Creating Circles and Ceremonies: Rituals for All ... - reading...

VIII Creating Circles & Ceremonies
Preface: A Brief Personal History of HOME
By Oberon Zell-Ravenheart
HOMEward Bound
Morning Glory and I have been creating and participating in ceremonies for most of our
lives. We were both very active in our respective families’ churches when we were children,
as we were fascinated by the mystique and magick of the rituals. We enjoyed all the seasonal
holiday celebrations (especially Hallowe’en!), birthdays, church retreats, and other annual
events. As teenagers, we created our own little rituals for many occasions: funerals for pets,
initiations, taking new names, full moons. I joined the Boy Scouts, and attended summer
camps where I was introduced to Native American-inspired campfire circles and other “tribal”
rituals—which I loved!
Approaching adulthood, we each discovered Paganism and Witchcraft, which led us into
creating group rituals for others. In 1962, I co-founded a Pagan Church—the Church of All
Worlds (CAW)—which necessitated developing an entire liturgy for our weekly services. In the
earliest phases of this process, my ritual constructs were largely derived from my childhood
experiences in church and Scouting, combined with ideas from the fantasy, science fiction, and
mythology I was reading at the time. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and
Robert Rimmer’s The Rebellion of Yale Marrat (1964) were particularly influential.
In the late 60s, living in St. Louis, Missouri, I became involved for a few years with the
local Unitarian Church, whose pastor, Webster Kitchell, became a close friend. Unitarian
liturgical structure and music—especially the hymnal, Songs for the Celebration of Life—
became another source of inspiration. I also came upon the brilliant work of Feraferia founder
Frederick Adams, and incorporated much of his ritual concepts and artwork into the ceremonies
I was creating. All of this experience came in very handy when, as a Pagan Priest, I
started being asked to perform public wedding ceremonies in those halcyon days of Hippiedom!
In 1970, I was introduced to modern Wicca and Ceremonial Magick, with all of its
formal and complex ritual structures. I took classes in these traditions from Deborah Letter
at her St. Louis occult store, The Cauldron, and received initiation in April of 1971. CAW’s
new High Priestess, Carolyn Clark, had been trained in Ozark “Druidic” Witchcraft, and I
studied with her as well.
During this period, my publication of Green Egg magazine and my articles on
“TheaGenesis” (the earliest published writings on what later became known as “The Gaia
Thesis”) brought me to wider attention, and I started getting invitations to travel and lecture.
Thus it came to be that while I was presenting a series of such talks at Llewellyn’s 3 rd Gnostic
Aquarian Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over Autumn Equinox, 1973, I met my lifemate,
Morning Glory. The saga of our romance is mythic, but I will not recount it here.
Our wedding at Llewellyn’s Spring Witchmoot the following Easter Sunday was an
enormous event—attended by hundreds of magickal people and Pagan luminaries. CAW
High Priestess Carolyn Clark and Arch Druid Isaac Bonewits officiated, with Margot Adler
singing songs by Gwydion Pendderwen. It was covered by local news media and Japanese
television, and appeared on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, upstaging the
Pope! Morning Glory and I had created the ceremony, and we subsequently printed it in the
pages of Green Egg. Evidently, this was one of the first Pagan “handfasting” rituals to be
published, and it became widely adopted as a model throughout the Pagan community.
After a few years together in St. Louis, Morning Glory and I bought and fixed up a 1958
Chevy school bus (“The Scarlet Succubus”), sold our house, and hit the road for the West
Coast. In the Fall of 1976 we arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where we met Anna Korn. She had
been trained in Texas in a pre-Z Budapest British Tradition of Dianic Witchcraft by Mark
Roberts and Morgan McFarland. I had been trained in an Italian Strega-Qabalistic tradition