Pagan family. But she quoted from the Bible what Naomi had said to her daughter-in-law Ruth: “Whither thou goest I shall go, and thy people shall be my people.” And so it was.
In the midst of all this grief around CAW and the ups and downs of Ravenheart Family dynamics, there were lots of truly wonderful times. We had many Family feasts together and spent long hours lounging in the hot tub. We created some fantastic art, Wynter’s Elemental plaques of the Bird Goddess and the Sea Goddess, Oberon’s Odin sculpture, my Hecate statue. We spent time laughing and having pillow fights, going to movies and concerts together. We grew a terrific garden every year, which was mostly Oberon and Liza’s bailiwick. We raised chickens and rabbits and had our own fresh eggs. Our houses were invaded by possums, raccoons, skunks, and rats, but we found it to be more amusing than distressing. We made lots of new friends and traveled to many gatherings and festivals together, having great adventures along the way.
OZ: About that time, a British author named J. K. Rowling started writing a series of books about a young wizard who was going to school to study magick and sorcery. She opened up this place in the universe where suddenly it was reasonable to talk about Wizards and Wizardry. Before that, you couldn’t say it. People would look at you and go, “Huh?” Then suddenly it’s all over the place.
Every now and then something creates a breakthrough, an opening in the world for something to appear. We humans are storytellers—that is our greatest magick, and one of our first. We sat around the campfire and we created ourselves; we created humanity by telling stories. The stories, in turn, create us—they shape us: the myths, the legends, the common references and metaphors. All these things are deeply rooted in our collective psyche. When a story attains a level of popularity like the Harry Potter books, millions of people have read this common story and therefore share this common mythos.
When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter stories, she incorporated an aspect that many people seem not to have noticed. In other stories of magick, from The Wizard of Oz to The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Star Wars, it’s all someplace else—somewhere over the rainbow, or in a long-lost ancient world, through a magick wardrobe, or even in another galaxy, a long time ago and far, far away. But the Harry Potter saga is set in our world, and in our time. Its central premise is that just beyond the mundane, everyday reality that you see is a sort of hidden and invisible society. But they’re real people, and they could be walking down the streets passing by you and you might never even know it. They have their places that they go to, and it’s all right here in the present-day world. And this is true.
In the Harry Potter mythos there is a magical world, with magical people, just around the corner. If you could find the right alley, or knew the right password, maybe you, too, could get in there. Maybe you belong there.
MG: It seems to be just the universe next door, and most of us as kids were desperate to find the key that would unlock that door and become part of that universe. Many things have changed in the world but not the desire of certain special kids to find their way into the realm of magick.
OZ: For a number of years I’d been lamenting at presentations in the Pagan community, and especially in the Wiccan community, that we didn’t really have a way to assimilate our kids. The whole thing was set up for adults only. You had to be eighteen before you could even apply to start studying or to join a coven or something. All of the online services there were available you had to be eighteen. There really wasn’t anything major for kids to get involved with except some programming at Pagan Festivals.
NARRATOR: Following the popularity of Rowling’s growing trend, Oberon was offered a book contract by New Page Books to write what he described as “a book of apprentice Wizardry, sort of a Boy Scout Handbook for young Wizards; what you need to know when you start off; what I wish I could have gotten hold of when I was eleven.” He was eager to dive in.
OZ: What I wanted to do was bigger than just what I know. I know a lot of stuff, because I’ve been around awhile. But one of the most important things I know is how many people know more than I do. Our community is full of Wizards, sages, and mages. These people are the world-class experts on magickal stuff. And really, this was something that should not just be a one-person job. This should be something in which the collective wisdom of our community could be compiled into one place, and offered to the next generation.
So I started talking to these folks, and we decided to form the legendary Wizards Council.
Part of the mythos and legend of Magick and Wizardry throughout all the ages of both history and of myth, is the idea of the Council of Wizards, such as the White Council in Lord of the Rings. There have been many schools and councils and associations of mages and Wizards and such. Unlike the village Witch, who is usually just all by herself on the edge of the village somewhere, Wizards tend to create schools, starting with Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens, founded in 387 BCE. So we started talking about this, and it wasn’t very long before we had gathered a rather amazing group of people and formed the Grey Council.
Utilizing the same skills and contacts I’d developed over a forty-year career as a writer, editor, and publisher of Green Egg, I coordinated and integrated contributions from many of the leading teachers in the magickal community, wrote everything else I felt needed to be said, drew many illustrations, formatted, and laid it all out in PageMaker.
NARRATOR: It was around this time that an old flame returned to OZ’s life. Her name was Julie, and he had first crossed paths with her back in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
JULIE EPONA: My then-husband Dr. Aidan Kelly and I ended up living in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. We became involved with a CAW Nest that was started in Hollywood and then went to the San Fernando Valley. As a part of that Nest, we attended the 1992 Grand Convocation of the CAW. It was very hot and very dry. I was camping with a two-year-old boy, which was quite an endeavor. What Aidan had worked out was that he’d get one night and I’d get one night, because you can’t go off and leave a two-year-old in the tent. The fog came in and I happened to wander down towards the drumming. It was getting chilly, and there was the Wizard with his huge, gray wool cloak lined with green flannel, and he offered to wrap me inside of it with him. Well, no girl in her right mind would refuse such an offer. So I snuggled in next to him. There was drumming, storytelling, and various frivolities going on.
I sat there and enjoyed my time with the Wizard. I wandered off in the fog with him. We couldn’t see much beyond the edges of the trail we were on. He had a beautiful staff named Pathfinder. At that point it was very much like walking through the forest with Gandalf. We were getting to know each other, and lo and behold we ended up at his tent instead of mine and spent an absolutely wonderful night together. We really established a magical connection that held us in very good stead. We saw each other a couple of times over the next year. I participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries and a Beltane ritual. But his life took him off on some very different adventures, and mine became very focused on trying to raise my son and provide for him. So we lost track of each other for a while.
NARRATOR: Unbeknownst to Oberon, she’d split from Aidan Kelly (a famous Witch in his own right, he’d co-founded the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn), remarried, and moved to Santa Rosa, settling down in order to provide a stable home for her son Aidan O’Ryan Kelly.
JULIE EPONA: We reconnected in 2003 while he was working on his Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard. When we picked up the conversation again after nearly ten years, it was like there had never been a break in it.
NARRATOR: By the next year, she would break up with her then-husband; her son would go to Washington state to live with his father; and she would move in with the Ravenhearts at Shady Grove.
OZ: She settled right into life with the Ravenhearts, and joined MG and me in our Mythic Images booth and presentations at PantheaCon, a huge Pagan conference held every February in a San Jose hotel, where the three of us bonded wonderfully as a great team. She landed Wolf a great job with the company she worked for, and he has worked there ever since.
JULIE EPONA: My relationship with Oberon has always been that of a girlfriend, and I have always been a girlfriend to both him and Morning Glory. My relationship wouldn’t be possible for me without my practice of polyamory, and really honoring their relationship as primary, and all that entails in terms of communication, honesty, and working together to make sure that all the juice is going to support everyone in the group. There is no one true right and only way to being polyamorous, anymore than there is any one true right and only way to be Pagan. But it’s the constant communication and negotiation that allows it to work.
NARRATOR: Even before she moved in with the Ravenhearts, she helped Oberon with his Grimoire.
JULIE EPONA: I contributed to some of the material in the Grimoire regarding young men, because I am primarily a single mom, and I had been a Cub Scout leader and was participating in the Boy Scouts at the time. So, in bringing some of that understanding of what young men are facing today in terms of ethics—it hadn’t occurred to Oberon to look at the gang violence and extreme peer pressure and bullying as a form of black magick.
OZ: I spent all of 2003 working on the book. If you read the Grimoire, and note carefully, you’ll see that the reading level goes up a year chapter by chapter. I worked with an editor who had worked with children’s books and could set the vocabulary and the style and reading level to progress over a seven-year period. So, by the time you’re reading the last chapter, you’re reading it at seven years advanced from the very first one. Sort of like what J. K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter series. I sent the disc off to New Page on December 16, and my author’s copy of the Grimoire arrived on Brigit’s Day, February 1, 2004. The Grimoire was a big hit—soon ranking as the number-one bestseller for New Page. But before it was even out, we knew we needed something more.
NARRATOR: In retrospect, it seems almost incredible that Oberon had not written a book before that point, given all the writing and editing he’d done over the course of his life. The Grimoire basically started a new career as author for him. In the years that followed, he would go on to publish Companion for the Apprentice Wizard and Creating Circles and Ceremonies. Both were very successful, making it onto New Page’s list of “Bestsellers” in the #2 and #4 spots, respectively—right behind the Grimoire. He also later co-authored another book, A Wizard’s Bestiary, with Ash “LeopardDancer” DeKirk; it was the book he’d conceived back in the mid-’70s while doing research with Morning Glory, and it included more than 1,500 illustrations. But when the Grimoire first came out, he had only one thing on his mind: a magickal school.
MG: The thing that makes Harry Potter, the whole cycle of those books, catch fire for kids and for adults, especially in the mundane world, is that they think, “I know there has got to be something more out there than going home and watching TV, or going to work, or going to school at this dull place where people bore me.” Because they can feel the Magick streaming behind everything in the universe.
When the first Harry Potter book came along, I read it, and I went, “Oh, that is so cool! I want to teach at that school!” I had all these great stories that I made up about it. I tried to go on some of the websites to play around with some of the other folks, but the problem was that I already had access to a much richer world. And what they were trying to do with those websites was to be just about the Harry Potter books, and it only went that deep. And I thought, “Boy, there really needs to be something that goes all the way down, that’s all about the real stuff.”
So OZ and I, Liza, and the other Ravenhearts started dialoguing about it, and what we could do to create such a school. And of course the Internet was the perfect place to do it.
OZ: For one thing, it should not be religious—not even overtly Pagan, because we’re not trying to recruit people’s kids into some funny religion, even if it’s our own. But Wizardry is not a religion. It’s like philosophy or science. You can have philosophers, scientists, or Wizards in any tradition or religion. Every culture has produced great Wizards, and we needed to preserve that. I didn’t want this to be identified as just a Pagan thing. It had to be universal.
Wizardry is the most authenticated profession that has ever been. That’s because the Wizards of old have left us their teachings and writings. They wrote stuff down. In many cases they were the only literate people in the community. Thus we have an entire history of Wizardry—it’s worldwide, and it’s in every culture. It connects with shamanism at one end and science at the other.
When I began writing it, I figured that I’d design the Grimoire itself as a course of basic studies, and then simply refer readers to various websites and online schools of Wizardry where they could go for further teachings. Since I’d taken particular pains to design a book that would be accessible to teenagers, I also wanted to make sure that sites I would be referring my readers to would be teen-friendly as well.
I had heard there were a lot of online schools of magick, so I went looking for a website that was teaching magick in a non-religious context. I wanted this to be for readers as young as eleven, like the book.
But I simply couldn’t find any online sources or schools dedicated to serious Wizardry or Magick that were suitable for teens, and that weren’t specifically Pagan or Wiccan-oriented. Paganism and Wicca are religious orientations, whereas Magick and Wizardry are studies and practices that are independent of any particular religion.
Moreover, just like covens, all of the serious websites and online schools that offered magickal studies at all were for adults only—operating at a college level, and not admitting anyone under eighteen.
A third factor was the unconscionably high rates of tuition in nearly all the online schools I looked into. I felt that these costs were way out of the price range of many of my readers—especially teens! And, finally, I wanted to direct my readers into a full curriculum in all aspects of Wizardry, with many highly qualified teachers in specialized areas.
When I get an idea for something I really think should exist, but doesn’t yet, I often take it as a “Mission Impossible” assignment to make it so. This was such an assignment. By the time I figured out what I wanted to refer my readers to, I realized that I would have to create it myself. Well, the obvious model was sitting right out there in front of me. It was created by J. K. Rowling. The idea of a “Hogwarts” kind of school seemed so natural.
I got all excited about this idea of the online school. At Samhain of 2003, I was attending a Pagan Pride event out in Salem, Massachusetts, and I found myself sitting down for lunch with a guy named Steve who had created a website for the local group. I said, “We’d really like to do something like that and have an online school.”
And he said, “Wow, that sounds really great! Count me in—I’ll be your website designer.”
For six months after that, it was a matter of me and other people who came on board feeding Steve ideas of things that we wanted to see—which were utterly impossible, yet he did them. Basically, the Grey School is a virtual online equivalent to J. K. Rowling’s fictional Hogwarts. Only we don’t teach just fantasy magic—we teach the real thing: true Wizardry, the Wisdom of the Ages, real Magick (with a k), alchemy, divination, psychic arts, sorcery, healing, wortcunning, beast mastery, spellwork, ritual, and so much more!
The earliest age of admission was set at eleven, and the classes were designed for junior high and high school level. I took on the responsibility of being headmaster, and the Grimoire became the basic foundational textbook. The Grimoire had already created an organization of classes and lessons. So I took a lot of them and retooled them and created study guides, exams, assignments, and all kinds of stuff. These were our first classes, but other teachers soon began creating their own, and today there are well over four hundred classes available!
With an initial faculty of thirty qualified and dedicated teachers, the Grey School of Wizardry opened its virtual doors at www.GreySchool
.com on Lughnasadh (August 1) 2004, to quite a rush of new students. What we didn’t expect was that three-quarters of the students enrolling turned out to be adults—some into their seventies! So we had to develop adult programs and systems as well as those for teens. The neat thing is many of them are parents who are enrolling with their kids.
MG: There are a lot of kids who would like to be in it, and their parents are Mundanes and won’t let them. We can’t push the envelope with that, because there are legal issues; kids under fourteen have to have signed parental permission.
NARRATOR: One more bit of Magick awaited them in 2004. After successfully working at a salon for a few years, Gail and her supportive boyfriend bought a Victorian house in Oakland and decided to get married.
MG: I asked her if she was planning a church wedding since Joe, her fiancé, was raised Catholic, but she said, “No way! They make you promise to raise your kids in the Church, and there is no way I’m going with that program.” She had picked out a beautiful mansion in Marin County that rented to wedding parties and was just looking for someone to perform the ceremony, but they had to be legally registered with the state. So I suggested that she contact her dear friend and childhood confidante, Cerridwen Fallingstar. She did, and Cerridwen agreed to be their Priestess. I must admit that I was pretty delighted that when push came to shove the most logical solution to the dilemma of what to do for a wedding ceremony was to make it a modern Pagan-style wedding. I knew that Cerridwen would do a wonderful job, because despite our differences we have always respected each other as fellow Priestesses.
OZ: Gail and Joe were married on October 1, 2004. Polly was there, and so was my son, Bryan, who flew in from Florida. Developing and administering the Grey School occupied much of my time over the following months, along with the usual round of parties, festivals, holly-daze, and travels for speaking engagements around the country.