Do you use a Pi Zero 1.3 (the one with the camera connector) and the ws281x driver? I just had the problem that hyperion worked on a Zero 1.2 but refused to initialize the ws281x driver on the Zero 1.3 (using the same sd card). So I just compiled hyperion with the latest ws281x driver and everything worked fine (support for the Zero 1.3 was added to ws281x about 7 weeks ago).