Good Morning Glory
(1948–1973)
I saw your face once in my dream
A thousand miles and years away.
Then Fate began Her cosmic scheme
To bring me to your side that day.
I’d travel far, to where you are
Favorite Lover, my Best Friend!
I’d do it all the same again;
I’d do it all the same again.
—from “love of my life” by morning glory zell, 1993
NARRATOR: When Tim and Morning Glory met, it was like something out of one of the many myths or stories that they both knew so well, but it was real. And as they got to know each other, they found out that though their family histories were very different, they had many things in common with each other. And so we will now go back in time and look at what Morning Glory’s life had been like before her fateful meeting with Tim Zell.
Morning Glory was born in 1948 in Long Beach, California. She was the only child of Polly Browning and James Moore, who had moved to Southern California from Mississippi during World War II.
MG: My parents were a traditional couple, with the father who worked and the mother who stayed home with the child, at least for the first eight years of my life. I was an only child; my mother wanted to have thirteen children, but instead she had six miscarriages and almost died in fifty-four hours of labor with me. I was born by cesarean section. So I was her sun and moon and stars; she decided that all my friends (and later my lovers) would be the adopted other children she never could have.
We had a pretty good life, and we should have been relatively comfortable, but when I turned eight my father developed emphysema. He worked in the oil fields in an increasingly smog-ridden city and smoked Kool cigarettes at a time when they advertised that Kool cigarettes were “doctor recommended.” Once he got sick, he could no longer work enough to make a living wage even though he tried. But he spent more and more time in the hospital until the doctors and hospitals ended up owning all his hard-earned money and property, and we were forced to move into an eighteen-foot travel trailer and become Gypsies. He suffered from the stress of losing everything, the constant struggle to breathe, and all the steroids and other weirder drugs he was given while the doctors used him as a guinea pig. After a couple of years of this, he went pretty crazy—from being a terrific dad to being perpetually ill, irritable, and violently abusive.
Every summer we would drive back to Mississippi to stay with our relatives there. A couple of times when my dad got too weak to work and too debilitated by the smog to live in Southern California, we would go back and stay for longer periods. When I was ten we stayed for a whole year and a half in Mississippi and I went to school there; I shunted around from one group of relatives to another in the summertime. I learned to milk cows, take care of 66,000 chickens, and harness a horse and plow a field. I learned to love the rural lifestyle, but I never fit in with the people; I was picked on a lot and was always in trouble.
NARRATOR: She began learning about, and loving, dinosaurs at an early age, just as Tim Zell had.
MG: When I was in the first grade, I discovered a Little Golden Book called From Then to Now. It was a child-sized bite of the evolutionary history of Earth, which was pretty wonderful in and of itself; but the real thrill for me was that it introduced me to dinosaurs! They were my first great passion. I read Darwin because I was a dino-brat, and I pretty much grew up with the notion of evolution as a given. I discovered that most of my relatives, including my mom, believed that evolution contradicted the Bible.
Surprisingly, my grandfather, who was a Methodist minister, did not believe that at all, because he did not believe in a literal translation of the Bible. He once told me, “The Bible, like all the other great, sacred works of mankind, is a metaphor, and anyone who believes in the literal truth of every single word of it is an ignorant idiot.” He didn’t see any problem with evolution as a process of Creation at all.
At that point in my life I still considered myself to be a Christian, but it was Granddaddy Moore who made the first real dent in my belief in the rightness of those teachings. It was around a discussion that I was having with him about my horse, who was twenty-three years old and didn’t have many more years left. I said to Granddaddy, “I guess I will see him in Heaven someday.”
He then informed me, complete with cited scriptures, that my horse would not be in Heaven because he did not have a soul; only humans had souls and went to Heaven. So I told him that if my horse wasn’t going to Heaven, then I didn’t want to go either. He asked me if I was planning on going to Hell instead, but I said, “No, I’m not. I’m going wherever the horses and other animals go.” Oddly enough he didn’t get mad at me this time; he just burst out laughing and called me “his little heathen.” Talk about prophetic words . . .
I frequently had dreams that would come to be true, and sadly I learned not to talk about them to other people. I dreamed that my dad’s boat was going to capsize and sneaked out to put in extra life preservers. That night he came home from an ocean fishing trip drenched and shivering but still alive. That was the first time people called me a Witch. I could feel spirits speaking in the wind, and every time I would smell burning leaves in autumn or fresh cut grass in spring I would get a frisson of delight, and the hairs on my neck would stand up and shiver. I would spend hours looking at the face of the moon, seeing the large, round, and slightly sad eyes of the Lady (it never looked like the “Man in the Moon” to me).
Going from California to Mississippi, back and forth like a ping-pong ball, had a strange effect on my upbringing. For one thing I was always “the new kid” wherever we went, and the culture shock was enough to give anyone psychic whiplash. I just got used to never fitting in anywhere and developed coping mechanisms. I was always outgoing and I made friends pretty quickly—but I made enemies pretty quickly, too. So I learned to tell stories to entertain other folks and keep them from picking on me.
I was a voracious reader, and no matter what town we traveled to, if we stayed more than two days I would beg to go to the library. It was my haven and my sanctuary. I would weave the stories I read into the tales I told, and that is how I learned to teach people—by telling stories and anecdotes. The downside of all this was that I learned early on that in order to keep from being picked on or whipped by my dad, or getting into trouble about stuff, I had to lie. So when I told stories I often embroidered them significantly; there were fantasy tales that I would tell as if they happened to me. My mom and grandma used to use the term story-telling as a euphemism for lying. So it all sort of got blurred together in my mind. I learned to tell stories to get attention and to distract people from being angry with me. I learned to tell them in odd ways because I never knew what it was that I was going to get in trouble for, since every place I went to the cultural norms were different. This behavior, in both positive and negative ways, would play a very large role in my life.
I mostly grew up in my mom’s church, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. They practiced an ecstatic form of Christianity, with baptism of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, and dancing in the Spirit. I was fully involved in it and deeply immersed in the emotional gestalt of the experience. When the Holy Spirit was with me, I always felt a strong, uplifting feminine presence, but I never really talked about that part of it to anyone.
But all the aspects of that brand of religion are male: God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; even the angels are portrayed as masculine. It is a religion that is all about men and run entirely by men, but its congregations are much more female than male. But it was what I knew, and I got along without asking too many awkward questions, until one day I went to the pastor and said, “Look, I’m concerned because my father beats my mom and me. Where is God’s will in this? What recourse do we have?”
Back then, there weren’t any battered women’s shelters, and at one point I went to a psychiatrist to try to get family-counseling help, but he told my parents that I was crazy and needed electroshock therapy. So when I went to our pastor, he told me that it was the woman’s duty to surrender to the will of her husband, and that if my dad killed my mom or me, we would get crowns in Heaven someday! He said that my duty was to be obedient and not rock the boat, and that really tore the mask off for me. After that, all the bits and pieces that never quite fit started coming faster into a rushing torrent of questions and doubt. All this was coincidentally right about the time of my puberty.
POLLY LOVE MOORE: Jesus says to love your companion—this is to the husband: “You have to love your companion like you love me.” And if you really have that nature of Jesus, and that husband offers that wife that sweet nature, the fruits of the spirit as the Bible says—love, peace, joy, and all that—then that wife is just going to be thrilled to death to fall in that shadow. Because then you’re going to get all that love that anybody is looking for.
MG: I loved my mom so much, but I couldn’t stand it that she was like a doormat. Whatever my dad did was okay with her—I guess it had to be, because periodically he would beat her and threaten to kill us both. That kind of behavior shaped me, but I never gave in; it never broke me. She was always terrified, but I just got angry and would argue right back at him and try to show him proof when I was right about something and he was wrong. I guess I was a smart-aleck kid who acted like I was his equal and he hated that—so we would get into these huge fights. Also, I would jump between him and my mom when he was hitting or kicking her. I can remember a time when he was threatening to kill me and I tried to bite his hand. He looked down into my eyes blazing back at him, and I guess he must have seen a piece of his own fighting spirit reflected there and he couldn’t bring himself to snuff that out.
Paradoxically, I never stopped loving my father; I know I must have loved him as much as I hated him. My father was my window and door into the natural world—he was sort of a deistic naturalist who loved Nature and introduced me to Her wonders. In spite of his craziness, he imparted that gift to me. My mother gave me deep love and appreciation for the spiritual world. She was an incredibly nurturing, loving parent. She taught me by example about unconditional love and a reverence for life. Hers grew out of devout Christianity, and though I took it in a different direction, we still shared in common a belief in the transformational power of unconditional love, a reverence for life, and a commitment to spiritual practice.
What I did not get from my mother was her fear. She led a fear-driven life from the time she was a child—even her faith was rooted in a fear of God and Hell—but I rejected that whole fear component. Perhaps her love gave me the strength to do that, but I think that it probably saved my life, because if I had reacted to my dad’s threats with fear instead of the anger he recognized in himself, he might have killed me. I took away a lesson in survival: to not back down, to stick up for what you believe in, and to be strong and not let yourself be intimidated by someone who is trying to bully you.
Not long after all this, when I was about thirteen, I had an opportunity to visit my aunt and my cousins in New Orleans and attend Mardi Gras. I glimpsed another entire universe. It was so exciting that I was overwhelmed, and I felt my spirit leaping up and exclaiming, “Wow—that’s what I want! Somehow that is my religion!”
That’s where I met Bacchus. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Girl, follow me!” And I did. After that revelation I knew that I was not suited to be a Christian.
POLLY LOVE MOORE: When she got old enough to know what she wanted, it never did bother me anymore. She’s just as sweet as ever and I love her just as much as I ever did. I still had to accept the fact that she had her right, her prerogatives, to choose whatever she wanted. Of course, I still always pray for her and for every one of her friends that they will be safe.
MG: Right about that same time, I discovered the works of Ayn Rand and became an outspoken and somewhat obnoxious Objectivist/atheist. But I had always been psychic, and there was no place in her universe for mysticism. So I began a conscious deliberate religious search. I studied a little bit about Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Yoga philosophy, which eventually led me to a Hindu temple where I first heard about Goddesses in the world today. And I was amazed and awed: “Wow, what an idea! You mean there are living Goddesses in the universe still?” I had read lots of Greek mythology as a kid—I was originally named for the Moon Goddess Diana—and that was fascinating. Learning about Lakshmi and Kali Ma and the power of Shakti was such an awakening. But when I started studying the actual practices, I found myself dealing with the same old bugaboos of celibacy, sexism, and obedience to male dominion. So I came to the sad conclusion that that just wasn’t quite it either.
Next I moved into more magickal realms. I read Lord of the Rings, and for a while I wanted to be an Elf more than anything else in the world. I guess on some level I always will . . . But I read other fantasy stories, classical fairy tales, Romance literature like William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World, and Celtic lore like The Mabinogion and the Táin Bó Cúailnge. I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves and later the series of Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.
Somewhere along the line, I got hold of a book called Diary of a Witch by Sybil Leek. I was about nineteen or twenty, and it all just clicked into place. The book told how the “Old Religion” had been suppressed by Christianity; it described a Horned God like Pan or Cernunnos, and His consort, the Goddess of many names. It all woke this deep feeling of recognition inside me. Like all the other bits and pieces I had been striving for were clues to this divine puzzle, and when it fit together it all made perfect sense: a true revelation! I realized that I was a Witch in this life and had been a Witch in other lives before. Unfortunately, Leek’s book also said if you’re not born a hereditary English Witch, you don’t get to be one at all. But I was not going to let what one person said about how one became a Witch stand in my way. This was before the books by Gerald Gardner were readily available in the United States.
Based on my eclectic reading, I decided that what I needed was an initiation. So in the summer before my senior year, I conceived this whole story in my imagination about an English Witch that I had met in Venice (California, not Italy) who was teaching me about Witchcraft. I gave her a name: Vashti Esterath, and invented a lineage for her. I can still see her face in my mind’s eye. Maybe I knew her from some past life, but in this one she was someone I dreamed about.
That summer I took off for Big Sur for a month. First I lived off the land for a week, then I fasted and took a major LSD trip. At Lime Kiln Creek, I dedicated my life to the Goddess, and then I climbed up the side of a big rock by a waterfall and dove into the pool of water. The person who dove off that waterfall was a girl named Diane, but the person who climbed out of that pool was a woman named Morning Glory. That was my initiation.
The next morning I awoke, and three other Hippie-type folks were sitting around my sleeping bag and they had covered it with little field morning glory flowers while I slept. They all said, “Good morning, glory!” and that is how I got my name. Oh, lots of people laugh because I am certainly not a morning person, far from it, but it was not the time of day that convinced me to take that name. Morning glory seeds contain trace amounts of lysergic acid, and they are part of the ancient shamanic pharmacopeia; their bell-shaped flowers, like Datura, resemble the skirts of the Cretan Goddess. They are common and unassuming but hide a potent secret in their hearts. All of these are the reasons why I chose that name.
Why would I change from a perfect Witchy name like Diane? The answer is that I love the Goddess and I respect Her, but I did not presume to take Her name, especially after I came into my sexuality and began to follow the ways of Aphrodite. As a young girl Diana protected me, but in order to stay with Her as an adult I felt that I would need to give up my love of men. She can be very possessive, that Goddess, and I did not want to end up like Callisto or so many of Her maidens that strayed from Her side to follow the love of a man or a God. So whether it seems to fit or not, Morning Glory I became and Morning Glory I remain. Even if I mostly see the dawn these days about the time I am heading to bed. Hmmm . . . maybe I should have called myself Nightshade. Oh well, too late now!
After this experience I embroidered it and wove it into my story about Vashti the English Witch and how my initiation had been under her tutelage, so that I could convince others that my initiation had been legitimate. Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . But regardless of what stories I spun about it, I always felt in my heart of hearts that it was a legitimate initiation.
NARRATOR: Though the details of her story would come back to haunt her years later, Morning Glory was actually way ahead of her time: self-initiation rituals would become very popular in the decades that followed. And there were probably other Witches around then who had done the same thing, but back then everything was shrouded in secrecy, a lot of tall tales were told, and no one was recording any statistics. Indeed, even Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated by an old Witch that no one had ever met, and to this day there is still speculation about who she was and what really happened.
Morning Glory remained independent in all things, and even while she was still in high school and living at home, she was working so that she could have a horse and her own car.
MG: In high school I took three years of Latin, biology, world history, and literature. But in the drama club I found a social circle I could relate to; I was also involved in the speech club and the debate society. I learned a lot of the best elements of creating a good ritual and about the Bacchic religious roots of the theater from our drama teacher.
I was working part-time at a local hospital in the laboratory and also did some emergency services work like EKG monitoring and collecting specimens and phlebotomy. I did other assistant lab work as well as grungy jobs like washing test tubes and specimen jars. I spent time up to my elbows in the midst of life and death there, attending to people in crisis and also sometimes when they died. These experiences really made me want to understand the passages between the worlds.
I remember a watershed moment for me was when a woman came in to the ER with chest pains; she and I had the same doctor. He came into the room and was laughing with us as I took her EKG. It was supposed to be more of a precautionary test, and then suddenly her back arched upward and her eyes rolled back. I thought my machine had broken because the needles went haywire, but she had just suffered a massive myocardial infarction. We tried to save her—the doctor, the nurses, all the tools of the crash cart; they hit her five times with the defibrillator, but it was just not going to make any difference.
Finally, there comes this nervous moment when everyone looks around sort of sheepishly at each other and shrugs. And then everyone looks at the doctor, and he sighs and shakes his head and we all start packing up our gear while he has to go and tell this woman’s husband the life-shattering news. The room emptied out and I was left alone with the woman, sort of lying like a broken doll on the gurney. One moment she and I had been laughing about some TV show and the next she was just lying there like a carved wax figure, her eyes still open, staring into infinity. When I bent over her to disconnect the leads, I stared into her eyes and sent out my thoughts to her as hard as I could: “Where are you now, and what is it like?”
I held very still and listened inward, and I heard her voice say to me with this silvery little laugh, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry; you’ll find out everything soon enough.” I thanked her and gently closed her eyes, then left with my machines and my question.
I was still living off and on with my parents, but I also shared an apartment with a girlfriend from drama club who had graduated the year before me. I turned eighteen on May 27, 1966, but I graduated in June. I moved out completely the day I turned eighteen, bought myself a seven-foot boa constrictor that I named Baby Doll, and for a year or so I pursued a career as a laboratory histologist for a private lab.
So, I worked and partied and went to junior college for a while, enjoying being a free bird entirely on my own, until my awareness of the political scene with the war in Vietnam and the repression of the antiwar and civil rights movements here began to overwhelm my consciousness. More and more of my time was spent working at the Peace Center or going to antiwar demonstrations or to love-ins, and it cut into my work and my school life. The Psychedelic Psixties had arrived in full tilt! I had actually gotten an awesome education in high school, and we were too poor for me to go to a four-year college, so I ended up at a second-rate junior college. But I got so frustrated with the poor level of education that was being handed out at the junior college that I followed Tim Leary’s suggestion: I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
I felt that I needed to start a new life in a new place. A friend of mine from the Peace Center wanted to come along as far as San Francisco, so we headed north in the warm summer sunshine. There was an on-ramp near the gas station where I filled up, and my friend pointed out some hitchhikers on the ramp, so I pulled over and gave this guy a ride. I recognized him from the Peace Center and also from driving around and smoking pot in the back of his tricked-out old psychedelic panel truck. His name was Gary, and he said he was also headed for San Francisco and that he had just got kicked out of the military for being too weird.
Our first stop was Big Sur, and I was planning on staying there for at least a month before I went any further north. I knew that I needed to touch the Earth and clear my head of all the bad vibes I had picked up traveling in the South and in the cities. Big Sur was always my magickal touchstone; it was like wandering through Middle Earth. When we got to Big Sur I offered to share my sleeping bag with Gary, because he had only brought a bedroll. But the deal was: if he wanted to do that, he had to help me keep my boa constrictor warm!
GARY FERNS: We met originally down in Orange County for a few months before we left for Oregon. I had just gotten thrown out of the Air Force and was sort of kicking around—a freewheelin’ Hippie. I met Morning Glory at one of the local head shops in Santa Ana. She was the “snake chick,” the one with the boa constrictor under the black light. We used to hang out with the same people and go to the beach or concerts. She decided to move to Oregon. I was kind of bored when I heard about it and it sounded like it might be fun, so I decided to go along for the ride. We stopped at Big Sur and made this intense psychedelic connection, and we decided we were married from that point on. We stayed at Big Sur for a couple of weeks and then ambled on up the coast. Eventually, we arrived in Eugene and connected with this other family from Orange County that we knew from the Peace Center who had migrated there earlier.
NARRATOR: MG and Gary co-created a commune with their friends. Eventually they merged with another, larger group that had a communal-style farm and they all moved out to the country. Then MG and Gary decided to have a child together.
MG: My daughter was born on November 11, 1969. I had a home birth in town, in the back room of a friend’s house. In those days, fathers were not allowed in the hospital delivery rooms, and Gary and I both felt that was really unfair. We had started this together, and we wanted to make it through together; so many women cut off from their partners become estranged by undergoing the pain and magick of the birthing process without them. I had a sixty-year-old midwife who was an osteopath who had delivered lots of babies, including the husband of the nurse who assisted us. We were just down the street from the hospital in case anything went wrong, but I was convinced from all the books on natural childbirth I had read that my birth would be a snap. When I went into labor, I thought there must be something really wrong because it hurt so badly. But once I got over the shock, I was able to use the meditation and breathing techniques I had learned, and it was all totally worth every minute of it. There were no complications at all, and Gary was able to help and to be there as my supporter all the time. And finally there was the baby. She was this beautiful copper color like an Indian child; we named her Rainbow Galadriel.
NARRATOR: The social experiment of communal farm living didn’t work out the way they had hoped, so MG and Gary moved with their newborn baby back into Eugene. They eventually settled down in a loft-like space where they formed a new community that included their downstairs neighbors.
CATHERINE CROWELL (C9): A friend of mine told me that there was a Witch living upstairs from her. It was the spring of 1972. So I went up there to meet Morning Glory. She and I started talking, and I didn’t come back downstairs for forty-eight hours. We stayed up night and day talking. She was fascinating and truly living a self-made life. That was a very valuable thing in 1972—my entire generation was really about redefining life and not simply accepting the mantle of suburbia.
She lived in an amazing little apartment with Gary, Rainbow, and an eight-foot boa constrictor named Ophelia that they kept in a hollowed-out TV set. The place was painted the colors of peacock feathers. It was a sort of converted attic. Gary had a love for antiques, so they had Victorian-style furniture, which one could pick up at the time, and it was always filled with candles.
MG: I started writing a column called “Magick Words” for The Augur, a local underground newspaper, and I was reading Tarot cards, teaching classes, and giving little seminars. I had lots of wonderful friends, and Gary was a great guy, but more of a retiring Buddhist-type spiritual person. He wasn’t cut out to be a Priest to be the partner to my Priestess self; I just didn’t have any magickal peers. I wanted to share my spiritual visions with the world, but there were no other Pagans or Witches there. I kept looking for other people to connect with; we even drove down to San Francisco looking for Witches, but we couldn’t stay long enough to make any real connections. Everyone was really underground and secretive in those days.
However, I did pick up a copy of Llewellyn’s Gnostica News at a psychic bookstore. I subscribed to Gnostica and finally heard about the Gnostic Aquarian Festival, or Gnosticon, to be held in Minneapolis over the Autumn Equinox weekend of 1973. So I decided that I was going to hitchhike to Minneapolis, go to the con, and finally meet some people like myself.
CATHERINE CROWELL (C9): She functioned alone as a Pagan in Eugene. She would always get interviewed by the newspaper at Hallowe’en, but there really wasn’t much of a community of that sort there at the time. Still she seemed fine and happy—she wasn’t always yearning and grumpy. Around the time of Elvis Presley’s concert from Hawaii, Morning Glory heard that there was a big festival that was going to be in Minneapolis. She was desperate to go there. They didn’t have any money, so I went to my father and I lied. I said I needed the money, I borrowed it from him, and I funded her trip. We sent her off with great love and encouragement, because she meant so much to all of us. She was an inspiration and a constant joy. And we knew that her religion was the foundation of that for her. So Gary and I did what we could. We sent her off. And she did not come back.
MG: When I got to the convention, I took a deep breath and looked around. It didn’t seem like there was anyone there that looked at all like me. They were mostly older, straight-looking folks. I finally saw a bunch of folks with brightly colored clothes, Renaissance-style tunics, and cloaks at the Church of All Worlds booth. I asked this one long-haired fellow how to get to my first workshop, and we exchanged some mutual excitement about the event and he gave me directions. After my workshop was done, I returned to the CAW booth and hung out with the folks there; everyone kept telling me that I had to meet this guy who was with them because we were so much alike. He even had a snake.
And eventually, when we did meet, it became a magickal meltdown. I hadn’t really read his articles in Gnostica News before I came, but I realized that I had signed up for all of his lectures based on the titles he had created from popular rock songs; they were all about Nature and the Goddess. He gave this amazing lecture on the TheaGenesis principle (later called the Gaea Thesis), which was the whole idea of the Goddess as an evolutionary force in Nature, and how we were all part of that one planetary consciousness. It was all the missing pieces of my own homegrown theology and answered all the biological and historical questions that had been plaguing me—wrapped it all up and tied it up with a neat bow and ribbon. I was completely blown away and so were most of the other people in the room.
I may seem like a pushy broad, but in many ways I am kind of shy; I’m especially nervous around people who I think are “famous” or more educated than I am. But I couldn’t stop myself from going right up to the front of the room at the end of the lecture and telling this man, “I really need to talk to you!”
I had meant it in a sort of “We should find time to have a conversation about this stuff” sort of way, but to my amazement he just took my hand and said, “You’re right!” and walked me right out the door, leaving all those other people behind with their mouths hanging open in astonishment. We went off to a little alcove behind some potted plants in the lobby and sat down and took a deep breath, turned to each other with a million things to say, and found ourselves . . . speechless, timelessly falling into each other’s eyes, into each other’s memories, into each other’s lives. It was like the dreamfasting experience for the Gelflings in the movie The Dark Crystal (which hadn’t been made yet).
It was the most profoundly important magickal act that had every happened to either of us. We were so in love that we could hardly speak.
But I have always had the ability to step back from my feelings (it’s a Gemini thing), so I paused and took a deep breath and said, “This is amazing and wonderful, and I love you so much I can’t even think straight. But I must be honest with you. I need you to understand that as much as I love you, I can never be in a monogamous relationship; for one thing I already have a family. Monogamy is just not in my nature and I don’t want to deceive you. I want to be free to have other lovers, and you’re free to do that as well. I’ll give you my whole heart and soul, but I cannot give you monogamy. There are other people in my life, and there always will be other people. Yet what we have together is special and unique beyond any measure; nothing will ever take away from that.”
And he looked back into my eyes and smiled like he had just found the Holy Grail.
OZ: I’d never had anybody present it to me as what they wanted. It had always been me saying that. Everything that we touched on was like that. We started coming up with every possible thing we could think of, and every time we did we found a complete match. From that moment on, we were totally inseparable. The whole rest of the weekend was like a dream. Everybody who had come up there with me was packed into one hotel room. (This was a custom I had picked up from going to science-fiction conventions. We had all brought our sleeping bags with us.) The closet was just big enough for Morning Glory and I to lie down in, so that became our private space. Though I think we probably kept everyone else awake all night with the sounds we were making!
MG: I have always been a “True Dreamer”—that is, from childhood I would have dreams that would come to be real. About two years before Gnosticon I had dreamed that I was going to meet a man who was going to be a teacher for me. The Goddess spoke to me and told me that I was to follow him, and he would lead me into a completely new life. When I woke up, the dream was so vivid that I told Gary about it. So I went about my life, sort of looking for this person and wondering when I was going to meet him. I had memorized his features exactly in the dream by sort of freezing the action and had never forgotten them. When I met Tim I kept thinking, “This must be the guy in the dream, but there is something different about him; he doesn’t look quite the same.” I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
And then I finally got a copy of the Gnosticon program book; I was flipping through it and I saw his picture. And it was literally like it was cut with scissors out of the dream. And I told him, “Wow, this picture doesn’t really look that much like you.”
And he said, “Yeah, it’s an old picture. It was taken two years ago.” Wham! There it was. It was truly Destiny, in my face staring back at me. And there was no way I could deny it, explain it away with logic, or escape from the inevitable reality of it. It was like the Gods said to me: “You have always asked for proof of real Magick; you asked for a miracle; now here it is. Deal with it!”
Many people go through their whole lives begging for just one scrap of true Magick and then rarely recognize it when it finally does arrive. But I was so blessed that I was not going to make that mistake; I was not going to lose this perfect, shining, Goddess-given gift. At that point I decided, “Okay, I have to accept that this is genuinely my karmic fate; so now what am I going to do?”
OZ: We became the darlings of the entire con. At the big banquet, they set up a special table just for speakers. Of course, I insisted that an extra place had to be set for Morning Glory! Right across from us was Isaac Bonewits, and he had two questions for us: “When are you going to get married? And can I perform the ceremony?” This was like twenty-four hours after we had met.
Well, we turned to each other and said, “Next year at the spring gathering.” Because they were going to be having an Aquarian Festival and Witchmeet on the 1974 Spring Equinox. “And yes, you can perform the ceremony.” And that was that; we just acted totally on impulse, even though we knew there was a lot that had to be resolved before it could happen. I mean, she had a loving husband and daughter and a whole community of friends out in Oregon.
MG: Gary and I had always had an open marriage, but it’s quite another thing to have two primary relationships over two thousand miles apart. The whole drive back to St. Louis I was pretty much a basket case. I sat in the back seat weeping inconsolably. It was definitely a case of “be careful what you wish for”—it will come about, but at what cost? The price was my relationship with my husband and daughter and my wonderful community of friends in Eugene. I came to understand why the ancient Greeks feared the power of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love; it was because Her gift was irresistible and caused lives to be torn apart and communities to be thrown into chaos.