Strange Days

A teaser snippet from the section Sympathy for the Devil in my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus






Strange days have found us,
Strange days have tracked us down.
They’re going to destroy‘
Our casual joys.’
The Doors. Strange Days.


I feel it’s significant that perhaps the two most notable rock tracks from the year of the Summer of Love carried a mood somewhat at odds with Flower Power. The Beatles A Day in the Life is the final moment of Sgt Pepper but it seems to almost celebrate bleakness and alienation with stupendous intensity.




photo Jane Bown

Beatles - A Day in the life
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Atmospheric footage from recording session of A Day in the Life


The Doors provide another motif from the Crowley Huxley Berlin 1930 dream as they brought Brecht’s Alabama Song forward into 1967 with a version on their first album. The closing track, The End presented an unsettling oedipal psychodrama set to music that seemed to be an appropriate soundtrack for a primal ritual. This was understood by Francis Ford Coppola who would later make use of it in Apocalypse Now (see video of introduction below). Jim Morrison found ‘weird scenes’ and ‘danger on the edge of town’ as he travelled the ‘highway to the end of the night’, a rider on the storm of the snake, Dionysus inciting the maenads to sacrifice him. Fiercely literate and cultured Morrison saw something else that was stirring. If the great ceremony was about to begin and the gods and myths of the ages be reinvented then sex and death might meet at the ‘feast of friends’. The enduring success of the Doors music and Morrison’s status as mythic icon indicates he helped express feelings that others shared.




Introduction to Apocalypse Now featuring the Doors The End


When a two thousand year reality tunnel breaks up, things are not necessarily going to run smoothly. During the sixties the tensions between contrasting generations produced extremes of response amongst the young. There were Nuit’s Love-ins and psychedelia but that was not all. In the heady cocktail many different forms of magic and mysticism flourished. In California in ‘67, if you looked beneath the surface there were a number of groups who seemed to be taking their lead from Ra Hoor Khuit. Vietnam dramatised a lot of the issues. The repression brought down on the hippy drug culture created a lot of anger and then hatred. Not everyone was into Gandhi and putting flowers down soldier’s rifle barrels as protest.

It was forty years ago today: Give Peace a Chance

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.