The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  Lest anyone think I am disparaging his writing wholesale, I am not. I draw stark contrast between his writing about personal matters—which was bizarre at best—and his writing about coins, which was splendid, witty, and unassailably accurate since it was based on facts about coins.

  To illustrate this contrast further, I will add another excerpt of his writing at the end of this chapter which will demonstrate how very odd, limited, and ultimately self-pitying his own perspective was. Here are two examples of what may be found in his unpublished masterpiece, and you can tell me whether you would want to read several thousand pages of this and whether you think that it would be likely to change the world into a grand utopia of free love and sex between all people:

  “Straight: adjective. Narrow. More like the cage than the bird, more like the wall than the vine or child that climbs it: more like the nightstick than the head it smashes.”

  “Marriage: noun. For the man, a wife sentence: for the woman, a new name and address.”

  Anyone can see how “The Cynic’s Dictionary” is destined to change the world into a utopia!

  Or not.

  I am including the following article written by my father, not because it is especially edifying, but because it might serve to illustrate his personality better than anything I could say. He wrote this to explain an eleven-month absence from writing his usual article, Bristles and Barbs, for “Coins” magazine. Note: “SBAs” are Susan B. Anthony two dollar coins, and the Berkeley Soap Opera was the extended family in Berkeley we lived in. “Don’t Make Waves!” is the way he felt he was obliged to suffer in silence, living in pain and endless misery.

  “Bristles and Barbs,” Coins, Vol. 28, No. 2 (February 1981), p. 68. By Walter Breen

  Before I get to the main theme, let me publicly thank my well-wishers who have been inquiring about my health during the months I’ve been away from these pages and up to my eyebrows in the Berkeley Soap Opera (“Don’t make waves!”). We are all at last over our major infections; I finally sent off the last installment (a 600 item bibliography) of the Encyclopedia of American Coins to Doubleday; we are no longer trapped carless in a house with four long-term house guests and all our major appliances out of order; the back door (vandalized by a burglar) has been replaced; I have had six narrow escapes from death in my car at the hands of loose nuts behind other wheels, who evidently don’t believe in turn signals or making sure intersections are clear; one of our house guests was shot in the leg and given three minor jaw fractures by a mugger; another family member was abducted by a rapist and rescued by a friend at the last moment; we contacted authorities after my foster son was mugged, on the same day he was almost blinded by chemicals; we settled out of court with the hotel in whose elevator we’d been trapped for hours; I have been (permanently, I hope) cured of asthma by a group of psychic healers; I am finally off crutches, no thanks to the turkey who left an extension cord stretched across my floor. (Never a dull moment.)

  And how’ve your last few months been?

  A few things stand out to me from this excerpt: I remember almost nothing of what he claims. During the time period in question, I never heard of anyone being shot in the leg, abducted or rescued, trapped in an elevator, or almost blinded by chemicals. To be fair, I was gone as much as I could be, but I still spent a certain amount of time at home and there should have been something said about such difficult events.

  I do remember one thing, and only one, which keeps me from saying I remember nothing of his mystifying claims. I do remember my father being on crutches, and tripping over an extension cord is a reasonable explanation although I don’t know how one could have ended up in his room without his knowledge or consent. After all, how many mysterious figures go into one’s room in secret, install suspicious extension cords and leave?

  Perhaps I was simply not close enough to him, or all these dramas mysteriously happened out of my sight, or somehow he forgot to mention any of it to me. Perhaps he was simply living in another space-time continuum where dreadful things conspired against him at every moment.

  His six near-misses behind the wheel? I think he was without any doubt the worst driver I have ever known. He would get so upset so easily that he would scream uncontrollably at other drivers for anything at all, and worse, he would ease off the brake pedal onto the gas pedal as though they were connected, and vice versa, which meant a passenger would invariably get whiplash from being his passenger. I would be willing to bet that all six near-misses were his own fault: the result of his own panic.

  But more obvious to me is this: even if those events all took place within eleven months, I am still willing to bet that he spent every spare minute writing, even if he neglected the column he was asked to write. To me this is a lengthy, nonsensical rehash of the classic “Dog Ate My Homework” gambit, and I’m not sure why he even included it in a professional article.

  Without a doubt he was a charming and charismatic writer, but his reality was distinctly different than that which happened in the lives of the rest of us. And no, the psychic healers did not cure his asthma.

  Try to not look so surprised…

  “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

  —Marcellus to Horatio, Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 4

  Chapter 24: Religion of the Month Club (1980–1982)

  “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine.

  Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them

  a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

  —The Holy Bible, 2 Timothy 4:3 (NIV)

  For a batch of intellectuals like my parents, a new interest is usually all that is needed to drive any interpersonal stuff away. In that light, my parents’ new interest in religion was quite enough to consume them all for some time and distract them from anything as trivial as genuine dislike of one another, incompatible values, and the occasional felony.

  Their interest in religion was more of a scholarly exercise than anything which could be confused with genuine faith in anything. After all, “sitting in a church does not make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.” Still, for my parents, who had money, books and plenty of space, making their very own religion seemed a reasonable project. I am not claiming there is anything objectively wrong with their religious inquiry. The problem is that I do not believe for a microsecond that any of them believed in any part of what they were doing.

  To say that my parents’ interest in religion inspired the respect and admiration of their offspring is a slight overstatement. Where my brother and I tried hard to not openly guffaw at each new fad, the overall effect was about as impressive as watching a pair of toads endlessly trying on ball gowns. No, the cut doesn’t matter. No, the color doesn’t matter. No, the fit doesn’t matter. Nothing is going to make a toad look good in a ball gown, and nothing is going to make a fake faith worthy of respect.

  Greenwalls was a two-story Victorian house with external stairs front and back, and behind the house was a two-story carriage house which was initially unfinished, like a barn on the inside. When both floors of the carriage house was finished, the upstairs, always called the “Temple,” became the nonprofit “Center for Non-Traditional Religion.” There was a giant pentagram painted on the floor which might still be there under the linoleum, although I don’t know what happened to the building once we were all gone.

  Before the Temple was finished, Mother held rituals in our living room. There was also a tiny little room off the library at Greenwalls that was used as a magical room. It was small and narrow with almost no furniture except the altar. A candle was always burning, and this was very important to both of my parents, not just as the symbol of fire, but as a symbol of eternity. Also on the altar was a little dish of salt (earth), a chalice of water (water), and a knife (air).

  My mother had a magic cabinet. It was five or six feet tall, a foot and a half wide, and made of grey enameled metal
with shelves. My father kept his geodes and other rocks and crystals in there alongside my mothers pictures and little statues, some silver jewelry and the ritual knife. It was double edged with a Japanese wrapped-cord grip expertly done by Mother’s friend Barry Green.

  On the wall was a piece of paper hand-lettered by my father. It said:

  Let none enter unless they

  ACKNOWLEDGE

  The Fatherhood of God

  The Motherhood of Nature

  and the Brotherhood of Man.

  Yes, I know that is awfully pompous, but all their religious meanderings were pompous.

  In 1978, my mother, my aunt Diana, my aunt Tracy and several others had a coven which they called the “Darkmoon Circle.” They had lots of rituals about which I remember little, except I thought that they were stupid and I had to make several magical robes for them. The robes were simple: a long length of black fabric folded in half crosswise and sewn up both sides with a hole in the top for the head. There was a white cord tie at the waist, knotted at both ends.

  What was the point of the Darkmoon Circle? The notion was that the “goddess” appeared in three aspects: “Maiden,” “Mother,” and “Crone” or “Wise Woman;” called collectively “The Triple Goddess.” Someone joked that I was the unmaidenly Maiden, Lisa was the unmotherly Mother, and Mother was the foolish Wise Woman. Even now I fail to see the point, but one thing we all did during the ritual was to act the part of one of those three “goddesses” complete with really dopey lines, typed out and stapled in the upper left hand corner.

  I know that in other pagan rituals, the stated intention is to get the “spirits” or “gods and goddesses” to inhabit the bodies of the ritual participants, and then for them to have sex with one another as though human beings were an earthly singles bar for disembodied spirits. Where I am certain that enough fancy language and historical references might make a “Great Marriage” seem less stupid, nothing could make it less stupid. My mother wrote about at least one of these “Great Marriages” in Mists of Avalon a few years later. In private, she joked about the possibility of invoking a spirit and then not being able to get it to do what she wanted it to do. It would have made a good plot device, I suppose, if one was writing a book.

  To attempt it seems the height of idiocy.

  Nonetheless, I had a “puberty ritual” with the Darkmoon Circle when I was 13 which took place in the hot tub and the living room at Greenwalls. We were all naked, or “skyclad” although there was no sex, and no attempts to get any spirits to show up that I recall. I was given a few gifts, including some needles and silk thread from Esther in a small leather bag, and a little moonstone from my aunt Diana wrapped in a square of white silk.

  One thing I had difficulty forgiving my mother for is the new words she wrote for Mozart’s incomparable Ave Verum Corpus. They are too stupid and banal to repeat here. Compare this to the part in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” where Beethoven’s Ninth is ruined for Alex by its inclusion in the Ludovico Treatment, meant to “cure” Alex. There is no excuse to destroy good music.

  Mozart was inspired by God, and anything Mozart wrote was much holier than anything which went on in my mother’s Temple.

  I noticed Mother and Diana wrote the pagan rituals with increasingly Christian language over time. Instead of Darkmoon Circle and Triple Goddess, we started hearing about the “Liturgy of the Mother” and the “Covenant of the Goddess.” The latter, also known as “COG,” was an organization Diana ran for years and years before she got mixed up with Asatru, or Norse paganism.

  The rituals made me feel sick. It was almost as though my mother thought that inventing a bunch of nonsense would suddenly cause a new deity-to-order to leap into existence, ready to do the bidding of people.

  Far from sanitizing it, the Christian-speak simply made the pagan stuff seem confused and lacking in identity. After all, if religion is meant to recognize ultimate reality, how can it be invented and reinvented by anyone with a Selectric typewriter and a Xerox machine? Yes, I know my parents would spend ages trying to talk anyone who would listen out of believing anything in the Bible and questioning the inspiration of the authors, but Mother never claimed inspiration, holy or otherwise, for the mindless twaddle she stuffed into the rituals we wasted our time with.

  The AOR, or “Aquarian Order of the Restoration” met in the newly fixed up upstairs of the Temple. The objective of the AOR was to restore Goddess worship to the culture. Although the Internet claims my mother and father founded the AOR in the ‘50s or ‘60s, that is absurd considering they did not meet until 1962. I first remember my mother and father holding AOR rituals in the ‘80s; I was there.

  Where the Internet claims my mother “initiated” others into the AOR, including “Ramfis S. Firethorn,” that was just my Uncle Don using yet another pseudonym. One notable use of all these pseudonyms is that it means the worst books my family has ever coughed up can be reviewed by lots and lots of people—or two people with lots and lots of pseudonyms, proving that nepotism is alive and well.

  All I remember of the AOR rituals is that they were just as stupid as the Darkmoon Circle rituals, they included men unlike the Darkmoon Circle, and in a particularly awful moment in one ritual my uncle Don held a sword to my throat and swore me to secrecy about something or other.

  I remember how horrified I was that men were present at the AOR rituals: mostly Don, my father, and Phillip (Phil) Wayne. The last thing I wanted was to be either skyclad or in nothing but a thin magical robe around a bunch of fat, oversexed creeps—whether I was related to them or not!

  When my parents had lost interest in Wicca and agreed that the objective of the AOR had been accomplished, they all turned their interests towards Christianity, or their interpretation of Christianity anyway. My parents felt that what they believed was far superior to anything that was actually in the Bible, and if they studied hard enough, they would be able to prove that their interpretation and revision was really the “right” one.

  Mother didn’t approve of how non-feminist the Bible was, and she certainly didn’t believe in any of that anti-gay and anti-lesbian stuff. My father was passionately interested in religion, although his beliefs were unsupportable. He was committed to the notion that he could prove that Jesus was a pedophile, and that John the Beloved Disciple was his teenaged lover: in my view, a hideous blasphemy.

  My mother had been volunteering as a telephone “pastoral” counselor at the Pacific Center, a gay counseling center in Berkeley. When she discussed this with Mikhail Itkin, he persuaded her that she had a vocation for the priesthood.

  First, a little bit about Mikhail Itkin:

  “Archbishop” Michael Francis Augustine Itkin (aka Mikhail Itkin) was the protege of Bishop George A. Hyde. Father Hyde presided over the Eucharistic Catholic Church in 1946, the first Christian church in the United States to ordain gay people. He ordained Mikhail to the priesthood in 1957. Bishop Hyde and Itkin parted ways two years later because he quit ordaining gay people and backed away from his pro-gay stance.

  Mikhail was a fan of gay sex, leather, and LSD. He had written an essay about spirituality and LSD which caught the eye of one Timothy Leary. He ran his own church, first called the "Primitive Catholic Church (Evangelical Catholic), followed about about six other names, finally settling on Western Orthodox Catholic (Anglican Orthodox). After a long, priestly love affair with the San Francisco bathhouses, Mikhail Itkin died of complications of AIDS in 1989. In 2002, the Moorish Orthodox Church decided he was a saint. No doubt Heaven leapt into obedience at their whim.

  For the next few paragraphs, I am going to set aside the use of quotation marks, because if I use all of them that the subject matter requires, I will run out. You can imagine, if you like, someone trying to read the following passage in a self-important tone, with a straight face, or perhaps imagine me reading it, laughing my brains out. Suffice to say, it is very difficult to take one’s parents seriously when they take leave of logic and reaso
n, but you’d think I would be used to that by now. Here we go, with no quotes:

  Mikhail helped my parents invent their very own Christian sect, and called it Gnostic Catholicism. I know, I know, that’s a bit like dry water or vegan hamburger. Mikhail had already ordained my father as an archbishop years before. His series of ordination classes culminated with him ordaining my mother as a priest, and Lisa, Don, and Don’s lover Kelson as deacons.

  This is my belief about Mikhail and his farcical notion of “ordaining” the people in my house:

  They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

  —The Holy Bible, 2 Timothy 3:6–7 (NIV)

  I was required to go to Mother’s ordination, after years of watching her be a pagan priestess. I was repulsed, finding the entire thing to be idiotic. I have no idea whether she took it seriously or whether she regarded it as the equivalent of a new merit badge. When Mikhail laid hands on her during her ordination, there was a loud thunderclap. This was interpreted by my parents as a symbol of great and wonderful things; for me it seemed more a sign of divine disapproval. I halfway expected her to be struck by lightning.

  The church horrified me. What went on inside seemed such a waste of time! There was no congregation: just them. No ministry, no people, nobody was helped. The entire shaky edifice seemed built on the notion that they, as gay people, wanted to be ordained, and gosh darn it, they were going to be ordained.