Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal (Paperback)

~ Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (Editor), Chas S. Clifton (Introduction), Christopher Penczak (Foreword)
Key Phrases: dark goddess, contemporary paganism, planetary biosphere, Green Egg, Circcn Egg, Church of All Worlds (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

As acknowledged in every history of modern Paganism, the articles, poetry, art, and letters published in Green Egg over the past four decades informed, inspired, and shaped the emerging Pagan community into the fastest-growing religious movement in the English-speaking world. This richly illustrated anthology of favorite writings and artwork from those legendary issues opens a window into the birth, infancy, and adolescence of a transformative cultural revolution that is now, in the 21st century, entering its maturity.

Selections from 40 years of Green Egg include articles from numerous contributors, including Antero Ali, Isaac Bonewits, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Darryl Cherny, Phyllis Curott, LaSara Firefox, Ed Fitch, Jesse Wolf Hardin, Anodea Judith, Ralph Metzner, Diana Paxson, Starhawk, and Robert Anton Wilson.

Experience the magick, the mystery, the humor and the history as it first appeared--in the pages of the Green Egg.

About the Author

Oberon Zell-Ravenheart is the author of Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, Companion for the Apprentice Wizard, and A Wizard's Bestiary. A respected leader and Elder in the worldwide magickal community and an initiate in several different Traditions, he has created and participated in many Pagan and interfaith groups and projects, playing a major role in reclaiming the spiritual heritage of pre-Christian Europe. As publisher of the award-winning magazine Green Egg, Oberon was the first to adopt the words "Pagan" and "Neo-Pagan" to describe the newly emerging Nature religions of the 1960s. Since 1968, Green Egg has served as a primary catalyst and journal for the entire Pagan community. Oberon resides in Sonoma County, California, with Morning Glory, his beloved wife of 35 years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 286 pages
• Publisher: New Page Books; 1 edition (October 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1601630468
• ISBN-13: 978-1601630469
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #749,112 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Taste of the Green Egg Omelette, January 11, 2009

By	C. Chapin-Bishop (Quaker Pagan Reflections) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Once upon a time, you could tell what "generation" of Pagan someone was by their first encounter with the Pagan magazine Green Egg. (I'm from the early Darling years, myself, though my teachers shared with me stacks of their original, mimeographed and hand-stapled Zell years, along with stories of legendary feuds in the Forum--the letter column of the zine--and of rivalries lost and found between one tradition and another.)

Green Egg held an importance to the forming Pagan community that nothing in recent years, with the possible exception of The Witches' Voice website, could hope to rival. We found ourselves and came to understand ourselves through the community we found through those pages.

Oh, there were exceptions. Some of us encountered Circle Network News first, or The Crone Papers, or Harvest. But, before the tidal wave that is the Internet swept most of them away, the first contact most Pagans had with the wider Pagan world was with zines, like Green Egg (often in the form of tattered stacks stored under their HP/s' bed). And if this is news to you, well, then, you must be a member of one of the new and rootless post-Web Pagan generation.

But even if there are no dog-ears or coffee spills to mark the pages, the new Green Egg Omelette anthology should help close the communication gap between generations.

Though it would be untrue to say that it's all here--the sometimes combative forum letters are not represented, for instance, which is perhaps just as well--there is a wide selection of articles that show how American Paganism came to define itself over the four decades of the Green Egg's publication. Some of the ideas in these essays became so important in themselves, like Tony Kelly's "Pagan Musings" or Morning Glory Zell's "A Bouquet of Lovers," that it is almost startling to find them here, in their original forms.

Other articles reflect a zeitgeist that peaked and ebbed over the years. It gave me a nostalgic thrill to find "witchcraft" [sic] referred to as "low-magic" by Brother Khedmel in a 1972 article on ceremonial magick; the rivalry and one-upmanship between "high" and "low" magick seems to me (mercifully) to be mainly a thing of the past at this point. So, too, I found myself chuckling at satires of the Robert Bly men's spirituality movement, and at half-forgotten icons like Pagan Cowboy Joe.

Christopher Penczak and Chas Clifton have contributed a forward and an introduction, and Clifton's chapter introductions provide some structure to what could easily have seemed like a jumble of articles.His chapter headers do a great job summarizing the main trends in areas such as Ecospirituality, Worship, Pagan Culture, and Gender and Sexuality--exactly as you would expect from the author of Her Hidden Children (the definitive history of the evolution of modern Paganism in the United States). Oberon Zell and the other primary editors also contributed to an introductory section which traced the evolution of the magazine over forty years of Pagan history, in terms that will probably be of interest to those who remember the different stages in Green Egg's development.

Overall, the book has a particularly professional layout, reflecting the original magazine while smoothly integrating old and new material in a way that is clearly not simply a cut and paste of old files. Lots of old illustrations and photographs are included, and they are generally of a high quality.

Unfortunately, there are some glitches, too. As is not unusual from small press publications, there are more typographic errors than there should be, and some of the biographies seem curiously out of date. (Chas Clifton's, for instance, seems to date to the time before the publication of his 1994 volume on Witchcraft and shamanism from his series Witchcraft Today. This oversight is especially odd given the important role Clifton played in helping to weave together the chapters of this anthology.) And, most seriously, an index would have been a wonderful addition to the book.

These are minor concerns, of course. Truth to tell, I enjoyed my tour of the Green Egg Omelette, and I enjoyed sharing it with my friends over the holiday. I urge everyone with a streak of either nostalgia or curiosity about the past four decades of the modern Pagan movement to order a copy. I suspect you will enjoy it--maybe even as much as we used to enjoy those tattered old copies from under the bed.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What The World Needs Now: Pagan Perspective, January 18, 2009

By	Eric C. Hartlep "Phandaahl" (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Change seems to be the word of the moment. Which camp do you fall into - those who laugh at it as an empty slogan, or those who praise it to the sky as a magic elixir? Or do you fall into the third camp, the one whose members have been living it, in small ways and as parts of a unified movement, for better than 40 years?

Because if there is one thing this world does not need, it is two opposed camps, battling for the supremacy of their views, while the world we love and depend on for life crumbles to dust and ruin. We need, to put it bluntly, the Pagan perspective, exactly what the Green Egg Omelette provides.
Our new, change-oriented president could do worse that read Green Egg Omelette (GEO) for clues to solving the horrendous problems he and our planet face.

The world is wracked by religious war, genocide, and ancient hatreds. Try reading P.E.I. Bonewits' "Aquarian Manifesto" in GEO, try "Why I am a Pagan" by Vicki Rhodes. Global warming is changing the whole planetary system of life, the circulation of water in our oceans, the pattern of rain and drought, engendering superstorms that devastate coastal regions and parch the interiors of continents. Try reading "Biotheology" by Tim Zell (Oberon) or "The Oilman's Burden" by Tom Williams. (By the way, Oberon's Terrabios idea preceded James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis by more than two years, first expounding the vision/idea of our planet as a unified, living whole; Oberon's article was written in 1970 & published in 1971, while Lovelock's synthesis based on Oberon's ideas was published in 1973).

And now for a necessary disclaimer: I have a short piece in GEO myself, my first book appearance. To have my story in the same issue as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Timothy Leary and so many others is quite wonderful to me. I have been told by four editors over the years that pieces I had published with them in magazines would appear in books. None of the so-called mainstream publishers ever followed through - only the pagans kept their word. Tells you something.

The book itself is really well put together, solid and substantial in the hand. The production quality is top-notch, and I really like the cover illustrations. Of course I was very pleased that, no doubt by complete chance, the issue with the dolphins on the cover which my little piece was originally in, is shown on the back.

Honestly, I have not considered myself anything - Christian, Pagan or otherwise - in any active way for many years. I have only been myself, living as I thought was least harmful and truest to my beliefs. But reading the early articles, and what Green Egg's various editors and contributors had to say over the years, I find that I clearly AM a Pagan - simply because I find myself in agreement with all the major tenets of the cause: that humankind is destroying the world through ego and lack of knowledge and understanding; that we ignore the natural world (which is NOT an outside thing, but we ourselves) at our and our planet's peril; that the only real answer is to make a sea change in the way humans live and interact with the world, with Gaia, with our fellow beings; that we impoverish our souls by belief in a false separation between ourselves and all the rest of creation.

So amazing to read the early articles and to realize that all the things the mainstream press is finally paying some lip-service attention to were the backbone of the pagan movement all along. Is it a bad thing that Detroit is in tatters as a car producing entity? Is it bad that people are staying closer to home and not traveling to far-flung exotic places to lose themselves for long weekends and to forget how much they hate their daily lives? Perhaps not - it may be a sign of the personal changes we need to make. Curious indeed that the outward shrinkage of the overblown, rush and forget world may lead to growth in the local and inner aspects of people's lives. Stay home, curl up with a good book, and send a copy to Barack Obama to read to his daughters (starting with "Circle of Life: Pagan Families", by Elizabeth Barrette) before tucking them in at night.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nourished and satisfied!, January 14, 2009

By	S. A. Platten "Director - Colorado Ecospiritu... (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What a delight to read and re-read! This book is a 'must' for anyone interested in a Pagan perspective on just about anything! It includes an incredible selection of tremendously well-written articles on more subjects than I could possibly include here. Literally, full to the brim with 'something for everyone!'

Reading it was like sitting down with some of the best-known names in the Pagan world and hearing their personal stories, experiences and opinions about a variety of topics that are as relevant today as they were twenty years ago!

This book leaves the reader with a deep appreciation for the author, the community, and the value and importance of Paganism as a life path. It is thought-provoking, educational, inspiring, and just plan fun!

I am deeply nourished and satisfied by Green Egg Omelette! I will be returning to it as a reference and resource for years to come.