Wizards of America - Oberon Zell

Well met, Wizards one and all,

As always, we hope that the day finds you in good health and high spirits!

As the United States marks its 250th year, the Grey School revels in its Founding Month with twenty-two years behind it. Anniversaries of founding naturally turn our attention toward those unusual people who looked upon an absence and decided, with some confidence and probably a little stubbornness, that something ought to stand there. For the Grey School, this reflection brings us very close to home, because our next American Wizard is the man who first imagined the School and then undertook the much harder work of making it real.

Oberon Zell founded the Grey School of Wizardry in 2004 and served as its first Headmaster for eighteen years, though he was already sixty-one when its doors opened. By then, he had spent four decades publishing, teaching, organizing communities, creating art, testing legends, and learning what happens when a powerful idea meets the decidedly less romantic demands of schedules, money, disagreement, and ordinary human nature. The School arrived as the gathering point of a lifetime's work, given an educational form that other people could enter, question, and eventually carry forward.

Some people spend their lives imagining what the world might contain. Oberon has spent his life attempting to build it, which is a rather different undertaking.

He was born Timothy Zell on November 30, 1942, in St. Louis, Missouri, while his father served as a Marine in the South Pacific, though we will call him Oberon throughout the life that follows. His childhood later took him to Crystal Lake, Illinois, where mythology, fairy tales, the natural world, and speculative fiction offered a landscape large enough for his curiosity to roam. Disney's Fantasia left a lasting impression, as did the recurring discovery that stories could contain ideas serious enough to follow beyond the page. Even the name by which he became known reflects a life repeatedly shaped through conscious reinvention.

As a boy, Oberon also discovered that publication could gather people around an idea. He produced a high school periodical called The Cool Ghoul, followed in college by The Atlan Torch. The titles improved only slightly, perhaps, but the habit beneath them was already well formed. He would write, draw, assemble, duplicate, and distribute until a private fascination became a shared conversation, often beginning the conversation before anyone else had thought to reserve a room for it.

At Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, and pre-med. There, in 1961, he met Richard Lance Christie, another pupil interested in psychology, intentional community, and speculative fiction. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land gave their conversations a provocative model, and on April 7, 1962, they shared water and formed a fellowship called Atl, which gradually developed into the Church of All Worlds.

Oberon completed his bachelor's degree in 1965, pursued graduate study in clinical psychology, earned a teaching certificate, and worked as a teacher, counselor, and administrator. Those experiences deserve a little attention, because the institutions he would later establish depended upon far more than imagination. He learned how ideas become teachable, how groups behave after the first excitement has passed, and how a vision survives only when someone is willing to answer correspondence, prepare materials, and attend to the ordinary work awaiting them on Monday morning. Inspiration may open a door, but somebody still has to write the lesson plan.

On September 7, 1967, Oberon brought the Church of All Worlds into public view during a talk at a St. Louis coffeehouse. While explaining the new community, he said, "I guess you could say we're Pagans." With those words, Oberon became the first person to publicly claim Pagan as a modern religious identity for himself while building an organized public community around that name. He took a word ordinarily applied from the outside and spoke it in the first person plural, giving scattered people a public identity through which they might begin to recognize one another.

The Church incorporated in Missouri on March 4, 1968, and seventeen days later he produced the first issue of Green Egg, initially a one-page ditto sheet. It grew into the most influential communications forum of the emerging Pagan movement, carrying articles, arguments, jokes, announcements, and letters among people who otherwise might never have found one another. He also helped organize the Council of Themis, an early effort at cooperation among independent groups, and in doing so showed that identity gains durability when people are given a means to speak, disagree, and remain in conversation.

This history is essential to Oberon's significance, though it is best understood as the first great public expression of a much broader gift. Again and again, he has given language to an idea, gathered people around it, and constructed a form sturdy enough for the work to continue even after agreement became complicated. Anyone who has founded an institution will recognize that final achievement as the true test, since enthusiasm is abundant at the beginning and considerably rarer when the chairs must be stacked afterward.

In 1973, at the Gnostic Aquarian Festival in Minneapolis, Oberon met Morning Glory. They married the following April and became creative partners for the next forty years, sharing a life in which scholarship, experiment, publication, and art continually crossed into one another. Morning Glory wrote and taught in her own right, helped edit Green Egg, and brought research, organizational skill, and an independent mind to their shared undertakings. Many projects publicly remembered under Oberon's name bear the mark of both their hands, and his life cannot be told honestly without allowing hers to remain fully present beside it.

Their most famous experiment began, as any sensible sequence of experiments eventually must, with the unicorn. Through the Ecosophical Research Association, established in 1977, they investigated whether the one-horned animals shown in old art might be produced in living form. They developed a process for repositioning the horn buds of very young Angora-Saanen goats so the horns grew together at the center of the forehead, and Lancelot, their first living unicorn, was born at the Spring Equinox of 1980.

Anyone can daydream about unicorns. Oberon filed the patent.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Patent 4,429,685 in 1984 for what the Zells called the unicorning process. Their unicorns appeared at Renaissance fairs and wildlife parks, then later with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, where the old image stepped rather unexpectedly into modern public life. The project combined biological technique, historical curiosity, showmanship, and a cheerful refusal to leave myth safely inside a book. Beneath the spectacle rested a serious habit of mind: the border between possible and impossible sometimes moves when curiosity is willing to test it.

That same instinct carried Oberon into the field. In 1985, he led a thirteen-person diving and filming expedition to New Ireland in Papua New Guinea in search of the animal behind local stories of the Ri. The journey deepened his conviction that the reported Ri represented something distinct from the familiar dugong, a conclusion he continued to defend. Oberon often approached legend as an open question rather than a conclusion already waiting to be defended; imagination supplied the invitation, and the physical world was allowed to answer in its own language.

Art offered another way to bring old images into tangible form. Oberon and Morning Glory developed Mythic Images during the late 1980s, drawing upon her study and collection of Goddess figures and his sculptural work. Their designs entered homes as plaques, jewelry, and statues, while the studio gave historical and mythic forms a renewed material presence.

Morning Glory also gave the emerging polyamory movement one of its defining words. In her 1990 essay "A Bouquet of Lovers," she introduced the adjective "poly-amorous" while describing relationships grounded in honesty, consent, negotiated boundaries, and responsibility. The noun polyamory developed independently soon afterward, though her language and ethical framework helped many people describe lives for which the available vocabulary had proven awkward or incomplete. It was another expression of a gift that ran through much of their shared work: finding language for a lived reality and giving it enough shape to enter public conversation.

In 1998, Oberon completed The Millennial Gaia, a seated figure of the living Earth whose curves gather mountains, rivers, clouds, and the many textures of life into a single body. The sculpture brought years of ecological thinking and artistic work together in a form that people could stand before, encounter, and carry into their own imaginations. An idea first expressed in his 1971 essay "TheaGenesis" had, after nearly three decades, acquired a face.

By the opening of the new century, Oberon had become an established writer, artist, publisher, and public teacher, yet one concern remained close to the imaginative boy he had once been. Young people drawn toward Wizardry still had few serious guides, while adults often assembled their education from scattered books and private experiments, sometimes with more enthusiasm than sequence. Oberon began gathering what he wished someone had placed in his hands when he was eleven, though by then he understood that a useful book would need the knowledge of many people rather than the confidence of one author alone.

In 2002, he convened the Grey Council, bringing together specialists who could contribute knowledge, challenge assumptions, and correct the natural limits of any single writer. Their work helped shape Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, published in February 2004. Oberon served as author, illustrator, and creative director, arranging a wide field of study into a progression an apprentice could actually follow. The book collected information, of course, but its deeper accomplishment was curricular: every chapter suggested another doorway, and the doors together implied a School.

The Grey School of Wizardry incorporated on March 14, 2004, and opened to pupils on August 1. It was founded as a nonreligious educational institution, distinct from the Church of All Worlds and open to pupils of many faiths or none. Oberon's religious history supplied experience in community-building, while the School gave Wizardry a broader educational home grounded in learning, judgment, practiced skill, imagination, and useful work. That breadth has remained essential to the institution's identity as it has continued to mature.

The School drew upon nearly everything that had come before it. Publishing had taught Oberon how to reach dispersed readers, education had shown him how wonder becomes a course of study, and years of organizing had taught him that symbols and shared language can help strangers become a community. Even the unicorns contributed a lesson of their own, since improbable undertakings, as it happens, sometimes benefit from accurate paperwork.

Of course, the Grey School has never been the work of one person. Faculty members wrote courses and guided pupils, technologists built and rebuilt the campus, and administrators carried the daily responsibilities that permit vision to survive contact with actual life. The present School has grown far beyond its founding form and is shaped by people Oberon never hired, working within programs and systems that did not exist in 2004. That continuing development is part of his achievement. A founder succeeds most fully when the institution acquires enough life to learn, change, and become larger than the founder's first conception of it.

The years also brought loss, and Oberon's public life cannot be separated from the endurance demanded by his private one. He survived colon cancer after surgery and chemotherapy in 2008. Morning Glory died on May 13, 2014, after years with multiple myeloma, ending a partnership that had shaped four decades of shared work. In 2015, grief and preservation took institutional form when Oberon opened the Academy of Arcana in Santa Cruz, where a museum, library, shop, and classrooms placed the collections and creations of their life together before the public.

The Academy remained open for two years before closing in 2017, and much of the collection returned to storage. Its closure was painful, though it did not end the old habit of turning experience into another form of teaching. In 2018, Oberon began his Walkabout of the Wandering Wizard, traveling, speaking, signing books, and teaching wherever a temporary classroom could be assembled. When one set of doors could no longer remain open, he carried the classroom with him, which may be one of the most characteristic decisions of his life.

The Grey School, meanwhile, also had to grow beyond its first shape. Here, admittedly, the story becomes personal. Like many Grey School pupils, I first encountered Oberon through the pages of the Grimoire, entered the School as a young pupil, and later returned as an adult to join its faculty. Over time I became his apprentice and protégé, learning from the founder while also coming to understand the institution as it had developed beyond the world in which he first conceived it.

At Highspire in Whitehall, New York, on November 26, 2022, Oberon formally passed the Torch of Wizardry and the Headmastership to me after eighteen years leading the School. The public facts can be written in a sentence, though the act itself carried rather more than a change of title. It held trust, affection, responsibility, and the sober recognition that a living institution must eventually be entrusted to hands that will carry it into circumstances its founder cannot fully predict. Oberon became Founder and Headmaster Emeritus and remained part of the School he had created.

Founders are most often celebrated for beginning, since beginnings make excellent stories and look very handsome on anniversary programs. Continuation asks something quieter of them. Oberon had to recognize that the School's future would grow from its past without becoming an exact preservation of it, and then allow another person to make decisions he might not have made himself. By relinquishing daily command while remaining within the School's life, he gave the institution room to mature under a new administration, which was itself an act of confidence in the work he had begun.

We call Oberon Zell a Wizard because his particular gift lies in the passage between imagination and embodiment. He moves from image to experiment, from private insight to publication, and from scattered interest to public institution. Imagination, in his hands, becomes a proposal for something the world might yet contain, followed by the practical labor required to make an encounter possible.

The results have taken many forms, and they have not all endured in the shapes he first gave them. Some became movements, others became art, and a few closed their doors after serving their season. Their influence continued whenever another person entered the conversation, questioned what they found, and made work of their own. The Grey School is one of those living structures, born in one person's imagination and now filled with many minds whose work carries it into places no founder could have designed alone.

Oberon's story remains unfinished because he is still here to tell it, revise it, and occasionally add another undertaking to the list. During Founding Month, we honor the man who imagined a School of Wizardry, gathered others around the idea, and made the door real. We also honor the less visible persistence behind that achievement: the pages assembled, the groups convened, the experiments attempted, the losses survived, and the willingness to begin again when an earlier form had reached its end.

As America enters its next 250 years, Oberon's life reminds us that imagination earns its place through useful work, and that an idea reaches its greatest power when other people can enter it and carry it farther. The nation has always depended upon people willing to create institutions before success was certain. Oberon belongs among them, distinctly, colorfully, and very much on his own terms.

Measured whole, Oberon Zell stands among the Wizards of America.