This coming November 18th, 2025 I will have been married for twenty-five years to Ceridwen, I don’t know how many lifetimes we have been together, but I would have to venture quite a few. She’s my soulmate. My twin-flame. Have you ever heard the song, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, by the Moody Blues? Ceridwen is the fulfillment of that prophetic song for me.
From the time I was, I think, around five years old or so, until about May something 1999, I had this recurring dream. At least once a week for forty-one years, I dreamed I was walking hand in hand beside a woman. It was always beside a body of water, sometimes a lake, or a river, or the ocean. I was always at Sunset, and the Sun always appeared bright orange. In at least one instance of the dream, there were two suns setting, so obviously that was not on Earth or even anywhere in our Solar System. In the dream I never saw her face, or heard her voice. As mentioned already, this dream recurred weekly, sometimes sooner for the later half of my childhood, though adolescence, and right into adulthood. Then one day, in May of 1999 it stopped. Cold turkey. It was the night Ceridwen moved in with me into my apartment in Ashland Oregon. The woman in the dream was Ceridwen. As they say, “third time is the charm.”
FIRST TIME CHARM
Lynne was my first wife. I married her on August 9th 1975. We lived in Kankakee IL, and during our marriage we owned four houses. Lynne and I had three sons together, Joshua, Jordan and Jesse, between June 1976 and May 1981. I was a “messianic Jew” (a convert from Judaism to Christianity). Lynne and I were involved in several “cults” over the years.
The first was His Community, which began as a Roman Catholic Charismatic prayer group. It was an outgrowth of the Cursillo movement in Catholicism, but then people started to experience pentecostal gifts, mostly just glossolalia (which honestly, I was able to fake, using Temple Hebrew I had learned attending synagogue services). The other “gifts” (healing, discernment, prophecy, etc.) were rarely manifest, or at least people thought they were manifest. I witnessed a lot of people interpreting dissertations expressed in glossolalia (AKA: “speaking in tongues”), but I suspected that these were people with a political agenda or belief that they wanted to convince others to adopt. Prophecy was greatly abused in His Community.
I was a member of Community’s “Core:” (as in a group of people rotten to…) and the nine of us met to discuss the business of Community on a weekly basis. This was only for about six months. A member of Community came to me expressing concerns that what Community was doing wasn’t particularly biblically based, so I prayed with him. A few days later I was called to a special meeting of the Core. That was November 11 1976, and I was accused to praying against the other leaders, found guilty by the other Core members, and defrocked.
How did the Core of His Community find out about my “grave indiscretion?” There is only one way they could have – Lynne told them.
The second was the Kankakee Fellowship. It wasn’t long after our leaving His Community that Duane Winn came to my house to meet me. He was the “Shepherd” of Kankakee Fellowship, which was affiliated with the protestant “Discipleship Shepherding” Movement. Duane’s “flock” consisted of a handful of disaffected ex-Catholics. Since I was still recovering from my recent “defrocking,” Duane was able to convince me that it had been a good thing for me to leave Community. We were with Kankakee Fellowship for a few years, but more and more I was seeing a pattern of biblical interpretation that was just not kosher. In recent times you may have heard of “Q-Anon?” Well the things Duane believed and taught make what Q-Anon believes sound like children’s fairy tales.
I was the worship leader for the Fellowship (I played guitar and I love singing), so I was experiencing life fulfillment through that. While attending KKK Fellowship, we bought a house in the same subdivision that Duane and his family lived in. We were there for three years, but things were getting worse and worse, and the doctrine was becoming more and more misogynistic. One weekend Duane and family were away at a Shepherding conference, and Lynne and I moved back into Kankakee. You see, our first home never sold (nor had we had a buyer) and that weekend our renters moved out. So I rented a U-Haul and we “u-hauled” it back to our old house in Kankakee. Thus ended out association with “cult number two.”
I never joined another one. I was burned out at this point. For a few years we (mostly me) were involved with a Quaker Meeting (Religious Society of Friends) affiliated with the Illinois Yearly Meeting of Friends. I found the Quakers to be more to my liking (politically) and I felt like they practiced a more true and pure Christianity. Even today, I believe this although I am pretty convince that Jesus was never an actual historical person. Lynne hated the Quakers. I’m not sure exactly why, but I had become close to one of the leading Friends in Kankakee, Bridget Rorem, and I think Lynne was jealous of her. Needless to say, because of Lynne’s disapproval, we stopped attending Meeting.
For a number of years I stayed home on the weekends. Eventually Lynne started attending a church without me. This new church she was involved in was not as radical as Community or KKK Fellowship had been, but they were radical enough that we started drifting apart spiritually and philosophically. By this time the Internet became a thing, and I bought my first PC.
In High School, prior to my conversion to Christianity. I had dabbled in the occult: Paganism, Witchcraft, polytheism, etc. When I was fifteen, my best friend Louis gifted me with Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. There I was introduced to the idea that you and I and everyone else are, in essence, G-d. The thing is, and maybe this is why the various forms of Christianity never really took a hold on me, we I have never not believed this. Yes, all those years, from the time I focused on Bill Brights tract, Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws? and “accepted Jesus into my heart as my ‘Lord and Savior'” through my involvement with two cults, then the Quakers, and then nothing — I always have held on to this belief – “Thou art G-d, and I am G-d; all that groks is G-d.” Even today, at 71 years old, I am still convinced of the truth of this. The same is true of my belief in Reincarnation, another belief I have held onto since even before my teens. It was on a field trip to Chicago in 5th or 6th grade. We are at the Field Museum of Natural History. I was in the egyptian room at the museum, looking at a mummy, and reading the biographical material about the young boy (a royal) whose body was contained within. I said to myself, “I KNEW this kid. I played with this kid.” That was my first reincarnation experience. I’ve had others since.
In a, I guess, last ditch effort to keep my marriage with Lynne together, we bought another house. A very big house, in a very good neighborhood. It was a house I had walked past on my way to school as a kid. I had always been attracted to it. When I researched it’s history, I discovered it had been built by one Jaques Boujenah, a Canadian Jewish dry goods merchant, who had once owned a store in downtown Kankakee. The house is an Eastlake, which is designed as an adaptation of Victorian architecture using oriental lines. The house looks a little like a pagoda. It features a full, finished basement, a library, living room, dining room, butlers pantry and kitchen. A formal stareway, and a back stairway from the kitchen to the “maid’s room.” Six bedrooms, two and a half baths. It’s a big place. Except, I was the one who cleaned it. I was the one who did all the cooking. Lynne had a new “hobby:” clutter up the place (and especially the formal starecase) with “stuff.” Drove me nuts. I started looking for ways to get away.
Drew Horn and I founded Boy Scout Troop 313 (with the sponsorship of the socialistic sounding Peoples Church). Joshua, Jordan and Jesse were members, as well as about a half dozen kids from Peoples Church. Our Troop won awards three years running for being the most active troop in Rainbow Council. That’s because every weekend possible we were camping or hiking together (remember how I was looking for a way to stay out of the house? This was it!) Things got complicated when I met a female scouter at one of the district campouts. I had an affair. It lasted several years. Then one day, in 1991 Drew called me and told me that the Church was disbanding the Troop, due to my affair with the female scouter.
How did the elders of Peoples Church find out? Lynne, who attended services at Peoples as much as I did (which was never) told them. It was done cold turkey too. No regards to the boys in the Troop were paid. Their scouting experience was over. I thought, out of regard for the boys involved that the Church would delegate another Scout Master, but no. Peoples Church was out of the boy scout business.
That was the straw that broke the camels back.
The following May, 1992, I left Lynne and drove 2,600 miles to Santa Cruz CA.
SECOND TIME CHARM
In Santa Cruz I moved in with “Qadisha” (a writer and videographer whom I had met on the Internet) and her daughter Amanda. A few months later I was a housemate under Robin and Deans roof, a few blocks away. This was because Q had made a vow to “the Goddess” that no man would ever live with her. Might also had had to do with Q being on public assistance (which she never mentioned to me) and “harboring a man” was strictly verboten. Robin and Qadisha were coven mates. Witches.
Q and I founded another “Coven”: Circle of Fire and Friends, which staged rituals at Twin Lakes Beach on all of the Pagan Sabbats, and a campout around Mabon at Pinnacles National Park near Hollister CA. It was at a Mabon campout that I met a fellow Jew, Duane Adam Rostoker (AKA, Adam Walks Between Worlds). Later that year, on the tourist loop at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, after a “Bring back the snakes” party, that he and I founded the Order of the Mithril Star.
Q and I were “handfasted” at a Mabon gathering held at Valley of Fire State Park, just North of Las Vegas NV. In attendance was about 100 members of the GEnie Pagan Community (GEnie was an alternate internet service like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL). I moved back in with Q for a couple of months, but then I had to find a new place to live (because of her “Goddess” complex and her being a welfare queen). I had been attending a little weekly Pagan discussion group in Felton CA (Circle of Fools) and it was there that I met Xavier Tavacoly. We became close friends, and so he invited me to rent a spare room in his mobile home locate in Ben Lomond CA. I lived there until the move to Ashland OR in 1998. Xavier was a ceremonial magician and a member of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis)
Q and I did not get along very well. She was manipulative, shaddy, prone to migraines, and misandros. She lied about a lot of things (I didn’t know she was on welfare. She told me she was a successful writer. The fact that she never published anything (or at least anything she was paid for) was inconsequential.) I was her business partner in an endeavor called Video Magick, a video production house (similar I suppose to my youngest son Jesse’s Arseneau Media Productions). I invested a great deal of my fortune in that business. It failed miserably. Mostly because Q didn’t like to, or want to, video weddings, and at time weddings were the bread and butter of video production houses.
It was Q’s idea to move to Ashland OR. That happened in the Spring of 1998. She found an a townhouse apartment there to rent, and after taking care of her business in Santa Cruz, I joined her. She found a Section 8 house elsewhere, (her house in Santa Cruz was also a Section 8 unit). I was left in the townhouse with my cat, Aleister. I was “forbidden” to wear my Star of David. Some one might associate me with Q and with Amanda, and thereby subject Amanda to persecution.
I founded what was first called, The Jefferson Index, and then renamed, Southern Oregon Pagan Network. The first was because I thought we could organize the entire (and mythical) State of Jefferson. When that proved to be too ambitious, we just stuck to Southern Oregon, particularly the Rogue Valley. It was through this endeavor that I met Ceridwen, and you can return back up to the top of this missive to read all about how that turned out.
