Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart are/were a couple of top tier hippies, who have spent years of their lives doing hippie things. Here are a few quick highlights before we get to the big stuff:
- Morning Glory met her first husband Gary Ferns in 1969. They met while she was en route to join a commune, and he was a hitchhiker who joined her. I think this may be the most 1969 way to meet a future spouse.
- Morning Glory and Oberon lived in a converted school bus for years, which in my opinion tops the classic hippie VW van.
- In 2018, Oberon embarked on what his Wikipedia page calls a “legendary” “Walkabout of the Wandering Wizard”, which in spite of the name was a road trip over the US.
- Morning Glory had a daughter called Rainbow who lived with them until she was an adolescent, when she left to live with her father (and Morning Glory’s first husband) Gary and changed her name to Gail. It seems that she doesn’t have much online presence, but I would love to hear her take on what this kind of childhood was like.
- They have a lot of illustrations and figurines of this rather terrifying image of the Goddess Gaia:
Now onto the bigger things.
My favorite hippie thing they did was develop a surgery to move a goat kid’s horns to the middle of its head so that, as the horns developed, they’d grow together into a single horn—or, in their words, creating a unicorn. The website for this is extremely dodgy about what they actually did to make this happen, calling it “magick”. A quote from Oberon:
In 1976, in the process of our research, [Morning Glory and I] discovered the secret of the Unicorn. Unicorns weren’t just figments of imagination, or distorted images of rhinoceroses; they had been actual living animals created by a closely-guarded secret process at various times throughout history, and derived from different species of horned animals. We realized that it was in our power to resurrect the authentic medieval Unicorn into the modern world.
The patent they got for the process is more specific, however:
The resulting “unicorn”, posing with Oberon and Morning Glory:
Oberon also founded The Grey School of Wizardry (named after Gandalf the Grey), which was founded in 2004. They aimed to educate students ages 11-17, though they mostly draw adult students, and have five Houses: Flames, Waters, Stones, Winds and Psyche. Your guesses are correct, as the first paragraph of their Wikipedia page confirms they were indeed inspired by Hogwarts.
The school is virtual, though they now have a physical location. And in case you were thinking this only means they have digital class recordings, think again:
The Grey School extends its reach beyond traditional online learning through the Virtual Grey School (vGSW), powered by Second Life.
They offer classes in 16 different subject groups: Wizardry, Natural Philosophy, Magickal Practice, Psychic Arts, Healing, Wortcunning/Herbalism, Divination, Performance Magics, Alchemy & Magickal Sciences, Lifeways, Beast Mastery, Cosmology, Mathemagicks, Ceremonial Magic, Lore, and Dark Arts. I trudged through their entire course catalog, and my interest was most piqued by the following:
- Santa Claus: A Global Wizard (Department of Wizardry, Year 2)
- Garbageology (Department of Natural Philosophy, Year 3). No description given, unfortunately.
- Chaos Magick (Department of Magickal Practice, Year 3). Practiced by toddlers everywhere.
- Wizardly Stage Presence (Department of Performance Magicks, Year 1)
- Electrical Wizard, Nikola Tesla (Department of Alchemy and Magickal Sciences, Year 2)
- Space Invaders: The Mortal Perils of Alien Fauna (Department of Beast Mastery, Year 3)
- Conceptual Quantum Physics 101 (Department of Cosmology, Year 1), “Description: Quantum Physics: A little physics, a little chemistry, a little magick…” I wonder if Griffiths has a textbook for this one, too.
- Statistics 401: Description to Regression (Department of Mathemagicks, Year 4). I wouldn’t have found this one so remarkable, except this was the course image:
![mathemagick]()
- The Elephant from Denmark and Other Mathemagickal Performance Tricks (Department of Mathemagicks, Year 7)
- Jediism 401: Introduction to Jedi Knighthood (Department of Lore, Year 4)
- Wizards of History 501: Scientific Revolution (Department of Lore, Year 5)
- Basic Banishing (Department of Dark Arts, Year 1), “Description: This class will introduce the student to the technique of banishing.” I think I have family I’d like to use this technique on. But perhaps I’d need the more powerful techniques from the Year 5 continuation called Advanced Banishing.
- Don’t Touch That! (Department of Dark Arts, Year 1). No description provided, but I’ll note that the teqhnique in the course title has failed me in the past.
I wondered for a bit if they were grifters, but I think they’re true believers. If nothing else, I think they’d be more successful if it was pure grift. I didn’t pick any of these out in the list above, but they have a bunch of courses in reiki, herbal healing, astrology, etc., and these are pretty big woo topics. I’d be willing to bet that their course in reiki isn’t the most popular you can find online, even though the school has existed for 20+ years at this point.
In case the tone of this post didn’t already give me away, I think much of their brand is quackery. But they were and are a couple of very ambitious hippies, and looking over all of it, I think I can respect the way they set their own path in life.