Category Archives: Essays

A collection of essays from the mind of Robert Anton Wilson

The Great Beast – Aleister Crowley

aleister-crowley

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Paul Krassner’s The Realist
Issue No 91-B, September – October 1971;
91-C, November-December 1971;
92-A, January-Febuary, 1972;
92-B, March-April, 1972

O – The Fool

All ways are lawful to innocence. Pure folly is the key to initiation.  – The Book of Thoth

Crowley: Pronounced with a crow so it rhymes with holy: Edward Alexander Crowley, b. 1875 d. 1947, known as Aleister Crowley, known also as Sir Aleister Crowley, SaintAleister Crowley (of the Gnostic Catholic Church), Frater Perdurabo, Frater Ou Mh, To Mega Therion, Count McGregor, Count Vladimir Svareff, Chao Khan, Mahatma Guru SriParamahansa Shivaji, Baphomet, and Ipsissimus; obviously, a case of the ontological fidgets – couldn’t make up his mind who he really was; chiefly known as The Beast 666 or The Great Beast; friends and disciples celebrated his funeral with a Black Mass: or so the newspapers said.

Actually it was a Gnostic Catholic Mass (even John Symonds, Crowley’s most hostile biographer, admits that at most it could be called a Grey Mass, not a Black Mass – observe the racist and Christian-chauvinist implications in this terminology, but it was certainly not an orthodox R.C. or Anglican mass, I mean, cripes, the priestess took off her clothes in one part of it, buck naked, and they call that a Mass, gloriosky!

So the town council had a meeting – this was the Ridge, in Hastings, England, 1947, not 1347 – and they passed an ordinance that no such heathen rites would ever be tolerated in any funeral services in their town, not never; I sort of picture them in the kitch Alpine-Balkan garb of Universal Studios’ classic monster epics, and I see Aleister himself, in his coffin, wearing nothing less spectacular than the old black cape of Bela Lugosi: fangs showing beneath his sensual lips: but his eyes closed in deep and divine Samadhi.

Because that’s the sort of images that come to mind when Aleister Crowley is mentioned: this damnable man who identified himself with the Great Beast in St. John’s Revelations in an age when the supernatural is umbilically connected with Universal Studios, Hearst Sunday Supplement I-walked-with-a-zombie-in-my-maidenform-bra gushings and, God’s socks, Today’s Astrology (“Listen, Scoorpio: This month you must look before you leap and remember that prudence is wiser than rashness:  Don’t trust that Taurus female in you office” – I repeat: God’s socks and spats); this divine man who became the Logos when Logos was just a word to pencil into Double-Crostics on rainy Sundays; this damnable and divine paradox of a Crowley!

Listen, some critic (I forgot who) wrote of Lugosi “acting with total sincerity and a kind of demented cornball poetry” and the words, like the old crimson-lined black cape, seem tailored equally well for the shoulders of Master Therion, To Mega Therion, the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley.  This is the final degradation:  this avatar of anarchy, this epitome of rebellion, this incarnation of inconsistency, this man Crowley whom his contemporaries called “The King of Depravity,” The Wickedest Man in the World,” “A Cannibal at Large,” “A Man We’d Like to Hang,” “A Human Beast”; and, with some anti-climax, “A Pro-German and Revolutionary.”

Now, to us, he is quaint.  Worse:  he is Camp.  Worse yet:  he is corny.

We don’t even believe his boast that he performed human sacrifice 150 times a year, starting in 1912.

None of these cordial titles was invented by myself.  All were used, in Crowley’s life-time, by the newspaper John Bull, in it’s heroic and nigh-interminable campaign to saveEngland from the Beast’s pernicious influence.  See P.R. Stephenson, The Legend of Aleister Crowley.

I — The Magician

The True Self is the meaning of the True Will: know Thyself through Thy Way.  – The Book of Thoth

For there is no clear way, even on the most superficial level of the gross external data, to say what Edward Alexander Crowley (who called himself Aleister: and other names) really was trying to do with his life and communicate to his fellows.

Witness: here is an Englishman (never forget that: an Englishman, and bloody English at times he could be) who in the stodgiest year, of the dreariest decade of the age we call Victoria, commits technical High Treason, joins the Carlists, accepts a knighthood from Don Carlos himself, denounces as illegitimate all the knighthoods granted by “the Hanoverian usurper” (he also called her a “dumpy German hausfrau” – poor Vicky), yes, and then for years and decades afterward continues, with owl-like obstinacy, with superlative stubbornness, with ham heroism, with promethean pigheadedness, to sign himself “Sir Aleister” –  a red flag in the face of John Bull.

But more: the same romantic reactionary, the same very parfet bogus knight, hears that the French authorities, scandalized by the heroic size of the genital on Epstein’s statue of Oscar Wilde, have covered it with a butterfly – and, bien bueno, you guessed it, there he is, at twilight with hammer and chisel, sworn enemy of the Philistines, removing the butterfly and restoring the statue to its pristine purity – but why by all the pot-bellied gods in China, why did he turn that gesture into a joke by walking, the same night, into London’s stuffiest restaurant, wearing the same butterfly over the crotch of his own trousers?

A Harlequin, then, we might pronounce him, ultimately: the archetypal Batty Bard superimposed upon the classic Eccentric Englishman?  And with a touch of the SardonicSodomist – for didn’t he smuggle homosexual jokes (hidden in puns, codes, acrostics and notarikons) into his various volumes of mystical poetry?

Didn’t it even turn out that his great literary “discovery” the Bagh-I-Muattar [The Scented Garden] was not a discovery at all but an invention – all of it, all, all! from the pious butpederastic Persian original, through the ingenious but innocent English major who translated it (and died heroically in the Boer War), up to the high Anglican clergyman who wrote the Introduction saluting its sanctity but shivering at its salacity – all, all from his own cunning and creative cranium?

Yes: and he even published one volume, White Stains (Krafft-Ebing in verse) with a poker-faced prologue pronouncing that “The Editor hopes the Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands” – and, hot damn, arranged that the author’s name on the title-page would be given as “George Archibald,” a pious uncle whom he detested.

Sophomore pranks?  Yes, but in 1912, at the age of 37, he was still at the same game: that was the year he managed to sell Hail Mary, a volume of versatile verses celebrating the Virgin, to London’s leading Catholic publishers, Burns and Oates: and he even waited until it was favorably reviewed in the Catholic press (“a plenteous and varied feast for the lovers of tuneful verse,” enthused the Catholic Times) before revealing that the real author was not a cloistered nun or an uncommonly talented Bishop, but himself, Satan’s Servant, the Great Beast, the Demon Crowley.

But grok in its fullness this fact: he really did it.  You or I might conceive such a jest, but he carried it out: writing the pious verses with just the proper tone of sugary sanctimoniousness to actually sell to a Papist publisher and get cordial reviews in the Romish press – as if Baudelaire had forced himself to write a whole volume of Edgar Guest:  And just for the sake of a horse-laugh?

To understand this conundrum of aCrowleywe will have to Dig.

II — The High Priestess

Purity is to live only to the Highest: and the Highest is All; be thou as Artemis to Pan.  –  The Book of Thoth

These jokes sometimes seem to have an obscure point, and one is uneasily suspicious that there might be Hamlet-like method in this madness. Even the alternate identities can be considered more than games: They might be Zen counter-games. Here’s the Beast’s own explanation of the time he became Count Vladimir Svareff, from The Confessions ofAleister Crowley: An Autohagiography.

“I wanted to increase my knowledge of mankind. I knew how people treated a young man fromCambridge. I had thoroughly appreciated the servility of tradesmen, although I was too generous and too ignorant to realize the extent of their dishonesty and rapacity. Now I wanted to see how people would behave to a Russian nobleman. I must say here that I repeatedly used this method of disguise – it has been amazingly useful in multiplying my points of view about humanity. Even the most broad-minded people are necessarily narrow in this one respect. They may know how all sorts of people treat them, but they cannot know, except at second hand, how those same people treat others.”

And the Hail Mary caper has its own sane-insane raison d’etre:

“I must not be thought exactly insincere, though I had certainly no shadow of belief in any of the Christian dogmas… I simply wanted to see the world through the eyes of a devout Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet of White Stains, the Persian mystic of Bagh-i-Muattar, and so on… I did not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of ones own “personality?”

Just so: the procedure is even scientific these days (Role-Playing, you know) and is a central part of Psychodrama and Group Dynamics. “You have to go out of your mind before you can come to your senses,” as Tim Leary (or Fritz Perls) once said. Sure: you can even become Jesus and Satan at the same time:  Ask Charles the Son of Man.

For Artemis, the goddess of nature, is eternally virgin: she only surrended once, and then to Pan: and this is a clue to the Beast’s purpose in his bloody sacrifices.

III — The Empress

This is the Harmony of the Universe, that Love unites the Will to create with the Understanding of that Creation. –  The Book of Thoth

The infant Gargantua was sent to a school run by the Plymouth Brethren, the narrowly Fundamentalist sect to which his parents belonged.  He commends the school in these cordial words from his essay “A Boyhood in Hell”:

“May the maiden that passes it be barren and the pregnant woman that beholdeth it abort!  May the birds of the air refuse to fly over it!  May it stand as a curse, as a fear, as a hate, among men.  May the wicked dwell therein!  May the light of the sun be withheld therefrom and the light of the moon not lighten it!  May it become the home of the shells of the dead and may the demons of the pit inhabit it!  May it be accursed, accursed – accursed for ever and ever.’

One gathers that the boy Alick was not happy there.  In fact, the climax of his miseries came when somebody told the Headmasters that he had seen youngCrowleydrunk on hard liquor.  Our anti-hero was put on a diet of bread and waters and placed in coventry (i.e., nobody, student or teacher, was allowed to talk to him), without being told what offense he committed; this Christian punishment (for his own good, of course) lasted one full year – at which point his health collapsed and a relative not totally committed to Plymouth Brethren theology insisted that he be removed from that environment before it killed him.

This incident is a favorite with the Beast’s unsympathetic critics; they harp on it gleefully, to convey that they are not the sort of religious bigots who would torture a child in this fashion; and they also use it to explain his subsequent antipathy to anything bearing the names or coming under the auspices, of “Jesus” or “Christ.”

It was this school, they say, which warped his mind and turned him to the service of the devil; a nice theory for parlor analysts or term papers, but it has the defect of not being quite true.  The King of Depravity never did embrace Satan, as we shall see, and he kept a very nice mind full of delicate distinctions and discriminations; of this experience he himself says, “I did not hate Jesus and God; I hated the Jesus and God of the people I hated.”

But now we jump ahead, past adolescence (skipping the time he seduced a housemaid on his mother’s bed; sorry, Freudians), past Cambridge (missing a nice 1890-style student riot) and past mountain-climbing (by 1901, he and his favorite fellow-climber, Oscar Eckenstein, held most of the climbing records in the world between them – all but one to be exact); we came now to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; caveat lector; we enter the realm of Mystery, Vision – and Hallucination; the reader is the only judge of what can be believed from here on.

IV — The Emperor

Find thyself in every Star. Achieve thou every possibility.  – The Book of Thoth

It seems that the Golden Dawn was founded by Robert Wentworth Little, a high Freemason, based on papers he rescued from a hidden drawn inLondon’s Freemason Hall during a fire.  No: it wasn’t Little at all, but Wynn Wescott, a Rosicrucian, acting on behalf of a mysterious Fraulein Sprenger in Germany, who herself probably represented the original Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt.

No: not so either: behind the Golden Dawn was actually a second Order, the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold – i.e. the original medieval Rosicrucians still in business at the old stand; and behind them was the Third Order, the Great White Brotherhood – i.e., the Nine Unknown Men of Hindu lore – the true rulers of earth, one can only say, if the last theory be true, that the Great White Brotherhood are Great White Fuckups.

The true true story of the Illuminati, Rosicrucians etc. – or another damned lie – is given in Illuminatus: or Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc., by Robert J. Shea and this writer, to be published by Dell this year, unless the Nine Unknown Men suppress it.

Well anyway, whenever the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn came from, there it was almost practicing in the open in London in the 1890’s, with such illustrious members as Florence Farr (the actress), Arthur Machen (the horror-story writer: you must have read his Great God Pan?), George Cecil Jones (a respectable chemist by day and a clandestine alchemist by night) and William Butler Yeats (a poet who thought his verse was superior to Crowley’s, he is described in Autohagiography as “a disheveled demonologist who could have given much more care to his appearance without being accused of dandyism.”).

In 1898, the King of Depravity was admitted to the Order: Crowley took the new name Frater Perdurabo which means Brother I-Will-Endure-To-The-End; he later changed it to Frater OuMh or Brother Not Yet – and began acquiring great proficiency in such arts as the invocation of angels and demons, making himself invisible, journeying in the astral body and such-like Wonders of the Occult.

In one critical operation of magick the Wickedest Man in the World failed abjectly in those early days; and this was the most important work of all. It consisted in achieving the Knowledge and Conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel – what, precisely, that may mean will be discussed later.

The usual operation, as found in The Book of Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage, requires six months’ hard work and is somewhat more grueling than holding the Ibis position of Hatha Yoga for that interlude, or working out pi to the thousandth place in you head without using paper or pencil.  The beast’s critics like to proclaim that he couldn’t manage this because he was incapable of obeying Abra-Melin’s commandment of chastity for the necessary 180 days.  We will later learn how true that claim actually is.

Invisibility, by the way, isn’t as hard as Lamont Cranston’s Tibetan teachers implied.  After only a few months practice, guided by the Beast’s training manuals, I have achieved limited success twice already; and my cats, Simon and Garfunkel, do it constantly.  There is no need to look for mysteries when the truth is often right out in the light of day.

V — The Hierophant

Be thou athlete with the eight limbs of Yoga; for without these thou art not disciplined for any fight.  – The Book of Thoth

Early in February, 1901, in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Beast began seriously working on dharana, the yoga of concentration.  The method was that long used inIndia: holding one single image in the mind – a red triangle – and banishing all other words or pictures.  This is in no wise any easy task, and I, for one would have much more respect for Aleister’scritics and slanderers if there were any shred of evidence that they ever attempted such self-discipline, and, attempting it, managed to stay with it until they achieved results.

For instance, after three weeks of daily practice, the Beast recorded in his diary that he had concentrated that day for 59 minutes with exactly 25 “breaks” or wanderings from the triangle: 25 breaks may not sound so great to those who haven’t tried this; a single hour, however, will convince them that 3600 breaks, or one per second is close to average for a beginner.

Toward the end of April, the Beast logged 23 minutes with 9 breaks; on May 6th, 32 minutes and 10 breaks.  I repeat: anyone who think Acid or Jesus or Scientology has remade his or her life ought to attempt a few weeks of this; it is the clearest and most humiliating revelation of the compulsive neurosis of the “normal” ego.

On August 6 the Beast arrived in Ceylon, still working on daily dharana – oh yes, in Honolulu he’d had an affair with a married woman, later celebrated in his sonnet sequenceAlice: An Adultery, published under the auspices of his fictitious “Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth”: his critics always mention that, to prove that he wasn’t sincere; one sometimes gets the cynical notion that these critics are either eunuchs or hypocrites.

Under the guidance of Sri Parananda and an old friend, Allan Bennett, now the Buddhist monk Maitreya Ananda, he plunged into the other “seven limbs” of yoga.  I say that his mountain-climbing involved less self-discipline. I will not argue; I will give a hint only.  Here are the first two steps in beginning to do pranayama:

1.  Learn to breathe through your two nostrils alternately.  When this becomes easy, practice exhaling through the right nozzle for no less than 15 seconds and then inhaling through the left orifice for a like time. Practice until you can do this without strain for 20 or 30 minutes.

2.  Now begin retention of breath between inhalation and exhalation. Increase the period of retention until you can inhale for 10 seconds, retain for 30 second and exhale for 20 seconds.  This proportion is important: if you inhale for as long as, or longer than, the exhalation, you are screwing up.  Practice until you can do this – comfortably – for an hour.

Got it?  Good; now you are ready to start doing the real exercises of pranayama.  For instance, you can add the “third limb,” asana, which consists of sitting like a rock, no muscle moving anywhere; the Hindus

recommend starting with a contortion that seems to have been devised by Sacher-Masoch himself, but choose a position that seems comfortable at first, if you want – it will turn into Hell soon enough.

All this has a point, of course; when pranayama and asana mastered, you can begin to do dharana without constant humiliating failures.  Congratulations: now you can add the other “five limbs.”  Of course, the temptation (especially after your foot is no longer merely asleep but has progressed to a state gruesomely reminiscent of rigor mortis) is to decide that “There isn’t anything in yoga after all” or “I just can’t do it” and maybe there’s something in Christian Science or the Process or probably another acid trip would really get you over the hump.*

Footnote: *Oh yes, brethren and sistern, we have known people capable of much rationalization.  Back in 1901, even, the Beast discovered that some of the “lesser yogis,” as he called them, used hashish to fuel the last gallop from dharana to dhyana; and he later recommended this to his own disciples – but always with the provision that the results so obtained should be regarded as an indication and foreshadowing of what was sought, not as a substitute for true attainment.  The Beast achieved dhyana, the non-ego trance, on October 2, 1901, less than 8 months after beginning serious dharana inGuadalajara.

VI — The Lovers

…rest in Simplicity, and listen in the Silence.   The Book of Thoth

This may be getting heavy, but it has to be endured for a while before the band starts playing again. Specifically, we should have some understanding of what we mean by dhyanaand what the Beast has accomplished in those 8 months. The best analysis is probably that given by the Wickedest Man in the World himself in his Confessions:

“The problem is how to stop thinking; for the theory is that the mind is a mechanism for dealing symbolically with impressions; its construction is such that one is tempted to take these symbols for reality.    “That is, we manufacture units such as the inch, the chair, the self, etc., in order to organize our sense-impressions into coherent wholes, but the mind which performs this kind service is so built that it cannot then escape its own constructs. Having imagined inches and chairs and selves, the mind then perceives them “out there” in the physical world and finds it hard to credit that they exist only in the mind’s own sorting machinery.    “Conscious thought, therefore, is fundamentally false and prevents one from perceiving reality. The numerous practices of yoga are simply dodges to help one acquire the knack of slowing down the current of thought and ultimately stopping it altogether.”

The mind’s self-hypnosis, of course, arises anew as soon as one comes out of dhyana. One never retains the ego-less and world-less essence of dhyana; one retains an impression thereof polluted by the mind’s pet theories and most resonant images. The Beast calls this adulterated after-effect of dhyana “mixing the planes” and regards it as the chief cause of the horrors perpetrated by religious nuts on the rest of us throughout history:

“Mohammed’s conviction that his visions were of imperative importance to “salvation” made him a fanatic… The spiritual energy derived from the high trances makes the seer a formidable force; and unless he be aware that interpretation is due only to the exaggeration of his own tendencies of thought, he will seek to impose it on others, and so delude his disciples, Pervert their minds and prevent their development…    “In my system the pupil is taught to analyze all ideas and abolish them by philosophical skepticism before he is allowed to undertake the exercises that lead to dhyana.”

By 1904, the Beast had come to the conclusion that all he had seen and performed, among the Magicians and among the yogis, could be explained by combining the known psychology with the emerging beginnings of psycho-chemistry. He had pushed mysticism as far as one can, and retained his Victorian Rationalism.

Then came the cataclysm ofCairo.

VII — The Chariot

The Issue of the Vulture, Two-in-One, conveyed; this is the Chariot of Power. – The Book of Thoth

Ever since his initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, the Beast has been practicing astral voyaging almost daily. This is considerably easier thanpranayama, asana, dharana, and it’s good clean fun even from the beginning.

If you are an aspirant, or a dupe, merely sit in a comfortable chair, in a room where you won’t be interrupted, close you eyes, and slowly envision your “astral body,” whatever the blazes that is, standing before you. Make every detail clear and precise; any fuzziness can get you into trouble later.

Now transfer your consciousness to this second body – I don’t know why, but some people stick at this point – and rise upward, through the ceiling, through the other rooms in the building, through the stratosphere, until you have left the physical universe entirely – to hell with it, Nixon and his astronauts are taking it over anyway – and find yourself in the astral realm, where NASA isn’t likely to follow with their flags and other tribal totems.

Approach any astral figures you see and question them closely, especially about any matters of which you wish knowledge not ordinarily available to you.

Return to the earth-body, awake, and record carefully that which has transpired. The diary of such astral journeys, carefully transcribed, is the key to all progress in High Magick, once the student learns to decipher his own visions.

The skeptical reader, if there are any skeptics left in this gullible generation, might point out that this process begins as an exercise of imagination and that there is no reason to think it ever crosses the line to reality. Quite so: but that objection does not diminish the value of the visions obtained.

The Beast has been at some pains to write a little book called “777” which is a copious catalog, in convenient table form, of the 32 major “astral planes” and their typical scenery, events and inhabitants. Using one’s own Magical Diary and the tables in “777” together with a few standard reference works on comparative religion, one can quickly discover where one has been, who has been there before and what major religions were founded on the basis of some earlier visitor’s account of what he had seen there.

One need not hold any occult hypothesis about these visions; you can even say that you have been exploring Carl Jung’s “Collective Unconscious” – or, more fashionably, that you have been deciphering the ethological record of the DNA code (Tim Leary’s favorite theory about LSD voyages, which fits these astral trips just as neatly). The important discipline is to avoid “mixing the planes” and confusing your explanation with the actual vision itself; or, as the Beast says in Liber O:

“In this book it is spoken of the Sephioth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist.

“It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them…

“The Student, if he attains any success in the following practices, will find himself confronted by things (ideas or beings) too glorious or too dreadful to be described. It is essential that he remain the master of all that he beholds, hears, or conceives; otherwise he will be the slave of the illusion and the prey of madness…

“The Magician may go a long time being fooled and flattered by the Astrals that he has himself modified or manufactured… He will become increasingly interested in himself,imagine himself to be attaining one initiation after another. His Ego will expand unchecked, till he seems to himself to have heaven at his feet…”

The teachers of Zen have the proper tactics against this danger of grandiosity:Crowley’s independent discovery of this strategy led to those behaviors – the jokes, the “blasphemies,” the shifts in name and identity – which led to his reputation as a kook, a Satanist, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

Having watched the decline into dogmatism and self-aggrandizement of various heroes of the New Wave of dope and occultism, some of us are maybe ready to see that the Beast’s incessant profane mockery against himself and his Gods was a necessary defense against this occupational hazard of the visionary life.

But then came the Mystification of Cairo – and beyond it, the Mindfuck inChina… and the discovery of the value of human sacrifice.

VIII – Adjustment

Balance against each thought its exact opposite. For the Marriage of these is the Annihilation of Illusion.  – The Book of Thoth

In March, 1904, the Beast and his first wife, Rose, were inCairo, and he was trying to teach her some Magick, a subject which bored her profoundly. And now this is the part we warned you about, take it or leave it, this is what seems to have happened – Rose went into a kind of trance and began murmuring various disjointed phrases, including “It’s about the Child” and “They are waiting for you.”

It soon developed that some god or other was trying to communicate;Crowleyasked 12 questions to determine which god and, gulp, her answers were correct, consistent and revealed a knowledge of Egyptology which in her conscious mind she did not possess.

Like: “What are his moral qualities?” “Force and fire.” “What opposes him?” “Deep blue” – until one god emerged that fit the box just as sure as Clark Kentfits the phone booth at the Daily Planet; Ra-Hoor-Khuit, or Horus in his War God aspect.

The Beast then took Rose to theBoulakMuseumand asked her to pick out the god in question. She walked past several statues of Horus – which The King of Depravity observed stolidly, although, he says, “with silent glee” – and then (shiver!) she stopped before Stele 666, Ra-Hoor-Khuit. “This is him,” she said.

Sorry about that, fellow rationalists.

And, of course, alas and goddam it, 666 – the Number of the Beast in St. John’s Revelations – was Crowley’s own magick number and had been for years.

Those who want to invoke the word “coincidence” to cover the rags of their ignorance are welcome to do so. Some of us have a new word lately, synchronicity, coined by no less than psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli – and I’ve read their books and must admit I came out as confused as I went in; as far as this brain can comprehend,coincidence is meaning-less correspondence, and synchronicity is meaning-ful correspondence, and if that makes you feel superior to the custard-headed clods who still saycoincidence, you’re welcome to it.

And there’s more: when the Beast acknowledged Ra-Hoor-Khuit on the other side of the astral phone hook-up, he was turned over to an underling, one Aiwass, an angel, who told him among other things that the true Word of Power isn’t abra-ca-dabra but abra-ha-dabra and the letter adds up to 418, which was the number of Crowley’s home on Loch Ness in Scotland; and Aiwass’s own name adds up to 98, which is also the number of love and will, the two chief words in his total communication, which is known as The Book of the Law – But enough; the proofs, mathematical and cabalistic and coincidental (if you must) run on for pages.

In summary, the Beast had been playing a Game against himself for six years, since 1898, invoking the miraculous and the proving after the fact that it was “only” his mind.

Now he had to begin considering that he had made himself the center of an “astral” field effect, having the qualities of an intelligence greater than his, and signifying same by multi-lingual and numerological correspondences coming not from “inside” but from “outside”: Rose’s mind, the “independent” decisions of the curators of the Boulak Museum and, then, a certain Samuel bar Aiwass.

For, in 1918, Crowleyhad adopted the name To Mega Therion, which means The Great Beast in Greek, and adds to 666, and, in an article in The International, he asked if any of his readers could find a word or phrase of similar meaning, in Hebrew, which would also add to 666.

He was himself no mean cabalist and had tried all sorts of Hebrew synonyms for “beast” but none of them added to anything like 666; yet the answer came in the mail – Tau,Resh, Yod, Vau, Nun, equal 666 – and it was signed Samuel bar Aiwas.

Aiwas is the Hebrew equivalent of Aiwass, and also adds to 93, the number of his Holy Guardian Angel.

But meanwhile came the Chinese Mindfuck.

IX — The Hermit

Wander alone; bearing the Light and thy Staff.  – The Book of Thoth

One day inRangoon, in 1905,Crowleyhappened to mention to a man namedThorntonthat there is no necessary connection between the separate quanta of sense-impression. Philosophy-buffs are aware that this has been observed by David Hume, among others, andThorntonreplied with another truism, pointing out that there is no necessary connection between the successive states of the ego, either.

The beast, naturlich, was aware that the Buddha had spotted that disturbing fact a long time ago, but suddenly the full import of it hit home to him on an emotional level.

Chew on it: he could not absolutely prove that there was an external world to Aleister Crowley, but merely that there appeared to be a tendency for sense-impressions to organize themselves to suggest such a world, Lord help us; and he could not absolutely demonstrate that there was an “Aleister Crowley” doing this organizing but only that there seems to be a tendency to aggregate internal impressions in such a way as to suggest such an entity. (Get the Librium, mother). All intelligent people have noticed that at one time or another – and quickly brushed it aside, to carry on in the only way that seems pragmatically justified, assuming the reality of the World and the Self.

The Beast, after the workings of his Magick, the experience of his dhyana (in which Self, indeed, had vanished for a time) and his encounter with the ever-lovin’ Aiwass, was not satisfied to rest in assuming anything.

There was no absolute proof that he had ever achieved dhyana, for instance, but only a tendency to organize some impressions into a category called “memory and to assume that they corresponded to “real” events in a time called the “past.” Nor could reason alone prove that he had seen a “miracle” in “Cairo,” or performed “Magick” in “London,” or suffered in a “school” run by “Plymouth Brethren,” or had a “biological” “relationship” “with” “beings” know as “Father” and “Mother.”

“About now,” he scribbled in his diary on November 19, “I may count my Speculative Criticism of the Reason as not only proved and understood, but realized. The misery of this is simply sickening – I can write no more.”

He started on a walking journey across Chinawith his wife and daughter, or his earth-body did; his mind was on a far weirder trip. “He had become insane,” writes unsympathetic biographer John Symonds in The Great Beast; “If this happened to any of us,” adds sympathetic biographer Israel Regardie in The Eye in the Triangle, “we too might feel we had become insane.” Of course, lately it has happened to a lot of us, thanks to the free enterprise pharmacopia of the streets, and we know with bitter memory what the suffering Beast was going through.

And it wasn’t six or ten hours in his case; it lasted four solid months, whileChinadrifted by like the eye in the triangle. We’ve been there, and some of us did the Steve Brodie out the window (the triangle?) and never came back and some of us found weird clues in songs like “Helter Skelter” – what triangle? – Rocky Raccoon went up to his room and Sharon Tate must die – doesn’t it? – Because John Lennon wouldn’t lie to us when a man is crashing out like American life bomb went authoritarian (what eye?) – So we’ll write PIG on the wall and they’ll blame it on the spades, see? Oh, yes, Charlie, I see – Sixty-four thousand, nine hundred twenty-eight, because 7-Up Commercials and we start from Void and anything we manufacture is necessarily composed of the elements of Void even when you call it your Self or your World – And then there was the strawberries…

Manson, hell; you could turn into Nixon that way.

X – Fortune

The axle moveth not; attain thou that.  – The Book of Thoth

The Beast described this 120-Days-of-Bedlam in a poem called Aha!:

The sense of all I hear is drowned;
Tap, tap, tap and nothing matters!
Senseless hallucinations roll
Across the curtain of the soul.
Each ripple on the river seems
The madness of a maniac’s dreams!
So in the self no memory-chain
Or casual wisp to bind the straws!
The Self disrupted! Blind, insane,
Both of existence and of laws,
The Ego and the Universe
Fall to one black chaotic curse…
As I trod the trackless way
Through sunless gorges of Cathay,
I became a little child!

“The are waiting for you,” Rose, in a trance, had said, a year earlier. “It’s about the Child.”

WhenCrowleyreturned toEngland, after becoming “a little child,” he received a letter from chemist George Cecil Jones, a friend in the Golden Dawn. Jones, who recognized what happened, wrote: “How long have you been in the Great Order, and why did I not know? Is the invisibility of the A.A. to lower grades so complete?”

Israel Regardie, a biographer sympathetic to Crowley, but dubious about the existence of the A.A. (the Third Order, or Great White Brotherhood, behind the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold) comments thoughtfully, “I do not wholly understand this.”

Herman Hess, who described the Third Order very clearly in Journey to the East, gives the formula for initiation in Steppenwolf:

PRICE OF ADMISSION:

YOUR MIND

XI – Lust

Mitigate Energy with Love; but let Love devour all things.  – The Book of Thoth

One act remained in the drama of initiation: the achievement of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  This most difficult of all magical operations had been started anew even beforeCrowleyleftChina, and, for all of his previous failures, he was determined to complete it successfully this time.  As mentioned earlier, this invocation takes six months and requires a rather full battery of magical and mystical techniques.

Sometime after his return to England, the Beast arranged to have George Cecil Jones “crucify” him (I am not totally sure what this means, but suspension on a cross, even via ropes, gets quite painful in a very short while) and, while hanging on the cross, he swore an oath as follows: “I,Purdurabo, a member of the Body of Christ, do hereby solemnly obligate myself… and will entirely devote my life so as to raise myself to the knowledge of my higher and Divine Genius that I shall be He.”

I n Chapter 9, “The Redemption of Frank Bennett,” in The Magick of Aleister Crowley, John Symonds tells how with a few words Crowley brought a species of Samadhi orSatori to Frank Bennett, a magician who had been striving unsuccessfully for that achievement over many decades.

The words wore, in effect, that the Real Self or Holy Guardian Angel is nothing else but the integration that occurs when the conscious and subconscious are no longer segregated by repression and inhibition.  It is only fair to warn seekers after either-or answers that in Magick Without Tears Crowley flatly denies this and asserts that the Angel is a separate “Being… of angelic order… more than a man…”

After the Crucifixion, the King of Depravity went on plowing his way through the required 180 days (the essence of the Abra-Melin operation is “Invoke Often”) and adding other various techniques.

On October 9, 1906 The Beast recorded in his Magical Diary:

“Tested new ritual and behold it was very good… I did get rid of everything but the Holy Exalted One, and must have held Him for a minute or two.  I did.  I am sure I did.”

On October 10, he added: “I am still drunk with Samadhi all day.”  And a few days later, “Once again I nearly got there – all went brilliance – but not quite.”  By the end of the month, there was no longer any doubt.  Eight years after commencing the practice of Magick, Aleister Crowley had achieved the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

XII — The Hanged Man

And, being come to the shore, plant thou the Vine and rejoice without shame.   – The Book of Thoth

The Beast lived on for 41 more years, and did work many wonders and quite a few blunders in the world of men and women.  In 1912, he became the English head of the OrdoTempli Orientis, a secret Masonic group tracing direct decent from Knights Templar.  In 1915, he achieved a vision of the total explanation of the universe, but afterwards was only able to record, “Nothing, with twinkles – but WHAT twinkles.”

In 1919, he founded the Abbey of Theleme in Sicily- but was quickly expelled by a moralist named Benito Mussolini after English newspapers exposed the scandalous sex-and-dope orgies that allegedly went on there.

Somewhere along the line, he became the Master of the A.A. or Great White Brotherhood (assuming it ever existed outside his own head, which some biographers doubt) and began teaching other Magicians all over the world.

He married, and divorced, and married, and divorced.

He wrote The Book of Thoth, in which, within the framework of a guide to divination by Tarot cards, he synthesized virtually all the important mystical teachings of East andWest; we have used it for our chapter-heads.

He landed onBedloesIslandone day, representing the IRA, and proclaimed theIrishRepublic, repudiating his English citizenship.

He wrote The Book of Lies, a collection of mind-benders that would flabbergast a Zen Master, including the pregnant question, “Which is Frater Perdurabo and which is the Imp Crowley?”  He got hooked on heroin; kicked it; got hooked again; kicked again; got hooked again…

He died, and his friends buried him with a Gnostic Catholic Mass which the newspapers called Black.

But he is best remembered for writing in 1928 in Magick in Theory and Practice that the most potent invocation involves human sacrifice, that the ideal victim is “a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence,” and that he had performed this rite an average of 150 times per year since 1912.

XIII – Death

… all Acts of Love contain Pure Joy.  Die daily.  – The Book of Thoth

Crowley’s admirers, of course, claim that he was engaged in one of his manic jokes when he boasted of performing human sacrifice 150 times a year;  he was not joking at all, as we shall see.

Even his bitterest critics (except Rev. Montague Sumners, who was capable of believing anything) admit that it’s unlikely that a man whose every move was watched by newspapers and police could polish off 150 victims a year without getting caught; but they are, most of them, not above adding that this ghastly jest indicates the perversity of his mind, and, after all (summoning those great and reliable witnesses, Rumor and Slander) there was some talk about Sicilian infants disappearing mysteriously when he was running his Abbey of Thelema there…

We have got to come to a definitive conclusion about this matter or we will never grasp the meaning of his life, the value of his Magick, the cause of his vilification, or the true meaning of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

XIV – Art

… make manifest the Virtue of that Pearl.  – The Book of Thoth

In 1912, we said, the Beast became English head of the Ordo Templi Orientis. This occurred in a quite interesting manner: Theodore Reuss, Head of that Order in Germany, had come to him and implored him to stop publishing their occult secrets in his magazine, Equinox.

The Beast (who had been publishing some of the secrets of the English Rosicrucians – but this wasn’t one of them) protested that he didn’t know anything about the O.T.O. and its mysteries.  Reuss then proclaimed that the Beast did know, even if he had discovered it independently, and that he must accept membership in the 9th degree with the accompanying pledges and responsibilities.

The Beast, who was already a 33-degree Freemason, thanks to a friend inMexico City, accepted – and found that his “new ritual” to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel in 1906 was the most closely-guarded secret of the Ordo Templi Orientis.

“Now the O.T.O. is in possession of one supreme secret,” the Beast writes in his Confessions.  “The whole of its systems… was directed towards communicating to its members, by progressively plain hints, this all-important instruction.  I personally believe that if this secret, which is a scientific secret, were perfectly understood, as it is not even by me after more than twelve years’ almost constant study and experiment, there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be realized in practice.”

Israel Regardie, the Beast’s most perceptive biographer, comes close to revealing the secret in a book called The Tree of Life.  However, he remarks that the method in question is “so liable to indiscriminate abuse and use in Black Magic” that it is not safe to reveal it directly; he therefore employs a symbolism which, like a Zen riddle, can be decoded only after one had achieved certain spiritual insights.

Charlie Manson understands at least part of this Arcanum of Arcanums; his misuse of it is a classic example of the danger warned of by Crowleyin Liber O: “he will be the slave of illusion and the prey of madness…  His Ego will expand unchecked, till he seem to himself to have heaven at his feet…”

The secret, of course, is the formula of the Rose and Cross which, as Frazier demonstrated in The Golden Bough, is the magic foundation under all forms of religion.

XV — The Devil

With thy right Eye create all for thyself…  – The Book of Thoth

A word about Evil; the Beast’s frequent injunctions to “explore every possibility of the Self” and realize your True Will etc. have often been misunderstood, especially when quoted out of context, in which case he sounds battier than those armchair enthusiasts of mayhem and murder, Stirner and Nietzsche and Sorel.

But the Beast was not an armchair philosopher, but rather an explorer, mountain-climber and big-game hunter who knew violence and sudden death well enough to call by their first names; he did not romanticize them. Her are his actual instructions about Evil from Liber V, an instruction manual of the A.A.:

“The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying “evil.” The essence of such practice will consist in training the mind and body to confront things which cause fear, pain, disgust, shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyze them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth. When this has been done, he should abandon them if they are really harmful in relation to health or comfort…

“Again, one might have a liaison with an ugly old woman until one beheld and love the star which she is; it would be too dangerous to overcome this distaste for dishonesty by forcing oneself to pick pockets. Acts which are essentially dishonorable must not be done; they should be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.”

Digest carefully that last sentence. These shrewd and pragmatic counsels are not those of a bloody-minded fool.

XVI – The Tower

Break down the fortress of thine Individual Self that thy Truth may spring free from the ruins. – The Book of Thoth

Now, The Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier was a best-seller, especially in the hip neighborhoods, so I can assume that many of my readers are aware of the strange evolution of some forms of Rosicrucianism and Illuminism in 19th CenturyGermany.  Such Readers are aware that there is certain evidence – not a little evidence, but a great deal of it – indicating that Adolph Hitler joined something called the Thule Society in Munich in 1923, and then later obtained admission to its inner circle, the Illuminated Lodge, and that it was here he acquired certain ideas about the value of human sacrifice.

It is, in fact, not only possible but probable that the attempted extermination of European Jewry was not only the act of insane racism but a religious offering to gods who demanded rivers of human blood.

The same psychology possessed by the Aztecs toward the end.  The omens, the oracles, the astrological skryings all pointed to doom, and the blood sacrifices correspondingly multiplied exponentially, hysterically, incredibly… and south in Yucatan much earlier, the Mayans, who always tired to restrict the blood sacrifice to one or two a year, deserted their cities for an unknown reason and fled back to the jungle; they shared the same astrological beliefs as the Aztecs, and it is plausible to suggest that they ran away from a similar oracle telling them that only more blood could preserve the empire.

In fact – I note this only for the benefit of future students of paranoia – a similar theory about our own glorious rulers has sometimes crossed my own mind.  Why not?  Every time an S-M club is raided by the fuzz, the newspapers mutter vaguely that among the clientele were “prominent” and “high-placed” individuals; and don’t ever tell me,Clyde, that those birds actually believe the milk-water “liberal” Judeo-Christian faith that they mouth in their public speeches.

Is this the answer to the question we all keep asking – year after unbelievable year, with growing disgust and despair and dementia – Why are we in Vietnam?  “Many gods demand blood” the Beast once commented sardonically – “especially the Christian god.”

XVII – The Star

…burn up thy thought as the Phoenix.   – The Book of Thoth

And, yes, there is a link between Crowleyand Hitler.  Douglas Hunt, the Beast’s most hysterically unfair critic said so in his Exploring the Occult, and he was closer to the bullseye than the Beast’s admirers.  There is a link, but it is relationship of reciprocity, for Hitler and Crowley are the reverse of each other.  Thus (and now we plunge to the heart of the riddle) here are the mind-bending, gut-turning words from Chapter XII, “Of the Bloody Sacrifice and Matters Cognate,” in Magick in Theory and Practice:

“In any case it was the theory of ancient Magicians that any living being is a storehouse of energy varying in quantity according to the size and health of the animal and in quality according to its mental and moral character. At the death of the animal this energy is liberated suddenly.

“For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force.  A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the must satisfactory and suitable victim.”

A footnote is appended here, not at the end of this sentence but attached to the word “intelligence.”  This footnote is perhaps the most famous sentence the Beast ever wrote:

“It appears from the Magical Records of Frater Perdurabo (i.e.,Crowleyhimself) that He made this particular sacrifice on an average about 150 times every year between 1912e.v. and 1928 e.v.”

This certainly seems clear, and horrible, enough, but the chapter concludes with the following further remarks:

“You are also likely to get in trouble over this chapter unless you truly comprehend its meaning…

“The whole idea of the word Sacrifice, as commonly understood, rests upon an error and superstition, and is unscientific. Let the young Magician reflect upon the conservation of Matter and of Energy…

“There is a traditional saying that whenever an Adept seems to have made a straightforward, comprehensible statement, then it is most certain that He means something entirely different…

“The radical error of all uninitiates is that they define “self” as irreconcilably opposed to “not-self.” Each element of oneself is, on the contrary, sterile and without meaning, until it fulfils itself, by “love under will,” in its counterpart in the Macrocosm.  To separate oneself from others is to lose that self – its sense of separateness – in the other.”

The chapter, let us remember, is called “Of the Bloody Sacrifice: and Matters Cognate,” and the Beast was a precise, almost pathologically sensitive, stylist.  If the whole discussion was about the “bloody sacrifice,” where the duce are the “matters cognate”?  And why does the footnote modify “male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence” instead of the last word in the sentence, “victim”?

Let us review:  The Beast originally failed in the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; his final success came after:
(a) his success in both the physical and mental disciplines of yoga.
(b) the achievement of accomplished skill in astral voyaging, and
(c) the death of the mind in China, after which he himself became “a little child;” the new ritual which successfully invoked the Angel in 1906 was the same which the Ordo TempliOrientis had kept as a secret for unknown centuries – presumably, other occult groups here and there, like the Beast, have also discovered it independently; because of his oath as a 9th degree member of the O.T.O., the Beast could not disclose it publicly; due to his love of both poetry and cabalism, we can be sure that the code in which he hints at it – the language of bloody sacrifice – would have some innate and existential (not merely accidental) correspondence with the true secret. Finally, the ritual seems somehow connected with “love under will” and losing (the) self – its sense of separateness – in the other.”

But some readers already know the secret and others have guessed…

XVIII – The Moon

Let the Illusion of the world pass over thee, unheeded.  – The Book of Thoth

Ezra Pound has remarked somewhere that Frazer’s Golden Bough, all 12 fat volumes, can be condensed into a single sentence, to wit: All religions are either based on the idea that copulation is good for the crops or one the idea that copulation is bad for the crops.

In fact, one can generalize that even the highest forms of mysticism are similarly bifurcate, some going back to ideas derived from the orgy and some to ideas derived from the ritual murder.

Leo Frobenius, in a series of heavy Germanic treatises on anthropology still untranslated from the Deutsch, has demonstrated, or attempted to demonstrate, a periodic oscillation between these two systems of magick, which he calls Matriarchal and Patriarchal. Two spin-offs from the Frobenius thesis in English are Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God andRattray Taylor’s Sex In History.

The Beast himself (aided by the handy revelations of friend Aiwass) suggests that magicko-religious history, at least in the Occident, has passed through The Age of Isis(primitive matriarchy), the Age of Osiris or the Dying God (civilized patriarchy, including Christianity) and is presently entering The Age of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, in which woman will appear” no longer the mere vehicle of the male counterpart, but armored and militant.”

How’s that for a prophecy of Women’s Lib?

Thus, if the orgy is the sacrament of The Age of Isis, as Frazer indicates, the dying god – or the dying population – is the sacrament of the Age of Osiris. The link between ritual sex and ritual murder is not merely historical or sequential: they are the same sacrament in two different forms.

And the latter becomes magically necessary whenever the former is no longer functionally possible whenever that is, orgasm is no longer a true [although temporary] “death” and becomes only the “sneeze of the genitals” which all forms of psychotherapy are admittedly or overtly trying to alleviate.

It is a truism that, on the psychological plane, repressed or unsatisfied sex seeks relief in sadism or masochism: it is more true on the astral or magical plane (whatever that is) that is the spiritual spasm cannot be found through love, it must be sought in violence.

And so we see that human sacrifice is the characteristic sacrament of such peoples as the Aztecs (read any history of Mexico to find out how much male chauvinism, prudery andNixonian macho they wallowed in), the Holy Inquisitors of the middle ages, the Nazis, and some power elites closer to home; while matriarchal cultures such as the Danubians of pre-historic Europe, the pre-Chou folk of China, the first dwellers in the fertile crescent, etc have left behind clear evidence of an equal and opposite ritualized eroticism, some of which has survived via the Taoists in china, The Tantrists in India, the “Old Religion” or witch cult in Europe…

But the Beast was not trying to reinstate the Age of Isis, like these; his magick, he tells us again and again, is preparation for the Age of Horus.

XIX – The Sun

Make Speech and Silence, Energy and Stillness, twin forms of thy play. – The Book of Thoth

Even outside the Manson Family, there is a lot of religious balling going on these days by people who have rediscovered part of the ritual of Isis; what the Beast was teaching was nothing as facile as this. The following words from Chapter VII, “The Formula of the Holy Graal,” in Magick are meant with dreadful literalness:

“The Cup is said to be full of the Blood of the Saints; that is, every ‘saint’ or magician must give the last drop of his life’s blood to that cup (in) the true Bridal of the Rosy Cross…

“It is a woman whose Cup must be filled. It is…the sacrifice of the Man, who transfers life to his descendents…For it is his whole life that the Magus offers to Our Lady. The Cross is both Death and Generation, and it is on the Cross that the Rose blooms…”

The sacrifice must be a real death, a true Rosy Crucifixion, if it is to replace the more violent magic of the Osirian Age. I forbear further quotation, for the secret is concealed beneath many a veil throughout the Beast’s works, but it involves at least: a mastery of pranayama, allowing the postponement of orgasm until the magick working is performed at length and in properly exalted enthusiasm; skill in astral voyaging, so the astral body may be busy in its own plane also; perfection in dharana, so that one ray of the mind remains in perfect coordination on the symbol of the Holy Guardian Angel.

What happens, then, can be considered either the true, natural oceanic orgasm which the Patriarchal Age has tended to destroy – or a new and artificial creation produced by this complicated yoga. It’s the same debate we hear endlessly about acid: does it restore our “natural” form of perception, or does it “artificially” create a new form?

And, thus, we can understand Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, who is being created. He is “the Child” that Rose’s Cairo vision invoked; the “little child” that the Beast became after his bad trip to China; “the male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence” who was sacrificed an hundred and fifty times a year after 1912; the Beast himself; and also Aiwass, the Holy Guardian Angel, both an internal aspect of Crowley’s mind and a separate “Being…of angelic order…more than a man,” for the question posed by the materialist (“Inside or outside? Subjective or objective?”) loses meaning in that trance of Samadhi where all the opposites are transcended into a unity that is also a void.

XX – The Aeon

Be every Act an Act of Love and Worship. – The Book of Thoth

In an early issue of his magazine Equinox, the Beast wrote with uncharacteristic solemnity:

I. The world progresses by virtue of the appearance of Christs (geniuses).
II. Christs (geniuses) are men with super-consciousness of the highest order.
III. Super-consciousness of the highest order is obtainable by known methods.

Therefore, by employing the quintessence of known methods we cause the world to progress.

In the first issue, in a more characteristic vein, he wrote:

We place no reliance
On Virgin or Pigeon
Our method is Science
Our aim is Religion

He did his work seriously and humorously, stubbornly and flexibly, wisely and sometimes unwisely, synthesizing – from High Magick and from yoga, from Cabalism and the Koran, from experiments with hashish and peyote and nitrous oxide to years of study of the Tarot and comparative religion, slowly extracting “the quintessence of known methods.”

After him came Wilhelm Reich, who discovered the same quintessence independently, and was also hounded, vilified and slandered.  And after Reich was Timothy, who finally let the djinn out of the bottle and in a decade changed the face of the world by a century’s worth.

But the Beast started the Revolution, and some of us now see that it is the essential Revolution, far more important than that of economics, and that he and his good buddy Aiwassdefined it better than Marx or even better than the frontal-lobe anarchists, when they (he?) wrote in The Book of the Law:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law…
To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I
will tell my prophet,  & be drunk thereof!…
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt…
It is a lie, this folly against self
I am alone: there is no God where I am…
Every man and every woman is a Star…
The word of Sin is restriction…
Remember all ye that existence is pure joy;
that all the sorrows are but shadows; they pass
and are done; but there is that which remains…
Love is the law, love under will…

For the Age of the Child is upon us; and those who seek to preserve the Aeon of Osiris and death are themselves only dying dinosaurs.

XXI – The Universe

And blessing and worship to the prophet of the lovely Star.  – The Book of Thoth

And yet – and yet – Manson reminds us, our brothers and sisters in the Movement remind us, sometimes our own unexpected behavior reminds us: there have been such millennial voices often in the past and they have been heralds not of a Golden Dawn but only of a false dawn.

If there is on central lesson to be learned from the Beast, it is not really Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, which has been around since Rabelais; not even the more profound and gnomic Every man and every woman is a Star; not even the formula of the Perfect Orgasm for which Norman has been searching so loudly and forlornly lo! these many years; it is rather his humor, his skepticism, his irony that reveled in the title of Beast and, even, at times, Ass; the rationality that warned against becoming “the prey of madness” by trusting one’s visions too quickly, and the common sense which said that, even if good and evil are identical on the Absolute plane, a man operating on the relative plane simply doesn’t enjoy a toothache or invent rationalizations to pick a brother’s pocket; the solemn warning that the sacrament is not completed until the Magician offers “the last drop of his life’s blood” to the Cup, and dies; but, above all these, the simple historical record which reveals that with all the ardor, all the dedication, all the passion he possessed, it still took eight years (including four months’ madness) before he broke down the wall that separates Ego from the true Self and that Self from the Universe.

COME BACK LYNDON!

“Come back, Lyndon!”
by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea

from The Organ
Issue IX, July 1971

 

GOD, HOW WE MISS L.B J.!

The confession comes with weeping violins, thunder off-screen and shadows gathering in the corners. There is the gnashing of teeth and the commotions at the other end of the alimentary tract causing a noticeable tightening of the ass-hole, while the liver dies a little, and the damage to key glands and trunk-line nerves will not be discovered by conventional medicine. Still, the confession, at last, must come. We were there; we marched with the others and chanted, “Hey, hey, L.B J., how many kids didja kill today?”; yes, we signed the petitions and wrote to the Congressmen, we even gave some credence to Garrison and Mark Lane and MacBird; we longed for the day and dreamed of the day when that Texas Turd was sent home to gather flies on the banks of the Pedernales and was replaced at the Helm by somebody, anybody, who didn’t have the soul of a cattle-rustler and a face like a study in the mesmerization of the anal sphinctre. Back in Texas was where we wanted him. We most definitely wanted him back in Texas.

Well, we didn’t get somebody. We didn’t even get anybody. By the malice of a left-handed and sardonic God, we got “Richard Milhouse Nixon.”

We repent all of our sins and heresies; we recant in public. We want L.B J. back. The next time our troops withdraw from Vietnam into another Asian country, we want old Lyndon there to explain it, with those crafty lines of ham Summer Stock piety crinkling around his eyes — not “Nixon” with that no-echo sound in his voice that makes it seem as if his throat is lined with styrofoam, and that Insect Trust remoteness from all human emotion. Confronted with the alien, the perhaps mechanical, the possibly Outer Space quality of seemingly motiveless malignity in “Nixon,” we are beginning to appreciate how American, how human, how down-home Lyndon Baines Johnson really was.

And the L.B.J. jokes — remember them? They were so folksy and real and earthy — remember? Remember, “Terrible accident at the L.B.J. ranch today — somebody left the gate open and the cattle all went home”? Remember the legends about his enormous schlong, and Paul Krassner’s great line, “When he calls a joint meeting, everybody cringes”? Remember, “The White House reporters can now tell when L.B.J. is lying. When he scratches his ear, he’s telling the truth. When he rubs his nose, he’s telling the truth. But when he opens his mouth — he’s lying!” Who tells jokes about “Nixon”? Perhaps the computers at the Rand think-tank do, exchanging ghastly electronic jests as they calculate scenarios for the next Asiatic incursion. But do you know any people who relate to “Nixon” enough to joke about him? Behind the name “Richard Nixon” is there anything substantial enough to jest about?

Remember the quick adrenalin flashes and the screams of rage in the old anti-Johnson demonstrations, the most exhilarating hate-trip many of us have ever been on? Do you know anyone who hates “Nixon” that way? Turn anywhere, look at the hardest-working and most dedicated peace crusader you know, and is there any personal feeling toward “Richard Nixon”? Never. At the most there is distaste and an attenuated metaphysical dread, a hunch that behind the seeming void of the public persona might be a secret so dreadful that the human mind would crumble on confronting it. Worse: that there is no horror behind the void, nothing but another void, which conceals a still deeper void, in a mad series of 0-dimensional Chinese boxes regressing infinitely always to another void, another mask, and still another void masking yet another void, forever?

History is a game for any number of players, but that’s the key — you need real players to enjoy it. The one thing that, sooner or later, any hyperactive participant (as we sometimes think we are) has to learn is that a good game requires a spirited opposition. We of the Left need a Right. Realizing that, you come to see that your enemy is not really your enemy in any total sense — he is as necessary to you as your friend. At that point you come to value the fact that your enemy is a human being; who can work up a good political enthusiasm against a moving van, the tobacco mosaic virus or the weather in Chicago? But we have reached this point of understanding only to have the universe swat us upside the head once more: Sitting across the table from us is “Richard M. Nixon” and we have the stale, disappointed feeling of being up against a chess-playing robot. If he wins, does it matter — if we win, does it matter?

People have humanized hurricanes and other disasters, they have even anthropomorphized the plague bacteria and projected malice into its invasions, but it is simply impossible to humanize or anthropomorphize “Richard Nixon”. The best public relations brains in the country have worked on the job for years, and all they produce when the TV cameras turn on is the same dead-level computer read-out of some very unconvincing used-car salesman’s pitch of fading memory. How different it was when L.B.J. said, “With a heavy heart, I once again resume bombing,” and the delivery was so Riverboat Gambler that you could feel an almost tactile relationship with the conniving but human sonofabitch who rehearsed the words over and over until they almost captured the ring of sincerity.

L.B J. was a bad father, a father you could hate, an old Huck Finn’s Pap of a reprobate who lied his head off and stole everything not nailed down but probably cackled with obscene glee over every swindle and laughed like hell when he told his cronies about it. You might want to ride him out of town on a rail, but you knew he’d make out all right in the next town and swindle the folks there, too, and you had a sneaking admiration for that incorrigibility. But nobody can think of “Nixon” as a father, good or bad, or any kind of brother, or even a very remote cousin. Being conquered by the Martians would be existentially believable compared to being governed by “Nixon” — at least the Martians, if inhuman, must be protoplasm. Who is that sure about Nixon? If he abruptly answered a press conference question with “That — does — not — compute,” who would really be surprised or feel aught else but that a buried suspicion had been confirmed?

Even “Nixon’s” admirers don’t admire “him” and this clearly communicated early to “his” circle who thoughtfully built up Spiro as a human and believable spokesman whom people could love and hate.

Consider what could have been “Nixon’s” finest moment, the day he announced that he was against abortion because of his belief in “the sanctity of human life.” Imagine how Lyndon-Baby would have handled that line, every crease on his face emphasizing the depths of emotion an spiritual revelation, the quiver in his voice on the key words “sanctity and “life,” the whole effect mounting to a crescendo of righteousness on a level with Fields himself saying, “What? Five aces in the deck? What scoundrel could have done that?” Do you member any of “Nixon’s” performances? Nobody does; Nobody remembers any of “his” speeches. They just remember that “he” was on TV again and said something, and no one can quite recollect whether “he” was selling “his” latest invasion or Ajax, the Foaming Cleanser.

Or, look at the other side of the picture. Recall the great oration that terminated L.B J.’s three decades of opposition to racial equality, that Falstaffian performance in which he pledged all his loyalty to civil rights and concluded raptly, “And we shall overcome.” It was pure Rod Steiger, right out of the scene in The Harder They Fall where Steiger, the gangster, tells his gunsels to “show some respect” for the man they’ve just killed. You felt a deep human identifica for L.B.J. and Steiger in those scenes and wished that they could succeed in making someone believe them, wished almost that you could believe them for a moment. Can you imagine “Nixon” handling that bit? Can you hear him saying, “We shall overcome,” and getting any response any more sympathetic or antipathetic than a yawn?

Obviously, given that people aren’t completely stupid or tasteless, it is hard at times to understand how come the American electorate made the trade — the monstrous human being for the robot monster. The best explanation we’ve found is the Conspiracy Theory. In our novel, Illuminatus! (to be published by Dell later this year) we dramatize the notion that just about every catastrophe in history can be explained by the machinations of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, a conspiratorial organization which runs international finance, all major political parties everywhere in the world, all communications media, the Catholic Church, and the Chicago Transit Authority. While doing the research for Illuminatus! we came across the fact that on April 1, 1968, Johnson was opening his morning copy of the New York Times while spooning a heavily-sugared wedge of grapefruit into that lugubrious face (which, as he himself quite frankly stated after viewing Peter Hurd’s portrait, was “the ugliest thing I ever saw”), when a pink slip fell out. The message read, “It’s April First, and you’re It,” and it was signed, “The Fellas.” Under this there appeared a peculiar symbol, printed in red, an eye inside a glowing triangle. A somewhat similiar eye can be seen — if “Nixon’s” stewardship of the economy has left you any bread — on the U.S. dollar bill, back side on the left.

Shortly after receiving this message, Johnson opted out of the 1968 Presidential race. We learned these facts in a teen-ager’s magazine called Teenset for March 1969 in an article on the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria by a writer named Sandra Glass. The writer disappeared before the article was published, Teenset changed its name to Aum, and Aum itself subsequently ceased publication.

Assuming — as do most Illuminati experts such as ourselves, Howard Bickler and Robert Welch of the John Birch Society — that Johnson’s masters are the ones who continue to rule the country through “Nixon,” can anyone visualize them disposing of “Nixon” by sending him a pink slip? They would simply pull the plug.

We blamed the war on the Democrats. When the Ghostly Old Party gave us “Nixon” as its nominee, the proceedings were as genteel as a wake in Grosse Point, Michigan. When the Democrats met in Chicago, the boil burst in full color on television and all over the parks and streets. Richard J. Daley, rumored in some documents we’ve found to be the fifth Illuminatus Primus, destroyed Humphrey’s chances of winning by making the nominating process look as democratic as parliament run by Oliver Cromwell. Can this have been an accident? Then why did Daley shout, “Ewige blumencraft!” (an Illuminati slogan used by Beethoven and Goethe) at Abraham Ribicoff at a most heated moment,on the evening of August 26, 1968? The boil burst, but it was not allowed to drain. “Nixon” plastered it over, that it might suppurate more in the darkness.

So, you Illuminated Seers, if you be human and not a race of inter-planetary invaders who are all “Nixons,” you, too must be fed up with the banality of this particular brand of evil. You’ve outdone yourselves this time. Let us have a man back in the White House. A shrewd, stupid, crafty, clumsy, eating, breathing, spitting, belching, balls-scratching, nose-picking, guilt-ridden, boasting, overcompensating, naive, corrupt, evil and innocent human being — another L.B.J. or the original L.B.J. himself, brought back for a re-run. Do not, O Illuminati, leave us out here in the twilight with no more for host than a sincere Coca Cola machine.

Mssrs Wilson and Shea apparently underestimated our ability to become angry, even at inanimate objects, such as a “sincere Coca-Cola machine.” This was a curious failing of the well-documented prescience  they demonstrated in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. After the 1976 election, Bob Wilson told me they had  thought they were writing fiction,  but for the previous two years, every morning he opened the newspaper, he realized they had written the headlines. (The basic question of Illuminatus! was “What if ALL the conspiracy theories they’d been reading as editors of Playboy’s Forum were true?” and if that were the case, what sort of government would we have?))

Robert Shea died March 10, 1994. Robert Anton Wilson died January 11, 2007.

Even a Man Who is Pure of Heart

“EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE OF HEART”

THE HORROR FILM AS AMERICAN FOLK-ART

Robert Anton Wilson

from the Journal of Human Relations, First Quarter 1971

Lon Chaney Jr. recently appeared on the Johnnie Carson TV show speaking in a hoarse and rasping voice. In answer to a question, he explained that his vocal cords had been permanently damaged, several years ago, when he was entertaining children at an orphanage; the children had asked him, over and over, to repeat the famous wolf-like growl which he used in his characterization of the lycanthrope, Lawrence Talbot, in a series of popular horror films of the early 1940s. The films were all produced, released and circulated before any of the children were born, but—as every TV-owner knows—they live on in the new medium of television, and, like the wolf-man himself, come back from their grave endlessly.

When Boris Karloff died, he had performed in every type of role, from light comedy to classical tragedy, on the stage and on TV as well as in films; but every obituary mentioned in the first paragraph that he was best known for his characterization of the Frankenstein monster in a film made in 1931. That film appeared on my television only two weeks ago, and I have no reason to believe it will not be back again before the year is over.

These stories illustrate what every theatre owner knows: Americans have an insatiable appetite for horrors, and a successful horror film will be revived more often than ‘any other kind of cinema entertainment. Now, while it is true that artists of high talent, such as Mr. Chaney and Mr. Karloff (and such great directors as James Whale, Todd Browning, Robert .Wise and Jacques Tournier) have graced some of these films with an artistry that is rare in Hollywood, the American movie is basically a commercial enterprise; these monster-epics are produced, not chiefly to express the creative imagination of the talented people who often contribute to them, but to move the audience in a way that will spell financial success at the box-office. In short, these films are manufactured as modern advertising is manufactured: with a cool and unsentimental eye on what is neurotic (and therefore exploitable) in the masses. Thus, they tell us a great deal about fellow countrymen—and, perhaps, about ourselves. Furthermore, if one takes a Jungian approach to depth psychology, one can assume that, as mirrors of the American collective unconscious, these entertainments contain parables of wisdom and healing as well as images of our pathologies and frustrations.

The dominant figure of the horror film, as nobody who has studied this field can doubt, is the “mad scientist.” This archetypal character has appeared in world literature since the mid-19th Century (and can be traced back, beyond that, to the evil sorcerer of early times); it is significant that he is the central character in. the first internationally-successful (and artistically respectable) horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, made in Germany in 1920. His most famous appearance, of course, is as Henry Frankenstein, played by Colin Clive, in Frankenstein itself; thereafter he appeared with monotonous regularity throughout the 1930s, usually portrayed by the Teutonic and humorless Lionel Atwill. Aside from Dr. Frankenstein, the mad scientist appeared most memorably in The Invisible Man, (1933) played by. Claude Rains and directed by James Whale, who had also directed Frankenstein. The Invisible Man, like Frankenstein, was so popular with the public that it gave birth to a series of increasingly mediocre sequel.

If the mad scientist is the dominant figure in American horror films, the dominant image is disaster: Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory destroyed and innocent victims dead on all sides; the Invisible Man wrecking trains and threatening to upset the stock market (demolishing capitalism itself at its nerve-center) but finally dying pitifully, a crazy man bleeding in the snow as the dogs close in on him; in later films, whole cities (and real cities, too: New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo) laid waste by the pre-historic monsters other mad scientists have foolishly revived. If these movies are telling us any one particular thing, it would appear to be that science is a profound menace to mankind and that our cities are vulnerable to total destruction virtually overnight. That we all know today that this is true might cause us to overlook the significant fact that this warning was implicit in films made ten years, fifteen years or even twenty years before Hiroshima. If we choose to say that these movies contain a seed of lumpen anti-intellectualism, we must add that they prophetically warned against the abuse of scientific knowledge at a time when the mind of the average rationalist contained no such intuition—when, in fact, it was believed by the “educated” classes that science contained no perils and promised only boons and benefits to mankind. Nevertheless, there existed, in inchoate and unconscious form, a far more sinister picture—the scientist as psychotic, standing amid the rubble of a disaster he had arrogantly created—and Hollywood learned early that masses of us would pay good money to spend a few hours in the dark dream-world of a theatre being frightened by that image.

This brings us to the basic question about such films: if the terrors were in our unconscious before they appeared on the screen, why do we pay to look at them? Why do we not “repress” and block them out? Why—as Aristotle asked long ago, of Greek tragedy—do we find entertainment in that which is not pleasing at all, but terrifying and pitiable? Aristotle’s answer was that we need periodic purgations of such emotions; psychoanalysts would accept the basic concept of purgation, adding only that we find an outlet for our masochism in identifying with the victims in these films and a simultaneous outlet for our sadism in identifying with the villains or monsters. More modern psychologists, less preoccupied with the morbid, would point out, perhaps, that there is a movement toward wholeness or healing in this kind of dark art; in Frederick Perk’ terminology, by confronting in symbolic form the sinister side of science, we are unconsciously seeking to complete a Gestalt – to take into consciousness that which has been pushed into the background by the scientism, humanism., optimism and progressivism of the official culture.

Thus, one can even find symbolic social criticism in these films. Bela Lugosi, in Halperin’s White Zombie, (1932), is an exploiter of labor: his plantation is staffed by half-human automatons (“zombies”) who finally rebel and destroy him. The great uncompleted Gestalt in the American mind–the realization that, sooner or later, the exploited turn on their exploiters, and, usually, do so in a violent manner—is here dragged into consciousness most hideously. Robert Armstrong, in Cooper’s King Kong (1933; like White Zombie, at the height of the Depression) is indistinguishable from the average Western film hero, as portrayed by John Wayne or Henry Fonda: he is brave, individualistic and has the typical American contempt for “weakness.” But he is also motivated entirely by gain (an element usually missing from Westerns) and, after he has successfully confronted and conquered the largest horde of monsters ever to appear in a single film—including a brontosaurus, a tyrannosaurus, a stegosaurus, a pterodactyl and a giant snake—the island on which all this occurs is virtually destroyed. The “natives” (as they are always called in such films) stand before their demolished huts looking, on a modern reviewing of this masterpiece, like survivors of the American invasion of Vietnam. At the climax, the biggest monster of all—the giant ape, Kong—is brought back to New York, and promptly runs amok, leaving large sections of the city in shambles. It is as if the big gorilla were acting out the SDS slogan, “Bring the war home;” King Kong was the first Weatherman. One can even find in the film an allegory on the process by which the imperialistic wars of the 19th Century (Armstrong’s invasion of Skull Island, to capture their natural “resources”—the monsters he hopes to exhibit for profit) gave birth to the world wars within the capitalist nations in the Twentieth Century (Kong on the loose in New .York). Once again, officially tabooed insights into the nature of out society are made palatable and admitted to consciousness by the dream-dark atmosphere of the movie theatre. That King Kong, like Dracula, also contains an element of unconscious homosexuality only shows that Freudian materials are among, but not all of, the repressed reality symbolically presented under the guise of “horror” in these movies.

The psychoanalysts are right, of course, in saying that we identify sadistically with the monsters as much as we identify masochistically with their victims. In this connection, the memorably monomaniacal exaltation of the Invisible Man—”The whole world is afraid of me!”—contained a warning about the American national character which few could understand in the early 1930s when the film was made, but which is now more generally understood as the “overkill” supply in the national arsenal steadily increases. Curiously enough, the very next line in the script of The Invisible Man was consciously intended to indicate the protagonist’s insanity, but now has anew meaning: “Even the moon is afraid of me!” The same tone of omnipotence and implied, Jehovah-like threat can be found in the public statements of theU.S. government whenever a new nuclear missile is put into production or another moon-shot is announced. Once again, the horror film was prophetic.

The reverse of the coin—the American desire to be loved, and a sense of misery that anyone should fear or hate us—is dramatized in the “wolf-man” films whose enormous popularity, we have seen, reached to the children of the present generation and caused the star, Lon Chaney Jr., to damage his vocal cords. The basic myth of these movies is a Kitsch version of the dogma of Original Sin: the hero, Lawrence Talbot, is, as portrayed by Chancy, a good man, a kind man, a conspicuously gentle and compassionate man—but, at certain tines of the month, he is supernaturally transformed into a half-wolf and driven to kill and devour innocent victims. This curse has fallen on him through no fault. of his own; he has been bitten by a werewolf himself. Like Lyndon Johnson in his public speeches, Chaney tells us again and again in these films that he only wants to be loved, he hates the necessity of killing (and would stop it if he could) but his compulsion is as great as the “commitment” which forced Johnson to continue the war in Vietnam. This typically American pathos (and bathos) is underscored by the fact that Talbot, although the heir of a noble English family, was raised in theUnited States, speaks and acts like an American, and could easily be the man who lives next door. The films also feature a bit of pop poetry that is repeated at least once in each of the four movies that make up the Talbot saga:

Even a man who is pure of heart

And says his prayers by night

Can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

And the moon is full and bright

It is interesting to note the progressive resolutions of Talbot’s problem in relation to the historical events at the times the films were made. The Wolf Man was produced in 1941, after the beginning of World War II but beforeAmerica’s overt involvement. In this version, Talbot can be killed by any silver implement, and is, in fact, killed by a silver cane wielded by his own father. Of course, in 1940, many Americans knew (and others suspected) thatRoosevelt was maneuvering to get us into the war; in the figure of the destroying father who kills his son “for his own good,” one is reminded, of Kipling’s bitter:

If any ask, why we died

Tell them: because our fathers lied

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man (1943) came afterAmerica officially entered the war. Here, there is no mention of any “cure” for Talbot’s condition—except for some papers said to be in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but quickly lost in the rather convoluted plot—and his murderous activities spread over several countries before he is temporarily stopped by being drowned.

In 1944, when the war was proving to last longer than the professional optimists in the Office of War Information had led the public to believe, the wolf-man was again resurrected—and this time, Dracula as well as the Frankenstein Monster were also revived to assist him in spreading terror, in House of Frankenstein. Significantly enough, in spite of the competition, the wolf-man holds the center of attention, and the myth has changed: now he can only be killed by a silver bullet fired by one who loves him. His quest for love and understanding is now redoubled, and, at the end, a gypsy girl who does love the poor tormented mass-murderer has the kindness to fire the silver bullet right into his heart.

Finally, in 1945, with the end of the war in sight, the wolf-man was brought back again, in House of Dracula. To the delight of all his fans, who had suffered with him for four long years while he sought a solution to his killing-compulsion, Talbot was not only cured for good this time; he managed to live through it, and even to win the girl he loved. The supernatural curse was not supernatural at all; there was merely a brain malfunction, which was cured by surgery! (Americans at that time were very optimistic about the plans for a United Nations Organization to prevent future wars.) Rationalism, at least temporarily, promised to triumph.

The next major cycle of horror films seems to reflect an attempt to digest Hiroshima—in the symbolic and distorted way typical of movies and dreams. Them (1954), The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Godzilla (1955), Giant Behemoth (1959), and about a score of others each dealt with the destruction (or threatened destruction) of a major, city by a monster unleashed or created by atomic radiation. Interestingly enough, the most artistically successful of this generally mediocre lot of films came from Japan—perhaps these were the most heart-felt and least ambiguous? Such grossly obvious allegories dominated the horror film from about the time of the demise of the wolf-man until the early 1960’s, but then a new, and especially interesting, trend appeared. The terror flick became simultaneously more explicit and more ambiguous. It became more explicit in bringing to the fore some of the Freudian elements that had previously been left unstated; it became more ambiguous in cutting its last umbilical connection to even the tattered shadow of rationalism and logic. Thus, where once every horror was “explained” (either by reference to the tradition of supernatural folk-lore or by some variety of pseudo-science, such as the creation of Frankenstein’s monster out of pre-existing parts snatched from graves and animated after assembly by a bolt of lightning), the new horror film might be said to have as its theme a remark made by the English biologist J.B.S. Haldane in his old age: “The universe may be, not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), for instance, deals with an attack on a smallCalifornia town by seagulls, crows and other birds, who seem temporarily bent on killing every human being who lives there. A few characters attempt explanations of this departure from nature, but the plot develops in such a way that each new attack renders the last explanation no longer credible. At the end, the horror is as much a mystery as it was in the beginning. Meanwhile, however, the heroine’s previous history of promiscuity and the hero’s Oedipus Complex have been manipulated in such a way as to suggest that one or both of them are somehow connected with the reign of aviary terror; this non-explanation (that’s the only word for it) is not only scientifically unbelievable, as is true in the classic horror films of earlier decades, but it is also inconclusive and inchoate. The audience is left to exclaim, like Byron, “I wish he would explain his explanation.” Nevertheless, this non-explanation lingers in the mind longer than an explanation would, and seems somehow to link with another character’s remark that the attack of the birds is the beginning of the End of the World. In short, the people in Hitchcock’s small town find the sudden descent of violent death as hard to fathom as most have found the government’s rationale for its invasion ofVietnam, but hints suggest that the answer is to be found in depth psychology, in theology, or in some occult blend of the two.

Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) is even more sexually explicit: one character is a Lesbian, another has a classic Electra complex, and a third is a puritanical sadist whose cruelty is overtly linked to his sexual repression. What happens during the haunting, however, is never explained: the audience is directed to believe in one ghost, in two ghosts, in three ghosts, in no ghosts, in telepathic hypnotism creating the illusion of ghosts, or in some form of malignity animate in the matter of the house itself. Evil is—this film seems to join The Birds in saying—and man can only recognize that fact; he cannot explain it.

Here I would like to point to a related trend, which first appeared, joltingly, in a non-supernatural horror film: Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). I call this theme the Slaughter of the Innocents. Briefly, Psycho introduces us to a young lady, played by the popular light-comedy performer Janet Leigh, who we have every reason to believe is the heroine of the film. Audience identification is further heightened by two technical devices: (1) there are a large percentage of “subjective shots”—scenes photographed from Miss Leigh’s viewpoint with the actress herself theoretically behind the camera; and (2) “interior monolog” (the spoken thoughts of the character played by Miss Leigh) is employed frequently. Thus, while watching the film, we are Janet Leigh—and we have the sublime confidence that whatever horrors she is to confront, she will survive them all, and stand in the hero’s arms at the fade-out. (This, after all, is Hollywood.) Then, about one-third of the way through the movie, Janet Leigh is killed. The shock is double: not only has the firmest of all cliché’s been destroyed before our eyes, but we die a kind of epistemological death ourselves-as we seek, vainly, for another character to become the focus of audience-identification and represent “us” up there on the screen. Compare this with, say, James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein: no matter how many times Henry Frankenstein and his wife were threatened by the monster, we always knew they would survive at the end, and they did. Hitchcock has pulled that rug out from under our feet forever. Furthermore, the implied message—that the good can die as well as the evil—was raised to a higher level of intensity in The Birds, where children are the most conspicuous victims. (James Whale, of course, included a scene in Frankenstein, in which a child is murdered by the monster; but the scene was censored from most prints when the film went into distribution back in 1931.) In The Haunting, not only is the heroine (the most pathetic character in the film) killed; she is the only one killed, and a rather obnoxious secondary character, who appeared to be killed earlier, turns up alive—to stand, in the fade-out, where we would expect the heroine to stand: beside the hero. Further-more, the irony and cruelty of this ending is high-lighted by the fact that, a few minutes earlier, in a scene placed and paced to suggest a climax, the heroine almost died but was saved at the last instant. Her death arrives, then, as an anti-climax—like the death of Cordelia in King Lear, and with the same evident meaning:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods:

They kill us for their sport.

The Slaughter of the Innocents escalates (to use an appropriate word) in The Dunwich Horror (1970), a mediocre adaptation of a fine short story, which has, however, one particularly telling scene: a farm family (typically American “salt of the earth”) are shown saying grace before dinner—and then the monster kills them all. In the old days,’ prayers and crucifixes could keep Dracula or the wolf-man at bay, but now, evidently, even Christianity has lost the war against the Powers of Evil. And the symbolic threat against the heroine in early horror films is no longer disguised as death: here it is explicitly rape, and she is not spared but suffers it. And Roman Polansky’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) is virtually a direct rebuttal of Dracula, featuring the same thematic characters: the murderous vampire and the benevolent scientist who fights him. Polansky outrageously explicates the Freudian interpretation of. the vampire legend, making his monster an overt homosexual; worse yet, the monster wins, and instead of extirpating the evil of vampirism, the-kindly scientist unwittingly spreads it over the whole world, where as it had previously existed only in the small unidentified Balkan country in which the film is set.

In Polansky’s next film, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the taboo against showing a pregnant woman in danger was smashed—the message is becoming clearer: pretty girls, innocent girls, children, farmers who pray before dinner, even the unborn, none are safe, for Evil is everywhere. More significantly, Evil in this film was hyper-respectable, just a little bit crazy, definitely stodgy and pompous, and, above all, middle-aged. Officially, the Evil were a band of witches; emblematically, they were the image of the Silent Majority as seen by the young and alienated. The pictorial, imagistic meaning of Rosemary’s Baby cannot be escaped: it says that the most respectable-looking middle-aged people you might see on the street will kill women and children, without even the excuse and the remorse of Lawrence Talbot, the wolf-man. The plot also contains a blasphemous parody on the birth of Jesus; and one scene shows the heroine reading the Time magazine article, “Is God Dead?”—the question all these recent horror films have been asking.

The wolf-man poem (“Even a man who is pure of heart. . .”) said subliminally to the audience: you, too, could be a mass-murderer; these recent films say, with increasing explicitness, that we can all be either murderers or victims, and that to look for reason or justice in the assignment of these roles is pointless. The history of the horror film, then, is the record of the American public’s uneasy groping toward an understanding of the repressed and unconscious forces which have madeAmericathe most feared nation in the world.

Talbot, it , should be mentioned, got bitten by the werewolf (and became a werewolf himself) only because he rushed bravely to the defense of an innocent victim of the beast’s attack. The message is Nietzsche’s: “If ye fight with a monster, beware lest ye become that monster.” His quest thereafter to find one who can love, understand and forgive him is the plight of official America (including the liberal, and conservative, intelligentsia); the Talbot theme—”I have -become Evil only because I fought Evil” it might be stated—lies behind all the rationalization for the growth, in this nation, of the most deadly military state in all human history. These movies were popular when a majority could believe that metaphysic, and could feel that Talbot was, truly “pure at heart” no matter how often he suffered the necessity of murdering. The recent horror films are less sentimental, more pessimistic and abruptly frank about the sexual desert at the heart of horror.

It is easy to see an analogy, visually, and emotionally, between Hitchcock’s birds descending on the California village (without any explanation that one can believe) and the American helicopters, or “whirlybirds,” dropping napalm on Vietnamese villages (without any explanation that an average citizen will care to believe.) The only film to state more clearly the real source of the sense of horror in our times was Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1962) which explicitly made the mad scientist, himself, (not any “monster” he rashly created) into the villain—and then identified him as a producer of nuclear weapons for the U.S. Government.

That the horror film actually contains Jungian archetypes can even be seriously considered. The sign of the werewolf, we are told in all the Talbot films, is the pentacle—a five-sided star with an inverse pentagon inside it. (This inverse pentagon has traditionally been used to invoke the Devil.) Quite as unconsciously as Hitler chose the reverse (bad luck) swastika as his symbol, the ironically-named U.S. Department of Defense has built its headquarters in a pentagon-shaped building; and a group of hippies, well versed in Occultism through drug-trips, gathered there in October, 1967 to pronounce a ritual exorcism: “Out, demons, out!” The secret symbols of the horror movies are, finally, becoming understood, at least by youth.

Man is said to be the only animal that lies, or can lie; but the possum—who lies with his whole body when he pretends to be dead—proves that definition to be inaccurate. It is more precise to say that man is the only animal who lies to himself A dog always knows who he is and what he wants, and so does every other animal from the hamster to the great blue whale, but if modern psychology has demonstrated one proposition beyond any further peradventure of doubt it is that most men, most of the time, know neither who they are nor what they want. They know only who society says they are and what their culture says they should want. Everything else—their own actual needs, wants, whims, desires and biological drives—is banished into a murky area variously known as the realm of the incomplete Gestalt, the Unconscious, or, in the poetic psychology of Carl Jung, the Shadow.

The archetype of this truncated man is that person whom militant blacks have named the Uncle Tom. He is the Negro who is so engrossed in “beating Whitey at his own game”—by playing the stereotyped role in which Whitey has cast him in that game—that he truly has forgotten, if he ever knew, who he is and what he wants. By no coincidence, radical American Indians have coined a term for an analogous figure in their culture—Uncle Tomahawk.

The bitterness and totally irrational fury of current American politics—there have been over one hundred explosions since January 1, 1970, plus the still continuing series of sit-ins, demonstrations, fire-bombings, occupations (of Alcatraz Island, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc.)—is a measure, perhaps, of the awakening that has occurred, quite suddenly, in recent years. A man jarred abruptly out of his sleep is apt to flail about a bit wildly and irresponsibly before he is fully returned to his senses. People who are awakening to a consciousness of true identity are similarly inclined to attack every moving target, because they have suddenly discovered the tragic truth behind Emerson’s famous remark that “society, everywhere, is in conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members.” They have learned that the basic human right, before and above all others, is the right to define yourself, and that society always, by its very nature, abrogates that right, even in allegedly free and ‘democratic states.

Socialization—the polite word for the brutal process by which a spontaneous, bright, lively, loving infant is tamed and frightened into becoming a cautious, calculating, dull, deadened, spiteful adult—is nothing else but dragooning people into the dominant games of a given culture and assigning them the roles they must play. Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst bolder than most, refuses to euphemize the domestication process at all and bluntly calls it “robotization.”

The awakening from robotism into Identity seems to have a largely, chemical origin—pot was a significant factor in the black rebellion (as Eldridge Cleaver testifies), peyote in the Indian renaissance and both pot and LSD among young whites. The role of marathon sensitivity-training sessions and encounter-groups, of course, needs to be acknowledged also, as well as the increased feedback of self-images created, as McLuhan points out, by modern electronic media. Whatever the cause, the basic nature of all revolution today revolves around the right to define one’s self—the right to declare the Social Contract null and void by issuing one’s own Declaration of Independence. Right-wingers are more sensitive to nuance than liberals—or most radicals—when they warn that the ultimate consequence of this tendency can only be anarchy. Anyone who fully understands the transformation that is occurring must have some empathy with the conservative’s frightened desire to put the genie back in the bottle, re-seal Pandora’s box, and return to the comfortable condition of what the Buddha very accurately called sleep-walking.

But, also, for those who have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, as Karl Popper once noted, return to paradise is impossible; we must now live in the real world, leave dream and myth behind, and begin thinking about the hard, spikey problems of how individuals who have become truly individualized can relate constructively to each other. Just as racism is invisible to the racist and male chauvinism unnoticed by the male chauvinist, most of the insanity and brutality of traditional authoritarian society is still undetected by even the most radical, who show every inclination toward continuing organized psychoses and sadisms with the token difference of substituting one ruling elite for another. It is time for society, and society’s rebels, to “put aside childish things,” inSt. Paul’s phrase, and to see, not “through a glass darkly,” but with clarity. It is time, in short, to think like adults—like Darwin, Frazer, ‘Kropotkin, Tucker, Spooner and, yes, Marx at his best—and not like the great romantics, Bakunin, Shelley, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, etc. Romanticism—the plunge into the unconscious to solve the problems of the Id in its own dark realm—is the path where Mrs. Shelley found Frankenstein, and all his kith and kin.

The Cybernetic Revolution

The Cybernetic Revolution

By Robert Anton Wilson

 From The Realist, No. 72, December 1966

Paul Revere 1976, two hundred years after the origi­nal, will be a guy galloping through every middlesex, village and farm, yelling: “Grab your guns, boys, the machines is a-coming!”

The Triple Revolution Manifesto got a great deal of gassy publicity a few years ago. There is no need to reiterate the obvious here. The reader has already heard of translating machines, song-writing machines, chess-playing machines and totally automated factories.

The labor dispute that almost put New York’s news­papers out of business last year was provoked by fear of automation, and the same fear has inspired most of the recent waterfront troubles.

The Negro riots of summer 1964 are attributed, by some sociologists, to the accelerating unemployment rate of urban Negroes. One statistic suggests the whole picture: in 1963 there were exactly 500,000 – one half a million – less mine workers employed than in 1945, and in 1964 there were again 125,000 less than in 1963.

At the Realist’s expense I attended the 3-day Confer­ence on the Cybercultural Revolution held at the Hotel Americana in New York.

The panelists were all well qualified engineers, man­agers, sociologists, etc. – Ph.D.’s were as thick, in the crowd; as sailors in the balcony of a 42nd Street tit movie-and they all seemed in basic agreement with the Triple Revolution Manifesto’s projection of massive ­unemployment directly ahead of us: massive unemployment utterly unlike the Depression of the ’30s, because there will be no “cure” for it.  It will be permanent.

And it is not merely the “proletariat” who are threat­ened. I, for one, came out of the conference seriously wondering how soon Paul Krassner was going to re­place me with a Bad-Joke-and-Radical-Propaganda machine.

Among the many possibilities seriously discussed by the conferences – this is straight reporting, not a Realist satire – was a gizmo called the “Friend-o-Mat, with a voice programmed to sound human and mellow, which would dispense Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian or any other kind of therapy to several patients at a time. All that remains is the deathless dream of an immortal limerick:

There was a young man from Racine

who built a screwing machine;

Concave and convex

It would suit either sex

And jacked itself off in between.

But even that machine is probably possible with the new mathematics and sophisticated hardware of cyber­netics. Cybernetics is, basically; an exquisitely subtle mathematical theory describing self-organizing and self-regulating systems “biological or mechanical.”

The theory is applicable to any form of self-correct­ing behavior, in the electro-colloidal system known as an animal, and shows how to duplicate that behavior in an electronic-metallic system known as a machine.

The irony of the cybercultural revolution is that this state of affairs is what we have always dreamed of. “Machinery is the moral substitute for slavery,” some­body wrote a long time ago; we have always thought that super-machinery would mean man’s liberation from toil and the freeing of his energies for “higher” artistic or scientific activities.

Now that the super-machinery is at our door, we begin to realize that it might bring, not liberation, but stagnation or starvation.

The latter alternative is, indeed, the ultimate impli­cation of cybernetics, if we return to the philosophy of classical capitalism as espoused by Barry Goldwater or Ayn Rand. Capitalism has inherited from Feudalism – and from the earlier theocracies, slave, states and sultanates – a certain idea which is completely: incom­patible with cybernetic technology.

I will try to state that idea as baldly as possible. This is it: The human race is divided into two groups – the People Who Matter and the People Who Don’t Matter.

The PWM are those who own the planet earth. Their ownership is a “legal fact,” although not an existential fact, and is demonstrated by land-titles, franchises, bank charters, stocks, bonds or other documents, certi­fied by the king or the congress, indicating the exact dimensions of their share of ownership. The PWM have an absolute right to exist, symbolized by these documents and guaranteed by the State.

The PWDM, on the other hand, do not own any part of the earth, and, therefore, do not have any absolute right to exist. They may obtain a relative right to ex­ist, however, by finding (or being found by) masters among the PWM who will employ them to toil, and compensate them by food and lodging, under slavery, or by wages, under capitalism.

Note that it is the State which decides who are the PWM and who are the PWDM.

Under Feudalism, and earlier systems, the PWM con­sisted only of the relatives of the king, and, since pro­duction was mainly agricultural, the principle form of ownership of the planet was through land-titles. Thus, the “nobility” became lords-of-the-land, land­lords, and levied a tax upon those who actually worked the land, the tax being known as “rent.”

The franchises, bank charters, stocks, etc., owned by the modern nobility are the same type of tax placed upon the productive process; capital interest is’ the “rent” of capital.

A man born into the PWM has his right to exist guaranteed by the State due to his inheritance of these certificates of ownership.

A man born into the PWDM, on the other hand, has no accepted worth in and of himself and obtains the right to exist only when a PWM will employ him.

This age-old class division is the idea mentioned above which is completely incompatible with cyber­netics, and I trust that I have stated it baldly enough.

Before Cybernation, the authoritarian structure had at least one slight protection built into it for the PWDM, which is that they are needed: the PWM can­not survive without the millions of PWDM grubbing and toiling away to produce the commodities of the nation. For this reason, the PWM have never allowed all of the PWDM to starve completely.

This is exactly where the nightmare of cybercultural revolution begins, for, in a cybernated age, the PWDM are no longer necessary. The PWM could let them all starve and be served forever after by machines.

The fellow who called machinery “the moral alterna­tive to slavery” never thought of this.

And among the PWDM are a class whom the partici­pants at the Cybercultural Conference jocularly called “the noodles.” The noodles think of themselves as being among the PWM, but by our definition, since they do not own any inherited franchises or charters of owner­ship over the planet, they are actually among the PWDM.      .           .

The noodles, you see, are the non-technical mana­gerial and administrative groups. (The technical man­agers and administrators, although also – by our defini­tion – PWDM, cannot be allowed to starve by the PWM.)

What will happen to the noodles, briefly, is that they will be in exactly the same leaky boat as the “gooks,” “niggers,” “errand boys” and other proletarians.

Although their higher salaries have allowed them to rub elbows and socialize (somewhat) with the PWM­ – and although they have, because of this, built up the delusion that they are among the PWM – the noodles will soon have their noses rubbed vigorously in the messy fact that they are, and always have been, PWDM.  (It couldn’t happen to nicer guys, could it?)

But we are exaggerating (I hope). Our PWM aren’t like the kings and sultans of olde. During the last great depression, without having to shoot or exile any of them, Roosevelt managed to get them to cough up may­ be $1 out of every million to go into a government dole, to keep them PWDM from starving.*

And Lyndon Johnson has read the Triple Revolution manifesto, or at least had one of his secretaries write to the Triple Revolution Committee and tell them that he had read it. So, let’s all relax, fellows; we can be sure that as cybernetic unemployment spreads, the dole will gradually expand to make up the difference, and nobody really will starve.

It seems to be this elevated level of utopian optimism that the Triple Revolution Committee would peddle to us. The picture I get is a 4-decker society in which: (a) The PWM retain their ownership of the planet through their land-titles, franchises, stocks, bonds, etc., and continue to rake off interest, or usury, on every productive process, while

(b) A technological elite actually runs things, and:

(c) The governing class, at gun-point – all taxes are collected at gun-point, let’s keep our eye on the ball here and not forget an unpleasant truth even if it is people like Goldwater who nowadays remind us of this particular truth – holds up the PWM and the techno­logical elite to collect just enough from them to dis­tribute a permanent dole to:

(d) Millions of bored and unemployed ex-workers and ex-noodles (who, presumably, will have lots of movies and TV to fill the long hours when they are too tired to fornicate any more).

By and large, the best brains of the Cybercultural Conference seemed to go along with this Triple Revo­lution formula, although I can’t imagine why. To me, it sounds like hell on earth. The best thing that can be said for it is that it is better than sticking to the old PWM mystique in the pure form of feudalism and classical capitalism.

The Triple Revolution formula is something that could arise only in America. It is a pure product of our national muddle-headedness and our refusal, ever, to ask fundamental questions and re-think fundamental assumptions.

Capitalism is under suspicion all over the world, ex­cept here. Here it is not an economic system but a re­vealed religion. Questioning it is a sign of eccentricity, if not depravity.

The Triple Revolution is not a revolution at all, being neither original nor radical (most of its ideas were long ago hashed out in the Social Credit and Technoc­racy movements).**

The whole Triple Revolution is nothing more than Hopalong FDR Rides Again – Capitalism plus the dole, period.

The irony of the Triple Revolution program is that it is based on ignoring the fundamental principle of cybernetics itself. The Triple Revolution program is an adaptation of cybernetics to our local (capitalist) au­thoritarianism (just as the ultimate Soviet program for cybernetics will be an adaptation to their own Statist authoritarianism).

But cybernetics itself is profoundly anti-authoritarian, and if we merely followed the logic of cyber­netics to its ultimate conclusion we would easily find the solution to the problems created by cybernetics. All of these problems, it will turn, out, are the result of not following cybernetics logically; they are the result of trying to dilute cybernetics with the logic of earlier systems.

Consider for a moment, not the hardware, but the essence of cybernetics. Cybernetics is a mathematical theory describing self-regulating’ or self-organizing systems. The general theory is’ applicable to mechani­cal, biological and social systems.

The material of the system doesn’t matter – you can be dealing with transistors and electric circuits; or with the nervous system of a cat or a man, or with a herd of cows or a tribe or nation of men – what makes a system cybernetic, or non-cybernetic, is the structure of the materials.

If, the structure allows for feedback from the envir­onment and alteration of behavior in accordance with the feedback, you have a cybernetic system. The essence of cybernetics is just that: an information flow that allows for self-correction.

‘This information flow is only possible where there is a structure to transmit and receive the information. It is perhaps necessary to point out that “structure” and “information” are very high order abstractions in cybernetic theory. The governor of a generator will illustrate this.

The first generators had a nasty habit of accelerat­ing until they tore themselves apart (no feedback). The governor was then invented. This is a pair of balls on a pair of flexible arms, attached to opposite sides of the generator. When the speed exceeds a certain point, the balls are thrown out by centrifugal force, creating a drag in the air. This slows the rotary velocity, until the balls fall back into place, the drag ends, and the machine starts accelerating again.

In this way, the speed is kept oscillating in the vicin­ity of a safe point where the generator will not tear itself apart. A thermostat controls a furnace in the same way. The balls of the governor, as much as the temperature-reading of the thermostat, are said to feed back “information” in cybernetic terminology. They “inform” the generator about its speed, just as the thermostat “informs” the furnace about the amount of heat it is generating.

There is an old Navy tradition that the steersman always repeats an order to the captain before executing it. If the captain says, “Sixty knots,” and the steers­man replies, “Fifty knots, sir,” it is obvious that he has mis-heard and the captain can correct him. This is another example of a feedback, or self-correcting, system.

Feedback can be very “smooth” and continuous. When I reach for a bottle of water, the eye feeds back to the brain information about how far my hand has moved, and how far it still must move, and the feed­back occurs continuously, every micro-second, until I reach the bottle.

If it is a bottle of bourbon I am reaching for, and I have already reached for more than I should have, the feedbacks in my nervous’ system work less “smoothly,” more “jerkily,” and I may even land on my nose in the middle of the floor. The first cybernetic anti-aircraft guns had just that jerky kind of motion.

There is also a condition of two much feedback. In human beings, this takes on the form of the Hamlet kind of neurosis – self-checking carried to the point of indecision, and paralysis. This also has its mechanical analogy. An early model cybernetic anti-aircraft gun was built with so much feedback that it kept correcting its direction of fire and never did fire.

A mechanical system is said to have “redundance of control” when it has optimum feedback – not too much and not too little. In redundance of control, every part of the system feeds back information to every other part, and the system as a whole is self-regulating. An automated factory works on this principle.

Democracy, from the point of view of cybernetics, is an attempt to introduce redundance of control to the social organism. Note that every step forward in de­mocracy – limited suffrage, universal suffrage, the ref­erendum, the recall, division’ of powers, etc. – has in­creased the feedback in the system.

It can be argued that democracy as we know it does not yet contain optimum feedback, but for the moment we will accept the democratic State as a model of suffi­cient feedback and self-correction.

Let us, from this perspective, contemplate for a mo­ment the “economic States” which divide the control of this country with the political State – let us, that is, contemplate the Corporations. How much feedback do they possess?

A long time ago, I decided that the corporations possess very little feedback and are, from a cybernetic point of view, unstable and primitive systems. At that time, I made myself a bet: nobody employed by a uni­versity, I bet myself, would ever announce this discov­ery in public, although it is a very simple application of cybernetic principles.

To my astonishment, on the second day of the Cyber­cultural Conference, Professor William Perk of the University of Southern Illinois, criticized the corporations on exactly these grounds, pointing out in detail how the basic feedbacks of the democratic State are completely lacking in the modern corporation.

Professor Perk went further and remarked that the citizen, spending- most of his life as the servant of an authoritarian corporation, is conditioned to submission and obedience and is gradually made psychologically incapable of participating fully in the freedom of the democratic State.

An, anecdote once told to me by Tobey McCarroll of the Humanists is very a propos here.

Mr. McCarroll, as a lawyer, was representing some Indians in their perennial fight against the Grand Land Thief, or the U.S. Government as we prefer to call it. While he was conferring with, the chiefs of the tribe, an archeologist appeared and requested permission to dig for relics in certain mounds whi.ch he believed were graves. The chiefs soberly gave permission, although they knew that the mounds were actually cesspools. The savant dug his way down into the dung, without a single Indian speaking up to warn him.

The folklore of all repressed peoples is full of such crude jokes. The Indians-like all repressed groups­ had long been forced to realize that they are not infor­mation-channels or feedback-channels in the major so­ciety. What they see, hear, smell, deduce, know or suppose is of no interest to the control centers of the society.

Having this realization beaten into them for several centuries, they are not about to start volunteering in­formation now. (The legendary poker-facedness of both Indians and Negroes, in the old days, frequently was a mask for this type of hostility, but always expressed in a context of doing what the master class demanded: communicating.)

Every authoritarian society creates this type of vol­untary “stupidity.” The employee of every corporation practices it most of the time, although not as much as the Indians. Any system lacking feedback encourages this species of sabotage.

(The Italian anarchist labor unions once tied up the railroads, not by striking; but merely by obeying all the laws on the books. Because there had never been enough feedback, the law-makers had never discovered how absurd and impractical most of their laws were – until the workers started obeying them.)

The PWDM are always in the position of non-feed­back senders to the PWM. This is the very definition of an authoritarian society. The PWM make the deci­sions, and the PWDM merely obey them. Any cyber­netics engineer knows that no mechanical system can imitate human intelligence if it has this non-feedback structure. .

Only the fact that capitalism has become a revealed religion keeps people from realizing the simple truth enunciated by Professor Perk: the Corporations, lack­ing feedback, lack human intelligence. As a whole, every Corporation behaves ten times more stupidly than any particular member of it.

Cynics have puzzled for a long time to explain the “hydrostatic principle of organization,” as Oliver Wen­dell Holmes called it; that is, the principle by which an organization, like water seeking its own level, sinks to the intelligence level of its stupidest member. This is that principle in a nut-shell. It is not a law of organi­zations at all, but just a law of organizations without feedback.

And this is why America is a schizophrenic and un­comfortable civilization. The political unit is, at least partly, democratic; the economic unit – the Corporation – is more authoritarian and centralized than any sultanate of old.

The citizen is told to be an individual, to be respon­sible, to think globally, to participate in the world’s activity – and, once in four years, he gets a chance to make a mark on a piece of paper.

The rest of the time, he lives as a medieval serf, within an organization that is exquisitely totalitarian. And these “private States,” make no mistake about it, dominate not only the time of the citizen, but all of the other dimensions of his” life as well, much more than the public State does.

The owners of the corporations, under capitalism, are the PWM, just as the owners of the land were, un­der feudalism. You might almost say, from the point of view of this kind of radical cybernetics, that capi­talism is the continuation of feudalism by other means.

I think that the tendency of this argument should be obvious to the reader by now. Either the PWM and their Corporations have a true title by ownership of the planet, or they do not. If they do, Ayn Rand is right and the State has no justification for coming along with a gun and robbing them to feed the PWDM.

If, on the other hand, the whole PWM mystique is just the modern form of “the divine right of kings,” if it has no basis in justice, then it is time we had as much balls as our ancestors had when they hauled Charlie Stuart I up before the court and stripped him of his powers.

It is time, in short; that the corporation go the way of the monarchy, and be replaced by democratic self-regulating institutions; institutions that would belong, not to a few of the people, but to all of the people. If the people really do own the planet, then there need be no State dole: they will merely receive dividends from their joint’ stock companies which will run their machin­ery for them, and they will have to take on the responsibility of making the decisions for these companies.

If the people are too stupid to run their own com­panies, then, by God, the old authoritarian system is justified, and the earth does belong to a minority. In that case, I see no reason why the talented minority should be robbed to feed the incompetent. This, really, is the choice that cybernetics sets before us: do we be­lieve in man, or do we believe in an elite of super-men?

The Triple Revolution is merely another American muddle, a refusal to face the issues, and an attempt to have one foot in each boat, while the boats are obvi­ously going in opposite directions.

Far be it from me to condemn stupidity utterly. It’s been around so long that I’m sure it must have some use. It does appear, though, that in facing the particu­lar challenge of cybernetics, intelligence may be of more use than stupidity. In that case, we will have to define the issues crisply and make a definitive choice.

Either we can trust the people, or we must trust an elite. It would be melodramatic, corny and inaccurate to state this choice as Socialism or Fascism, because most forms of socialism are fascism. Whatever you want to call it, however, the choice remains.

God knows, I wouldn’t attempt to influence such a conglomeration of heretics as the Realist readership, on how this choice should be decided. The choice is probably out of our hands, anyway; the corporations own 98% of the wealth.  I’ll see you on the unemploy­ment line. . .

 

* Corporation taxes are higher than that, of course – as conservative readers will quickly write to tell me. Very true, but I still remain dubious about how much of corpora­tion taxes goes into the various doles and how much goes into warfare and cold warfare to protect the corporations from rebellion on the part of their foreign serfs.

** And Ezra Pound went to the jail and the bughouse for insisting on precisely these ideas over Rome Radio 20 or so years ago. Remember?

 

Sex and the Mind-Expanding Drugs

“Sex and the Mind-Expanding Drugs”
by Robert Anton Wilson

Cavalier, April 1966

 

Hallucinogens – the authorities notwithstanding – will be used from now on by some of the people to escalate their sexual ecstasies.

Several years ago, Paul Krassner started a rumor that the government possesses a super-super-weapon known as the O-Bomb-O for Orgasm – which would defeat an enemy by rendering him into such ecstatic transports of delight that he would have no energy left to fight, Naturally, various hipsters, lunatics, philosophers and other social deviates began wearing buttons demanding lewdly:

OH, DROP THE O-BOMB

Like many another wistful and mordant satire on our times, this O-Bomb joke has shown a recent tendency to come true. The O-Bomb, otherwise known as the psychedelic chemical, has been dropped right in the middle of Whitest America. The initials LSD are now better known than LBJ. Marijuana is growing in 97 per cent of the nations window boxes. Peyote is the only Indian word, aside from tomahawk, that every freshman could spell correctly on a recent examination at a well-known university. In short, we are living in the early Zonked epoch of the Orgiastic Age. While authorities have been wondering how to head oft the Hallucinogenic Revolution, the revolution has already occurred.

A dozen consciousness-expanding and sensation-magnifying drugs are available, at reasonable prices, anywhere in the country, and there are no specific laws yet against most of them.  And the word is out that – in addition to creating hallucinations, visions of God, instant psychoanalysis, telepathy, and various creepy and/or ecstatic sensations nobody has yet been able to verbalize – these potent potions also can lead one into sexual fulfillment beyond anything imaginable to those who haven’t had it themselves.

It is this last aspect of the psychedelics that accounts chiefly for their sudden popularity. “Americans,” as Tallulah Bankhead said long ago, have sex-in-the-head, and that’s a hell of a place to have it,” All of us are hipsters in the special meaning that Norman the Mailer gave to the word hipster in his White Negro: “The hipster’s search is . . . a religious quest . . . for the perfect orgasm.” No matter what his sex life is like, every American harbors the Promethean dream that it can be bigger, better, more cosmic, more earth-shaking. God is not dead; His name has been changed to Simultaneous Climax.

The psychedelics are the answers to our dreams (and, as Goethe remarked with typically Teutonic gloom: Beware of what you dream of – you night be so unlucky as to get it). There can be no doubt, in spite of the attempts of the au­thorities to cover this up by emphasizing the occasionally nightmarish side effects of these chemicals, that every psychedelic is also a magnifying glass which expands orgasm into three or four new dimensions,

A Harvard research project, to quote just one bit of “scientific evidence, gave LSD or psilocybin to twenty-five married couples in their own homes, and all reported a remarkable intensification of the sexual experience. Such terms as “cellular orgasm,” “pulsating energy patterns,” “internal fireglow” and “melting and flowing of the entire body” were used by the lucky participants. The report states that the drugs created “profound feelings of interpersonal communion and unity which endowed every action with beauty and significance.”

Cannabis sativa, also known as grass, pot, marijuana, reefers, boo, etc., is the safest, most erotic, mildest and most pop­ular of the perception-boosting drugs-but it is also the most heavily sanctioned, legally. For possession of more than one ounce of cannabis, you can be sentenced in New York State, to ten years’ imprison­ment and penalties are about equally severe elsewhere. There isn’t a college in America today where cannabis isn’t known, and used, by a minority; in several col­leges known to the author, the majority is zonked on canabis every weekend.

Last January New York University or­dered a number of students (variously reported as from six to twenty) out of a dormitory in its Washington Square com­plex because of reported use of mari­juana. At press time no other discipli­nary action had been taken against the students who included some girls living in a separate wing of the dormitory.

Show biz people use it continually. A professional marijuana “dealer” told me recently that his clientele included, along with bohemians and musicians, many young office workers, professional people and one lawyer.

The effect of pot, initially, is intensifi­cation of sound and color awareness, together with an erotic tingling of the whole body. Some psychologists regard this tingling as the re-establishment of “polymorphous perversity” (non-genital sexuality), which Freud thought was born into all infants and destroyed by social repression. Sex with pot is not goatish and brutal, as it often is with booze: it is a slow, loving, very gentle, exquisitely intense experience. Before trying it, brethren, remember: If the state catches you having this kind of unauthorized orgasm, your rump will land in The Joint for ten years.

The effects of cannabis last from about twenty minutes to about one hour, but often seem much longer due to distortion of the time sense. Habitual users say that sex can be had, ecstatically, at any time after the pot has begun to take effect. With prolonged use, the drug tends to create a feeling of religious brotherhood with other pot-heads and a paranoid dis­trust of non-users; the pot-head never knows when somebody will turn out to be an FL (fuzz-lover) and turn him in.

Not a psychedelic, and not illegal, is a drug similar in some ways to cannabis as an orgasm-booster: amyl nitrate. A cousin of ordinary smelling salts, amyl nitrate, when inhaled, creates an intense, cocaine-like exhilaration for something less than a minute. Faggots have used it for years, and the word began spreading to the rest of us only recently: If you and your girl sniff this stuff just before orgasm, you will have an experience unlike anything you can imagine in advance. Amyl nitrate is known as “poppers” and is used, both sexually and non-sexually, on many col­lege campuses. Medical authorities re­gard it, like pot, as harmless.  These are grade school level in the psychedelic hierarchy, however. High school is peyote, psilocybin and mescaline. (Reform school, to follow the meta­phor until it staggers, is Jimson weed, yage and belladonna.) Peyote, a cactus, and psilocybin, a derivative from a mushroom, have been used in Mexico for more than 2,000 years. Peyote spread to the Indians of the United States about 70 years ago and is now used in religious rites by the Native American Church. Both peyote and psilocybin have been traditionally connected with telepathy, clairvoyance and “projection of the astral body.” Mescaline is one of the four active ingredients of peyote and is available in most metropolitan areas.

The effects are approximately the same whether one uses peyote, mescaline or psilocybin, although there is some ten­dency toward side effects of nausea with peyote. The experience lasts from six to twelve hours, and, typically, includes anx­iety, bolts of quick terror, beautiful hallu­cinations, telepathy, sudden self-insights, moments when “time stops” and you dwell in Eternity, space-disorientations, and a growing sense of tranquility and love for all living creatures. The body-tingle, or general eroticism, of cannabis also appears and much stronger and with more benevolence in a peyote or psilocybin high.

The pot-head feels sexy; the peyote user, more likely, will become loving, and sex will only be part of the feeling. Ex­perienced voyagers say that peyote sex is superb, much better than pot-sex, but should not be started until late in the “trip” – earlier hallucinations are apt to destroy one’s ability to focus on the loved person. By the fifth or sixth hour, when the hallucinations have passed and typi­cally benevolent tranquility has begun, sex – with a truly compatible partner – is an unspeakably sacred and ecstatic ex­perience. Sex with an incompatible part­ner can send you spiraling back into hallucinations or anxiety.

Psilocybin and mescaline are illegal, but they are not under the control of the Harrison Act and hence do not concern the U.S. Narcotics Bureau. The dangers of getting busted are small unless you make a lot of noise and the neighbors call the gendarmes. Peyote is legal every-where, except in New York, Massachu­setts and Pennsylvania.

Jimson weed, belladonna and yage (pronounced yah-hay) are the Vietcong of the psychedelic world. Three kids were arrested in California recently running down the street howling at passersby to get the red, white and blue alligators off them; it turned out that they had been eating Jimson weed. Belladonna is simi­lar. A friend who tried it told me of seeing giant gorillas, Nazi storm troopers, naked witches, and polar bears wearing black turtleneck sweaters. Yage, typically, transports you to Yage City, which is said to be a cross between Easter Island and ancientEgypt, and telepathy is very common, (yage is called telepathinein some medical books). Temporary blindness, unconsciousness, psychoses and acute vomiting are recorded side effects of all three of these.

A dose of belladonna that’s safe for one person can be fatal for another, which is one more reason for avoiding this kick. It is noteworthy, however, that bella­donna was used in the medieval period as a sex-booster by the so-called “witches.”

Morning-glory seeds, which are coming into wide use, are the college-level in the psychedelic hierarchy. The varieties that cause sensation-magnification and mind-expansion are Heavenly Blue, Pearly Gates, Flying Saucers and Wed-ding Bells. A hundred seeds are said to be perfect for a sexual “trip” (200 take you into hallucinatory and religious experi­ence; 250-500 will bring you all the way to ego-loss and the heights of mysticism; above 500 is dangerous).

On 100 Heavenly Blue seeds, erotic sensitivity becomes acute all over the body, color and form take on new beauty and “depth,” and everything appears pro­foundly meaningful, in a definitely re­ligious sense. This is a surprisingly “cool” experience – cool as heroin and other ad­dictive drugs are cool – and lacks the nervous, rapidly “flowing” emotional tone of peyote, psilocybin and LSD. It is an experience “of the mountains,” of clarity and calm and clear air, with profoundly pantheistic tranquility at the heart of it. Orgasm becomes more an act of giving than of taking – an act of giving in, of surrender in the widest sense, of happen­ing rather than doing. The seeds are legal everywhere.

Lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25, or LSD, is post-graduate work. It is the best, and most dangerous, of all psy­chedelics. It is the joker in the pack, acting sometimes like the seeds, some-times like belladonna or Jimson weed, sometimes like peyote, and frequently acting like nothing ever recorded before even in its own weird history. It has cured schizophrenia, alcoholism, criminal psychopathy, frigidity, and, it has been said, even cancer, in some cases and has been ineffective against them all in others; it has created the most mystical and God-centered of all psychedelic experiences; it has often led to temporary psychotic breakdowns; a few people have been driven to suicide by it. Nobody should ever try it without professional supervision.  LSD is illegal throughout the nation, but easily available in cubes retailing for $3 to $7 in most big cities through extra-legal sources. The morning-glory seeds can be purchased legally anywhere, and $1 will buy enough for a hundred-seed sex-jaunt, or you can grow your own. Belladonna can be purchased, in various medicines, at drugstores, and $1.50 can buy ten “trips.” Jimson weed you have to find growing wild. Yage, imported from South America, costs about the same as LSD; so do mescaline and psilocybin. Prices on cannabis vary widely, but $1 for a “roach” (cigarette) is typical; three roaches, passed around a circle one by one, will get a group of six to eight peo­ple quite happy.

These prices are especially remarkable when you remember that an alcohol-head, not necessarily an alcoholic but a “heavy drinker,” can spend $15 to $25 a week on his habit, and an addict of heroin call quickly reach the stage of enslavement where his need costs him $65, or more, per day.

Psychedelic prices are misleading, be-cause hardly anybody, except pot-heads, ever wants to take more than one or two “trips” per month. The afterglow and the intellectual stimulation always take a few weeks to wear off, and you just are not interested in another “trip” for a while.

Such a cheap Instant Transcendence, obviously, is not going to be effected by laws or persecutions anymore than booze was affected by the Volstead Act. The Psychedelic Revolution has occurred; society is going to have to learn to live with the fact that a certain not-very-small minority is hereinafter going to insist on, and practice, the right to make them-selves more sensitive than the majority, both erotically and otherwise. The O-Bomb has fallen, right in our midst.

William Burroughs: High Priest of Hipsterism

“William Burroughs: High Priest of Hipsterism”
By Ronald Weston
(a RAW pseudonym)

from Ralph Ginzburg’s fact:
 Nov-Dec 1965
Volume 2, Issue 6

Burroughs has been called everything from a genius to a timid Marquis de Sade, but one thing is undisputed: No other writer has led a life that is more fascinating and horrifying

William Burroughs may not be the greatest fountainhead of literary inspiration since James Joyce, as some people think he is. And it is quite possible that he is also not the most out­rageously untalented writer since Ayn Rand, as some other people think he is. But there is no doubt about one thing: No other American writer, living or dead, has led a life more fasci­nating, grotesque, and blackly bitter. No other American writer, for that matter, has been thrown out of the Army after being diagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic, has become a drug addict and remained one for 15 years, has shot and killed his wife, and has eventually become one of the leaders of a cult attempting to change the very consciousness of the world.

At 51, Burroughs has written only a few books-a part-factual, part-fictional autobio­graphical fragment called Junkie, produced under the pen-name of William Lee; novels like The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express, and The Soft Machine; and-the book that made him infamous-the harrowing and horrifying story of life seen through the diseased mind of a drug addict, Naked Lunch. Not since James Joyce’sUlysses, it can safely be said, has any book flabbergasted the critics the way Naked Lunch has.

Mary McCarthy has praised Burroughs’ “peculiarly American” humor, complained that Naked Lunch is sometimes “disgusting,” “tiresome,” and “perplexing,” and concluded by re­ferring to his “remarkable talent.” Norman Mailer has said, “Naked Lunch is a book of beauty, great difficulty, and maniacally exquisite insight. I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” The New Yorker has written, “Mr. Burroughs got away with too much. . . in Naked Lunch. There was bitter satire, apparently grounded in genuine rage. There were many rough words and many beautifully turned sentences. And there was no form at all.” Time has dubbed Burroughs’ nov­els “potluck: the cauldron, having flipped its lid, spills nightmare fantasies, sick jokes, narcotic dreams, and polemics against pushers. . . .” Rich­ard Kluger, editor of Book Week, has written: “. . . Burroughs’ effects are stunning. He is a writer of rare power. . . his talent is more than notorious. It may well turn out to be important.” Jack Kerouac says, “Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.” George P. Elliott, in the New York Times Book Review, says, “It is a toss-up whether Nova Express is even more boring than Naked Lunch. . . . Bur­roughs’ writing fails literally and intellectually.” Poet Robert Lowell has said of Naked Lunch, “It’s a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a ‘beat’ writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years.” Critic Alfred Chester says that Burroughs, along with Vladimir Nabokov, is experimenting with form itself, which makes them “the novelists one presently has to reckon with.” Norman Pod­horetz, editor of Commentary, a bargain-base­ment imitation of Encounter, deigns to let us know that he does not “admire” Naked Lunch. The English critic Philip Toynbee says that both Naked Lunch and Nova Express are “bor­ing rubbish_ insufficiently redeemed by passages of brilliant invention.” Richard Sullivan of Notre DameUniversity, speaking of Nova Ex­press, has said it is a “poor, bad, destructive, corruptive, idiotic book. Nobody should read it. . . . A sad book, a sorry book, a practically unreadable book for both author and publisher: Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs, who might flunk freshman English either on grounds of punctuation or loose and slow thinking.” Critic Richard C. Kostelanetz writes, “Naked Lunch is one of the more truly original and ex­citing pieces of prose to emerge from the fifties.” Critic John Wain has said of Naked Lunch, “From the literary point of view, it is the merest trash, not worth a second glance.” Poet John Ciardi has said Naked Lunch “is. . . a master­piece of its own genre,” and that Burroughs is “a writer of great power and artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for true values.”

Of all the comments made about Naked Lunch, probably the most perspicacious came from novelist Herbert Gold: “At its best, this book, which is not a novel but a booty brought back from a nightmare, takes a coldly implacable look at the dark side of our nature. . . . Wil­liam Burroughs has written the basic work for understanding that desperate symptom which is the beat style of life.” And certainly the silliest literary critique of Naked Lunch came from As­sistant City Attorney Roland Fairfield, who was prosecuting the book in Los Angeles. Here is an extract from the trial record:

Mr. Fairfield: . . . Your Honor, I would just like to point out to the Court that the following words are used in the book a total of 234 times on 235 pages; and I wllI spell them out rather than say them in the court

The Court: Go ahead “and say them. We hear them probably once a week.

Mr. Fairfield: Fuck, shit, ass, cunt, prick, ass­hole, cock-sucker. Two hundred thirty-four times on 235 pages!

*     *     *

The critics have had almost as much trouble trying to pigeon-hole Burroughs himself as they have had trying to pigeon-hole his books. He has been called the Martin Luther of Hipster­ism, the beatest of the beats, a nihilist, an adoles­cent Henry Miller, the high priest of the beats, an Action writer, the farthest-out of all far-out writers, and a timid Marquis de Sade. And while this article will not try to determine once and for all Burroughs’ worth as a writer, it will try to answer one question: Just who is William S. Burroughs?

Burroughs was born Feb. 4, 1914, in “a solid, three-story, brick house” in St. Louis. He was the grandson of the inventor of the Bur­roughs adding machine, and his own parents “were comfortable. My father owned and ran I a lumber business.” His earliest memories were “colored by a fear of nightmares. I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark, and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams where a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of -taking shape. I was afraid some day the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smok­ing opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: ‘I will smoke opium when I grow up.’ ”

He continues: “I was subject to hallucina­tions as a child. Once I woke up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in a block house I had made. I felt no fear, only a feeling of stillness and wonder. Another recur­rent hallucination or nightmare concerned ‘ani­mals in the wall,’ and started with the delirium of a strange, undiagnosed fever that 1 had at the age of four or five.”

Burroughs has also written, to Fact, “My parents were never mentally ill. My father died last year. Mother still living in Palm Beach, Florida. Relationship excellent.”

He attended a progressive school, and says, “I was timid with the other children and afraid of physical violence. One aggressive little Lesbian would pull my hair whenever she saw me. I would like to shove her face in right now, but she fell off a horse and broke her neck years ago.”

When he was about 7, his parents decided to move’ to the suburbs, “to get away from people.” Burroughs attended a private high school. “I was not conspicuously good or bad at sports, neither brilliant nor backward at studies. I had a definite blind spot for “anything mechanical. I never liked competitive games and avoided these whenever possible. I became, in fact, a chronic malingerer. I did like fishing, hunting, and hiking.” He also read Wilde, Ana­tole France, Baudelaire, and even Gide – and eventually “I formed a romantic attachment for another boy” and they spent time together bi­cycling, fishing, and exploring old quarries:

At this time, Burroughs continues, he read the autobiography of a burglar, called You Can’t Win. The burglar had spent a good part of his life in jail. “It sounded good to me,” says Burroughs, “compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out.” He and his friend found an aban­doned factory, broke all the windows, and stole one chisel. They were caught, and their fathers had to pay for the damages. “After this my friend ‘packed me in’ because our relationship was en­dangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the others, and I found myself a ‘good deal alone.” However, he and the other boy “re­mained friends for 30 years.”

Burroughs retreated into reading and into solitary hiking and hunting. “I drifted into solo adventures,” he has written. “My criminal acts were gestures, unprofitable and for the most part unpunished. I would break into houses and walk around without taking anything. . . . Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a 22 rifle, shooting chickens. I made the roads unsafe with reckless driving until an accident, from which I emerged miraculously and portentously unscratched, scared me into normal caution.”

Burroughs went on to attend Harvard. “I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables.” He was a mediocre student.

“By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set. . . . But these people were jerks for the most part, and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off to the setup.”

He graduated from Harvard during the Depression, and since he could not get a job, went abroad for a year or so, living on a $200-a-month trust fund he had. He studied medicine at the University ofVienna for a while, kept a pet ferret, and in Greece married a Jewish girl flee­ing from the Nazis and brought her to this coun­try. They were divorced some years ago, but they are still good friends

*     *     *

Back in the States, Burroughs was still alone and he continued to drift. He studied general semantics with Korzybski in Chicago, learned jiu-jitsu, and went back to Harvard to take 2 years of graduate study in anthropology. He also entered psychoanalysis with a hypno-ana­lyst, who found him un-hypnotizable and re­sorted to drug therapy with nitrous oxide. Seven personalities came to light within Burroughs, he says, including a distinguished pro­fessor, a raving maniac who had to be put in chains while the analyst spoke to him, and an elderly Negro. “Analysis,” Burroughs wrote later, “removed inhibitions and anxieties so that I could live the way I wanted to live. Much of my progress was accomplished in spite of my ‘orien­tation,’ as my analyst called it. He finally aban­doned analytic objectivity and put me down as an ‘out-and-out con.’ I was more pleased with the results than he was.” Today, he writes: “I am now extremely doubtful whether any results are obtained by psychoanalysis, which I con­sider a rigidly dogmatic and superstitious system.”

‘” In 1941 he was drafted into the Army. “I decided I was not going to like the Army and copped out on my nut-house record-I’d once got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off a finger joint” to impress a boy he had a crush on. “The nut-house doctors had never heard of Van Gogh. They put me down for schizophrenia, adding paranoid type to explain the upsetting fact that I knew where I was and who was Pres­ident of the U.S. When the Army saw that diag­nosis they discharged me with the notation, ‘This man is never to be recalled or reclassified.’ ”

It is not necessary, perhaps, to comment on Burroughs’ defensiveness in this matter.

Once out of the Army, Burroughs worked as a private detective, an exterminator, a bar­tender, and so on. He had married a second time, and he and his wife, Jane, frequently used marijuana andbenzedrine “for kicks.” Soon after he began taking heroin, in 1942, he be­came hopelessly addicted.

One day recently I asked William Bur­roughs why he had become addicted. “Addic­tion is a disease of exposure,” he replied. “By and large people become addicts who are ex­posed to it-doctors and nurses, for instance. People I knew at the time were using it. I took a shot, liked it, and eventually became an addict. ”

“But weren’t you aware of the dangers?” I persisted.

Burroughs thought a moment and replied, “The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinforma­tion. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn’t believe them about addiction. I thought I could take it or leave it alone. They give out that marijuana is a harmful and habit-forming drug, and it simply isn’t. They claim that you can be addicted with one shot, and that’s another myth. . . They overestimate the physical bad effects. I just didn’t believe them about anything they said.”

Burroughs’ first few years of addiction were spent in New York City, where he met poet Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs “was my great­est teacher at the time,” says Ginsberg. “He put me on to Spengler, Yeats, Rimbaud, Korzybski, Proust, and Celine. Burroughs educated me more than Columbia, really.” Poet Alan Ansen met Burroughs through Ginsberg. He called him a “totally autonomous personality,” totally self-directed and nonconformist, and added that he looked like a con man down on his luck. “A cracker accent and the use of jive talk fail to conceal an incisive intelligence and a frighten­ing seriousness. . . . How many addicts one knows incapable of more than a sob or a mono­syllable, how many queers who seem to have no place in life except the perfume counter at Woolworth’s. . . . To use drugs without losing consciousness or articulateness, to love boys without turning into a mindless drab is a form of hero­ism.”

Burroughs’ dope habit soon reached the point where it cost more than the $200-per-month he received from his trust fund. Like most addicts, he began pushing the stuff himself. When it seemed that the law was beginning to take note of his activities, he skipped out to New Orleans. Jack Kerouac, who had met him in New York, visited Burroughs and has given a vivid description of the Burroughs household in his novel, On the Road, describing Old Bull Lee (Burroughs) taking his three shots of heroin a day and lecturing interminably about the Mayan codices; Jane Lee “never more than ten feet away from Bull,” loving him madly; their child, Ray (actually William Jr.), running around “stark naked in the yard, a little blonde child of the rainbow”; Bull showing off his arse­nal of guns; Jane devouring $100 worth of benzedrine every week; Bull falling asleep with Ray in his lap, “a pretty sight, father and son, a father who would certainly never bore his son when it came to finding things to do and talk about.” This idyllic period came to an end when Burroughs was arrested for possession of heroin. He skipped bail, took his family to Mex­ico, and began the exile that was to last 15 years.

*     *      *

In Mexico, Burroughs began his first serious attempt to kick the habit. He tried an’ unfortu­nate approach frequently recommended by junkies, the “liquor withdrawal.” You stay drunk all through the first 5 days of pain and agony, and for as long as possible afterwards, taking whiskey every time your cells cry out for junk. Charlie Parker, the great jazz musician, went insane trying to kick heroin this way and landed in a state hospital. Burroughs blanked out for several days, came to standing in a bar pointing a gun at a total stranger. He was furiously angry without knowing why and ready to kill the man, but a cop appeared and disarmed him. Then he came down with uremic poisoning (caused by alcoholism) and in agony took some paregoric from a sympathetic junkie. Paregoric is an opiate and contains the same addicting substance as opium, heroin, and morphine. Bur­roughs was hooked again.

. He tried “liquor withdrawal” a second time a few months later and shot his wife. Carl Solo­mon, in his introduction to Junkie, says Bur­roughs shot his wife “in a ‘William Tell’ experi­ment . . . demonstrating his marksmanship by attempting, to shoot a champagne glass off her head and killing her in the process.” Burroughs denies this. “I was just crazy drunk,” he says, “and didn’t know the gun was loaded.” The death was pronounced accidental. Burroughs sent his son back to St. Louis to live with his parents and he himself took off for Tangier, French North Africa, where the price of junk was still low enough to be covered by his $200­a-month trust fund.

Ten times he tried to kick the habit, trying accepted techniques and inventing some of his own. He tried the quick-reduction method, went through unmitigated hell, and relapsed. He tried a slow reduction, and found that it merely spread the pain over 2 months instead of 10 days. He tried using antihistamines during with­drawal, cortisone during withdrawal, Thorazine and resperine during withdrawal: The pain was always hideous, and relapse always followed. Once he tried using marijuana during with­drawal; it was an unspeakable nightmare. Marijuana, like all the consciousness-expanding drugs, magnifies and intensifies every experience. Music is sweeter, sex is tastier, colors are brighter-and pain is more wrenching. The aches, twitches, cramps, chills, fevers, nausea, diarrhea, and hallucinations of opiate withdrawal were all increased a thousand-fold and Burroughs almost died of shock and exhaustion.

Another time he tried the method known as “prolonged sleep,” in which the doctor keeps the patient unconscious with barbiturates for the first 5 days (the worst days) of withdrawal. The theory sounds good: You go to sleep and wake up cured. Burroughs woke up in hell-the most painful of all his withdrawals. He is convinced that his acute pain on that occasion was the result of barbiturate withdrawal superimposed on top of opiate withdrawal. (Barbiturate ad­dicts suffer even worse on withdrawal than opiate addicts. Sometimes they die.) Two weeks later he was still too weak to walk. He relapsed almost immediately after release.

*     *     *

In 1957, after 15 years, Burroughs found himself at the end of the junk line, in a state of ter­minal addiction. He had one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. He had not taken a bath in a year, or cleaned or dusted his room,. Garbage was piled to the ceiling; light and water had been turned off for nonpayment. “If a friend came to visit,” he wrote later of this period, “– and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit? – I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision – a gray screen always blanker and fainter – and not caring when he walked out of it.” And yet, somehow, by some miracle of sheer character, William Burroughs got up, got out of that room, flew to London for one last attempt at withdrawal, and freed himself finally of the curse visited upon him 15 years earlier. In 8 years, he has not relapsed.

The miracle was accomplished with the aid of a remarkable physician, Dr. John Yer­bury Dent, and a new compound called apomor­phine. Apomorphine is made by boiling mor­phine with hydrochloric acid and it allegedly acts on the back brain to regulate the metabo­lism. “I can state definitely,” Burroughs has written in the British Journal of Addiction, “that I was never metabolically cured until I took theapomorphine cure.” Over the years be­fore Dr. Dent died, Burroughs sent numerous other addicts to him, with, reportedly, equally favorable results. But the American medical profession still maintains an uninterestin the whole subject. “They are afraid of apomorphine here,” Burroughs says. “It’s a semantic hang-up: The association with morphine scares them.” Burroughs is convinced that apomorphine is the best tool’ yet invented to handle all forms of anxiety and addiction, and is tirelessly propa­gandizing for further research to be done with it. One psychiatrist in New York has been per­suaded by Burroughs to try it on alcoholics and reports good results; the Federal hospital for narcotic addicts at Lexington still remains coldly indifferent.

“Apomorphine,” Burroughs says, “restores the natural self-regulation of the organism. It can be used, and should be used, for all the cases where tranquilizers are now used. A tranquilizer just hits you on the head and numbs you. Apo­morphine undercuts anxiety by restoring the natural metabolism.” He is particularly incensed that the ever-increasing number of opiate addicts in America do not have this method of treatment available.

According to government statistics, 90% of all those ever treated for opiate addiction in Federal hospitals relapse soon after their release. Other studies, such as Berger’s Dealing with Drug Addiction,argue that the actual relapse rate is more than 95 % . Barney Ross, the former boxer, has told of addicts he met at Lexington who had been through 30 to 40 “cures”; Dan Wakefield’s The Addict says that many, many more have been through more than 50 “cures” without redemption.

William Burroughs’ escape from this Inferno’ would be an epic of human endurance if he merely spent his remaining days sitting on park benches feeding pigeons. Instead, he has gone on to create a literature of cosmic fantasy unique in history. And if his books are full of the horror of being human, he has lived that horror and has the right to record it.

*     *     *

Getting the first of his books, Naked Lunch, into print was a saga almost as Herculean as kicking the junk habit. Over 40 publishers refused it because of its breath-taking sexual excesses. Finally, in 1959,the Chicago Review, a literary magazine sponsored by the University of Chicago, agreed to publish’ several episodes from Naked Lunch. Before the magazine went to press, however, university officials, seeing the galleys, reneged. The editors of the Chicago Review thereupon resigned and started a new magazine, Big Table, just to get Burroughs into print. The response was immediate, at least among other writers. Norman Mailer described Burroughs as a “genius” without waiting to see the rest of the book, and others were equally enthusiastic. The Evergreen Review immedi­ately began publishing further excerpts from Burroughs in almost every issue. The Olympia Press, in Paris, which had already rejected Naked Lunch, asked to see the manuscript again, and decided to publish it. Grove Press brought out an American edition shortly there­after. Everything Burroughs has written since then has been published immediately.

William Burroughs, after 15 years abroad – mostly in Tangier, Paris, and London – is now back in New York City, renting a loft on Centre Street. It is an austere, naked-looking room, with a refrigerator in one corner, a few comfortable chairs for guests, no carpet or, drapes, a typewriter, a tape recorder, and shelves full of neatly stacked manuscript pages arranged in some precise but recondite system comprehensible only to Burroughs himself. It is a room for serious work by a serious man. Bur­roughs shows you to a chair with a courtesy that was commonplace when he was young but has now almost vanished. He makes tea for you, following a complicated brewing and steeping system to ensure the perfect flavor. After an hour or so of conversation, he serves two mar­tinis. He answers all questions patiently and politely, in a Harvard voice with just a tinge of the St. Louis of his boyhood still in it. When you ask how he found this place, Burroughs says, grinning, “I was helped by Finkelstein the Loft King” (you can see the capital letters, just the way he would write it in one of his books) “also known as the Artist’s Friend. He knows where every empty loft in Manhattan is at any time.”

Burroughs has just finished writing and helping to direct a movie called Towers Open Fire and is now working on a book, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, combining his own words with news photos, advertisements, comic strips, and other Americana “that seem to go together.” He shows you some pages and explains, “That photo there-that’s a Vietnamese being beaten up by American soldiers. He wanted them to go home and leave his country alone. I took it out of the issue of Time which had an flttack on my Nova Express in it.” Under this photo Burroughs has placed a line from Nova Express: “Now I’ll By God show you how ugly the Ugly American can be.”

At 51, Burroughs looks, and talks, very much like the Harvard anthropologist he once almost became. Although his books’ are written in a style compounded of dozens of special (and vulgar) argots-underworld slang, homosexual slang, hipster slang, addict slang, and medical-school slang, among others-Burroughs in per­son can talk for 3 hours without ever using col­loquialism or obscenity. In his years as a heroin addict he became so thin that the street boys in Tangier where he lived for 12 years called him “BI Hombre Invisible”; today, he is a well-built, robustly healthy man whose glasses and precise speech suggest” that he is a theoretician engaged in some arcane branch of mathematics or math­ematical physics. He talks about the exploding star in the Crab Nebula which went nova in A.D. 1069 and was observed by Chinese astronomers; he is very intense and wishes to be sure that you understand the importance of this in the structure of Nova Express.

Nowadays Burroughs is not the lonely per­son he once was, having a son who is a folk singer as well as a coterie of admirers who are always inviting him to speak before Greenwich Village gatherings. Recently he even played a role in a movie, and he has just been offered another role, and this new career may yet win him away from writing altogether. “Acting gives me more of a charge than writing,” he told’ me. “I’d like to play gangster roles.”

Like Arthur Koestler, Colin Wilson, and the theologian-scientist ‘Teilhard de Chardin, Burroughs is convinced that only a “mutation in consciousness” can save Mankind from nuclear destruction (a catastrophe he thinks will occur “just as soon as the U.S. and Russia sign a mutual nonaggression pact. When you read about that, run for the South Pole. The bombs will start dropping on China before, the ink is dry”). Burroughs believes that his whole 1ife has been an attempt on his part to experience, and to transmit to others, his own “mutation in consciousness.”

I myself have no doubt that Burroughs through his journeys into and out of the hell of addictive drugs and the “artificial paradise” (as Baudelaire called it) of the hallucinatory drugs – has experienced some sort of expansion of consciousness. After all, he has experimented with not only heroin and marijuana, but with hashish, psylocybin, yage, Pakistan berries, LSD-25, mescaline, and the fantastically potent N-demethyltrytamine – No One goes to Bur­roughs expecting to find a tormented and warped genius like de Sade; one finds instead a gentle-man in the old meaning of that term, a courteous, scholarly person with the serenity of the Chinese sages of legend. As he himself puts it, “Any drug that increases your awareness increases your insight into other people. I think that what prevents people from seeing other people’s minds is that they’re so preoccupied with their own minds, with their own petty problems. If you learn to shut your own mind off, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s in other people’s minds.”

Yet this man whose own life has been per­meated by drugs, whose entire philosophy has been inspired by drugs, and whose literary suc­cess itself can be tied to his drug-taking, is no emphatic in his rejection of all of them, includ­ing the consciousness-expanding drugs. “They do lead to new, nonverbal insights;” he says, “but you very soon reach a point of diminishing re­turns. And they are dangerous. I have seen people go through anxiety states which could have led to suicide if they had not been re­strained.”

William Burroughs, always unpredictable, has a new message: “Learn to make it without any chemical corn.”

 

Don’t Go Away, Mad

“Don’t Go Away, Mad
By Robert Anton Wilson

from Ralph Ginzburg’s fact:
 Nov-Dec 1965
Volume 2, Issue 6

 

Though the John Birch Society is fighting Mad, and even Mad Aye’s just aching to get Mad, the Madmen remain as uninhibited – nay, as madcap as ever. Reason: the millions of Madolescents who, are confirmed Maddicts have lots and lots of Mad money

Up to now, the Radical Right has been pretty lucky. True, it has antagonized a lot of librar­ians, psychiatrists, and P.T.A. members, but these groups have always been, as enemies go, rather meek and ineffectual. But now the Right Wing’s luck has run all the way out. For it has gone and picked on Mad Magazine, and now it is no longer messing with amateurs and softies but with the most savage and artful assassins in America today. The Right Wing has gone from fighting Girl Scouts to tangling with hell-for-leather Marines.

It took an unusual amount of valor com­bined with an extraordinary lack of discretion to attack Mad, and, logically enough, the men re­sponsible were both retired Army generals. First, a brigadier general denounced Mad on a TV show down South, calling the magazine “the most insidious Communist propaganda in Amer­ica today.” His wrath was inspired by Mad’s having published a hipster version of the Gettys­burg Address (“Fourscore and like seven years ago. . .”). Next, Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker hurled down his gauntlet by publicly announc­ing his little list of pet peeves – and la, Mad Magazine led even Harvard University.

The Madmen nursed their wounds, bided their time, and then – in their July, 1965, issue – struck back. “The magazine’s inside back cover depicted a Right Wing rally on the steps of the Statue of Liberty. The reader was asked to fold the page according to instructions supplied at the top – and then the picture changed and the rally’s leader was shown running a sword through Miss Liberty’s heart. Two months later, in its September issue, Mad portrayed a day in the life of a John Birch Society policeman, in­cluding his attendance at a Birch Society meet­ing to hear a lecture on “Better Policemen for a Better Police State.” Obviously, these attacks have been just warm-ups; more is to come.

Hoping to stimulate the feud a bit more, Fact sent a. copy of the Mad article to Robert Welch, dictator of the Birch Society, and asked for his comments. Alas, Mr. Welch is wisely hightailing it for the hills. Wrote Mrs. Mary F. White, Welch’s assistant: “We feel that it would be much better to ignore both the ‘article’ and its source.”

By running away after attacking Mad, Mr. Welch was doing a typically Right thing and an untypically right thing. After all, others who have fought with Mad in the past have lost abys­mally. Ten years ago, for example, Time Mag­azine, with its usual uncanny accuracy, called Mad “a “‘short-lived satirical pulp.” Mad waited a few years, then ran a devastating satire on monopoly newspapers, including one mock story, that read “as follows:

DAILY MONOPOLY WINS COVETED “HENRY R. LUCE AWARD”

FOR EXCELLENCE IN NEWS REPORTING 

New York, Feb. 13-Henry R. Luce, Editor-in-Chief of LIFE and TIME Magazines, presented The Daily Monopoly with his annual award for “Excellent News Reporting” today.

“Of all the newspapers considered,” said Luce, “The Daily Monopoly most closely follows the long-estab­lished journalistic traditions of LIFE and TIME in not allowing such mundane and unimportant things as facts to stand in the way of the personal feelings and prejudice of its publisher and editor in the presentation of straight news.”

Nor is being in the firing lines anything new for Mad. Once it urged its readers to sub­scribe to the “Crime-of-the-Month Club” by writing to “Mafia, Italy.” This prompted a stern rebuke from a postal inspector – the Italian Government had protested to the State Depart­ment, which asked the New York Post Office to investigate.

Another time, Mad ran an article on games, including a section on “How to Become a Draft Dodger.” It recommended its readers, in order to get their official Draft Dodger card, to write to J. Edgar Hoover. Not long after, an FBI man paid a formal-visit to the Madhouse on New York’s Lexington Avenue to warn the staff that Hoover was decidedly not amused.

 *     *     *

Despite its penchant for trouble and its passel of enemies, Mad is thriving as no other Ameri­can satire magazine ever has. It boasts a circula­tion of 1,900,000, which includes 43% of the nation’s high-school students and 58 % of the nation’s college students, as well as adults like Herbert Gold, Jack Kerouac, and Orson Bean, in addition to virtually every cartoonist and humorist in the country. Maddicts adore their magazine as much as Cassius Clay adores Cas­sius Clay. They send the editor 1500 letters every week, and a few readers have collected every single copy since Vol. 1, No.1, 13 years ago. At the 1960 Republican National Conven­tion, Mad fans even squirmed past guards to wave an ALFRED E. NEUMAN FOR PRESIDENT sign in the middle of a Goldwater demonstra­tion. Neuman, an imbecilic child with buck teeth and a fatuous grin, is Mad’s mascot, like Playboy’s bunny. In fact, china busts of Neuman sell in the millions, and his motto – “What-me worry?” – has become so famous it may soon appear in Bartlett’s. Mad’s camp followers also purchase Swedish, Danish, and British editions, three “annual” reprint editions every year bear­ing such titles as The Worst of Mad, More Trash from Mad, and Son of Mad,plus paperback re­prints and hard-cover rereprints. Like all ingroups, Mad readers have their own language, which consists of nonsensical words like “pot­rzebie,” “furd,” “veeblefetzer,” “axolotl,” and “eccch.” One fan has published a cross-index to the magazine, The Complete Mad Checklist. A few other fans have gone so far as to print entire magazines devoted to Mad, one of which, en­titled Hoo-hah, publishes articles like “What is Potrzebie?” (Answer: a Polish word for aspi­rin.) ,

Mad has even given birth to a classicist cult, just as film and jazz have. Where your film classicist dotes on the early Griffith and Eisen­stein and deplores the decline of the art since sound was introduced, and your jazz enthusiast puts down every innovation in the blues since 1928, the Mad classicist claims that the first 3 years (1952-55) were the best, and that Mad has been going down ever since. When asked about this cult, Mad editor Albert Feldstein replies tersely, “Nuts to them. No further com­ment.”

This is a sore point with the 39-year-old Feldstein, since Mad had a different editor in those years, one Harvey Kurtzman, who left after a dispute with Mad publisher William M. Gaines. Feldstein prefers not to discuss the Kurtzman cult, but Gaines will discuss it eagerly and at great length, pointing out that Kurtzman has started three magazines since he left Mad. One of them was called Trump, and in this venture Kurtzman had the solid backing of Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, trying to duplicate his success in swiping the Esquire formula. Trump, along with Kurtzman’s two other imitations, failed, and now he and artist Will Elder are doing a comic strip, “Little Annie Fanny,” for Playboy.

To get his side of it, I telephoned Kurtz­ man in Mt. Vernon, New York. “I’ll admit,” he told me, “that Feldstein has a successful formula -he touches the mass market more than I did. However, Al Feldstein did an imitation of Mad when it first came out, called Panic, and it failed. Mad has cornered the market. It had a running head-start and a lot of money to work with.” Kurtzman also mentioned being miffed because the early annual Mad collections don’t have his name on them. “I really got them together my­self and laid them out and made the covers, and they all had my name on them. After I left, my name was carefully deleted in the collections. A kind of dirty pool.”

*     *     *

The reason for Mad’s maddening success might astonish its readers. Writer Richard Gehman hinted at it when he said, “The main reason for Mad’s popularity is its thumb-nosing attitude.” George Lea, a Chicago writer, says “Mad puts everybody and everything on.” Al Feldstein, Mad’s editor, is closest when he says, “People enjoy satire because in laughing they get rid of some pent-up hostility.”

The most penetrating analysis ever made of Mad was a study by psychologist Charles Winick, writing in the Merrill-Palmer-Quarterly at Behavior and Development in July, 1962. Ac­cording to Dr. Winick, the very name – Mad­ suggests hostility. What Mad does is to let its teen-aged readers vent their antagonism toward adults and the world of adult_ in an acceptable way.

The magazine, says Dr. Winick, “largely mocks the adult world. This is a world in which the magazine’s readers have not yet engaged di­rectly, but which they are approaching during a period when they are trying to learn who they are and what their feelings’ are. By enjoying satire on this adult world, they can approach it while mocking it.”

Dr. Winick goes on: “A major problem of adolescents is how to express their hostility while seeming not to do so. One noted expression of this conflict was ‘Hound Dog. . . .’ This rock-and-roll record sold 5,500,000 copies, almost all to teen-agers. Its lyrics represent pure hostility. . . . Elvis Presley, the nonpareil exemplar of the rock-and-roller’s hostility toward the adult world, is the first performer in history to make a long-playing record that sold over a million copies. Another example of adolescents’ ability to use media in this way is the extent to which they will seem to read all of a school-circulated magazine (i.e.,Reader’s Digest) which has both serious and humorous material, but will pay at­tention to the jokes and cartoons, and largely ignore serious material.”

Mad, in short, gives its young readers a socially acceptable outlet for releasing their ag­gressions against the frightening world that adults have built around them. Says Dr. Winick: “The adolescent readers of the magazine face the prospect of going out into the adult world, not with anxiety but with an opportunity for gratification through laughter, as they achieve symbolic mastery over the adult world by con­tinually assuring themselves that its institutions and personalities cannot be taken seriously.”

Among the adult institutions ridiculed again and again by Mad are movies, magazines and newspapers, television, and – especially advertising. Mad has satirized virtually every major advertising campaign of the past 13 years. It is Mad’s forte. Every time a new ciga­rette ad is launched, Mad will parody it – in­cluding a blunt reminder that cigarettes cause cancer. For example, in a parody of a famous Lucky Strike ad, Mad first ran a picture of a rough hombre smoking a Lucky, carrying a rifle, and being admired by two younger men. The line underneath: “Likely Strife separates the men from the boys. . . .” The next picture showed the same fellow, still carrying his rifle, but in a doctor’s office now-being told he has lung cancer. The line underneath: “. . . but not from the doctors.”

Every new liquor ad is also picked up by Mad-with a jolting suggestion that the cus­tomer will probably wind up with a case of the DTs. Old Crow whiskey has recently been run­ning stories of great moments in American his­tory that were connected with its booze. This drew from Mad a picture with these lines: “John Wilkes. Booth gets primed for the job with Old Croc. . . . American idiots, alcoholics and assas­sins have been getting up their nerve with Old Croc for 127 years.” When the American Medi­cal Association began its series of “Great Mo­ments in Medicine,” Mad struck back with a painting, on the same style as the A.M.A. ads, showing a “Great Moment” called “Presenting the Bill.” The unfortunate patient, just recov­ering from a heart attack, ‘is shown suffering another one as he finds out how much the doc­tor is charging him. And Life Savers ads were parodied in a dentist’s bill, with Life Savers in place of the zeroes, “Decayers” in place of “Life Savers,” and the terse motto, “The best friend your dentist ever had.”

The most brutal of Mad’s recent onslaughts was against Bayer aspirin. “Bayer needs fast relief!” shrilled this ad. “Disastrous rumors about all aspirins being alike is causing com­pany GREAT CONCERN. You can’t imagine how sick the Bayer people are about-this vicious rumor.” Off to one side is Bayer’s familiar cross­-section of the human body, with the stomach bearing a new motto: “What are you doing here for a headache, stupid?” Opposite this is the usual criss-crossed “Bayer” trademark with the caption, “Men who know medicine recommend aspirin. The trouble is, they never recommend Bayer by name-despite the billions of free samples we send them. . . because aspirin is as­pirin, darn it!” The usual panel of satisfied cus­tomers appears somewhat distorted: “I take Bayer because competition from other aspirins is giving me that anxious feeling of NAUSEA,” says a gent inconspicuously labeled as the presi­dent of the Bayer Aspirin Company. “I take Bayer because aggravation from my client is giving me that gut-ripping feeling of ULCERS!” enthuses the president of Fink Advertising Agency. But a simple housewife says bluntly, “I don’t take Bayer because I get plain just-as-­good aspirin much cheaper, which gives me a feeling of THRIFT.” She is holding up a bottle of “1000 aspirin $0.79.”

Mad’s ridicule of other American institu­tions is often quite as brilliant as its take-offs on advertisements. What it did to Reader’s Digest was a classic. Showing a mock cover of the magazine Reader’s Digress, it listed these typical articles: “We Are Losing Idaho and Montana to the Russians”; “What Your Dog Should Know About Sex”; “We Is Winning the Education Battle with the Reds”; “The Day They Shot Jim Bishop”; “The D.A.R.-A Communist Men­ace”; and, “My Twenty-Five Favorite Dirty Jokes, Passed Off by The Reader’s Digress as Wholesome American Folklore.”

One feature of Mad’s satire is only discov­ered when you wade through a few hundred issues and copy out excerpts for use in an article about Mad, as I have recently done. This dis­covery is that, without the charming illustra­tions by Mad’s artists, Mad’s words seem more blunt and considerably braver than they do in the company of the illustrations. The hostility becomes more naked, less jovial, when the illus­trations are missing. Mad’s appeal, obviously, is as a catharsis for those who feel they will go berserk if some form of counterattack against Mad Avenue’s calculated insults to our intelli­gence is not provided for them. The teen-agers apparently are the ones, not yet “adjusted” to our society, who need this form of counterag­gression most.

*     *     *

The men who run Mad are, not surprisingly, a little like rambunctious adolescents themselves. William M. Gaines, the 200-pound publisher, is a resolutely noncommercial individual who has nevertheless made a million dollars several times over in his 43 years. E.C. Publications, the firm that publishes Mad, has always been more of a joke than a business to him. He calls an editorial conference by honking a Harpo Marx horn, and clears the air (when a conference develops disagreements) by firing a blank car­tridge from an old Western pistol. He has never installed an inter-com system: When he wants to speak to the editor, he bellows, “Hey, Al!” When the editor wants to speak to Gaines, he bellows, “Hey, Bill!” The offices are decorated with signs bearing such inspiring mottoes as “GOD BLESS OUR FALLOUT SHELTER, “DOWN WITH GOOD TASTE,” and –largest of all – BILL GAINES IS A RAT FINK.”

Typical of Bill Gaines’s way of running a business is a whim that struck him in 1960, when he discovered that Mad’s only subscriber in Haiti had not renewed for 1961. Gaines im­mediately did what seemed logical to him. He chartered a plane and flew the entire 9-man staff of Mad to Haiti, where they sought out the recalcitrant subscriber and knelt on the ground before him, begging him to renew. When the subscriber continued to play hard to get, Gaines presented him with an honorary gift subscription for life, gave the staff a week at a Haitian hotel at his own expense, and flew back to New York.

Again like an adolescent, Gaines loves practical jokes. For 4 years he had Mad’s office boy convinced that he had a criminal twin brother, “Rex” Gaines. frequently Bill would leave the office early, then the villainous “Rex” would lurch in, ask the terrified office boy some incomprehensible and sinister questions, snatch a few dollars from the petty-cash box, and dis­appear. Filially tiring of this game, Bill told t4e office boy that “Rex” had departed on a world cruise, and never brought him back.

*     *    *

Gaines got into the satire business more or less by accident. Educated at New York University, he was preparing for a career as a chemistry teacher when his father was killed in an auto­mobile crash and he inherited E.C. Publications, then a fumbling little company putting out such comics as Picture Stories from History and Pic­ture Stories from the Bible. Parents approved of these comics, but children found them dull and traded 10 of them for one Batman. Gaines, a fan of horror magazines and old horror movies, introduced two new B.C. comics, Vault of Hor­ror and Tales of the Crypt. (Some of the most gruesome stories were written by Gaines him­self, in collaboration with Al Feldstein, who now edits Mad.) Kids went for these comics in a big way, and even some adults began reading them and sending Gaines fan letters; for a while it looked as if E.C. Publications was on its way to a big success in the horror field. Then the roof fell in.

Dr. Fredric Wertham, a New York psychi­atrist, wrote a book, Seduction of the Innocent, charging that crime and horror comics were a major cause of juvenile delinquency, and his worst examples were drawn from Vault of Hor­ror and Tales of the Crypt. Mothers’ groups and P.T.A.s around the country began passing reso­lutions condemning Gaines; local censorship drove his books out of the candy stores in many places; and, finally, the late Sen. Estes Kefauver summoned Gaines to appear before his Congres­sional Committee in 1952. Both Kefauver and the nation’s press portrayed Gaines as a callous monster, seducing children into sadistic prac­tices and lining his pockets with the profits of crime. ”

Bill Gaines was almost crushed by this experience. He believed-and still believes that his horror books were genuine literature in the tradition of Poe, Hoffmann, and Lovecraft. Confronted by Kefauver’s moral indignation, Gaines mumbled and shambled nervously and behaved exactly like the guilty wretch Dr. Wer­tham had accused him of being. When the ordeal was over, Gaines came back to New York, stopped publication of his horror comics, and concentrated his energies on the new comic, Tales Calculated To Drive You Mad, which he had just launched as a parody of his horror books.

The first issue of Tales Calculated To Drive You Mad consisted, of a parody of one of Gaines’s horror comics, a parody of one of his science-fiction comics, a parody of one of his competitors’ crime comics, and a parody of a Western movie (“Varmint”). Tales Calculated To Drive You Mad succeeded so well that, by 1955, it was outselling the combined total of all the horror comics before they were abandoned. Gaines then shortened the title to Mad, con­verted to slick paper and an adult format, and raised the price from 101 to 251 (it’s 301 now). The rest is history.

Despite his success with Mad, Gaines is anything but ambitious. He loves to tell the story of a brief conversation he once had with Hugh Hefner. Hefner asked him, “What new projects are you starting?'” Gaines replied firmly, “None.” Hefner gasped in horror, “None?” “It was like blasphemy,” Gaines chuckles, as he tells the story. “Nothing could have shocked Hefner, I’m sure, any more than that.”

Yet Gaines does retain a pained nostalgia for the old Vault of Horror days. So do many of his old readers. Recently the publisher showed me a letter from a man, a Ph.D. in the physics department of a leading university, who confessed being a Vault of Horror fan and begged Gaines to revive that magazine. “I get two or three letters like that every month,” said Gaines proudly. But when I asked him if he might bring back Vault of Horror, his lips pressed together determinedly and he said, “Never.”

Former editor Harvey Kurtzman, who ad­mits “I see red when I talk about Mad,” none­theless has many kind words to say about Gaines. “I think Bill is an intelligent man. There was always a straightness and an honesty that impressed me about Gaines. I never knew him to sell out. He has integrity.”

On the other hand, Kurtzman left Mad be­cause he couldn’t take what he calls Gaines’s paternalism. “I was just being strangled under his paternalism. He holds his people very tightly and jealously, and he treats them like little chil­dren. You have the feeling that you just don’t have any rights. Instead of just handing you a bonus at Christmas time, he’d buy us-oh, one guy would get an outboard motor, another guy. . . I remember once I got a very expensive camera-projector set. Well, the point was, if I did good work, I wanted cash for it, cash 1 could spend for myself.”

Another former Madman, artist Will Elder, says of Gaines: “I felt Bill had to be the nucleus of activity, or else he was quite cold. And I think he kind of did all the thinking for us. 1 knew a lot of us resented that.”

Finally, editor Feldstein has this to say about his boss: “Mr. Gaines is a unique pub­lisher. He’s honest. He’s not money-mad-re­gardless of what some people say. And Bill gives me complete editorial freedom, except for working in an advisory capacity, where he might feel 1 was going overboard with a legal prob­lem. He has refused to merchandise this maga­zine, and he has not opened the pages for ads. Yes, we have been approached for ads-by the Coca-Cola people. We turned them down.”

*     *    *

Mad is certainly to be praised for its honesty, for instilling a healthy attitude of skepticism in America’s adolescents, and for being an hilari­ously funny magazine. But it does have its faults. What most readers object to, however, is star­tling: Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s mascot.

Gaines is so fond of Neuman that he has turned down thousands of offers from compa­nies that want to make Alfred E. Neuman wrist watches, calendars, etc. Once Gaines let an Alfred E. Neuman T-shirt be marketed, but soon had qualms and withdrew it from the mar­ket. “I can’t commercialize Alfred,” he said. (The picture itself may have originated in a noncopyrighted ad for an Ohio State Fair in 1892. As for the name, Alfred E. Neuman was a mad scientist in one of the horror stories Gaines and Feldman wrote for Tales from the Crypt.)

According to Dr. Winick, who conducted a poll of 411 regular readers of Mad, one-half of those who expressed any dissatisfaction with the magazine did so because of Neuman. Their ex­planations were that he “runs too often,” “looks too dopey,” and so on. (Curiously, most of the students who liked Neuman were doing poorly in school. Says Dr. Winick: “It can be specu­lated that the less successful students are more likely to identify with Neuman because he conveys a feeling of failure, defeat, defensiveness, and uninvolvement. His non-worry slogan has a ‘let the world collapse, 1 don’t care’ qual­ity, and his appearance suggests stupidity. . . . The less effective adolescent might like Mad because of Neuman, who represents fecklessness and nonachievement.”)

The ubiquity of Alfred E. Neuman, though a minor matter, is one thing definitely wrong with Mad. Richard Gehman complains of the magazine’s occasional monotony. Then there are the stories that are just plain silly-like the loathe some Spy vs. Spy feature. And then there is the complaint that virtually everyone hurls at any magazine at one time or another: that it’s edited by formula. As artist Will Elder says, “1 thinkMad has found a formula, and it’s happy with it. It’s the same old cookie they keep stamping out. Occasionally they come out with something real good, but its not enough. And I think their formula is running the mag­azine downhill-because nothing new is done, nothing experimental is done.”

The most current criticism of Mad, how­ever, is not that it’s edited by formula, but that it sedulously avoids important social issues. In other words, that even Mad has a few sacred cows.

Esquire Magazine was among the first to assert this, last year, in a weak parody of Mad. “Hey, gang!” wrote Esquire. “Have you ever noticed how we are the leading magazine of satire and act brave about daring to poke fun at all kinds of sacred cows, but mainly we never criticize anything that really matters:?” Some topics Esquire suggested: integration, capital punishment, poverty, and fall-out.

As usual, though, Esquire was a few years behind the times. Mad used to avoid important issues; but no longer. If. any thing, Mad seems to be turning into an illustrated version of the Nation. .

In the last few years Mad has dealt with capital punishment, poverty, labor-management relations, problems of Latin America, – nuclear war, and-as the attack on the John Birch Soci­ety shows-with politics. The funny thing is, these articles usually haven’t been funny. As one reader, Rick Wood of Memphis, Tennessee, wrote to Mad recently, “In the old days, Mad Magazine aimed its satire at such allied indus­tries as comic books and advertising. Today, the admitted clods at Mad aim their barbed shafts at government, art, politics, and anyone else unfortunate enough to stand in their way. Today, thru progress,Mad is sharply satiric, bitter, pointed, and fraught with meaning. Once upon a time, Mad was funny!” ­

The fact is, this is probably the most seri­ous criticism to be made of Mad-it’s getting a little bit too serious, too social-minded, and in that direction lies disaster. For most of Mad’s readers are simply not interested in interna­tional affairs and in major social problems. In his survey, Dr. Winick found that “Respondents expressed no interest in seeing problems of ado­lescence like parents, vocational choice, or sex treated by the magazine. Its readers seem to prefer that matters close to them not be satir­ized, with the exception of movies and educa­tion, which are both relatively external institu­tions. . . . Adolescents may have difficulty in perceiving comic elements in situations in which they themselves are involved.”

*     *    *

But if Mad does keep on its present road and does begin losing circulation, and if Bill Gaines suddenly decides to take a whack at the old hor­ror comics again, there would be at least one benefit. For it has been rumored that at typical Mad story conferences, the entire staff tries to outdo one another in telling sexy and scabrous stories, none of which, of course, ever appears in the magazine. “We have,” boasts editor Feld­stein, “the greatest collection of unprintable ma­terial in the world. Compared to us, the Kinsey Institute is just a library for kindergartners. And we’re going to publish all of it-in our last issue.”

That last issue will certainly be something to see. I only hope that, long before it arrives, Mad has gotten around to giving the John Birch Society the coup de grace.


The Anatomy of Schlock

The Anatomy of Schlock

by A Nonymous Hack

from The Realist, No. 62, September 1965
reprinted in The Best of The Realist

For three months, I have worked as an editor in the coun­try’s leading schlock factory. My boss assured me that our schlock reached 30,000,000 Americans every month, and that, brethren, is a lion’s share of the schlock market.

Let me define my terms. Schlock is the next level down, below kitsch. Kitsch is naive, maudlin, hokey, unsophisticated. Commercial folklore, so to speak. Its flavor is bland, and, like American food, it is processed to be without any strong flavor, good or bad. Kitsch is “I Found God When My Doctor Told Me I Had Cancer,” “Jackie Kennedy Tells Why She Will Not Re- Marry,” “Should Wives Enjoy Sex? ”

Schlock, on the other hand, is brutal, lumpen-prole, aggres­sive, hairy; like carnival hot-dogs, so spicy you might vomit if you’re over-sensitive. Schlock is “He Beat His Grandmother to Death With Her Crutch,” “Love-Starved Arab Peasant Wom­en Raped Me Twenty Times,” “The Disease That Liz Caught from Dick.”

I got into the schlock market when I answered a New York Times ad for an editor for a slick men’s magazine. I passed the interview with flying colors and was hired. Then it was ex­plained to me that, in addition to the slick men’s magazine, I would also be editing three pulp men’s magazines.

The three pulps were, of course, pure schlock. They sported titles like (these are actual examples) “The Corpse Lovers,” “Inside Those Queer Bars,” “How to Find Your Favorite Vice,” “The Big Snatch,” “My Mommy Was A Hustler,” “Girls Who Suck You Dry.” Of course, the more raunchy of these titles did not live up to the expectations they aroused: schlock is not hard-core pornography but soft-core. “The Big Snatch” was about kidnapping and “Girls Who Suck You Dry” was about girls who take all your money and leave you.

Well, I have a family to support (as Adolph Eichmann may have said when his job was first explained to him); I sat down and began writing schlock. I produced such gems as “Wild Sex Freaks of History,” “A Prostitute Reveals Her Naked Soul,” “If You Think You Have V.D.,” “Can Lack of Sex Cause Cancer?” and “How Cowards Dodge the Draft.”

In between these epics, my magazines were crowded with cheesecake layouts, and I found that writing the captions to these was more fun, even, than writing the articles. As on all such magazines, the cheesecake came out of a file-the models had signed away everything, including (I think) their children’s life insurance, on a release form that couldn’t be broken by Clarence Darrow himself – and I invented whatever I wanted to say about them.

In creative and ironic raptures one day (and a bit dismayed , by the hard, whore-like expressions on the broads the art de­partment had handed me), I picked up the heaviest cruiser in the lot – a mauler who looked like she was 38 years old and had been a whore for 20 of those years in the $10-a-throw Sands Street section of Brooklyn – and wrote that she was a Sunday School teacher from Indiana.

The others I gave the usual fictional backgrounds, making them” girl scientists,” “typists,” “airline hostesses,” and so forth. Once in a while I would make one a “Greenwich Village hipster” and have her say something like “I dig the peyote scene” or “William Burroughs is my favorite writer,” but I was careful not to pull that one too often.

Meanwhile, another department of the schlock factory also published a tabloid newspaper – the kind that features head­lines like “Iron Lung Patient Rapes Two Nurses.” The editor was understaffed. (This didn’t prevent the publisher from con­tinually suggesting that he fire somebody – the publisher wor­ried that every department was overstaffed.)

Just for the hell of it, and because I was getting to enjoy schlock in a perverse sort of way, I took on writing the ESP col­umn in this newspaper. I read the predictions that had ap­peared over the past several months and began grinding out my own predictions, out of the blue. It was surprisingly easy. Among other things, I predicted that Lyndon Johnson would be assassinated, that anti-American riots would occur in another Latin American nation, that the $15,000,000 pornog­raphy collection on the closed shelves of a large public library would be robbed by a mob led by a defrocked priest “well known in occult circles,” that flying saucers would be in the news again, that shocking discoveries would be made at Stone­henge throwing new light on ancient Egypt and revealing how man came to be on earth (ESP bugs, I reasoned, are generally also the types who believe that man was deposited here by fly­ing saucers and that Egypt is full of occult mysteries}, that peanut butter would be found to contain radioactive isotopes, and that a Hollywood star would be involved in a sex-and-LSD orgy.

In a short while, I began getting letters from fans. Many of them congratulated me on the number of my predictions that came true, although actually none of them ever came true. Ap­parently, these people possess a very convenient kind of mem­ory. (When Kennedy was shot, many astrology magazines ad­mitted they hadn’t predicted it, but I recently heard from an as­trology buff that all the leading astrology magazines had pre­dicted it!)

As an experiment, I tried the most outlandish prediction I could imagine in my ESP column. I predicted that a new island would rise in the Pacific Ocean, covered with strange non­-Euclidean buildings bearing inhuman hieroglyphics. I had lifted this from “The Call of Cthulhu,” by H. P. Lovecraft. The ESP fans ate it up. They are always expecting things like that to happen anyway.

I was becoming a schlock meister, a veritable uber­schlockmeister. I started dreaming up titles for tabloid stories. All the stories in the tabloid, you see, were fictitious. (Inciden­tally, the best inspirations are never used. They are too far out. Such as: “Kicked Out of Ku Klux Klan for Negro Blood – He Becomes Muslim Leader.”)

The staff would have a bull session each Monday morning and work out 15 or 20 ideas for the next issue. “Say, how about this,” somebody would cry. “Mad Hunchback Sells Hunch to Butcher/Woman Poisoned by Hunchburger?”

“Nah,” the editor would say, “Too far out in left field.”

“How about, ‘Vice Squad Cop Catches V.D. From Prosti­tute He Arrested’? ”

“Great, ” the editor would reply, “We’ll use that one. ”

And so another “news” story would be born. I often reflected that we represented the next stage in journalism, after The New York Times. The Times merely alters and selects facts to fit a particular political line. We invented our facts on the spot, a much more creative process.  If it is the destiny of man to “transcend mere reason and empiricism,” and to “achieve a rebirth of myth and magic,” as many modern philosophers think, I can safely claim that we schlockscribes in our grubby offices were doing more to further that end than the Times.

I soon discovered that my predecessor on the men’s pulps had applied the same formula: “Woman Gives Birth to Pup­pies” appeared in the tabloid; “Women Who Have Given Birth to Animals” had appeared several issues back in one of the men’s pulps. A girl who regularly had intercourse with a dog­ – a spectacle she performed for money in a Mexican whore­house – had “worn down her immunity” to dog sperm and thus became impregnated. The pulp archly stated that the story had appeared “in several Mexican newspapers” but that “some doc­tors” claim it is impossible. The tabloid picked it up without any reservations. Folklore students of the future will have to wade through tons of this schlock in stalking down the origins of various contemporary folktales.

The schlock-sex field is much tougher than schlock-crime or schlock-ESP. “This is kind of tame,” the publisher, or schlock­fuehrer, would say occasionally. Since he fired one person every week without fail (and thus kept us all in that half-mad kind of frenzy necessary to the production of true schlock), this remark would spread terror throughout the factory. We would outdo ourselves with “Teen-Age Sex Club Seduces Parents” or “Wolf-Men Who Drink Blood for Lust.” Then, the schlockfuehrer would come around again, looking worried. “Take out ‘cunni­lingus,’ ” he would say (referring to a factual story, for once, about a crusader for sexual freedom), “you gotta be careful in this business. ”

My predecessor, I discovered while going through back is­sues, had named one model “Senora Maria Theresa Fellatia” and said she was waiting for an appointment “with her phy­sician, Dr. Cunnilingua.” Somehow, this one went through. It is altogether possible that the publisher didn’t know either of those words at the time.

The biggest panic occurred when some pubic hair was dis­covered in one of my pulps, in an issue done by my predecessor but on which I had corrected the blues (last stage before publication). The printer discovered the small dark tangle and called the publisher, saying we could all go to jail. The publisher came thundering into my office, gibbering: “Pubic hair! You let pubic hair go by! Goddamn it, pubic hair! We can all go to jail! ”

The printer, fortunately, was able to correct the plate. After that, I scrutinized each crotch with the kind of care I usually give only to living girls. Anybody who passed my office and saw me studying a vulva through a magnifying glass would have thought, “What a horny bastard! He’s really in the right job.”

In spite of the one-firing-every-week policy, I enjoyed myself in the schlock factory. Most of us laughed a great deal, es­pecially after each firing (we knew then we were safe for another week). Schlock is fun to write. The best, of course, is the stuff you have to reject for publication, but which everybody in the office enjoys. “Jayne Mansfield Revealed To Be Male Has-Been Who Had Sex-Change Operation,” was one the publisher dreamed up himself, and for two hours nobody could talk him out of it. His lawyer finally made him see reason, which is too bad. It would have been the tabloid’s best-selling issue. . . until Jayne sued them out of existence.

Another one the whole office loved was “The Four-Letter I Word That Sue Lyons Calls Burton,” which was based on a gossip column item that Sue Lyons called Burton “Bull,” but: the readers wouldn’t find that out until after they bought the magazine and read the story. My all-time favorite, cooked up by a girl who worked on the movie mags, was: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Singer Catches Leprosy/Audience Splattered by Flying Or­gans.” Alas, the editor of the tabloid thought that was too much even for his audience.

The movie magazines were, like all good schlock, basically dishonest. The stories were more-or-less true but were given the schlock-treatment by our staff. An item would be lifted out of Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons and then jazzed up with a suggestive or blood-curdling title and developed into a whole story. Everything in the story, except the key fact, would be fabrication. As long as none of the stars were made to look criminal or foolish, we never had any complaints from the stu­dios’ legal departments.

Intrigued by a cover-line on one of our “true confessions” mags – “Stripped Naked in the Subway/Nobody Would Help Me” – I found that no incident remotely like it occurred any­where in the story. The little 60-year-old lady who ground out three of these mags, writing most of them herself, had carried journalism even further than our tabloids.

At this point, the publisher gave me another magazine to do – a detective mag. He also gave me, at last, one assistant to help with the three schlock mags. The assistant proved to be a talentedschlockscribe and quickly was grinding out “Sixty Streets of Sin” and “He Asked Me To Sleep With His Wife” at a sizzling rate. I let him take over two out of the three schlock mags, and concentrated on one schlock mag, my slick, and the detective mag.

My career in the schlock factory was brought to a close when I began preparing my first issue of the “slick.” It was an imita­tion of Playboy, with lots more cheesecake. Looking over Play­boy and its other imitators, I decided that the key to success in this field was, in a word, balls. I set out to create the boldest, most sophisticated, raciest men’s magazine ever. The editor-be­fore-the-editor-before-me was fired for making it “too in­tellectual.” I was careful to avoid that error.

The publisher said he didn’t want schlock in this one maga­zine – “It’s our class publication,” he used to repeat – but he was such a pure, dedicated schlockmaestro that everything he touched turned to schlock. Looking over past issues, I dis­covered that the only non-schlock one that had been put out by the editor fired for being “too intellectual.” “Not schlock and not egghead,” was my guiding principle. I revamped my table of contents several times, making it more schlocky each time. I kept two non-schlock articles, a factual piece about Cuba, and an interview with a prominent novelist, and tried to make the rest of the pieces come out as both schlock and non-schlock simultaneously. This I did by giving them schlock titles but sophisticated insides, or, in one case, a sophisticated title with schlock insides.

It didn’t work.

One week the tabloid editor was fired on Monday, his suc­cessor was fired on Wednesday, and the publisher called me in­to his office on Thursday. “I don’t want you printing writers who are writing The Great American Novel,” he began. He told me my whole issue was too intellectual and that several stories were being dropped from it. He ended the interview on a paternal note: “I got a reputation for doing a lot of firing, ” he said, “but I’m trying to change that. I’m not going to fire any­body without two week’s notice, from now on. As for you, you’re still okay in my book. You just have to learn a little.”

He had made a similar speech to the tabloid editor before fir­ing him. I typed up a job resume that night and brought it into the office half an hour before starting time the next morning. I had run off 20 copies of it on the office photostat machine when the schlockfuehrer called me into his office and fired me.

Until a replacement for me could be found, everything – the slick, the whodunit, and the three pulps – was put in the hands of the little 60-year-old lady who did the confession magazines.

The Religion of Kerista and Its 69 Positions

“The Religion of Kerista
and Its 69 Positions”
By Robert Anton Wilson

from Ralph Ginzburg’s fact:
 July-Aug 1965
Volume 2, Issue 4

Beatniks, swingers, and hippies all over the world are banding together to create a society where anything – but anything – goes

Eight years ago, an ex-Air Force officer named John Presmont was sitting in his room on East 31st Street in New York City when a voice spoke to him and told him he would be the founder of the next great world religion. Presmont, after leaving the Air Force with an honor-able discharge, had become, by the age of 38, what nice people call a “bohemian” or beatnik.” At the time the Voice spoke to him, he had been reading the Koran and smoking marijuana rather heavily for 6 weeks. For several months before that, he had been laboriously plowing through all the scriptures of the great religions-Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, and so forth. Earlier still, he had chewed and digested a great deal of modern psychology and sociology. Like most of us, he was concerned with the growing horror of this age and, like a few of us, he had felt this concern grow within him until it overmastered and all but obliterated all his other interests. Nonetheless, he was abashed by the Voice.

“Why does it have to be me?” he cried.

BECAUSE YOURE SO GULLIBLE, the Voice answered solemnly.

“But what should I do?” Presmont continued to object. “I don’t know anything about founding a religion.”

PEOPLE WILL COME TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH,” said the Voice unperturbed.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS THING FROM HAPPENING. HAVE A BALL, ENJOY YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST. FIND THE MOUNTAIN BESIDE THE SEA. THE PIED PIPER WILL PULL OUT THE SWINGING PEOPLE.

Today, a chubby and cherubic 44, John Presmont has become Jud the Prophet to a few thousand followers scattered in such odd places as London, Berlin, Tangier, New York City, San Francisco, and Passaic, New Jersey. For the first 5 years, his religion was called our thing” by its adherents because the Voice had said that THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS THING FROM HAPPENING. Three years ago, however, the word got out that the Mafia is called “our thing” (cosa nostra) by its members, and Jud soon had another vision, seeing a colony of Buddhas (Enlightened ones) living on an island with a huge mountain by the sea, and it was revealed to him that the island would be called Kerista (derivation unknown). His followers now call themselves Keristans, and the religion is called Kerista.

The rule of the religion of Kerista is the rule of Rabelais’s abbey of Theleme: Do What You Will. Kerista is a religion of joy and freedom, a religion without dogma or restriction, and a religion of ecstasy, for the Voice had told Jud the Prophet, HAVE A BALL, ENJOY YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST. The Keristansuninhibitedly follow this injunction, and Kerista is, therefore, utterly unlike the dominant forms of religion .in Judaeo-Christian cultures. The New York police have been harassing the New York Keristans for quite a while, and on Oc­tober 16, 1964, they arrested Jud the Prophet and 1I. others for possession of marijuana. The police, obviously, don’t believe that anybody who is having a ball is really religious. Jud the Prophet, like Jesus and Mohammed before him, will have to endure the persecution of the infidels.

 *     *     *

A few weeks ago, I journeyed down to the eastern part of Greenwich Village – where the bohemians now hang out – to meet nine members of Kerista and learn about the essence of their faith. Do you know the East Village? You can walk for 10 blocks and never see a building that doesn’t look as if it should have been condemned during the reign of Warren Gamaliel Harding. Puerto Rican kids, sleepy from marijuana, lounge in windows watching you with insect eyes of indifference or brush past you angrily on the sidewalk and the mes­sage Screw white America comes off them like garlic from an Italian kitchen. Negroes loiter about with no more hope of the future or despair for the present than a rock has. The smell of poverty comes back to you, and if you haven’t smelled it in 20 years you still recognize it – it is a blend of cooking that is too spicy (to hide the fact that the food is too little) and the reek of the dying bodies of old men who have known despair for too many years and the odor from the always-slightly-plugged-up hall toilets – and you see teams of cops pacing nervously around and they look at you with mean cop eyes won­dering if you’ve got $100,000 worth of Heroin in your attaché case and what you are doing here in your uptown clothes anyway. Yes, this is a good place for a religion to be born; in such squat hutches Peter and Paul and Matthew must have preached.

My appointment was with a 24-year-old C.C.N.Y. graduate who called himself Dau. When I found his apartment, a good-looking brunette who said her name was Tre let me in and said Dau would be back shortly. (Most of the Keristans eventually take these new names, which, like the Black Muslim “X” or the Catholic confirmation-name, symbolize a new identity.) The apartment consisted of just two rooms. A monument-sized American flag acted as a room divider-, another American flag hung over the window in lieu of curtains. There were no lights.

Dau suddenly charged in behind me, a hyperactive boy with a short, neat beard, and announced that the “vibrations” were better in the “nursery,” so we would conduct the in­terview there. We tramped down the stairs into the building next door and went to another apartment where seven other members of Kerista were waiting.

“I’m E.Z.,” said a giant of a man who re-minded me vaguely of the illustrations to Paul Bunyan stories. He was wearing trousers, but nothing above the waist and no shoes or socks. His thick black hair hadn’t been inside a barbershop for at least a year and his curly black beard was as wild as Rex Barney’s pitching the season the Dodgers retired him. Three naked babies, all less than a year old, were playing on the floor. (The Keristans share everything, including the care of babies.) A blonde young lady wearing nothing but a pair of black panties came out of the kitchen, nodded at me, and went into another room, from which she soon emerged in a bathrobe and joined the discussion.

“You see?” Dau said. “Aren’t the ‘Vibra­tions better here?” Everybody agreed that the vibrations were better.

I asked if Jud was present, and it turned out that he wasn’t. “But I wanted to speak to the leader,” I complained. A 22-year-old boy named Good quickly explained, “No, no, man, you don’t get it. Kerista has no leader. Jud is the prophet. Kerista doesn’t need leaders, or teachings, or theories, or stipulations, or restric­tions. Kerista is freedom.”

“Kerista is freedom and love,” E.Z. corrected.

What I had heard around town was that Keristans were all bisexual, promiscuous, and 99% of the time zonked out of their skulls on marijuana, peyote, LSD-25, or some other psychedelic drug. As delicately as I could, I in­quired about this aspect of their freedom.

“Well, first of all,” Good said, “we’re not trying to enforce anything on anybody. That goes against freedom, and freedom is our first law. People can keep any hang-up they’ve got, as long as they want to keep it. Of course, if they want to get over their hang-ups, we’ll help them. But we don’t pressure anybody to try anything that they’re still square about. We have one member who’s still a virgin.”

It developed that this apartment – which belonged to E.Z. and Marquel, the blonde girl who greeted me in her panties – was the “nursery” only today. The three babies belong to all of this Kerista cell, and whichever apartment they are in for a day is the “nursery” for that day. All in all, there are 10 such apartments in the EastVillage now.

The interview proceeded:

Q: Well, what happened after Jud heard the Voice?

A: [By Good] Nothing. He had to wait for the people to come, like the Voice said. One by one, over the years, we’ve found him.

Q: Do you take these odd names when you join Kerista?

A: [By Dau] Well, first you got to get in contact with your pure self, through Buddho, the art of no-defense. That means not defending the social self with all the usual hang-ups and bullshit. When you find the pure self, you take a new name.

Q: How do you get the new names?

A: [By Dau] From a Ouija board.

Q: I see. What is Buddho, the art of no-defense?

A: [By Dau] You get rid of bullshit.  You stop defending yourself. Dig? You don’t put up a front. You admit who you are. You don’t play-act, you don’t put people on.

Q: But how do you Learn Buddho?

A: [By Good] We teach it. You name the price, half-price for the first lesson. You start with conversation and learn how to stop de-fending yourself on that level. Then you move in and get rid of the more subtle defenses.

Q: Did Jud invent Buddho?

A: [By Tre, 23, female] Dau invented Buddho. It’s a contraction of Buddha and judo. We’ve all added something to Kerista. There’s no one truth.

Q: Now, about this voice that spoke to had. Do you believe it was the Voice of God?

A: [By E. Z.] If you want to call it that. You could call it Jung’s “collective uncon­scious” or the Zen “not-self” if you wanted. We’re not particular. The important thing is not theories. The important thing is living accord­ing to the pure self, not full of a lot of bullshit.

When you ask the Keristans about the “vibrations,” they are rather vague. “You know, man, the vibrations.” When you ask if they mean the hypothetical “orgoneenergy ocean” suggested by Freudian heretic Wilhelm Reich, they disagree. Some think Reich’s orgone energy is the vibrations, some doubt it. Reich and Freud, chiefly, they blame for the conservatism of modern psychiatry, and recently they sent out advertisements to all the psychiatrists, psy­choanalysts, and psychotherapists in New York City offering to help them. “Let us solve your problems,” the ad said. “We have none of our own. Learn Buddho, the art of no-defense. You name the price. First visit half-price.” There have been no takers.

The Keristans I interviewed come from a variety of backgrounds and it was hard to find a common denominator among them. E.Z. is 28 and grew up in the slums of the lower East Side, not far from where Kerista now flourishes. Although he was born of poor Russian immi­grants and didn’t finish junior high school, E.Z. acquired an education in the Air Force and worked for the Federal Aviation Agency after his discharge. “I was a good, middle-class square for 5 whole years,” he says of his period with the F.A.A. His salary finally reached $10,500 and he acquired a wife and a home in a fashion-able Long Island suburb. But all the time he was “reading, reading, reading” and brooding over the meaninglessness of his job and his life. One day, he says, “The bullshit got to be too much for me. I just said to myself, `This is no way for people to live.’ ” He quit his job, left his wife, and moved to the East Village and “became a beatnik,” in his own words. Two years later he met JohnPresmont and was con­vinced that Kerista was the proper way for peo­ple to live. “Our society is all warped and fucked-up,” he says.

Onn, a divorced 22-year-old with one child, was born in Alaska. Her parents were both teachers. Onn attended Northeastern University before making the EastVillage scene. She was converted to Kerista after her first LSD session with Keristans because “they looked so beau­tiful and everyone else looked so ugly.”

Fly, an intense, highly-charged girl, is also 22 and has a B.A. in philosophy from Brooklyn College. Before becoming involved with Kerista, she was a member of the Committee for Non-Violent Action, an uncompromising pacifist group that practices hard-core Gandhian civil disobedience and is always going to jail for it. Fly is convinced that Kerista will be “the next great world religion.” Self-consciously hip, Fly told me that she has sampled “pot, hashish, and Heroin,” quickly amending the last to “uh, I mean, junk.”

Dom, 21, a bearded giant, comes from a Ukrainian farm family in Pennsylvania, “real European peasants,” he says. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and later lived for a while in the Glen Gardner community in New Jersey, a religious (mostly Roman Catholic) anarchist group.

Good, 22, comes from a lower-class Hungarian-American family and summed up Kerista for me by quoting a line of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s: “Everybody has his own hole to climb out of.” He has attended C.C.N.Y. and joined Kerista as soon as he heard of it. “Like as soon as it came along it was the thing to do,” he says.

Marquel is an attractive 29-year-old blonde who was born of a middle-class Irish-American family and attended Bennington. She worked as a researcher for a leading advertising firm for 3 years, then, in disgust, went on unemploy­ment “while I tried to find myself.” When un­employment ran out, she waited on tables and posed for artists. Later she went to Paris and lived on a houseboat on the Seine for a year. She has had two children, by natural childbirth, and has never married. Along with the standard psychedelic drugs, she also has tried belladonna, an unpleasant experience which she finds im­possible to talk about.

Tre comes from a middle-class German family in Pennsylvania and is 23. She attended Maryville College and now lives with Dau, who is 24. “The first time I was turned on LSD,” Tre told me, “I wanted to see Dau, so I picked up his vibrations and followed them. I went right into a park, following the vibrations, and there he was.”

 *     *     *

All of these Keristans were either born into the middle-class, or, like E.Z., achieved middle-class status through their own talents, and all have rejected it. They have turned their backs on the Affluent Society and now squat in the slums of the East Village convinced that they have liberated themselves from a living death. Their poverty does not bother them much, ex­cept to the extent that it handicaps them in fending off the police, who are taking an in-creasing, and unwelcome, interest inKerista.

All that is central to Kerista, as it was ex­plained to me, is Buddho, the art of no-defense; there are no regulations or stipulations. Buddho, it seems, is a technique, invented by Dau, for escape from other-directedness. It begins with watching yourself in ordinary conversation and observing how often you are “defending” against implicit (or projected) criticism from the other party. More advanced Buddho in­cludes the conquest of greed, sexual jealousy, and other “hang-ups.” “We’re trying to live ac-cording to the pure self, not full of bullshit,” E.Z. says. When asked how Kerista differs from the many other swinging, free-living people in the East Village, San Fran, and other pockets of bohemia, E.Z. answers, “No difference. Except we have purpose, direction, goals, and love.”

The economics of the Keristans, I learned, are as strange as their religion and their sexual practices. At present, in the East Village group, four are working, four are receiving compensation from the Department of Welfare, and 18 are living hand-to-mouth. In practice, the eight are supporting the 18-or, if you prefer, the four who are working and the State of New York are supporting the 18. (Whenever anyone is in danger of eviction, for example, the group raises the money for that month’s rent on that apartment.) What keeps this from being pure parasitism is that the ones who are working and the ones who are sponging are continually changing places, and that the ones not working are providing services for the entire group, such as baby-sitting or shopping or carrying clothes to a laundermat. When money gets especially short, a few members will return to their parents’ homes for a while. (The groups in Passaic and Paterson each have a high-salaried executive in them, and the group in Las Vegas are all said to be comfortable.) John Presmont’s Air Force pension guarantees that the New York group will always have an apartment on which the rent is paid up to date.

It was getting late, and Dom was eager to brew up some peyote tea, so I left, after making an appointment to meet Jud the Prophet.

 *     *     *

Two days later, I went up to the Radio City office of a man named Desmond Slattery to meet Jud the Prophet. I found Jud to be a large, amiable, bearlike man with a shock of white hair that made him look more elderly and patriarchal than his 44 years. I started by ask­ing him about the Kerista philosophy of sexual freedom. “We believe in love,” he said. “People shouldn’t be like balloons, ready to explode if they’re touched. We believe in total sharing, and that means sharing love and affection as well as property. In Kerista, the only standard of a sexual relationship is mutual consent, by the two or three or four or however many parties are involved. We only have one full-time homosexual member that I know of, but most of us are bisexual. People either dig that this is the natural, decent, loving way to be-have, or they don’t. I won’t give you a lot of details for pornographic readers to drool over.

Look,” Jud said, “my work is over, in a way. I had the vision and communicated it, and now I’m finished. It’s up to Des here to take the next step. You should really interview him. Des is the most important man right now, because the most important part of -Kerista right now is building an island colony, and that’s his territory.”

Desmond Slattery, a man of 50 with a short, gray beard that made him look like Walter Huston playing Satan in The Devil and Daniel Webster, took the ball immediately. “Get this clear,” he said. “I’m not religious. I abominate all religions, without exception. To me, Kerista is a social movement, and Jud knows how I feel.”

“I don’t care whether people call it a re­ligion or a social movement,” Jud said. “The important thing is that they act naturally and decently.”

Desmond Slattery began to explain the island colony to me. He had voluminous papers, maps, booklets, charts, and other paraphernalia to illustrate everything he said. A graduate in sociology from the University of Wichita, Slattery went into the jungles of British Honduras 5 years ago and created a new industry-the breeding of bees in a new environment and the extraction from them of a special honey obtain-able only from bees fed on jungle vegetation – and his success was written up enthusiastically in an article in Bee World, the beekeeper’s journal. Slattery sold the business as soon as he had proved it could be done, for profit-making is the least of his interests. He has been a merchant seaman, a pilot for Pan Am, an Air Force officer, a hobo, a movie actor, and a TV producer, but most of the time he has preferred agricultural work in such odd corners as Tahiti, Japan, and South America. His real love is ecology, the science of biological balances that reveals the interdependence of all living beings. “That’s my religion,” he says. “Ecology.” The Kerista island colony is to him a scientific experiment. “We’ll put Jud’s ideas to work in a natural environment and find out what they can do,” he says. All the laws relating to agricultural co-operatives in British possessions are before him on his desk, together with maps of several possible islands; you believe, suddenly, that he will do what he says he will. He may well be the Pied Piper who will pull out the Swinging People.

But a doubt remains. “How do you get the money to start?” I asked.

Slattery hauls out a piece of paper. “Here’s four plans,” he says. “I’m cooking up a few others if these all fall through.” He has set his goal at $50,000 and each plan seems like a fairly possible approach. One plan starts with 200 members, and another with 100 members. “If we can’t get all the bread we really need,” he says, “I go in with only 14 people, hire a few Indians, and start clearing the jungle with machetes.” He means it. He has done it before. “Of course,” he adds, and his eyes twinkle, “I’1I pick those 14 damned carefully.”

After the island is founded, Slattery plans to make it a tourist attraction for hipsters. “Kerista will become the hip San Juan,” he says enthusiastically. “We’ll keep our rates low, so people without a lot of bread can afford to come. There’ll be thousands every year. Instead of living in a hotel with a lot of rich squares for 3 days, they can be with other swingers for a whole month. Every hippie in the States will eventually come down to make the scene with us.” He is expecting to charge $120 for a year on the isle of Kerista, payable at $10 per month for the previous year. (Further details about the island colony can be found in Keristan Flyer, 25 cents from Box557, Radio City Station, New York.)

A friend of mine asked Jud, 4 years ago, why he founded Kerista, and Jud had answered, “I don’t want to work for a living.” I asked him about that, and he answered, “That’s right. When we get the colony going, nobody will work. When you’re doing what you want to do, it isn’t work; it’s play. One cat is raising rabbits, another is raising chickens, somebody’s growing vegetables, they’re all having a ball, is that work? Work is when you’re taking orders from somebody you hate.”

“How would you sum up Kerista?” I asked,

“Total sharing,” he said. “Getting rid of masochism and sadism, inferiority and superiority. Being yourself.

“Kerista is the essence of hip,” Jud went on. “There are millions of hipsters all over the world who have part of it. They’re looking for Kerista without knowing it. Norman Mailer said that hip was going to give birth to the next re­ligion. He was right and we’re it.”

When I had entered Slattery’s office, I had been introduced to a young Negro girl, Joy, who then proceeded to sleep through most of the interview. Just before I left, I. asked Jud if Keristans objected to monogamy-I was think­ing of the Oneida colony in 19th century New York which regarded monogamy as antisocial selfishness-and he said, “You still don’t understand. Kerista is freedom. People can have one partner, if that’s what they really want. I’m married to Joy. We were married 7 weeks ago.”

Joy, who is 19 and came up from Alabama a year ago, told me how she got into Kerista. “I was taking around a petition to ask the city; to keep Mobilization for Youth open, and I met Jud in a bar and asked him to sign. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I sign everything.’ Then he started telling me about Buddha, and I agreed to come to aKerista meeting. After I heard them all I said, `You people are crazy.’ But I thought it over. Two days later, I joined up.”

 *     *     *

About a week afterwards, at my invitation, Jud and Joy came out to spend a weekend with my family in our home high in the mountains of Sussex County, New Jersey. Unlike many hipsters we have had over, Jud and Joy were excellent guests, and my four children quickly fell in love with Joy. After the first meal, Jud insisted onwashing the dishes. Joy cooked the big meal on Sunday. Jud also forced us to let him pay for some of the food for the weekend.

In the relaxed atmosphere of my own living room, I probed Jud for some more information about the unconventional sexual practices of the Keristans. I soon learned, for one thing, that it is not at all unusual for two or three Keristans to be engaged in sexual hi-finks on a couch while several others carry on a conversa­tion in the next room. I then inquired about the problem of contraception.

“Most of the Keristan men detest condoms,” Jud said, “so it’s up to the girls to protect themselves. They use the usual things, dia­phragms and coils and pills.”

This is protection against unwanted births, but it seemed to leave the venereal-disease problem unchecked. I asked about the rumor that Kerista had suffered a gonorrhea epidemic a few months ago.

“Yeah,” he said morosely. “That was Dau’s fault. He went balling with outside chicks and brought back a beautiful case of the clap. It spread to nine of the downtown Keristans in a week. But then we caught it and everybody went down to the Public Health Service and had shots. It’s all cleared up now. On the island, we’ll take precautions and make visitors submit to a medical before mixing with the community.”

None of the unmarried Keristan girls has yet become pregnant through Keristan group-sex, Jud said. “At least,” he added, “not in the New York groups.” The three babies I had seen were all born before the mothers joined Kerista. Feeling the lack of a definitive summary of Kerista, Jud has been working on a kind of statement of principles. Since Moses had his 10 Commandments, Luther his 95 Theses, and the Anglo-Catholics their 39 Articles, Jud has decided to have 69 Positions. “This is just tentative, though,” he said. “You don’t have to agree with all of it to be a Keristan.” He has written 25 of the 69 Positions and showed them to me:

Legalize group marriage. Legalize indecent exposure. Legalize trial marriage. Legalize abortion. Legalize miscegenation. Legalize religious intermarriage. Legalize marijuana. Legalize narcotics. Legalize cunnilingus. Legalize transvestitism. Legalize pornography. Legalize obscene language. Legalize sexual intercourse. Legalize group sex. Legalize sodomy. Legalize fellatio. Legalize prostitution. Legalize incest. Legalize birth control. Legalize Lesbianism. Legalize polygamy. Legalize polyandry. Legalize polygyny. Legalize homosexuality. Legalize voluntary flagellation.

“You see,” he said, “it’s all common sense. Almost all intelligent people are Keristans al-ready, without knowing it.” He has a half-formed plan to amalgamateKerista with LEMAR (the League for Legalized Marijuana) and form a new political party with the 69 Positions as its platform. “We’ve still got a secret ballot,” he said, “and people who are afraid to stick their necks out in public could go into the voting booth and, for once, stand up for what they really believed. I bet we’d get a lot of votes and scare the pants off the squares.”

Later, Jud was reminiscing about the loft in which 22 Keristans had lived together for a while last year. “It was groovy,” he said. “The rent came to $10 a month for each person.” It had its drawbacks, though: Dau brought in some really weird types. “There was one guy who showed up, balled 20 girls in a week, and never came back or paid for anything. And there was a girl who was pretty far out, all she ever said was the word ‘fuck.’” Jud is trying to persuade the other Keristans to screen out “the wrong types.”

Joy is pregnant and Jud is shortly coming up for trial on a marijuana charge, but his spirits remain high. “Kerista can’t fail,” he says, “because people need it. We’re all isolated in modern society. Isolation makes men paranoiac: They’ve proved that in the laboratory. Cut a man off from all human contact and he starts going mad in about 6 hours. We’re all too isolated and cut-off since the old religions died and commercialism began. We need a new religion-Bernard Shaw said it, Koestler said it, every intelligent man has said it. Kerista is the new religion. Nothing can stop Kerista. Noth­ing.”

The Voice that spoke to Jud 8 years ago had more humor than the Voices that have spoken to other visionaries in the past, and Kerista may even seem, to the skeptical, a satire on religion. But there could be no doubt of the fervor, and the sincerity, of Jud when he said, “Nothing can stop Kerista.” Kerista might very well become, like Zen in Japan, the church of an intellectual and artistic minority. There is certainly a market waiting for Jud’s product. Three-quarters, at the very least, of the creative people I have met have been living as if they were members of Kerista without knowing it.