The Oracle

Sort of a table of contents of the Oracle

The Oracle was a collectively produced bookish publication put together as part of the planning efforts for the first gathering  which took place near Granby, Colorado in 1972. For the Rolling Stone Magazine version of what happened on July 4, 1972, click here. 

However, for today, we'll be focused on the Oracle itself and a bit of Garrick's Hipstory.

Garrick's rap on the Oracle Hipstory: The Printing

The plan was to print 5000 copies. We printed extras of some of the sheets (each sheet was a 8 1/2 x14 inches folded so there were four pages on each sheet) and so to make the full number of copies we used some additional sheets to make 5k. Some sheets misprinted and I'd guess there were about 4800 complete copies, then an additional 200 copies with varying numbers of sheets missing.

The printing was at Visionworks Press in Eugene, Oregon which was managed by Kate Jackrabbit and Sean O'Reilly of the Lost Cactus Cowboys. We collated the pages, working day and night at The Free University (right next door) run by Eugene's counterculture power couple, Bill and Cindy Wooten. At first we sewed the pages together with purple thread but that was so time consuming that after a while we got large rubber bands to put along the middle crease to hold the books together.

144 pages, plus the gold colored cover. We intentionally left the middle centerfold blank - kind of like the Silence - so that everyone could fill it in themselves with whatever they felt belonged there most. Of course pretty much everyone left them blank rather than color something in. Lastly we used all the extra pages up, so there are some copies floating around that have 16 or 20 or 24 pages missing. They were all given away for free starting right outside the Free U, and emanating out from there in the many directions.

Cars left loaded with them in their trunks heading east, southeast and so on. When the Woodstock Family got their copies, they - with Day, from Woodstock Earth at the helm - reprinted 2000 copies in black and white with a tan cover. I could hardly believe my eyes when someone at Strawberry Lake handed me a copy - and it was the reprint!

In the original we tried to divide the book into halves, with more or less everything in the first half about the envisioned upcoming Gathering, and the second half about all the other aspects of the emerging world peace culture: organic gardening, holistic child-raising, women's rights, home birthing, recycling, (some of these words were hardly in the language at that time!), wind and tidal power, herbal remedies, companion planting, as well as information about the Hopi's struggle at Black Mesa (which they had given us to use and reprint if we wanted to), and many other topics most of which are widely known about today. But 4 decades ago a lot of this was pretty new stuff for most people.

We wanted to print in a rainbow of colors, and while it looked really beautiful, the pages printed in yellow ink were almost impossible to read! And the pages in yellow-orange ink almost as difficult! Ahh, the excesses of youthful enthusiasm. A year later some of us worked on a revised edition which never got published...we were trying to undo, or re-do some of the slightly unwieldy phrases that we had written, and which didn't quite read as well in print as we had thought.

In the early 1980's Baker Paul set up the first large-scale bakery at the Gatherings in 1981 at First Idaho. He rigged up piping thru the stone - not mud - ovens which made for showers that were frankly a lot more fantastic than the baking facility!  He worked on a book he called Rainbow Oracle 2, which he printed maybe a hundred copies of, and which was mostly about how the next generation of Rainbow Gatherers were stepping in and stepping up.

That's sort of where we are at today, really. There is a next generation that really is doing pretty much all the infrastructure, and all the coordination and footwork. It would be beautiful to see a new edition of the Original Oracle, and even better to see a renewed Oracle that could bring the vision forward, not just for us old-timers, and not just for the current Riders On The 'Bow, but for the generation that is yet ahead of us.

~ ~ ~ End Garrick's Rap ~ ~ ~ ~

If you'd like to seem a somewhat tattered copy of the Oracle in PDF format, click here.

Please note the oracle is copy righted under the following Creative Commons license:

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