My Blog Talk Radio presentation entitled Timothy Leary: heir to Aleister Crowley? is available for listening now.
Phone problems in the last five minutes prematurely curtailed the broadcast but I had finished the essential material.
Most of the lecture is taken almost verbatim from a chapter in my book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.
The central topic is a mysterious episode in 1971 when Leary and the English writer Brian Barritt found themselves walking in the footsteps of Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuberg in their legendary occult workings in the Algerian desert that included the raising of John Dee's "mighty demon" Chroronzon.
Although the subject has been discussed by other writers, I believe I have a unique and interesting perspective on what it actually meant abd how it helps us to understand the whole drama of Leary's life.
My Blog Talk Radio presentation entitled Huxley and Crowley: Goodbye to Berlin, Hello Sgt Pepper is available now as archive download. it is one hour in length.
When Aldous Huxley and Aleister Crowley met for lunch in Berlin in 1930 the two great visionaries could never in their wildest imaginings have anticipated the events that would lead to their posthumous appearance together on the Beatles Sgt Pepper cover in 1967. From the backdrop to the movie Cabaret to Timothy Leary and the Human Be-In and the Summer of Love, here is a story of myth, ideas, and influences, taking in a whole host of cult figures and providing an introduction and context for the psychedelic era.
Material drawn from my book Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus.
This Saturday (30th Jan) I shall be giving a lecture between 2.45 and 3.45 in a Glastonbury Mystic & Earth Spirit Fayre weekend (at the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury High St) dealing with the mysterious episode in the Algerian desert when Timothy Leary seemed to find himself walking in the footsteps of Aleister Crowley in one of the most powerful and notorious magickal events of the Great Beast's life.
The material is largely taken from my current book and I believe expands perspective on this fascinating subject to a wider appreciation of Leary's life in general.
£5.00 entry gives access to all Glastonbury Fayre events on the day
Greetings from Glastonbury and the transmission of the Avalonian Aeon.
Here are a series of extracts from my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus that serve as a mood-setter and kind of movie trailer. Some of these sections are separated by lots of material in the book and have featured in blogs before but they hang together quite well as a policy statement. They feature the three main characters in my narrative: Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, and Timothy Leary. Those who find this mix to their liking may care to investigate the blog further and perhaps look out for the book when it is published on Dec 5th
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This is the information age. We have access to more data in a shorter space of time than could ever have been imagined even a few decades ago. That still leaves us with the issue of what we choose to look for and why. Kids leave school today without being able to recount any details of Auschwitz or Hiroshima. A teenager asked for a response after seeing Schindler’s List at the cinema derided it as boring. Nothing really happened in it. The passion, intensity, and brilliance of popular music in the sixties have become all but unknown to new generations. There are hippy kids in Glastonbury with hardly any real knowledge or interest in the sixties upheaval. On one level, I can’t understand that at all. On another, seen from the perspective of the idea of Gurdjieff’s sleepwalking humanity and James Joyce’s nightmare of history from which we need to awaken, the Gnostic prison of the Matrix, I can.
As far as I’m concerned this whole thing, the twentieth century, with it’s Nazi and psychedelic eras, this time that Crowley has called the dawning of the Aeon of Horus is so mind shatteringly heart-bustingly compellingly interesting and important that at times I feel like I’m straining with every nerve to take on board every last nuance in order to maintain the altered state of gnosis necessary to comprehend it. In that comprehension is ecstasy and terror, ‘the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star’.
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I’m walking through Cairo Museum in a culmination of a thirty year journey. A loud multi-national hubbub of noise throbs around the enormous high-ceilinged interior as a great tumult of life bustles everywhere around me. Egyptian guides compete to make themselves heard, instructing international groups clustered by the mind-shattering exhibits whose imagery has so deeply permeated western consciousness. Arab art students sit in groups on the floor, girls in Muslim headscarves, guys in western attire, chatting, laughing, comparing pictures on their mobile phones, whilst sketching assorted antiquities. The backdrop of sound blends with synthesiser droning, wind, thunder, tambura, tablas, chanting, and twelve-string electric guitar coming from my headphones. I’ve started to notice something. Amidst all of this movement the artefacts of Ancient Khem convey a profound stillness.
Moving slowly, savouring every moment, past huge stone figures, up the stairs to the second floor, I’m coming into the vicinity of the most famous archaeological find in the world. An ever denser tumult gathers around the exquisite death mask of Tutankhamun and I will certainly be joining them. I have far greater preparation to appreciate its beauty than when I last saw it as a schoolboy at the British Museum in 1972. I haven’t come just to see the boy king though.
My main reason for being here is a noon appointment marking the anniversary of a perplexing event. It’s with another nearby item that receives far less attention. Large elliptical and rectangular openings on the second floor look down upon the first. Pillars support a balcony walkway which in turn has arched entrances to smaller enclaves. Section 23 is flanked by large figures of the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, standing with arms outstretched, in glass cases. Passing through between them, and looking immediately to my right, in the fourth level of a cabinet full of wood and stucco funerary stele, I see for the first time the object of my quest: exhibit 9422 commemorating Ankh af na Khonsu, an obscure twenty-sixth dynasty priest.
Photo by Andrew Collins. Enhanced by Sue Collins. Taken in April 1997. Year 93.
The stele measures 51.5 by 31 cm. A card from its previous home in the now defunct Boulak Museum numbered 666 gives a hint of why I am here. More brightly colourful than its companion pieces and of more accomplished artistry, it attracts some of the young people to sit in front of it and draw. A plaque on the wall labels the room’s contents as New Empire Funerary Furniture. Panning back out and around from my initial focus on the stele I now notice some of the other items displayed. There’s a cabinet full of wooden hawks, another full of haunting golden-faced busts with nemyss headdresses, all manner of different sized figures, such as dog-headed Anubis, that, in combination with the ebb and flow of synthesiser drones and deep surging sounds that could be mellotron cellos, help to create an outstanding ambiance.
There’s a sound from my headphones now like an extended rumble of thunder from what one commentator likened to a storm in the desert at dawn as I listen to the conclusion to the twenty minutes of music Jimmy Page composed for occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. I feel fortunate to have finally tracked down a bootleg recording of this legendary piece and that a musician friend was able to clean it up in his studio. It has assisted superbly in setting the necessary mood, also giving me a further sense of full-circle as it was Page’s interests that helped begin this journey for me decades ago as well.
There’s a little red book in my pocket and it’s not the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. I take it out as noon approaches. The Book of the Law is supposed to be a text dictated by a non-human intelligence announcing the onset of a new era. The stele was of central importance in its creation, Ankh af na Khonsu being an alleged past-life of its twentieth century scribe, the legendary Aleister Crowley.
Holding my book cover image by the Stele. April 10th 2009.
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It began to dawn on me that history felt like a mighty weird affair. I read top historians and took on board arguments for economic, sociological, and technological determinants but for all the growing mass of data and ideas that filled my head something that felt like it ought to be cohering wasn’t. Yes, if you look at what was happening in Germany following their defeat in the First World War, their treatment by the Allies with the Treaty of Versailles and the economic troubles of the twenties, a resurgence of an aggressive nationalism seemed inevitable. That doesn’t account for the strangeness and severity of form it took.
With the sixties, it is possible to point to a number of economic and technological factors that made the emergence of some sort of youth culture highly likely. That doesn’t really explain why it turned out to be such an outrageous party. The drugs certainly made a difference but they simply can’t bestow talent on mediocrities. How remarkable that as Hitler, Himmler, and their associates reached the climax of their endeavours at Stalingrad and Auschwitz, so the grouping that included John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger, were coming into incarnation.
It seemed to me that the main players of the Nazi nightmare and the swinging sixties were rather specialised groups. They were uniquely over-qualified for the situations that they were born into. The group of characters who were available to take the whole thing to the limit and beyond seem to have been assembled by a brilliant casting agency. The usual ways of looking at history didn’t satisfactorily explain to me why it all turned out to be quite so hideous, quite so ridiculously brilliant. I felt there was a deeper mystery trying to reveal itself.
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In some brief fragments on Gnosticism included in Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword Parsons wrote that ‘The Holy Ghost is the feminine counterpart of Christ – the Sophia. God is manifest in the union of Christ and Sophia.’ ‘Let us celebrate in singing and in dancing, in friendship and in lovemaking, and in all manner of joyous and bountiful and beautiful things that are fitting to the love and worship of God, who made all things. Let us put away fear and envy and hatred and intolerance and all thought of guilt and sin out of our hearts, that we may worthily celebrate our brotherhood in joy and love. In the name of Christ, that is the Son of God, and of Sophia, that is the Daughter of God, and of their union that is God, Amen.’ ‘Formal Christianity has distorted, perverted, and misinterpreted the teachings of Christ. Mankind can only find happiness by rejecting the false doctrines of sin, guilt, fear, hatred and intolerance: and in accepting the gospels of Love.’
From the London Times Oct 5th 1969.
It is in the context of such sensibilities that Parsons Antichrist material must be assessed. Much has been made of him deliberately taking on the role and vowing to spread the Law of Thelema throughout the world in the name of the Beast 666. Despite Israel and Chorazin and a general Revelation ambiance we’re not talking about an Omen movie here. A brief sample of his Manifesto of the Antichrist may hopefully restore some perspective.
‘An end to the pretence, and lying hypocrisy of Christianity. An end to the servile virtues, and superstitious restrictions. An end to the slave morality. An end to prudery and shame, to guilt and sin, for these are of the only evil under the sun, that is fear. An end to all authority that is not based on courage and manhood, to the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police, and An end to the servile flattery and cajolery of mobs, the coronations of mediocrities, the ascension of dolts. An end to conscription, compulsion, regimentation, and the tyranny of false laws.’
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‘I will put a live coal upon your lips, and flowers upon your eyes, and a sword in your hearts, and ye also shall see God face to face. Thus shall we give back its youth to the world, for like tongues of triple flame we shall look upon the Great Deep - Hail unto the Lords of the groves of Eleusis!’ Aleister Crowley. Rites of Eleusis.
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‘No we will not forget who we are Our wild souls still beat Our muscles strain against the bonds When tides of ancient energy surge within We tremble We sit trembling in our cages It is hard for the proud wild to be captive We will not forget who we are We pray that you, beloved, do not forget who we are.’ Timothy Leary. Prison 1970.
The fervour of those times may seem difficult to comprehend. A few factors are crucial to understanding. First of all, in case anyone hasn’t heard, LSD is an extremely powerful substance mindwise. To experience it just after the drab fifties was a bit of a shock to the system to say the least. Those who were a tad disturbed by 9/11 would do well to ponder the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This was the most intense episode of the Cold War. It might just have been the most intense episode not just of the Cold War but the whole of recorded history in as much as a nuclear war was genuinely an imminent strong possibility. Short version: Russia started setting up nuclear missile bases on Cuba within close first strike proximity to the USA whilst stating that they were doing no such thing. America found out and said stop doing that or there will be trouble. An invasion of Cuba and nuclear strike on Russia were seriously planned for. Bombers were loaded and ready to go. For a few weeks global stress levels rose to unprecedented highs. A deal was struck and the missiles removed.
It was as if the enormous collective alchemy stirring since 1945 was reaching a crucial transformative stage. Just over a year later Kennedy was killed as Huxley exited on LSD. Some of the early acid heads felt that LSD and the Bomb were like a kind of yin and yang of the new epoch that needed to be balanced out. Was there some kind of mysterious timing that had revealed such power in the realms of the sub-atomic and the energy field of consciousness all but simultaneously? The world had nearly destroyed itself, the divine king of Camelot (as Kennedy’s presidency came to be known) had been sacrificed. Unless the world caught up in the inner wisdom game very rapidly the final catastrophe could be horribly near. War mongering madmen riddled with Reich’s emotional plague, armoured against the free flow of love and sexuality, ruled the world. Give them some acid and chuck them in a pool full of dolphins and they might just sort it all out. They would probably be at least a bit less inclined to want to kill each other.
I can forgive Timothy Leary his grandiloquence in trying to save the world with LSD. I will cut him some slack for what in hindsight was irresponsibility in encouraging a generation to drop out and thereby facilitating a westward flow of innocents like some children’s crusade that would soon overwhelm the Haight-Ashbury scene and be exploited, abused, and leave some very real human tragedies in its wake. The clinical pre-requisites for a good trip of set and setting would not always be available for some of these unfortunates. We shall examine the more gruesome outcomes of that shortly. In the sixties the sense of how far it was possible to take something dissolved. The space race was the best indicator of that. Huge developments in the history of the human race were occurring in rapid succession. The sky was no longer the limit. If we can put a man on the moon within a decade of deciding we want to do it who says we can’t transform the consciousness of humanity in a similar period of time? Such was the incredible spirit of the age.
Artwork by Adam Scott Miller.
I would like to think my book could serve as a fine christmas present/read.
Give Peace a Chance video. Press triangle to play.
From The Most Dangerous Man in America in the upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus
In October 1966 LSD had been made illegal in the USA. This made a particular trajectory fairly inevitable. Leary became the most bustable person in America. G Gordon Liddy, who later masterminded the Watergate break-in, was an early nemesis, raiding Millbrook in 1966. Leary seemed to become more politicised. He famously appeared, alongside his wife of the time, Rosemary, with John and Yoko for the recording of Give Peace a Chance in a Montreal hotel two years to the day after the release of Sgt Pepper in June 1969. Leary flamboyantly decided to seek election as Governor of California, running against incumbent Ronald Reagan. The campaign slogan was “Come Together” and Lennon started writing a song to promote it. Strangely enough this was when the attempts to thoroughly bust Leary peaked with various sentences for a few minor offences being strung together so that he eventually faced an astonishing twenty years in jail for possession of a small amount of marijuana.
John Lennon found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience in the recently opened Indica book shop in London on a visit with Paul McCartney. He apparently took the contents on board and tripped-out in that reality-tunnel. A particular line lingered. ‘Whenever in doubt, turn off yourmind, relax and float downstream.’ Such was the inspiration for the Beatles first psychedelic track Tomorrow Never Knows that appeared on their 1966 Revolver album. This was one of the most radically experimental musical compositions of the sixties. The basic sound of it was unlike anything heard before. It’s a candidate for the accolade of being their greatest moment, even beyond the coming triumphs of Sgt Pepper. A basic Indian-style drone and processed hypnotic drum beat had backward tapes of guitars, cymbals, and strange tape-loop sounds overlaid to form an appropriate soundscape for Lennon’s double-tracked vocals that seemed to chant as much as sing the lyrics.
John Lennon’s journey was one of the most remarkable of all sixties examples of how far things could move in a short period of time. In 1964 he had been singing, ‘I want to hold your hand.’ A mere two years later he was encouraging his listeners to,
‘Lay down all thought, Surrender to the Void, It is shining It is shining.
That you may see The meaning of within, It is being, It is being,
That Love is all and Love is everyone, It is knowing, It is knowing.’
Within another year it had come to,
‘Limitless undying Love which Shines around me like a million suns, It calls me on and on, across the universe.’
After a chat with Marshall McLuhan, the great sixties media analyst and prophet of the communication age global village where the medium is the message, Timothy Leary was advised that he himself was a vital part of the package he was hoping to disseminate. He needed to cultivate an endlessly positive persona. This wasn’t too difficult for him. He also needed a snappy soundbite slogan for the media advertising age. ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ would resound down through the decades to Leary’s good and to his detriment. It became the equivalent of Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt’ and took precedent as a legacy over Leary’s preferred ‘Think for Yourself. Question authority’.
1967 rapidly manifested events typical of its mythic status. There had already been sizeable stirrings of what would become recognisable as hippieness. Something was building and the need was felt for a larger scale event that could expand it further. Talk of the coming Age of Aquarius was in the air. A date in January was chosen for astrological reasons suggestive of well-aspected communication. Golden Gate Park San Francisco hosted the Human Be-In, a 'Gathering of theTribes’. Mysticism and politics met as chants to Shiva led by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg shared the stage with anti-Vietnam war diatribes and rock music. Leary, fully prepared by McLuhan, now manifested his full acid guru persona, dressed in white and intoning for the first time to a sizeable audience his ‘Turn on, Tune in, Drop out’ mantra. The 30,000-strong crowd smoked plenty of spliffs, tripped-out, and felt generally excited and empowered to see just how many of them there already were. Leary had been the star of the show.
I can forgive Timothy Leary his grandiloquence in trying to save the world with LSD. I will cut him some slack for what in hindsight was irresponsibility in encouraging a generation to drop out and thereby facilitating a westward flow of innocents like some children’s crusade that would soon overwhelm the Haight-Ashbury scene and be exploited, abused, and leave some very real human tragedies in its wake. The clinical pre-requisites for a good trip of set and setting would not always be available for some of these unfortunates. We shall examine the more gruesome outcomes of that shortly. In the sixties the sense of how far it was possible to take something dissolved. The space race was the best indicator of that. Huge developments in the history of the human race were occurring in rapid succession. The sky was no longer the limit. If we can put a man on the moon within a decade of deciding we want to do it who says we can’t transform the consciousness of humanity in a similar period of time? Such was the incredible spirit of the age.
On June 1st 1967 the most legendary of all rock-pop albums was released. With each passing decade perspective on the relative merits of the Beatles Sgt Pepper change. A few things remain constant. Some of it has always seemed brilliant and probably always will. Some of it is a bit weak. Other tracks people are changeable about. Maybe it’s not even the Beatles best album. It does carry a quite extraordinary atmosphere with it that snapshots a stunning period of time and always evokes it. The cover was an important part of the whole charisma of the album as it featured the band lined up in the company of rows of faces of famous people from different fields they had selected. This is where the dream-like thread of narrative that has taken us from the Berlin of 1930 has led.
John Lennon arranged for Aleister Crowley to be among the group featured on the cover. The famous shaven-headed image can be seen along the top row on the left. Early on in the project he had wanted to include Jesus and Hitler as well. Along with Mahatma Gandhi, JC and the Fuhrer never made it to the final version. There’s little to indicate that Lennon really knew much about Crowley at all, beyond his reputation as drug pioneer and general wild man. Just below the Beast, slightly to his right, is Aldous Huxley. It’s like Crowley is standing behind him looking over his shoulder. There they both are at the peak of the Summer of Love in a manner their most psychedelic visions and social prophesying could never have imagined.
A few weeks later, on June 25th, in a major moment for McLuhans’s new communication age global village, the Beatles represented Britain in an unprecedented satellite TV link-up called Our World, performing the specially-composed All You Need is Love to an audience estimated at 400 million. McLuhan himself actually appeared in the Canadian section of the broadcast. The global sensorium was thoroughly massaged. It was the peak of the great wave. Other vibrations were arising that would wither at least some of the flowers.
Paul is the author of Avalonian Aeon, Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus, Mysterium Artorius, The Glastonbury Zodiac and Earth Mysteries UFOlogy,, Glastonbury Psychogeography, The Michael Line, the Qabalah and the Tarot, Atargatis, William Blake and the Glastonbury Gnosis, The Occult Battle of Britain, and Glastonia Aegyptiacus.
Paul is available for lectures, tailored Glastonbury tours and Reiki initiations.
