Abstract

High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture

By Erik Davis

This project interweaves two critical investigations into the history of religions in

America, one theoretical and one historical. The theoretical investigation concerns the question

of religious experience, and particularly how scholars of religion understand this category once

we recognize that to label any experience “religious” already prejudices the phenomenon in

question. Developing the work of Ann Taves, I call for a more fine-grained account of how

forms of extraordinary experience come to be constructed as religious (or mystical, occult, etc.)

through the creative assemblage of existing scripts and templates. However, using the

ontological theories of Bruno Latour and Felix Guattari, this project argues that the

constructionist account of religious experience does not necessarily negate the phenomenological

and pragmatic dimensions of such experiences. In this sense, the project brings an ontologically

rich understanding of constructionism into productive dialogue with the current of American

religious experience initiated by William James.

The scripts and templates associated with well-bounded religious traditions are relatively
easy to identify. However, within the countercultural period, a wide variety of discourses—

religious, psychological, occult, fictional, aesthetic, technological—compete and commingle as

ways of shaping and understanding the myriad of intense, sublime, and profoundly weird

experiences that, through psychedelics and the pursuit of a wide variety of “altered states of

consciousness,” characterize so much countercultural life. Though most studies of the

counterculture focus on the sixties proper, I am interested in tracking the construction of

extraordinary experience into the seventies, when disappointed revolutionaries turned in droves

towards gurus, self-help regimens, and proto-New Age spirituality. While analyzing some of the

sociological dimensions of this influential cultural shift, the project principally investigates three

symptomatic but singular intellectuals: the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the underground

author Robert Anton Wilson, and the future psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna.

Employing their own unique mix of esotericism, social science, irony and fiction, all three men

wrestle with their own extreme bouts of “high weirdness” in ways that reflect critical mutations

in American religious experience.

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the originating inspirations of this book have been with me since my Yale

undergraduate years, which, speaking as a mid-career PhD candidate, now seem a very long time

ago indeed. As such, a complete reckoning of the individuals who have helped this project

toward the light of manifestation would not only be excessively lengthy, but riddled with gaps

imposed by fallible memory and the nebulous and yet pervasive way that our individual efforts

are supported and realized through our relationships with others.

First I would like to thank my thesis committee. Jeffrey Kripal has been a generous and

inspiring advisor who has encouraged me unreservedly to find my own “weird” path through

scholarship even as he laid out an exceptionally useful map of the field and particularly of the

history of religions, whose lineage I now claim as my own. Cary Wolfe has also proved

unremittingly encouraging of my work as both a thinker and a writer, and his work on systems

theory and posthumanism has provided a deeply influential, if mostly implicit, inspiration for

this project. William Parsons has not only proved a superb model for the classroom teaching of

religion and mysticism, but has reliably beamed sunny Bay Area “vibes” in the direction of this

San Francisco native, thereby easing my transition into the strange land of Texas and the stranger

land of academe.
 v

Within the wider community of Rice, I was helped and encouraged by a number of

faculty members as well as fellow graduate students. Claire Fanger, John Stroup, Anne Klein,

Phil Wood, and Richard Smith all helped this project along in important ways, in part by

convening seminars and workshops that called forth excellence. Among my many friends and

conversation partners in the Religion, English, and Philosophy departments, pride of place go to

Dustin Atlas, Derek Woods, Benjamin Kozicki, Mike Griffiths, and Jacob Mills, all of whom

challenged and inspired my thoughts and sharpened by critical acumen. I would particularly like

to thank my colleague Matthew Dillon, who not only generously shared thoughts and references

relevant to our many shared fields of interest, but whose exacting scholarship and discipline have

proven invaluable in innumerable practical ways.

Academic colleagues beyond Texas also proved many words of insight and

encouragement, especially Christian Greer, Marcus Boon, Michael Saler, Alexander van der

Haven, Joshua Ramey, Heather Lukes, Molly McGarry, and Mikita Brottman. Equal waves of

assistance came from beyond the walls of academe. The deep fuel for the project came through

(sometimes desperate) conversations with Mark Pilkington, Jennifer Dumpert, Victoria Nelson,

Fernando Castrillon, and my old friend Jeff Linson. Many others provided precisely the

fragmented reference or concept I needed at the time, or game me the opportunity to work out

my ideas in public. These include Jacques Vallee, Eddy Nix, David Pescovitz, Matt Cardin,

Mike Jay, Earth and Fire Erowid, Matthew Souzis, Juris Ahn, Craig Baldwin, and Uel

Aramchek. Special thanks to Finn McKenna for providing me a rare peek at the most important

of his father’s unpublished writings.

This book would not have been possible had not I been granted the extraordinary

opportunity to provide editorial assistance to Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem after they
 vi

madly took on the task of wrangling eight thousand largely hand-scrawled pages of Philip K.

Dick’s Exegesis into a book, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011.

Thanks to both of them for inviting me into the engine room of VALIS. The intertwined worlds

of Philip K. Dick scholarship and fandom also gave me the opportunity to present earlier

versions of this material, along with providing an ongoing conceptual and imaginal base of

operations. Here I would like to thank David Gill, David Hyde, and Alexander Dunst for inviting

me to participate in their respective PKD conferences, Fred Dolan for inviting me to share my

PKD work at the SLSA, and to acknowledge as well as conversations and vital data-swaps with

James Burton, Chris Mays, Richard Doyle, Patrick Clark, John Fairchild, Lawrence Rickels, and

Ted Hand. Finally, I must thank two professors at Yale who watched over my initial foray into

PKD criticism so many years ago, David Rodowick and Richard Halpern.
 CONTENTS

Abstract ii

Acknowledgments iv

INTRODUCTION: High Weirdness 1

High Times
A Wayward Word
Weird Naturalism
Reality Construction Company
Uncanny Criticism

1 The Seventies Self: Spinning Religious Experience 54

The Centrifugal Self

The Varieties of Talking About Religious Experience
Illuminating Differences
Reconsidering Religious Experience
Bottoms Up
The Altered States of America
Magnetic Currents
Self Tech

2 Magic Molecules: The Birth of Psychedelic Occulture 135

Good Friday Any Day

Perennialists
Pranksters
Ride the Snake
Mystic Sixties
 vii

Head Masters
Media Mysteries
Seventies Occulture

3 La Chorrera: The Scientific Romance of the Brothers McKenna 198

Freaky
Crypto Rap
Pharmakon
Shroom With a View
Grammatology
Resonance
The Stone
The Experiment
Weird Media
Latour’s Razor
Flickering Beings
The Tale of Two Books
Time Waves for No One
Guides

4 Hail Eris!: Robert Anton Wilson’s Skeptical Illuminations 312

Plot, Counterplot
Illuminate Us!
Hodge Podge
Fnord
Guerilla Ontologist
Operation Mindfuck
Religia Discordia
Eldritch Palmer…
…and his Holy Hoax
The Method of Science
Tantric Thelema
Chapel Perilous
Dog Star Days

5 VALIS Calling: Philip K. Dick’s Trash Transmission 438

West Marin Blues

Fabulous Freak
Flow My Tears
Dia-Gnosis
 viii

Bullshit Artist
Rending Accounts
ΙΧΘΥΣ
Exegesis Unbound
The Collage of Cosmic Consciousness
Snatching Voices
Dreambook
Sacred Seeking
Gnostic Comparativism
The Hymn of the Signal
The Conundrum of the Call
Missive

CONCLUSION: Profane Illuminations 581

Bibliography 595
 Something always escapes.

—William James

INTRODUCTION: HIGH WEIRDNESS

This dissertation is about, and inspired by, high weirdness, a mode of culture and

consciousness that, in my telling, reached a peculiar peak in the early 1970s, when the handful of

highly intelligent writers and psychonauts that make up my subjects pushed hard on the

boundaries of reality—and got pushed around in return. I raise the flag of high weirdness as both

a standard (of the unstandard) and a warning of sorts, like the indication “here be dragons” that

medieval map-makers scrawled on the margins of the known world. The margins that our avatars

of high weirdness explored were, admittedly, more cognitive and cultural than geographical. But

the phantasms they both fought and fell for in those margins were as monstrous and florid in a

way as any fire-breathing worm: religious obsession, overwhelming synchronicity, paranormal

psychedelia, cosmic conspiracy theory, pathological delusion, paranoid pulp fiction, and other

dimensions of that cultural zone that the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick called “the trash

stratum.”

Indeed, this project began as a study of Philip K. Dick and the series of extraordinary

experiences he underwent in early 1974, when a delivery woman with a curious Christian

necklace knocked on the door of his apartment in Orange County, California. Peculiar things had
 2

been happening in Dick’s life and texts for decades, but the series of perceptual anomalies,

synchronicities, oracular dreams, and close encounters that characterized the period he called

“2/3/74” really take the cake. Equally amenable to the discourse of visionary gnosis, science-

fiction fabulation, and psychopathology, 2/3/74 offers an exemplary locus of high weirdness in

the history of American (and Californian) consciousness. Descending with the force of

revelation, 2/3/74 nonetheless did not deliver a coherent message or prophecy, and Dick spent

the rest of his eight years on this planet feverishly hashing through the meaning of his

experiences in his fiction, his letters, his published essays, and the Exegesis—the immense and

enigmatic private journal that eventually clocked in at over 8000, largely hand-written pages.

Though Dick’s late “religious turn” puzzled or repelled his earliest critics, some of whom

feared he had gone mad, the novels he wrote in this period have now been richly recuperated by

the growing numbers of science-fiction critics and literary theorists drawn to his work. As a

historian of religions, I wanted to approach this period of Dick’s life from a different angle, one

informed by the study of mystical experience, the hermeneutics of religious discourse, and the

cultural history of American spirituality in the postwar period, with special emphasis on the

psychedelic transformation of esotericism. I aimed to shed light on Dick’s gnostic, esoteric, and

theological sources; contextualize Dick within California’s unique spiritual counterculture; shed

light on the dynamics of altered states of consciousness and their construction as religiously

meaningful events; and, perhaps most importantly, directly engage the eccentric religious,

esoteric, and comparativist hermeneutics—and the reflection on such hermeneutics—that Dick

himself practiced in his late work.

I still intend to get to a lot of that. But in the course of navigating 2/3/74 and the matrix of

rabbit holes that is the Exegesis, I realized that there was a fundamental problem in my project.
 3

At the end of the day, it was still a story of one individual, albeit a remarkable individual who

managed to be at once incredibly singular and disturbingly multiple. But it is tough to make one

guy, largely working on his own, into the emblem of a significant mutation in American

religious experience and identity. Poking around the network of Dick’s associates,

commentators, and fellow travelers, I discovered a cluster of sometimes eerily similar

experiences and more-or-less autobiographical texts among a number of countercultural figures,

many of whom, it must be said, also either resided in or spent serious time in California in the

early 1970s. These include Dick’s correspondence pal Robert Anton Wilson, who spent most of

1974 in a “reality tunnel” in which the esoteric conspiracy theories he had cranked out in his

pulp fiction masterpiece Illuminatus! (co-written with Robert Shea) intruded into his life in the

guise of apparent communications from discarnate aliens linked to the star system Sirius. No less

weird was the experience of Terence McKenna, a brilliant former Berkeley student and

psychedelic intellectual who returned from the Amazon in 1971 with a tale about the mother of

all trips: a mushroom journey, taken with his brother Dennis, whose gnostic, paranormal, and

science-fictional overlays McKenna would later compare explicitly (if somewhat audaciously) to

2/3/74. Two years later, the comet Kahoutek triggered the “starseed transmissions” that catalyzed

a major intellectual and cognitive shift in the mind of the then-imprisoned Timothy Leary, which

in turn heavily influenced Robert Anton Wilson.

All the memoirs and accounts by these men blend elements of religious mysticism and

esoteric gnosis with cybernetic media, alien communications, and an embrace of altered states at

once pragmatic and marked by popular underground culture. They are also all wonderful texts,

tales that were published or framed as non-fictions, but non-fictions haunted by, at the very least,

ontological phantasms that suggest the genres of weird fantasy and science fiction. As such, they
 4

present the wonderful opportunity for a relatively close comparative study that moves beyond the

confines of a single nervous system. The fact that all of these stories unfold, at least in part, in

coastal California in the early to mid-1970s suggests that, at the very least, there are specific

Zeitgeist engines operating behind the scenes, and that some serious cultural archaeology is

called for, work that we will lay out early in this volume.

At the same time, though some of our avatars of high weirdness had personal connections

or were aware of one another’s work, they also found themselves in different generations, social

locations, and intellectual/artistic milieus. Terence McKenna (born 1946) was the only one who

belonged to the sixties youth culture, though Robert Anton Wilson (b. 1932) played a great job

of catch-up, immersing himself in the LSD scene, the occult revival, and a hedonic libertarian

anarchism. And though all are figures were marked by the postwar presence of LSD and other

psychedelics, Philip K. Dick (b. 1928) only tripped a few times. Finally, though many of these

figures express a Promethean, heretical and even skeptical attitude towards religious experience,

Dick includes traditionally Christian tropes and sensibilities within his countercultural

constructions.

My decision to call all of this “high weirdness” draws from my long-ago encounter with

Rev. Ivan Stang’s 1988 catalog High Weirdness By Mail: A Directory of the Fringe: Mad

Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks & True Visionaries, a book worth briefly tarrying with here. Stang

divided his directory of “crank literature” into categories like “Weird Science,” “New Age

Saps,” and “Cosmic Hippie Drug-Brother Stuff,” which in turn collected capsule reviews and

contact information for a variety of niche organizations like Christian Technocracy, Saucer

Technology, the Warlords of Satan, and the Good Sex for Mutants Dating League. Stang’s

volume was part of a micro-trend of fringe catalogs that marked the eighties underground—one
 5

also thinks of the Loompanics Catalog, Amok Books’ Dispatch series, Mike Gunderloy’s

metazine Factsheet Five, CoEvolution Quarterly, and Ted Schultz’s Fringes of Reason: A Whole

Earth Catalog. These and other compendia represent a time, long before the World Wide Web,

when the counterculture had splintered into a proliferation of subcultures accessible largely

through alternate media, amd particularly zines. These circuits of marginal mediation were by no

means restricted to post-sixties currents, but included a rainbow array of American alternatives to

a mainstream or mass media culture. Many of these subcultures, including holistic health

movements, Ufology, paranormal science, feverish rightwing Christianity, antinomian parody

religions, neopaganism, and an ascendent New Age, could be placed in the category of

alternative religion.

The tone of these compendia varied widely: Amok presented a rictus grin of nihilism,

while Gunderloy maintained a scrupulous impartiality. Stang’s attitude towards the groups and

individuals he wrote about hovered somewhere between Dada celebration and juvenile snark.

“Appreciate unexpected glimpses of the strange ‘realities’ behind religions other than your

own?” he asked in the introduction. “Entranced by the thought process of the mentally ill?”1 In

other words, Stang’s notion of high weirdness was not something most of the groups he

cataloged were aiming for or interested in. Instead, high weirdness signified, but only in part, a

deliriously ironic distance cultivated by Stang and his readers, a parasitic effect of perverse

enjoyment that could be generated, Stang showed, from a mail-order trawl through the mediated

margins of American culture, haunted by conspiracy, delusion, and “the freak show of faith.”

Stang was perfectly upfront about the role that mockery played in his curation of American

fringe religion, though the smirk was only one element in a deliberately heterogenous mask of

1. Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail: A Directory of the Fringe: Mad Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks & True
Visionaries (Simon & Schuster, 1988), 10.
 6

attitudes that included rationalist skepticism, irrationalist pranking, and a kind of celebratory

bemusement that can only be called wonder. Indeed, part of the fun lay in keeping open the

possibility, at least in some cases, that “true visionaries” lurked among the kooks.

But the truly visionary warp of Stang’s project lay in the fact that neither himself nor his

readers could keep their distance from the phenomenon at hand. Part of the problem was

categorical. Alongside many naively or unintentionally weird groups, Stang’s catalog also

included many comic artists, zinesters, satirists, and musicians who, like himself, were self-

consciously mining, recombining, and rebroadcasting a subcultural aesthetic that Stang himself

was helping to fashion. Such intentional high weirdness also characterizes the organization for

which Stang still serves as Reverend to this day: the Church of the SubGenius. Most simply

characterized as a parody religion, the Church, first developed by Stang and Philo Drummond at

the end of the 1970s in a variety of zines, is most centrally associated with its prophet: J.R.

“Bob” Dobbs, a 1950s salesman whose grinning Ward Cleaver-like visage is invariably pictured

with pipe.

This goofy but strangely unnerving image needs no giveaway announcements— Ceci

n’est pas un prophete. Beyond the iconography of suburban America in the 1950s, the Church

also drew its matter from a wide variety of conspiracy theories, UFO narratives, pulp fictions,

and apocalyptic religious forms, with Scientology, fundamentalist Christianity—then flexing its

political muscles as the Moral Majority—and the ascendant New Age coming in for focused and

roughly equal drubbing for their copious “bulldada.” As we will see in a later chapter, the

Church of the Subgenius drew a great deal of inspiration, lore, and tone from Discordianism, an

earlier, more individualistic, and less pop culture-saturated parody religion whose ironic

mysteries, slapstick anarchist politics and terrible puns were transmitted into the seventies
 7

counterculture principally through Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s 1975 Illuminatus!

trilogy.

But for all the bad puns and learned satire, Stang and other leading SubGenii would also

insist that their religion was real. However you interpret this second-order irony—as a

paradoxical mode of sincerity, or a bid for tax breaks—it affirms and announces the disruptive

power of religious fictions, a faith—or better said, a procedure—that some sociologists of

religion now identify with “postmodern religion” or even “hyper-real religion.”2 This slippery

sense of self-reference is key: in the section of his High Weirdness catalog called “More Weird

Religion,” Stang listed his own Church under the heading “The One Sane Anchor In This Raging

Sea Of False Belief.” He did, however, also include other similar anchors, such as Robert Anton

Wilson, the Discordion co-founder Kerry Thornley, and fellow travelers like Antero Alli and

Hakim Bey. With these shout-outs, Stang let the mask slip: high weirdness was not simply an

ironic category for eccentric and naive chunks of American cultural detritus, but a self-reflexive

engagement with those religious materials, even a religious tradition or esoteric current of its

own. In this tradition, whose spectral currency flows throughout this project, the object of high

weirdness is folded back into the subject, a Möbius strip of cultural and cognitive positioning

that helps establish the enigmatic topography of the term.

Since Stang’s book, high weirdness has also become a subcultural term of art for a mode

of extraordinary experience, one most often associated with paranormal activity, occult

phenomena, synchronicities, and psychedelic voyages. In this sense of the term, which is closer

to the one I am developing in this project, high weirdness occurs when the peculiar logics

2. See, for example, Adam Possamai, Religion and Popular Culture a Hyper-Real Testament, (New York: P.I.E.-
Peter Lang, 2005); also the discussion in Carole Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith
(Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
 8

associated with various marginal cultural narratives—particularly those concerning conspiracy

theories, extraterrestrials, esotericism, and fantastic pulp fictions—intrude forcefully, uncannily,

and sometimes absurdly into the texture of lived experience. Such a formulation, of course, begs

many questions, including the question of “experience,” which some cognitive psychologists and

scholars of religion would like to expunge from the vocabulary of the human sciences entirely.

Here I want to insist that by “experience” I don’t mean some essential or “pure”

immediacy that might ground religious or metaphysical claims or behaviors in the foundations of

subjectivity. As we will see, I hold that experience unfolds within extensive networks of cultural

materials, information technologies, and psychological apparatuses that are both individual and

transpersonal. In that sense, experience is always “mediated,” which does not mean, however,

that it disappears, or that its sometimes extraordinary singularity can be factored away by the

invocation of psychological, sociological or neurological conditions. In this I also cleave to an

older, often disparaged, but deeply relational approach to the study of religious events: a radical

empiricism or phenomenological orientation that takes both the substance and surface of

experience seriously, and that does not believe that robust explanations of experience—reductive

or otherwise—suffice to resolve the existential and ontological enigmas and ruptures opened up

by our most extraordinary, unsettling, and even pathological encounters.

Here, as an example of a singularly bizarre but strangely mediated experience, is a trip

report included in Jim DeKorne’s 1992 text Psychedelic Shamanism, an innovative and

imaginative discussion of psychedelic phenomenology that includes a good deal of DIY detail on

various esoteric preparations. In the following account, an anonymous colleague of DeKorne

concocted a pharmacological analogue to the Amazonian brew ayahuasca by combining eight

grams of Peganum harmala seeds with ten grams of the traditional DMT-containing leaves of
 9

Psychotria viridis, both purchased through a mail-order catalog. After swallowing the vile brew

that resulted, the phenomenology began. He soon began to see mosaic tapestries, whose vaguely

“Aztec” patterns seemed at once organic and calculated. “And then…

the high weirdness began. The tapestries disappeared and were replaced by darkness.
Soon stalagmites and floor-to-ceiling columns appeared. I was in a cave with rock
formations that resembled trees designed by Dali—seemingly vegetable and mineral at
the same time. As I “moved” among them, I noticed one that was much larger than the
others. Getting closer, I noticed a large crack in its side, and then that the interior was
hollow and illuminated by a pale blue light.

It was then that I noticed the entity. About the size of a large dog, but with reptilian
characteristics. (The word “dragon” popped in and out.) It moved toward me the moment
our eyes met. Only about eight feet of approach was necessary for it to press its face
against the crack in the column. (Have you seen the Sci-fi classic “It Came from Outer
Space”? There was a slight resemblance between the space monsters and this being.) I
feel now that here I blew it. This being wanted to get close to me, yet I did not speak nor
did I move closer. I forgot that I was a participant and not merely an observer. Time
passed as we stared at each other. Finally this creature made a kissing movement with its
“lips” and a glowing blue ball emerged from its mouth through the crack and hung in
space. The rest of the image faded, but the ball—in 3-D—hung in my bedroom for some
minutes.

In this exemplary scene of high weirdness, mere experience is replaced with the more

unsettling event of an encounter, an encounter with an Other who pops out of the phantasmagoric

scene after returning the gaze. Here, as readers, most of us instantly fall away towards other

explanatory registers, such as temporary psychosis, pharmacological derangement, or, as Jodi

Dean does in Aliens in America, political alienation returned as an alien “symptom.”

 10

The difficulty we have with staying close to the phenomenological account is, crucially,

mirrored by the author himself. By remaining a mere “observer” of the scene, he falls short of

the full encounter. Hovering around the pivot of reason and madness, detachment and delusion,

he reflects an ambivalence that is crucial for high weirdness. Similarly key in this account is the

presence of popular culture fantasies, which we find here in the reference to a B-movie monster,

to Dali’s dorm-room biomorphs, and to the iconography of dragons. Just as the two-dimensional

tapestry was replaced with a topologically complex imaginal space—the 3-D cave supported by

hollowed pillars—so too might the entire encounter be placed in turn within the higher

dimensional folds that characterize high weirdness, whose various psychological, neurological,

cultural, political, and cosmic networks both compose and exceed the individual imagination.

The complexity of this knot is considerable, and seems almost designed to elude attempts at easy

mapping. One angle of approach, however, lies right under our noses: the concept, significance,

and affective resonance of the phrase high weirdness, a wayward term of art to which we must

now turn to set up the complex ontological template of what is to follow.

High Times

The high in my title High Weirdness is, on one level, a simple measure of relative

intensity, as in high anxiety, or of large numbers, as in high frequency or high cost. These are

only some of the resonances of a highly polysemic word, which can described a spatial location

(high mountains), power (high status), and even liminality, as in high seas, which are beyond the

legal jurisdiction or borders of any nation-state. But, in addition to these terms, the word high

inevitably invokes exuberant states of intoxication as well, and while the high of high weirdness
 11

is a measure of intensity, verticality, and liminality, it is most intimately tied to the condition of

being high on psychoactive substances.

The OED tracks this use back to the seventeenth century, with Thomas May’s minimalist

translation of Lucan: “he’s high with wine.” In the postwar era, the word was only infrequently

associated with alcohol, but increasingly took up with a long list of pharmacological instigators:

cannabis, psychedelics, cocaine, amphetamines, heroin. That said, the rhetoric of the high should

never be reduced to a index of drug use or a synonym of intoxication. Indeed, the early seventies

also saw the rise of phrases like “natural high” and “high on life.” Though often offered as a

replacement for the drug culture, as in the Christian writer Louis Savary’s 1971 youth-oriented

psychology book Getting High Naturally, these terms also remind us that the condition of being

high is not identical to the presence of a substance or its particular psycho-physiological

properties, but refers more to the way we hold, interpret, or ride those markers. As David Lenson

notes, being high is less about what we perceive than how we feel about what we perceive; as

such, “a drug’s affect outweighs its effect.”3 And these affects in turn encompass a wide variety

of dynamic states and evocative feelings—buoyancy, bliss, dreaminess, detachment,

exhilaration, mania, vision, ascent.

This latter note is particularly important here, as it points to the profound tug of

verticality that hides in the high. Lenson observes that the term “high” suggests a “rising above,

the obtaining of a superior overview.”4 From Lenson’s socio-political perspective, this rising

above represents a very specific, anti-consumerist transcendence: a mode of pleasure that

exceeds the insatiable desire driving capitalist consumption, what Burroughs calls “the algebra of

need.” Given the ease with which consumer capitalism absorbs psychoactive states, Lenson’s

3. David Lenson, On Drugs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 69.

4. Ibid, 73.
 12

stance may be excessively utopian. But we can go much farther, or higher, with this vector of

ascent. For such rising above also invokes innumerable facets of religious discourse, where one

will find copious images of mountain tops and stairways to heaven, of world trees and angelic

spheres above the empyrean. Rhetorically, much religious language is marked with the immense

exhortatory pressure to seek what is above, to ascend and quit the low world and the heavy flesh.

The highness of the modern drug user, like the “peak experiences” of the New Age seeker or the

penthouse suites of the ultrarich, is a secular trace of this transcendental legacy, one that in

certain cases—with the psychedelics certainly, and cannabis as well—retains a complex

interpretive and phenomenological engagement with spiritual and religious language and

imagery.

Drugs make people “high” not simply because the modern West retains a cultural legacy

that associates the heights with desirable or holy states of mind and being. Like the rhetoric and

imagery of light, the figure of height pervades too many religious, mythological, and ethical

domains to write off as a pure cultural contingency. That leaves us, then, with the suspicion that

the links between height and abstract values like transcendence are rooted in some sort of general

ontological condition. One way of sussing out this condition is through the sorts of comparativist

moves enjoined by a figure like Mircea Eliade, who gathered hosts of examples from across the

written records of religion, mythology, and ethnography to develop his influential and deeply

contested arguments about the fundamental patterns of religious life. These debates are too

arcane to enter into here, but it is important to emphasize that, for all his over-reliance on the

notion of shared ontological structures (what Jung called “archetypes”), Eliade rooted many of

his comparisons in the embodied actuality of human life on our particular planet. As such, some
 13

of his evidence and argumentation can be relatively smoothly ported to the increasingly

biological, neo-Darwinian, and cognitivist frameworks of contemporary scholarship.

For example, Eliade held that the cultural values of “the high” derive from the sky, the

actual sky—blue, stormy, blazing and then blackened with points of light—that all sighted

humans confront throughout their lives, whether or not they think of it as “the heavens.” For

Eliade, some of the symbolic associations of height are, as it were, already carried by the

physical existence of the sky. “The sky ‘symbolizes’ transcendence, power and changelessness

simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful.”5 This sort of

essentialism can be questioned of course—does the sky, with its weather and wandering stars,

really embody “changelessness”? Nonetheless, Eliade is right to look for the kernels of

comparison, especially around a basic notion like height, in some of the existential facticity we

encounter as earthbound humans.

Today a more modest and empirical version of such thinking can be found in their

anthropological notion of conceptual metaphors developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

The basic argument of the authors is that all human thinking—even abstract scientific concepts

or philosophical reasoning—is inextricable from metaphors whose “experiential basis” lies in

our bodies and our interaction with fundamental elements of nature and human culture, like food,

or journeys. One category of such metaphors they describe as “orientational,” since they depend

on our basic physical orientation in space. Though the authors acknowledge that different

cultures interpret these orientations differently, they nonetheless argue for the vast and

systematic extent of the positive metaphoric orientation of “UP.” In English, desirable

instantiations of status, health, mood, virtue, quality, and cognitive power, are all described

5. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 39.
 14

through variations of UP, which of course also lies behind the many meanings of “high” sited

above. Lakoff and Johnson’s carnal conceptual metaphors go a long way toward affirming the

basic poesis of human cognition—including rationality—and I take these lessons to heart. At a

time when the rigorous associations that undergird comparison remain highly unfashionable in

the study of religion, Lakoff and Johnson point towards a bodily and biological domain of

fundamental metaphors that can not only illuminate the “poetic” grounds of conceptual

thought—including religious thought—but also suggest very concrete points for robust

comparisons across cultures. Such deeply embodied work will, I believe, reveal more substance

to Eliade’s admittedly excessive pattern recognition than is currently acknowledged.

That said, there is another current of thought that helps explain the metaphoric and

conceptual depth of the high, a current that, I believe, turns us away from the confident

materialist foundationalism that ultimately restricts Lakoff and Johnson and towards a more

phenomenological view. In Dream and Existence, the existential psychoanalyst Ludwig

Binswanger draws attention to the pervasive similes of rising and falling found in the description

of moods, values, dreams, and concepts. He acknowledges the strength of the notion, which

anticipates Lakoff and Johnson, that holds that language draws expressions from the sensory

sphere to indicate “psychic characteristics and processes.” But he ultimately rejects this

foundationalist move on existential and phenomenological grounds. Invoking Husserl and

Heidegger, Binswanger writes

When, for example, we speak of a high and a low tower, a high and a low tone, high and
low morals, high and low spirits, what is involved is not a linguistic carrying over from
one sphere of Being [the sensory-motor sphere] to the others, but, rather, a general
meaning matrix in which all particular regional spheres have an equal ‘share’…
 15

In Binswanger’s view, what lies beneath the various uses of high and low is not the body

orienting itself in physical space, but an “ontological existential” vector of movement from high

to low or low to high, one that manifests itself in mood, in movement, in cognitive work. Though

falling and rising are deployed in many contexts, they “are not themselves derivable from

anything else. Here we strike bottom ontologically.”6 This phenomenological basis is also, “to be

found in all religious, mythical, and poetic images of the ascension of the spirit and the earthly

weight or pull of the body.” Binswanger thus resists the physicalist foundationalism of Lakoff

and Johnson, which argues for a determined root in the diurnal body, and instead affirms a

phenomenological root in experience itself, including the experience of only marginally sensory-

motor domains. “Language, the imagination of the poet, and—above all—the dream, draw from

this essential ontological structure,” says Binswanger. And we of course can add religious

fabulation to this list as well.

However, it is in Binswanger’s attention to the dream that the deeper implications of this

existential and phenomenological view come to the fore in ways that illuminate psychedelic

religiosity and the high weirdness to come. To understand this, let’s return to Lakoff and

Johnson, who based their anthropological theory on the notion that a metaphor “can serve as a

vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis.”7 But what is an

experiential basis for us? Who are we? Obviously our experience of tripping and falling, or of

rising up refreshed from a nap, help shape the “general meaning matrix” of highs and lows. But

the experiential basis for such a useful conceptual metaphor also lies in those dreams in which

we soar into the empyrean, and plunge into infernal darkness. In this way, says Binswanger, we

6. Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream & Existence, edited by Keith Hoeller (Seattle, WA: Review of
Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986), 83.
 16

can understand these basic meaning matrixes more through poetry, myth, and dream than

through science and philosophy, because the former acknowledge that our existential essence—

Dasein, in Binswanger’s Heideggerean lingo—“in no way lies openly revealed, but…loves to

conceal itself ‘in a thousand forms’.”8 Poems, myths, and, I will suggest, the visions of high

weirdness (psychedelic or pathological), point to a self that cannot be snugly fitted into an

“individual body in its outward form” but operates in multiple frameworks and ontological

modes. This is the self without foundation, discovered to be already constituted through

experience, and is phenomenologically bracketed or enigmatic from the get-go. This is “the

primal subject of that which rises and falls” in all domains, very much including dream.

As Foucault puts it in his early essay on Binswanger’s text, dreams bring forth “that

which in Existenz is more irreducible to history,” a transcendent mode of freedom and world

creation linked to a dialectical mode of imagination whose dynamics we will return to later in

this dissertation.9 What is important here is that Binswanger’s concern with the existential

dimension of highs and lows shifts the discussion from an anthropological frame (which, like

Lakoff and Johnson, “analyzes man as man within his human world”) to a properly ontological

one concerned with creative being. “One must turn to the vertical dimension to grasp existence

making itself,” Foucault writes. In other words, the vertical dimension “is existence itself

indicating, in the fundamental direction of the imagination, its own ontological foundation.”10

A more contemporary voicing of Binswanger and Foucault’s emphasis on the vertical

dimension can be found in the work of Peter Slotrerdijk. “Vertical tension” is Sloterdijk’s name

for the force, at once ontological and anthropological, that compels us to craft and employ such

7. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 18.
8. Foucault and Binswanger, 84.
9. Ibid, 75.
10. Ibid, 66.
 17

technologies, to push and transform ourselves, to seek the heights. Sloterdijk’s notion allows him

to understand and even valorize the call of transcendence and intense ascesis that characterizes

so many traditional religious forms, from the Upanishads to Buddhism to Christian monasticism,

but he does so without bothering with theology or metaphysics. What is animating these

religious forms, essentially, is vertical tension, and the brilliant and sometimes desperate

anthropotechnics that respond to that tension by transforming practitioners.

As such, Sloterdijk, who spent time at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the

1970s, praises the power and ingenuity of many of the practices that undergird various religious

traditions. But he also writes from and for a world forever changed by the Enlightenment and

death of God announced by Nietzsche. Though the horizontal logic of immanent or this-worldly

modernity has drastically diminished the pull of otherworldly transcendence and its attendant

regimens, the Indian rope trick of vertical tension continues to compel. In contrast to the literally

“depressing” attitudes of realism, vertical tension establishes a “primary surrealism” in the work

of humanity’s self-crafting: the swerve of mutation.

Sloterdijk finds modernity’s surreal masters of the vertical among artists, athletes,

psycho-spiritual practitioners, and, most poetically, acrobats. “Whoever looks for humans will

find ascetics, and whoever observes ascetics will discover acrobats.”11 In other words, the

vertical dimension is not something to resolve by grasping some metaphysical belief structure, or

by prosaically anchoring oneself in quotidian habits, but by maintaing a precarious field of

tension that we continually cross over, fashioning ourselves by overcoming ourselves through

challenge, discipline, and practice.

11. Peter Sloterdijk, trans. Wieland Hoban, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge, UK;
Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 62.
 18

Of course, we are still in the shadow of Nietzsche here, that great philosopher of the

heights, of higher men and highest values, whose work, Sloterdijk writes, stands as “a witness to

the vertical dimension without God.”12 Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of

the future witnesses a tightrope walker prepared to perform in front of a crowd. And it is here

that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero

of the spirit. “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves,” says Zarathustra.

“Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome

mankind?” Humanity is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that

passes over the abyss. In premodern religions, Slotedijk’s vertical tension pulled upwards, but for

we moderns it instead provides the tension that allows a leap forward.

That said, Zarathustra is unclear about the exact stages or techniques that might lead us

mere humans to the ubermensch, and Nietzsche is unclear about whether he thinks such a

manifestation is an actual historical possibility given the cultural, technological, and spiritual

quagmire he prophesied for the modern West. The question, in a sense, remains open, which

leaves room, at the very least, for continued experiment with heights (which of course also

means a continued confrontation with the depths). This is why, elsewhere, Nietzsche describes

the philosophers of the future as those who attempt.13 Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a

predilection for risky behavior, such philosophers and free spirits are “curious to a fault,

researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Their

truths are only their truths, not everyone’s, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit,

at least as guests.”14

12. Ibid, 39.

13. Versucher in German, a term that also denotes experiment. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Beyond good and evil,
trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39
14. Nietzsche, 42.
 19

Today such Overman experiments might remind us of the vitamin-munching, bio-

hacking transhumanists, a catch-all term for a wide variety of groups and individuals fashioning

the protocols and programs of radical human enhancement through science and technology.

Here, in a deeply atheistic sensibility, vertical tension remains as the “up” in “uploading,” the

fantasy of immortality through the algorithmic replication of the software of the self, who now

can inhabit the cloud. But though transhumanists are fond of quoting Zarathustra on the

Overman, their obsession with life extension—if not much of the program—also recalls the

resentiment against time and finitude that Nietzsche so loathed.15

Another variety of such experimental philosophers, I believe, can be found in our avatars

of high weirdness, who represent, to varying degrees and in varying ways, a more esoteric

template for the transhumanism whose desires and discourse was only just beginning to emerge

in their era. In these experiments and experiences, the self itself was put on the line, and the

world revealed by science and technology was forced to resonate with the world revealed by the

poetic and religious imagination. In this sense, they could be seen as shamans, but only in the

specifically modern and acrobatic sense that Terence and Dennis McKenna gives the shaman in

their 1975 text The Invisible Landscape, where they write that:

the shaman's psychic life is not unlike the unnaturally dexterous dances he performs at
the height of his ecstasy; it is a constant balancing act, as though he were a psychic tight-
rope walker on the razor's edge between the external world and the bizarre, magical, often
terrifying world within.16

15. For more on the relationship of Nietzsche to transhumanism, see Michael Zimmerman, “Last Man or
Overman?”, http://integrallife.com/integral-post/last-man-or-overman (Accessed March 2014).
16. Terence K McKenna, and Dennis McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 26.
 20

Of course, the McKennas were transforming the anthropological archetype of “the

shaman” into a model for their own activity, and it is in this sense that all of our avatars of high

weirdness were functioning as experimental shamans. Whether or not their inner worlds were

opened up through paranormal protocols, psychoactive substances, esoteric practices, or the

vagaries of psychopathology, those worlds were bizarre, magical, and sometimes terrifying.

That’s interesting enough, and gives us some remarkable snapshots of how religious

experience was mutating into weirdness. But high weirdness is something else, something more

sublime and disorienting. High weirdness describes the tension on the psychic tight-rope

walker’s razor’s edge: the surreal and flickering cross-talk between the external world and the

inner world, whose distinctions begin to break down, to fold within one another, to blur.

Balancing on such weirdness—and the willingness to fall—demands an existential commitment

that, like both the shaman and the experimental philosopher, becomes an avocation of the

outside, the beyond. But it also relies on a culturally coded and prepared inside—a meaningful or

substantive interiority that itself is enfolded from an exterior symbolic realm inhabited by

cultural stories, material idols, and collective practices. The singularity of individual experience

can never be reduced to a purely sociological or cultural plane, but it can never be divorced from

it either. To understand the shamans of high weirdness, then, we must look a bit more at the

turbulent religious discourses that characterizes the sixties and early seventies, and particularly

the language and methodologies of the occult. For something weird happens to the vertical

tension during the counterculture: it starts to pull, not just up, but out—far out.
 21

A Wayward Word

The roots of weirdness lie in the substantive wyrd, a common Old English word, related

to similar terms in other northern tongues. In the old language of Beowulf, as well as the Middle

English of Chaucer, wyrd is compassed by the operations of destiny, with auguries, and with the

Fates as the personified agents of necessity. The adjective is first found in the phrase weird

sisters, which was used by Scottish poets to describe the classical Fates—the Roman Parcae—

before Shakespeare attached it to the witches of Macbeth. But Shakespeare’s spelling of weird is,

well, a bit weird—“weyrd,” “weyward,” and “weyard” appear in the first folio, but never

“weird.”

These three alternate spellings link weird with wayward, a word used frequently by

Shakespeare to denote the capricious and willful refusal to follow rule or reason. This suggests to

some Macbeth scholars that, in addition to their oracular knowledge, the three witches derive

their unquestionable uncanny power from their willful resistance to the norm, a turning away

from the center that one scholar calls “centrifugal.”17 The “weird” that enters modern English,

then, suggests both the knowledge of necessity, and the perverse and chaotic twist away from the

law. The weird is the way of the Other.

In its adjectival drift, “weird” develops an increasingly aesthetic register, one that

bloomed, unsurprisingly, in the hands of the Romantics. Shelley especially enjoyed the term,

with its occult aura, and compared himself in one verse epistle to “some weird

Archimage…plotting dark spells, and devilish enginery.”18 Shelley also helped stretch the term,

17. See Shamas, Laura Annawyn, ‘We Three’: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters (New York: Peter
Lang, 2007), 14-17.
18. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Letter to Marie Gisborne (1820),” English Poetry 1579-1830: Spenser and the Tradition;
http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=36326 (Accessed May 2015)
 22

in an arguably wayward way, beyond the frame of fateful knowledge towards the eerie and

atmospheric. In the fantastic “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude,” he speaks of “weird clouds”

and a night that “makes a weird sound of its own stillness”—a paradoxical, self-cancelling

making that verges on the unnatural in its silent sounding. More importantly, Shelley also linked

the word to a certain kind of story, as when, in “Witch Atlas,” the poet speaks of a “tale more fit

for the weird winter nights / Than for these garish summer days, when we / Scarcely believe

much more than we can see.”19

Here the weird is playfully counterposed with the daylight mind that does not need to

believe, but is satisfied to know, or to believe it knows, what it can see. Perhaps we can see in

this daylight mind the sensible sensibility of the Enlightenment, which aids and abets the famous

disenchantment of the world by insisting that, in Christopher McIntosh’s words, “the universe

ultimately contains no contradictions, no mysteries and no miracles.”20

Such is not the frame of mind best suited to tales of witches and wonders. Indeed, the

Romantic reaction to Enlightenment’s diurnal rationality can be seen in part as a relocation of

enchantment away from the sphere of religion—increasingly isolated from the naturalistic facts

of the world provided by rational science—and into the human imagination, conceived at once as

the site of uncanny aesthetic experiences and the “devilish enginery” of creative art and

writing.21 In this sense, “weird” not only describes the witches in Macbeth, but Macbeth itself, a

19. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Witch Atlas”, 670-72; http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/witch.html

(Accessed May 2015)
20. Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central
Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 9.
21. As Marcus Boon explains, this process of ensouling or enchanting literature arguably goes back to the
Renaissance confrontation with classical paganism, when “the growth of literature as a cultural form in Europe was
fueled by the need to find a way to express the ‘dark’ but fascinating energies of the pagan, natural world, while
remaining ‘true’ to Christian dogma.” See Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess a History of Writers on Drugs
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 223.
 23

supernatural tale whose telling, at least in the theater, is uncanny enough to warrant the

superstitious demand that one refer to the work as “the Scottish play.”

Despite the fantastic atmospheres in so much Romantic poetry, the weird loomed much

larger in the far more popular genre of the Gothic novel, which is generally considered to begin

with the publication of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764. Eventually, after various twists and

turns through the expanding networks of nineteenth-century media, the Gothic novel’s chart-

topping tales of ghosts, aberrant sexuality, decadent priests, and violent exotica bloomed into the

modern genre of supernatural horror. As Victoria Nelson writes in her study Gothicka, this genre

became “the preferred mode, or even the only allowed one, [that] a predominantly secular-

scientific culture such as ours has had for imagining and encountering the sacred, albeit in

unconscious ways.”22 By the early twentieth century, some writers and critics started referring to

supernatural horror as the “weird tale,” and in spring 1923 the fantasy magazine Weird Tales

started publication in Chicago. Weird Tales was a pulp magazine, one of hundreds of

inexpensive fiction publications that helped define American print culture in the first half of the

twentieth century. Printed on cheap “pulp” paper, the pulps are largely remembered (and

collected) today for their lurid cover art and sensational tales of crime, lust, and violent

heroism—as well as stories of supernatural horror and what would become known as science

fiction.

Weird Tales unleashed Robert E. Howard’s wizard-battling Conan and the corruscating

otherworlds of Clark Ashton Smith into the popular imagination, but the magazine’s eternal

flame was unquestionably H.P. Lovecraft, a writer whose “eldritch” tales of forbidden books and

loathsome cosmic monsters would directly influence some of the high weirdness that lies ahead

22. Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2012), xi.
 24

in this book. In the 1920s, Lovecraft wrote an extended literary essay about supernatural horror

and the “weird tale.” In his essay, Lovecraft stressed that weirdness was at once an affective,

imaginative, and cognitive effect. “The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or

not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown

spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the

scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”23

But to produce this effect, the author explained, writers of the weird had to finesse the all-

important interaction between fantastic otherness—what Lovecraft called the “Outside”—and

the daylight framework of realism and its naturalistic assumptions. Some weird stories introduce

only a single supernatural or anomalous element, while others elaborate fantastic and unreal

worlds that, when they work, accord with what Lovecraft believed were the human brain’s innate

imaginative capacities. But for Lovecraft himself, the most powerful weird tales, as he famously

wrote to Smith in 1930, must be rooted in the real, and “devised with all the care and

verisimilitude of a hoax.”24

For Lovecraft, the weird achieves its peculiar power through a close proximity to a more

or less realistic portrayal of ordinary existence that it nonetheless deviates from. In this it

resembles the uncanny, another atmospheric and emotionally laden term associated with

supernatural or weird fiction, and one that, in part because of Freud’s well-known essay on the

affect, retains an essentially psychological and naturalistic character.25 In his essay, Freud

stresses the double character of uncanny objects or events: they are both familiar, even quotidian,

23. H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx

(Accessed February 2015).
24. Cited in S.T. Joshi, "Afterword," in H.P.Lovecraft, The History of the Necronomicon (West Warmick, R.I.:
Necronomicon Press, 1980), 9.
25. The word “uncanny”, like the weird, also possesses important cognitive connotations—canny derives from the
Anglo-Saxon root ken, for knowledge and understanding, and so the uncanny is, like Lovecraft’s “Outside”, beyond
one’s ken.
 25

and unexpectedly and exceptionally strange. One familiar example of uncanny objects are dolls

or wax figures, nonliving things who nonetheless suggest, on a level of fantasy that adheres to

their very form, an eerie animation—an effect that Freud links, in his developmental

understanding of religion, to the “animist” psychology of children and early human cultures.

Another uncanny example, drawn from Freud’s own life, is the experience of wandering

lost in a city but finding oneself returning to the same spot again and again. “How weird,” we

might say, were this to happen to us. Such involuntary recurrence, Freud claims, stages an

uncomfortable but strangely thrilling return of the repressed, a compulsion to repeat the object-

cause of our own anxiety that the good doctor eventually linked to the death drive. The

uncanniness of such unintended or “chance” recurrence also lends a spooky significance to

seemingly meaningful coincidences, which for Freud is exemplified by the experience of

encountering the same number over and over again through the course of an otherwise normally

scattered day.26 Here we have one of the first descriptions in psychological literature of the

phenomenon that Jung, moving in a transpersonal direction diametrically opposed to Freud,

would later attempt to establish as the “acausal connecting principle” of synchronicity—a

principle, or at least a phenomenon, that will play a major role in the episodes of high weirdness

to come.

Despite the similar meanings of the two terms, the difference between the uncanny and

the weird opens up when we consider the expressive forms associated with the terms, and the

very different cultural locations those forms occupy in the twentieth century. In part because of

Freud’s reading, the uncanny carries a subtle sophistication, a “literary” quality one might

associate with modernist writers like Borges and Bruno Schulz, or with classic films like

26. 62 is Freud’s example, though others, as we will see, prefer 23. The irony of Freud’s position is that, like the
superstitious believer, the psychoanalyst also has serious doubts about the role of “chance” in uncanny events.
 26

Nosferatu or Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Weirdness, on the other hand, rears its pulpy head in

trashy magazines, exploitation movies, comic books (whose mid-century titles include Weird

Science, Weird Chills, Weird Fantasy and Adventures into Weird Worlds), and other unserious

outposts of horror, macabre fantasy, and science-fiction. Weirdness is the uncanny’s low-brow

doppelgänger, a demotic country cousin. This doesn’t make the weird any less uncanny,

however. Indeed, popular genres arguably do an even better job of staging the repetition

compulsion described by Freud, especially given the obsessive drive to repeat-with-a-difference

that characterize the genre structures that organize the production and consumption of such

forms.

More importantly, weirdness develops an aberrant or even delinquent profile that plays

well with and is associated with social outsiders. Over the twentieth century, weirdness becomes

not just an aesthetic effect or atmosphere to be cultivated or enjoyed, but a social site, a mode of

rebellion, even a deviant, sub-hip identity of sorts—the “wayward” way of the weird sisters,

twisting away from norms. Teenagers, hot-rodders, queers, bohemians, drug users, and odd-balls

of all stripes have taken up the flag of the weird or found it draped upon them—since the 1940s

at least, “weirdo” has denoted not only threatening (and possibly perverted) individuals, but

those who are merely, even self-consciously peculiar. This aura of weird deviance also holds true

throughout the long course of the increasingly self-conscious counterculture that is the main

focus in this project. For example, cartoonist R. Crumb’s Weirdo magazine, which ran from 1981

to 1993, was an intentionally “low-brow” compendia of underground comix, outsider art, frank

quotidian tales, and Church of the SubGenius-style agitprop clearly aimed, like Stang’s

directory, at fellow “weirdos,” whether or not they might self-identify with the rather lowly term.
 27

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, weirdness has drifted away from the

oracular or supernatural, away even from the spine-tingling atmospheres of the uncanny, and

towards a sort of trashy, pop-culture alterity. And yet: the sacred trace remains. In the

seventeenth issue of Weirdo, which appeared in 1986, Crumb published a remarkably faithful

illustrated account of one of the episodes of high weirdness that inspired this book, an account he

boldly entitled “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.” The un-ironic depiction of Dick’s

mystically-informed experiences reminds us that weirdness carries a “supernatural” charge even

as it trickles through the margins of a modern culture largely conceived and experienced as a

disenchanted and secular space. After all, even in the most low-brow drive-in monster mash,

weird culture generates a highly ambivalent blend of wonder and horror that directly recalls the

widely resounding definition of the numinous provided by the religious historian Rudolph Otto

in The Idea of the Holy, which appeared in English in 1923. Attempting to account for the non-

rational element of the sacred, Otto characterized the encounter with the numinous Other as

mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a mystery that at once repels and attracts, terrifies and

fascinates. “The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread,

but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm.” 27

Otto’s weird distinction would in turn help Mircea Eliade, perhaps the most widely-read

historian of religion in twentieth-century America, construct his own extremely influential

account of the sacred. For Eliade, the sacred—which is always defined in contrast with the

profane—is not only marked by the psychological polarity of attraction and repulsion, but by an

ambivalence of values. Many examples of the “hierophanies” that manifest the sacred in a

particular time and place are marked by such ambivalence. Many aboriginal cultures considered

27. Otto, Rudolf, The idea of the holy: an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its
relation to the rational, trans. John W Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 31.
 28

some objects—taboo or otherwise— to be both holy and dangerous, an ambiguity that Eliade

also insists can be found operative in Christian mysticism and the literate classical world as

well.28

But there is a weirder ambivalence lurking in Eliade’s dynamic notion of the sacred,

which is more complex and a bit less essentialist than many of his contemporary critics in the

academy allow. For Eliade, the distinction between sacred and profane is certainly ontological,

but the objects and processes that can come to embody the sacred for any given society are, in a

sense, up for grabs, even contingent. “Anything man has ever handled, felt, come in contact with

or loved can become a hierophany.”29 Though Eliade had a tendency to reify and essentialize

certain hierophanies—the center or omphalos being only one example—the sacred can manifest

though all manner of profane elements, “even the most alien.” This leads to the paradox of the

idol, whose sacredness lies precisely in the fact that it is also profane, and “this paradoxical

coming-together of sacred and profane…produces a kind of breakthrough in the various orders

of existence.”30 This paradoxical coming-together, with its volatile ontological instability, is the

pivot of high weirdness.

Eliade also notes that, at least in the elementary and “vivid” hierophanies captured in so

many ethnographic writings, the sacred object is often, well, strange. “Everything unusual,

unique, new, perfect or monstrous at once becomes imbued with magico-religious powers.”31

Twins, albinos, botanical oddities, the appearance of white missionaries—all such unusual sights

were likely candidates for an ambivalent flash of the sacred, which may or may not last through

28. Homo sacer, the “sacred” person who is exiled from their social location, signifies an exiled supplement to the
law that is both hallowed and cursed. The term has become important in the contemporary political theology. See
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
29. Eliade, Patterns, 11.
30. Ibid, 29
31. Ibid, 13.
 29

the social incorporation of the unusual things in question. Here we establish a key element of the

weird, whose best name—at once technical and resonant—is anomaly. The anomalous appears

on the profane plane as nothing more or less than a sometimes striking deviation from the norm,

a general category of phenomena that even the most hard-headed naturalist or reductionist must

recognize. (Of course, what constitutes a meaningful anomaly is another question.) But such

anomalies don’t only include spontaneous environmental or biological phenomena that must be

explained or managed through cultural or mythological means. Anomalies, weirdnesses, can also

be produced. Recall Shakespeare’s wayward twist on the word weird, and the implication that

power of the weird sisters was in part a willful centrifugal turn away from the norm—a twist that

can include, not only the statistical deviance of spontaneous environmental or biological

anomalies, but intentionally “deviant” cultural performances as well.

Weird Naturalism

A wonderful example of weird performance is provided by Bronislaw Malinowski, a

towering figure in the functionalist school of British anthropology. When Malinowski came to

analyze the spells pronounced by the magic-workers he got to know in the Trobriand Islands, he

identified what he called their “weirdness coefficient.” This coefficient—in mathematics, the

term means a fixed multiplicative factor—was made up of secret names, “abracadabra,” unusual

phonetic combinations, alliteration, “weird cadences,” and other deviations from ordinary

colloquial language. The weirdness coefficient helped establish the otherness and power of

magical speech, a power that did not depend on a conventional grammatical or semantic

production, but was rather enacted in an emotional performance, often in sing-song, whose
 30

meanings and force were generated out of that very performance of intense affect and esoteric

knowledge. Such non-ordinary power was necessary, in Malinowski’s view, in order to

compensate for the anxious uncertainty associated with important and sometimes dangerous

human activities, like fishing or growing staples, that were “subject to chance and not completely

mastered by technical means.” Magic was thus a kind of affective supplement to technical

competence that was marked and generated, at least in part, through linguistic deviation.

Though Malinowski’s concept of the weirdness coefficient may or may not help explain

the power of the Trobriand wizard gardeners, it does establish the notion that weirdness can be

quantized as a degree of differential alterity, or deviant deviance. Indeed, it was precisely when

Malinowksi came to translating the texts of Trobriand wizard speech that the unusual variations

became noticeable as a consistent linguistic pattern. “The better we know the Trobriand language

the more clearly and immediately can we distinguish magic from ordinary speech. The most

grammatical and least emphatically chanted spell differs from the forms of ordinary address.”32

Today some scholars have attempted to rigorously quantify the “weirdness coefficient” within

the computational paradigm of natural language processing, which demands the ability to gauge

potentially meaningful statistical variances in vast arrays of linguistic values.33 Here we can only

applaud Malinowski’s literary instinct regarding the word weird, which becomes, in some

admittedly and necessarily fuzzy sense, a technical measure.

In more recent decades, the notion of “weirdness” has also became attached to

discussions of quantum physics both inside and outside of popular science writing. The presence

of such a ripe word within the discourse of physics—the still-reigning king of sciences, the most

32. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 222.
33. See Khurshid Ahmad, “Pragmatics of Specialist Terms: The Acquisition and Representation of Terminology. In
Petra Steffens, ed., Machine Translation and the Lexicon (Proc. of the 3rd EAMT Workshop, Heidelberg 1995).
Heidelberg: Springer. pp 51-76.
 31

metaphysical of non-metaphysical accounts of reality—is an almost poetic measure of the starkly

counter-intuitive challenges that any thinking person encounters when confronted with both the

experimental evidence and the theoretical implications of quantum mechanics. These elements,

sometimes called “spooky” as well, include indeterminacy, the wave/particle duality,

entanglement, and other unnerving marvels whose surreal challenges to Newtonian physics and

naive realism alike we do not have time to rehearse here. Simply put, quantum mechanics is

weird because, if it actually describes the real (which it very much seems to do, at least in its

sub-atomic domain), then the real is really fucking weird. So when the physicist Heinz Pagels

peppered his popular 1982 book The Cosmic Code with the phrase “quantum weirdness,” none

of his colleagues batted an eye. As a quasi-naturalist category, then, weirdness represents, like

the uncanny or the sublime, a trace of the sacred that even the most secular among us must

acknowledge. Unlike the uncanny and the sublime, the weird is, for all its pathological air, the

degree zero of the wonder and enchantment that modernity has in many ways defined itself

against, but which never really disappeared.

The link between weirdness and quantum physics stretches back, not coincidentally

perhaps, to the seventies, when the bizarre philosophical implications of quantum mechanics

returned to scientific discourse after decades of being swept under the carpet of far more

pragmatic and instrumental applications of the theory.34 In a 1976 essay on Quine’s game-

changing essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” the philosopher Hilary Putnam favorably recalled

Quine’s argument that analytic or “a priori” arguments—that is, statements resting on apparently

ahistorical or transcendental logical foundations—were, despite appearances, essentially

34. For more on the return of philosophical conundrums to the discussion of quantum mechanics among physicists
and philosophers, see David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum
Revival (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
 32

historical and even “psychological” artifacts. That is, so-called Boolean logic, including the law

of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle, aren’t written in stone.

To support Quine’s position, Putnam brought up the problem of how to interpret the fact

that quantum “weirdness” and its various “anomalies” radically challenge these fundamental

rules. For instrumentalists interested in results, he noted, the solution was not to worry about

ultimate reality but simply figure out and use what works. Another approach, Putnam wrote, was

to consider “the hypothesis that we live in a non-Boolean world.”35 Putnam wasn’t necessarily

suggesting this move, but he was suggesting that to philosophically affirm quantum weirdness,

we might just have to accept that a more anomalous logic rules the real.

A few years before Putnam, the author Arthur Koestler also described quantum

mechanics as “weird” in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence. A “reluctant convert” to the

paranormal, Koestler was not a wild speculator, and his intelligent chapter on the “the Perversity

of Physics” contained only the lightest hints of the quantum mysticism that would come to the

fore later in the decade with the enthusiastic reception of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of

Physics(1975) and Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu-Li Masters(1979). Instead, Koestler wanted

to use the “negative affinity” between quantum physics and parapsychology simply to

demonstrate that “in so far as both are unthinkable,…the weird concepts of one provide an

excuse for the weirdness of the other.”36 That said, Koestler was also keen to point out certain

interesting points of contact between quantum mechanics and parapsychology. In the attempt to

become more rigorous statistically, modern parapsychologists had begun resorting to the same

mathematical domain that replaces strict causality in quantum mechanical accounts: the domain

of probability. In other words, individual instances of a guessed card—one of the dominant tests

35. Hilary Putnam, "'Two dogmas' revisited,” in Gilbert Ryle, Contemporary Aspects of Philosophy (Stocksfield:
Oriel Press, 1976), 207.
 33

at Rhine—are meaningless. Instead, the percentage of correct guesses over very large numbers of

individual trials must be compared to what probability theory would dictate as the odds that

chance alone was in effect; it is the degree of variation, or deviance, from this probability that

becomes meaningful—that becomes, if it is consistent and statistically significant, the anomaly

to be explained.

High weirdness, in this sense, could be understood in the light of anomaly, of encounters

or experiences that radically undermine the framework of naive realism. But at the same time,

these are anomalies that—like quantum models of entangled particles or the statistical oddities of

parapsychological tests—never leave the plane of the world. As such, the rumor or trace of God

is always twined with the pathological, or mutant—an aberration lurking in the shadows of

immanence rather than an avatar of transcendent beyond. Even as weirdness retains an aura of

the numinous, it also finds itself folded into the profane, as a centrifugal or “wayward” turn away

from naturalistic norms to which it remains, nonetheless, intimately tied.

All this suggests the “weird realism” described by the contemporary object-oriented

philosopher Graham Harman. In addition to being a massive fan of H.P. Lovecraft, Harman is a

realist—the things we perceive in the world are in some fundamental sense real. But he is not a

materialist, since his “ontology of objects” stretches to include, not just dogs, trees, and flames,

but “societies, ghosts, gods, pirates, coins, and rubies.”37 For Harman, these objects have their

own autonomous life but, in contrast to the confident correspondence theory of rationalists,

which holds that the mind can understand the essence of objects, these things are also

fundamentally opaque and unknowable, “mysterious and veiled,” their known properties

separated by some “weird tension” from their essence as objects. This mysterious and veiled

36. Koestler, Arthur, The Roots of Coincidence; (New York: Random House, 1972), 110.
37. Graham Harman, “Realism without Materialism,” SubStance #125, Vol. 40, no. 2, 2011, 52.
 34

quality is, in part, what makes reality weird, and that calls for philosophy to devote itself to

“weird realism.”

Even incorporeal objects do not derive their reality “from some transcendent force lying

outside the bounds of human finitude, but in a twisting or torsion of that finitude itself.”38 And

yet that twisting finitude torques itself, at least at times, in precise manifestation of the vertical

tension, of higher things, of things high, all remainders or reminders of the old transcendent

forces of myth. Weirdness therefore characterizes a multidimensional and ambivalent space of

esthetic effects, anomalous events, and deviant ontologies in which sacred and profane, the

marvelous and the statistical, wonder and horror, all overlap and reveal the opacity of the real.

Uncanny experiences of this razor edge put tremendous pressure on what Bruno Latour

refers to as the modern constitution: the conventional, almost instinctive division we moderns

make between subject and object, nature and culture, mind and matter. Within this framework,

we “place” the sometimes extraordinary phenomena associated with religious experience

“inside” the subject, who in turn is strictly separated from an outside characterized by material

forces that, nonetheless, ultimately underlies the subject. High weirdness scrambles this

boundary, staging anomalous experiences that call up both the uncanny affectivity of the

supernatural and seemingly deeper or “occult” forms of naturalist necessity.

Unsurprisingly, then, high weirdness overlaps with the paranormal, a liminal zone of

modern thought and experience that, as Jeffrey Kripal has shown, restages the sacred in light of

the massive historical shift from religion to science. Along these lines, Kripal insists that part of

what characterizes paranormal phenomenon is a blurring of the categories of real and fiction—

that weird realism again. Defining the space of the “Impossible” through formalist literary

38. Graham Harman, “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl,” Collapse, IV, 2008, 360.
 35

theory, Kripal notes that this weird and paranormal ambivalence between real and fictional, in a

text or in a life, recapitulates what Tzvetan Todorov defined as the logic of fantastic literature,

which emerges through the “irruption of the inadmissable within the changeless everyday

reality.” Faced with such anomalies, characters (and readers) find themselves at a crossroads:

either they are victims of a sensory illusion, or they have glimpsed “an integral part of reality”

that is, nonetheless, “controlled by laws unknown to us.” This crossroads is a site of deep

uncertainty, a point of enigmatic insight, indeterminacy, and terrible temptation. “The fantastic,”

Todorov writes, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the

other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre.”39

Kripal’s point is that, within the sacred paranormal, this dynamic—which places

everyday realism in tension with marvelous irregularities—exceeds the boundaries of literary

genres, and enters into the folds of experience itself, as well as those texts, autobiographical or

otherwise, that stage the folded or implied tension between reality and fiction in particularly

charged ways. In my tongue, the fantastic becomes the weird, a mode that, in my reading

anyway, makes an even more explicit engagement with the naturalistic fringes of immanence

even as it points to a Beyond that challenges reductive accounts.

Reality Construction Company

Bruno Latour’s recent project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, is of central

importance to this text, because Latour’s multiplication of ontological templates and his attention

to the craft of mediation is perfectly keyed to the vagaries of high weirdness, which itself can be

39. Kripal, Jeffrey, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2010), 34-35.
 36

said to mediate between science and religion. Latour is principally a sociologist of science, and

he deeply respects the networks of processes, technologies, institutions, and agents necessary for

the construction—and emergence—of scientific facts. What he rejects is what he calls the “Great

Divide” of modernity, the Western template that divides existence into human culture, with its

projections and creative fictions, and an impersonal nature accessed and described through

scientific procedure alone. Along with many other thinkers today, including anthropologists like

Phillipe Descola and Viveiros de Castro, Latour sees the Great Divide as a particular historical

arrangement or anthropological schema of ethics and knowledge production, rather than the only

possible or “reasonable” template of existence.

Though he is sometimes accused of relativism by rationalists and old school realists alike,

Latour recognizes that there is a qualitative difference between scientific facts and other human

artifacts, and that any account of science that ignores the peculiar and particular claims of these

units of truth has failed. For Latour, a fact is neither an unmediated avatar of objective reality nor

a purely manufactured chunk of human culture. Instead, facts are the end result of careful,

complex, and often laborious processes of construction that build bridges between different

ontological domains, templates with their own particular rules of existence and appearance. At

the end result of a successful scientific mediation, beings from a certain domain—the place we

would conventionally call “nature,” but that Latour dubs the zone of reproduction—are able to

“pass” into the domain of referentiality—the domain of knowledge and the material media

required to organize and communicate that knowledge. What results is a fact, something that is

both constructed through material and cognitive processes, and yet is rendered autonomous

through that very process, appearing as something that must be wrestled with, must be taken into

account. In his crucial essay The Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour compares the construction of
 37

scientific facts to, of all things, the West African construction of “idols.” In both cases, a process

requiring material protocols and human craft results in a kind of being that, in the end, takes

autonomous flight, and is no longer constrained solely by the human artifice that produced it.

For Latour, following the philosopher and semantacist Korzybski, the map is definitely

not the territory. But a well-constructed map does allow the topology of a mountain chain to

“pass” into a two-dimensional zone of referentiality, such that you are better off making your

way through the mountains with the map at your fingertips. As children of Korzybski, all our

avatars would similarly agree that the map is not the territory. But in the face of extraordinary

experience, they also multiply and willfully reassemble the range of possible maps, a

constructive effort that in turn influences both the unfolding of their experiences and their

accounts of those experiences. However, while much of the forthcoming text is devoted to

analyzing the cultural, philosophical, and psychological building blocks that helped construct

specific episodes of high weirdness, the phenomena themselves—what William James called the

“wild facts”—still demand, or at least will be given, their own relative autonomy, a tricksy

agency best established through Latour’s variable ontological modes.

In other words, “construction” here will be less a sign of contextual reductionism, than an

affirmation of the potential emergence of surprising modes of being in the process of such

construction. Such a tactic is particularly necessary, and particularly controversial, when the

topic involves religious experience, to say nothing of its various paranormal and psychedelic

analogs. For here, ontological or “supernatural” claims are routinely reframed by naturalistic and

critical scholars today as “nothing but” constructions based simply on surrounding cultural,

sociological, and psychological scripts and expectations interacting, perhaps, with neurological

states of “arousal.” Latour, while sharing a constructionist sensitivity to the networks and
 38

mediations that assemble anthropological reality, Latour offers an eloquent politics of

metaphysical modes whose “weird realism” is a most welcome rejoinder to the poverty and

distortion of this miserly nothing but.

By drawing attention to the way that social processes establish and mediate reality

through cultural and linguistic codes, the notion of “construction” is often used to undermine

“essentialist” accounts about the substantial meaning or objective existence of a thing or being.

Racial difference, for example, is not a function of genetics (or souls) but a social and cultural

construction which organizes a continuous spectrum or distribution of closely related differences

into discrete categories. In this sense, the revelation of constructivism is often linked to an

emancipatory politics.

However, as Latour points out, this use of construction tends to overwhelmingly stress

the critical and deconstructive consequences of the concept rather than its positive or,

paradoxically, “constructive” dimensions. “Construction,” as it is dominantly used in social

theory, is too tightly coupled to that “nothing but,” as if the mediations required for constructive

processes to work somehow render the resulting phenomena insubstantial, illusory, or worthy of

dismissal or condemnation. It implies that we must choose between the artifice so exposed or

some more genuine foundation beneath, explanations of foundations that could be Marxist or

socio-biological.

Latour associates the most critical constructionism with deconstruction, which he

characterizes, rather simplistically, as counseling a stoic resignation to the failure of mediation to

present any foundations at all, a stance (or drift) that Latour believes reflects an excessive

idealization. The flipside of this idealization, which forecloses all foundations, is

fundamentalism, the notion that foundations are available without any manipulation,
 39

interpretation, or other form of mediation. (In this sense, some naturalists and skeptics represent

“fundamentalist” views of objectivity.) In contrast to both these positions, the pluralistic universe

of radical empiricism demands attention to the extraordinary number of networks and linkages

that allow real beings to pass between frames, to establish real continuities and smooth

transformations, even to appear in the first place, in whatever manner of appearance is

appropriate for their respective ontological modes.

In his attempt to bridge “the irreparable crack between what is constructed and what is

true,” Latour presents an alternate definition of construction, elements of which are particularly

germane to the weird beings ahead. Latour argues that the action of construction is intrinsically

doubled: “when someone acts, others get moving.” The directional vector of the action between

the purported author of the construction and these other beings is in turn uncertain, since it

presents a fundamental circularity.

Here Latour draws from the crucial example of fiction. Balzac is the author of his novels,

but according to the author, he often gets “carried away by his characters.” Though a Romantic

and writerly cliche, the claim describes an oscillation in agency that is crucial for any robust

notion of construction that passes beyond a linguistic game. For Latour, this oscillation reaches

an extreme with the example of marionettes and their operators. “There can be no doubt about

the manipulator’s control over what he manipulates: yes, but it so happens that his hand has such

autonomy that one is never quite sure about what the puppet ‘makes’ his puppeteer do, and the

puppeteer isn’t so sure either.”40 Expand the example to include a ventriloquist’s dummy, and

some of the weird and uncanny implications of Latour’s approach become clearer.

40. Latour, Bruno, An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 158.
 40

But Latour himself gets weird enough when he adds a crucial demand to his robust

portrait of constructionism, which he calls, with an infelicitous term that he draws from Etienne

Souriau, instauration. One condition of instauration is that the action “has to provide the

opportunity to encounter beings capable of worrying you.” Without defining them exactly, he

describes them as “beings whose ontological status is still open but that are nevertheless capable

of making you do something, of unsettling you, insisting, obliging you to speak well of them…”

The “beings of law,” constructed through social and institutional processes but nonetheless

emerging with their own particular ontological template, are enough, as Latour says, to force a

judge to wake up at night, vexed by the question: “Did I make the right decision?” 41

These beings don’t have to be taken, at least yet, in anything like an esoteric vein, one

that, as we will see later, Latour himself approaches in his descriptions of the template associated

with “beings of metamorphosis.” But it is crucial to emphasize how much Latour’s realist and

relational turn goes against dogmatic social constructionism, with its refusal of any sort of direct

encounter or capacity to recognize beings epistemologically “outside” the frame.

What, for example, is a strict constructionist to do with the event that lies at the climax of

Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”? The poem is a preeminent example, in a post-

theological key, of a spiritual encounter with a being arising from an artistic construction, and it

is important to keep in mind later in this book, when we will encounter independent intelligences

leaning through cultural and cognitive constructions. The stone “glisten[s] just like wild beasts’

fur” and “burst[s] forth from all its contours / like a star,” but it is the famous last two lines that

strike a chord both uncanny and hieratic:

for there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

41. Latour, 177.

 41

In his book of the same name, Peter Sloterdijk limns this encounter in ways that, while

detuning Latour’s ontology into another key, respect both the significance of the event and the

important resonance it holds for discussions of spiritual encounter in a secular age. Here the

classically religious phenomenon of being “spoken to from above” redeploys itself within an

aesthetic construct, and the resulting poem becomes “a document of how newer message

ontology outgrew traditional theologies.”42 In Sloterdijk’s account, the statue’s being as an

aesthetic object is contracted into a message, more specifically a “message-thing” that does not

activate itself, “but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.”43 For this “quintessential

metanoetic command” to be received, however, the poet must wager or extend her experience in

a peculiar way by “accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it—indeed, that it eyes me

more sharply than I can look at it.”44 Following Weber, Sloterdijk describes the capacity to make

this inner gesture, with all its improbability, as “religiosity,” an ability (or curse, according to

some skeptics) that some people evidence quite naturally.

Sloterdijk adds the crucial point that such abilities can also be practiced. What is required

is a certain “grammatical promiscuity” that swaps objects and subjects. “In the position where

the object usually appears, never looking back because it is an object, I now ‘recognize’ a subject

with the ability to look and return gazes.”45 In Martin Buber’s terms—which were important to

the generation we will be looking at—the “it” of the statue becomes a “you,” creating an

“encounter” where previously there was only and “experience” of the object world. In exchange

for the willingness to participate in this reversal, to endow the stone with the capacity to send

42. Sloterdijk, You Must Change, 22.

43. Ibid, 20.
44. Ibid, 23.
45. Ibid, 24.
 42

discrete messages, the poet receives the reward of a private illumination, which in Rilke’s case

takes the form of the demand for transformation itself. Sloterdijk’s conclusion: “religiosity is a

form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained.”46 As we will see, much of the high

weirdness to come is a consequence, in part, of such flexibility, taken to a heretical and

sometimes atheist extreme.

Like Rilke’s statue, Latour’s beings, though they have their own resources, do not arise

on their own. Once again, fiction and art continue to offer a privileged example, not because

these crafts have little to do with the hard truths of science, and are therefore easier to make

nebulous points with, but because they trumpet the dimension of constructionism too often

ignored by most users of the term in an epistemological or social context: the value judgment

bound up with the act of construction itself. “Constructed, yes, of course, but is it well

constructed?” Latour asks.

The question of value or quality points to the ongoing negotiation and relational ethics

that undergirds construction, a back-and-forth that, diagrammed, suggests the positive feedback

loops of cybernetics and the language of “emergence.” The sculptor, as Latour says, is not the

creator of the work but rather the “instuarator” of a work that comes to and through him, but that,

without him, would never appear. If it is wrong to say that the statue is a form in the mind of the

sculptor that is merely imposed on the block, however, it is equally wrong to say that the statue

awaits “potentially” in the marble. The beings that Latour is interested in escape both registers,

both “creative imagination” and “raw material.”47 To capture such beings, again, requires

ontological templates that lie in the hybrid interzones between nature and culture, subject and

object.

46. Ibid, 25.

47. Latour, 161-62.
 43

Rather than the univocal language of substance or “being-as-being” that still supports the

Great Divide, Latour instead opens the Pandora’s box of “being-as-other”: varieties of beings

who pursue their continuity without reference to some foundational substance. “They do not

head up or down to seat their experience in something more solid; they only move out in front of

experience, prolonging its risks while remaining in the same experimental tonality.” To

establish these distinct forms of alterity, and to encounter the beings that inhabit these modes, we

must practice an “experimental metaphysics” that is indistinguishable from a radical empiricism

that can “rediscover the thread of experience” and the pluralistic universe to which they lead.48

The role of this alterity in Latour’s capacious and congenial philosophy, recalls William

James’s philosophy of mysticism, which includes, in G. William Barnard’s words, a “theoretical

openness to a preexisting, partially-formed, autonomous ‘otherness’ appearing within

experience.”49 In the pages ahead, I will reference this incomplete constructionism or openness

to encounter by referring to the Other or the Outside, and hope that this account here suffices for

such gestures, whose motivation is as empirical as it is ethical.

Uncanny Criticism

In his book on culture and surveillance in the American seventies, the cultural theorist

Stephen Paul Miller writes that “the seventies were the uncanny decade, the undecade, and to

understand it requires an uncanny methodology.”50 Uncanny criticism, Miller writes, “is not so

48. Ibid, 152.

49. See Barnard, G. William, Exploring Unseen Worlds William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1997), 129. Cited in Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing
Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 92.
50. Miller, Stephen Paul, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999),
12.
 44

concerned with cause and effect as it is with readings that become possible by noting

relationships between phenomena.” The uncanny—or weird—historian, in other words, draws

attention to “how patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect,” as Don Delillo puts it

in his JFK conspiracy novel Libra.51 Rather than offering explanations that privilege largely

linear chains of influence, the critic constructs open networks of linkages that ripple across

disciplinary frameworks and scales of explanation, a practice that allows unexpected patterns,

meanings, and forces to meet and mutate in what Miller calls “illuminating interdisciplinary

interfaces.” Though Miller rightly insists that uncanny criticism still involves causal

explanations, cause and effect act “more as inflections than dominant keys.”52

Miller’s method emerges from one of the axioms of critical theory: the notion that a

nation’s or a film’s or a person’s surface narratives actively obfuscate the psychic or political

conditions that underlie and give rise to them, and therefore conceal more than they reveal. As

such, such phenomena need to be read against the grain. Here we tap into the famous

“hermeneutics of suspicion” that Paul Ricoeur linked with the great late-19-century triumvirate

of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, and that continues to play such a decisive role in critical

scholarship.

Nietzsche pierced the moralistic mask of Christianity to expose its resentment and

warped refusal of the will to power. Freud’s diagnostic symptomology, on the other hand, tracks

the peripheral details, recurrent elements, and unintended “slips of the tongue” of a patient’s

speech back to the peculiar knots and blocks installed in the unconscious through repression. For

some Marxist critics, particularly those following Althusser, the analytic goal is to show how

seemingly innocent or even apparently commendable cultural objects actually function as

51. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988), 44.

52. Miller, Seventies, 35.
 45

ideological support for bankrupt social relations, structures that are tucked away in what Fredric

Jameson called the “political unconscious.” In this view, as Miller says (with Nixon and

seventies paranoia in mind), “culture is a cover-up.”53

Of course, such a symptom-driven approach sometimes follows the chain of cause and

effect back to a linear source beneath the surface. Freudian or Marxist critics have often

presented their methods dogmatically, as the secret keys to understanding a given cultural or

psychological phenomenon. As their critics are wont to suggest, their more exuberant readings

can even shift into a “paranoid” or conspiratorial direction in which the totality of elements all

point ominously towards a core explanandum. Miller warns against a too-easy embrace of such

hidden causal accounts. For the uncanny critic, the goal is not to reveal an underlying cause but

to gesture towards an “absent totality” that, following the Lacanian notion of the real, structures

the symbolic systems of culture and consciousness while remaining forever foreclosed to

articulation or analysis. There is no “invisible but coherent cause,” Miller says. “Rather, absent

causes generate uncanny connections.”54

As we will see, such uncanny connections almost inevitably invoke modes of correlating

and connecting data that resemble or recall the pattern thinking found in esoteric or occult

discourse, with its doctrines of correspondences, signatures, and the acausal associations of

divination and serendipity. For Miller, the uncanniness that characterizes both the object and the

method of his study of the seventies is not so much “spooky” or “eerie” as “peculiar, astonishing,

bizarre, and incredible”—a distinction that reflects the same semantic drift away from the

supernatural and towards the secular that we identified with the word weird above.

53. Ibid, 21.

54. Ibid, N. 5, 368.
 46

However, in both cases, the evocative play of uncanny criticism, at least in my

deployment, lies precisely in its ambivalent fluctuation across supernatural and secular registers,

whether those zones are accorded ontological, psychological, or merely cultural consistencies.

The “absent totality” of the real may be foreclosed for strictly structural reasons, but it is also a

void whose present absences ripples and reverberates across the surface of things in a process

that one of Philip K. Dick’s internal voices described as “perturbations in the reality field.”

Reality appears to be composed of multiple interacting fields, of course, cosmic and

metaphysical dimensions as well as personal and political ones. Indeed, such dimensions may

actually emerge (or appear) precisely through the construction of such uncanny connections.

To write your way through such a pluralistic zone requires a tool-kit of theories and

approaches, a grab-bag of cultural, psychological, neurological, philosophical and even esoteric

frameworks that may be called upon both to identify a particular empirical or ontological domain

and to build “illuminating interdisciplinary interfaces” between them. Such a potentially

haphazard approach, of course, has its own problems, and arguably only muddies the waters,

especially when the phenomena in question are already so weird and heterogenous. Faced with

the apparently outlandish pathologies, some readers would no doubt prefer the exacting slice of

Occam’s razor to the on-the-fly assemblages of the nomadic bricoleur.

In order to provide a more visible through-line, I would like to cast high weirdness

against the backdrop of a more conventional disciplinary concern, which is the discourse

surrounding religious experience. Given the baggage this term carries, both inside and outside of

scholarship, it might be said to just get in the way of our story—especially when that story in

many ways concerns the astonishing emergence of noetic insights and intense visionary

encounters within “secular” or countercultural contexts more or less freed from the religious
 47

communities and transcendental ontologies that have traditionally given such experiences a name

and a habitation. Moreover, there are many other options. I could—and will—speak instead of

gnosis, or of spiritual or visionary or paranormal or transpersonal experiences. While there are

problems with all of these terms, they all fit comfortably on one side of the distinction between

extraordinary or numinous states of consciousness and the dogmatic frameworks of institutional

religion. This distinction, though problematic on its own, is nonetheless fundamental to the

countercultural period I am concerned with, which we can now see served as a crucial way-

station for the development of the “spiritual but not religious” orientation that today has

congealed into a recognizable identity and cultural current.

There are three reasons I would like to keep the term religious in play, however. One is

that I am, among other things, a historian of religions. I cannot help but place the outlandish

material in this study, much of which identifies itself as part of a skeptical critique of religion,

within the context of America’s long religious tradition of inventive metaphysics and visionary

alternatives. The high weirdness of the early seventies is not separate from America’s larger

cavalcade of Mormon cosmologies, Spiritualist phantoms, Theosophical vibrations, Masonic

plots, and channeled alien masters, nor from those mystic and otherworldly domains of pulp

culture and the paranormal that are best considered, as Jeffrey Kripal has argued, ongoing

mutations of the sacred more than replacements for it.

On a more theoretical level, I also see the discourse and protocols of our avatars of high

weirdness squarely within the phenomenological pluralism that William James seeded in his

still-resonant text The Varieties of Religious Experience. As we will see in the following chapter,

James’ radical empiricism is foundational for many of the figures I discuss, as well as of crucial

importance, in a more reflexive way, my own approach. Though I “weight” sociological and
 48

cultural factors more than James did in his sometimes essentialist accounts of religious

experience, I also follow his famous admonition that these phenomena are substantial enough

that they urge us to refuse any “prematurely closing of our accounts with reality.”

A second reason for staying within the orbit of “religious experience” is to remain

bracingly aware of one of the strongest critiques currently brought to bear on that discourse: that

the unreflective language of “religious experience” falsely implies that there is something

inherently or essentially “religious” about any particular kind of experience. So, rather than

wrangle a more hair-splitting and determinate piece of jargon, I am instead interested in

following the more constructionist approach suggested by the scholar Anne Taves. This

approach foregrounds the processes by which anomalous, extraordinary, or—as she sometimes

calls them—“special” experiences are staged, framed, and experienced as “religious” or

“gnostic” or “mystical” or “visionary.”

This critical disaggregation, which draws attention to the tiny leaps that are made

between experience and event, description and phenomenology, is arguably appropriate for all

modes of extraordinary experience. But it is particularly germane to my study. One of the

unusual and instructive features of high weirdness in the early seventies is that the process of

constructing the appropriate language and associated ontological frameworks for extraordinary

experiences of a broadly taken religious or mystical cast is brought radically and creatively into

question by the experiencers themselves. In an iterative example of constructionist feedback, this

reflexivity in some cases is fed back into the phenomenology itself, partly as a warrant for

actively “programming” experiences in advance. Though we will not see much religion in these

accounts, we will see something very much like “religious experience” both evoked and

disavowed, self-consciously constructed and deconstructed, stirred up and then refused.

 49

Finally, I want to underscore the way in which, in every single case that we will

investigate, these experiences not only include astonishing synchronicities, striking perceptual

anomalies, and blazing esoteric insights, but encounters with nonhuman intelligences. Though

mercurial and often bizarre, the “presence” of these nonhuman agents bring us back to arguably

the most archaic religious idea, or at least the first scholarly idea of archaic religion: the belief in,

or communication with, incorporeal entities.

There are a few reasons for this stress. One is simply that some daemonic presences are

fascinating and uncanny, and play, it seems, an outsized role in the particular time and space that

interests me here. Another reason is simply that the possible existence of such intelligences is

such a hard claim, one that is much less assimilable to normalizing discourses about spirituality

that, say, offer naturalistic but non-pathologizing explanations for a profound sense of oneness

with nature. Even though many contemporary experiences considered mystical, transpersonal, or

spiritual are linked to at least the possibility of counter-normative ontological claims, they are, at

the same time, relatively easy for insiders and outsiders alike to assimilate to individual

psychodynamics. In these cases, the totality of the experience can be considered to be taking

place within the subject alone.

But with the crucial exception of Jungian psychotherapy, with its discourse of archetypal

interactions and its practices of active imagination, the sorts of “close encounters” with

incorporeal intelligences we will be looking at make metaphysical and even ethical claims that

put intense stress on naturalist accounts. In other words, these experiences widen the gap

between the “emic” sphere of more-or-less religious beliefs, in which gods and other

independent incorporeal agents are routine, and “etic” discourses that overwhelmingly tend to
 50

reject, reduce, or pathologize such phenomena. As such, these beings call forth the fiercer

ontological tensions I associate with the weird.

It is tracking the dynamics of this tension that interests me the most. Even as the high

weirdness in this study is illuminated by resources found in the environs of religious

experience—including mystical and especially occult experience—they also represent extreme

examples of how extraordinary phenomena become detuned or divorced from religious

explanations while they are reframed and reconstructed as something else. Another way of

saying this is to point out that, during the relatively narrow slice of cultural spacetime covered in

this study, the category of religious experience was itself undergoing intense contestation,

multiplication, deconstruction, and recoding.

Religious experience was “up for grabs,” in other words, subject to a variety of

transformative processes, some involving incoming new religious movements, some involving a

host of emerging psychological frameworks, and others involving the hedonism of consumer

culture. In this study, these transformative forces will be traced along three socio-cultural axes:

psychedelics, the occult revival, and a self-consciously cybernetic media ecology. Within these

three matrixes, both the phenomenology and the understanding of extraordinary experience

fluctuate between materialist and idealist registers, suggesting a weird passage between subject

and object, matter and mind, consciousness and culture.

Psychedelics are chemical substances, some of which emerge directly from the industrial

laboratory, that trigger experiences that, at least for some properly prepared nervous systems,

simulate or effect something very much like religious or mystical experiences. The seventies

occult revival, though tapping into currents of esoteric thought and practice that can be traced

back to the Renaissance if not antiquity, was also an eminently modern phenomenon wedded to
 51

ideas of rationality and causality, as well as a concrete “anthropotechnics” of altered states,

psychological concepts, and phenomenological protocols that were themselves propagated

through electronic media, pop culture artifacts, and postwar transformations in publishing.

Finally, both the subjective modeling and material expression of these ambiguous

experiences were inextricably bound up with the cultural disposatifs and technological

frameworks of an increasingly self-aware and dynamically resonant media ecology. This ecology

was characterized at once by a multimodal expansion of analog media and the first binary

stirrings of a digital culture whose models and networks gained cultural and philosophical as

well as technical force. As such, the seventies were marked not only by Marshall McLuhan’s

reflexive Mobius strip of form and content, with its emphasis on tactile overload and archaic

nonlinear perception, but by the proliferating paradigms of cybernetic systems and information

theory, which suggested a rigorous language of mystical “wholes” as well as a technical account

of mind and meaning.

By articulating the dynamics of these three socio-cultural conditions, I hope to illuminate

many of the peculiar characteristics and curious similarities we will find among our otherwise

singular avatars of high weirdness. By providing historical and cultural context, in other words,

we can isolate some of the building blocks that individuals use to construct and narrate their own

extraordinary experiences. According to the contextualist and historicist assumptions that

dominate the humanities today, the placement of individual experience—or narratives of

individual experience—against the backdrop of broad social phenomena and technological

systems is, to put it lightly, a decidedly uncontroversial move. However, rather than focus on the

origins of such heterogenous materials, I am more interested in drawing the network across a

protean and heterogenous intertwingling of culture and consciousness, media and metaphysics,
 52

empirical anomalies and otherworldly encounters. That is, rather than offer a specific interpretive

key to such complex phenomena—some socio-cultural, psychological, or neurological baseline

to return to—I also want to perform the work of mapping or constructing relationships or points

of resonance between elements and dimensions of discourse and experience. As such, I will pay

close attention to how extraordinary experience is constructed, to the autonomous “otherness”

within experience, and to the strange loops of artifacts and discourses established between these

domains.

The structure of the book will be relatively straightforward. Part one of the book attempts

to set the stage by establishing something of the psychological, political, and sociological

conditions of early seventies America, a period of time that remains elusive and enigmatic in

cultural memory but whose political anxieties and fragmented cultural creativity form a

significant background for our tales. The first chapter will address the centrifugal drift of

subjectivity that followed the collapse of the counterculture’s millennialist dreams, including a

fervor for extraordinary altered states of consciousness—“religious” and not— that I will read

methodologically through William James. In the second chapter, I want to draw attention to two

significant social and cultural forces that, though already well-established in the sixties, helped

fashion the peculiar launching pads for the psychonauts in our scopes: the psychedelic

amplification of consciousness, with its own associated religious discourse, as well as the occult

revival that brought esoteric ideas, practices, and teachers East and West into the picture.

Part two of the book will address three avatars of high weirdness in turn, drawing

connections less through explicit comparison than through shared themes and overlapping fields

of resonance. In the first of these, we will follow Terence McKenna, on the lam after an

international drug bust, when he travels to Columbia with his brother Dennis to perform their
 53

now legendary “experiment at La Chorerra,” an event that inspired his later career as a

psychedelic raconteur as well as the domestication of psilocybin mushrooms. In the following

chapter, we will explore a similar science-fictional intrusion occurred to Robert Anton Wilson,

whose study of conspiracy theories and exploration in sexual magic erupted into a fearsome bout

of high weirdness in 1974, chronicled in his later book Cosmic Trigger. Wilson’s visit to what he

famously called “Chapel Perilous” also coincided with the subject of our final chapter: the

“2/3/74” experiences of Philip K. Dick, and his attempt to read and write his way through them.

In the face of the abstractions all too familiar in cultural analyses, I will respect the

singularity of my subjects in their individual chapters, but common themes, moves, and

constructs will point to what I believe is a significant mutation of American religious experience.

As a heretofore ignored “culture of consciousness,” high weirdness offers new varieties of

religious experience shaped by conceptual and affective networks drawn from cybernetics,

popular culture, and postwar paranormal occultism.

This mutation represents, on the one hand, the prelude to the New Age, a prophetic

development of postmodern religion and its playful and often antifoundationalist engagement

with fictions and the figments of personal experience. On the other hand, our avatars also point

to a more elusive but equally significant development: a post-religious stance of radical

empiricism, or weird naturalism, that attempts to respect the phenomenology of extraordinary

experiences while maintaining, however inconsistently, a skeptical and constructionist

framework that allows alternative modes of affirming what would otherwise be supernatural

suppositions. And it is to highlight this latter current that I have settled on the term high

weirdness, because the overtones of the term precisely point to the ontologically ambivalent zone

that flickers between the sacred and profane, romance and realism, gnosis and nature.
 54

CHAPTER ONE. THE SEVENTIES SELF:

SPINNING RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

All the episodes of high weirdness I will discuss in this book took place between 1970

and 1975, which means that any attempt to understand them requires that we begin with a

cultural spore-print of America during that time, remembering of course that such zeitgeist

diagnoses are, like their mycological analogues, never entirely trustworthy. For the sake of

convenience I will simply call this period the “early seventies,” an era whose outlines and

character remain hazy in the nation’s cultural memory, as if it were cloaked in a kind of smog.

Part of the reason for this lack of distinction is the period’s transitional placement between the

highly overdetermined “sixties”—whose cultural and political dynamics are often considered to

last into the subsequent decade—and the more garish and colorful markers of the seventies as a

whole, like disco and punk, Pong and Star Wars, the Bicentennial and the first crystalline

growths of the New Age.

Indeed, such liminal confusion is a key characteristic of the early seventies, as radical and

transformative forces unleashed in the sixties fragmented, mutated, and dissipated into much

broader segments of culture and society, generalizing a sense of unstable potential. On the one

hand, this meant that one no longer needed to be an inhabitant of San Francisco, the East Village
 55

or Ann Arbor to explore the creative confusions of drugs, uncorked sexual experimentation, and

the sort of alternative world-views associated with holistic healing or the occult revival. At the

same time, and in stark contrast to the previous years, the horizon of large-scale social

possibilities seemed to abruptly narrow. Despite the marvels and breakthroughs of those years,

the nation drifted into a slough of despond perhaps unprecedented in American history.

In polls taken at the end of the 1970s, people looked back at a decade of “disillusion and

cynicism, helplessness and apprehension,” a list we might as well round out with despair,

paranoia, boredom, and frustrated rage.55 Indeed, one reason for our perpetual amusement at

tacky seventies icons like sideburns, shag carpet, and smiley faces is that we need to keep the

trauma and confusion of the era at bay, despite the fact—or perhaps because of it—that so many

of the era’s bummers resonate with our own today: a merciless recession, fears about the

environment and global terrorism, surveillance paranoia, political cynicism, foreign war fatigue,

and a pervasive apocalyptic undertow that co-exists with an over-heated, desperately sexualized,

and often bleak popular culture.

This doomy and unnerving cluster of feelings is enshrined in the nihilistic and

“existential” tone of so many Hollywood films of the era, populated with errant cops, ominous

conspiracies, lonely lovers, and the last cowboys drifting hard. An air of sweeter and more

passive melancholy can also be heard in the plaints of the chart-topping singer-songwriters who

emerged from the ferment of late sixties folk-rock. Don McLean had a huge hit in 1971 with

“American Pie,” a tune whose plaintive mood and obscure lyrics—meant to eulogize Buddy

Holly and the early years of rock’n’roll—“evoked intense feelings of collective loss, of ruined

55. Stephanie A. Slocum-Schaffer, America in the Seventies (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 213.
 56

innocence and diminished potency.”56 Any number of songs and albums by Joni Mitchell, Neil

Young, and Leonard Cohen told a similar bipolar tale of anxious interiority and hedonic

restlessness, of opportunities squandered or snatched away.

A good deal of this deflated air can be chalked up to the disappointment, frustration, and

disorientation that followed on the widespread recognition that the millennialist dreams of large-

scale collective transformation that characterized “the sixties” had hit the skids. This swift and

bitter sunset was beautifully captured by Hunter S. Thompson in a retrospective rumination that

occurs early on in 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Standing on a hill outside the city of

sin, his head momentarily above the weirdness he would chronicle like no other journalist of the

era, Thompson reflected that “it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the

energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash.” He recalled the “fantastic

universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…We had all the

momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” Looking West across the

desert, toward the golden state that cradled so much of the counterculture, he notes that “with the

right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally

broke and rolled back.”57

The roll-back occurred at different times to different souls, but the import was clear, and

crisply put by the sociologist Steven Tipton in his classic account Getting Saved from the Sixties:

“Large-scale social change in the direction of the countercultural ideals of mysticism,

communalism, and socialism did not occur, either by radical political transformation of the old

56. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free
Press, 2001), 49
57. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
(New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 68.
 57

order or by ever-expanding growth of the new psychedelic lifestyle.”58 Within Tipton’s words, of

course, we also find a reminder that the act of sixties dreaming was always already polarized

between the two central and often conflicting agendas of outer struggle and inner transformation.

This split, of course, is perhaps the most characteristic distinction made in discussions of the

sixties: the divide between New Left activists and psychedelic hippies, between Berkeley and the

Haight, or between what Lawrence Leamer called the “Fists” and the “Heads.”59 The

conventionality of this distinction mars many historical accounts of the sixties, which tend to

ignore both the radical social possibilities of the consciousness movement and the psychedelic

politics that Ken Goffman and Dan Joy describe as the “freak left,” a sometimes zany mode of

anti-authoritarian radicalism that, at least according to Julie Stephens, directly informed, for

better and worse, later postmodern modes of cultural politics. That said, the distinction remains a

useful one, even as the developments in the early seventies united both sides in a sad but

sometimes constructive aftermath.

The Fists arguably began to crumble in 1969, when the Students for Democratic Society,

the spine of New Left activism, dramatically dissolved into a riot of rival factions, including the

soon-to-be bomb-tossing Weathermen (a name quickly feminism-corrected into the Weather

Underground). By the end of 1970, many countercultural leaders—including Huey Newton,

Angela Davis, John Sinclair, and the Head ideologue Timothy Leary—were in courtrooms, jail,

or exile. In the spring of that year, National Guardsmen shot and killed four Kent State students

during a protest. Shock and anger impelled millions to protest over that summer, but by the end

of the year, mass demonstrations had declined in numbers, force, and media presence. Though

58. However, Tipton does not include the anarchist possibility, always a crucial and ever-present thread of
countercultural political imagination. Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in
Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 29.
 58

protests against the war continued, many Fists felt they were pounding against a concrete wall,

and, in Todd Gitlin’s words, “helpless fury turned to spleen or withdrawal.”60 Though new forms

of social and environmental struggle were opening up, and radical impulses would continue to

fuel the emergence in the seventies of the modern “terrorist,” for all intents and purposes the

Movement as a collective field of radical possibility was over.

The dawn of the seventies found the Heads in retreat as well. Following the muddy

collective ecstasy of Woodstock festival in August 1969, the Heads faced their own grim

symbolic boomerang at the Altamont Free Concert in December that same year, when Meredith

Hunter was stabbed by a crew of Hell’s Angels and three others died in a chaotic and nerve-

wracking scene. Too much can be made of Altamont, but little can match the symbolic and

existential punch provided that same fall by the Tate-LaBianca murders and the subsequent

arrest and trial of Charles Manson and his peculiar “family” of glassy-eyed and knife-wielding

girls and boys. With his mystic hippie rhetoric and apparent charisma, Manson perfectly

embodied the silent majority’s fears about the amoral violence, mind rot, and hedonic excess that

lurked in the permissive, go-with-the-flow ethos of the counterculture. Though embraced by

some in the underground as a radical antihero, Manson not only bloodied the Aquarian dream in

the mind of the mainstream but forced thoughtful freaks to reckon with the pathologies and

moral drift of the scene.

All of this would have been tough enough without the political traumas and economic

calamities that characterized the early seventies in America. Despite widespread opprobrium and

Nixon’s campaign promise to end the war, the bloody mire of the Vietnam war continued to

thicken. In April 1970, Nixon announced that American ground forces were invading Cambodia,

59. Cited in Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991),
10.
 59

a country the administration had been heavily bombing, initially in secret, throughout the

previous year. This “incursion” would trigger the Kent State killings, and three more years would

have to pass before the last American troops withdrew from the country, and five more before

the whole grim adventure was put to sleep with the loss of Saigon in 1975.

Economically, America in the early seventies slipped into a peculiar state of

“stagflation,” in which inflation was accompanied by frozen wages and high unemployment—an

anomalous conjunction as far as Keynsian economics dictated, and one whose psychological

effect may be compared to trying to climb up a down escalator that’s moving faster than you can.

In late ’73, in response to American support for Israel during the ominously biblical Yom-Kippur

war, the Arab oil cartel OPEC declared an embargo on crude oil, triggering apocalyptic lines at

service stations. These major news stories were interlaced with any number of unnerving and

melancholy portents: highjacked jetliners, the Munich terrorist attacks, the pathos of Patty

Hearst, and the last man on the moon. But the most epochal and psychologically significant

political story in the early seventies was Watergate, an almost mythopoetic perversion of

governance whose real and symbolic betrayals helped feed the paranoia and disaffection with

consensual reality that plays such an important role in high weirdness.

Watergate was only the most spectacular peak in the mountains of government

malfeasance and mendacity that came to light in the era. In 1971, after the Citizens’ Commission

to Investigate the FBI burglarized a field office in Pennsylvania, the FBI’s COINTELPRO

campaign was exposed. This clandestine and not infrequently illegal program was designed to

“expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” organizations and individuals

considered “subversive”—a category that included Rev. Martin Luther King, the Black Panther

60. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 414.
 60

Party, the American Indian Movement, SDS, and the student protest movement.61 The paranoids

in these largely countercultural organizations, in other words, were vindicated in their suspicion

that their comrades were not entirely on the up and up. Also in 1971, the journalist Daniel

Ellsberg began releasing the Pentagon Papers through the New York Times; these revealed that—

in confirmation of conspiracy theories and ambient suspicions alike—the Johnson administration

had extensively lied to Congress and the public about the causes and operations of the Vietnam

war. Though this material besmirched an earlier administration, Nixon hated the leaks, just as he

had hated the unauthorized news reports about the secret bombing of Cambodia. So he sicced an

internal crew of anti-leak “plumbers” on Ellsberg. Charges of conspiracy and espionage against

the journalist were eventually dropped after it was shown that Nixon’s goons had used

unauthorized wiretaps, a break-in to a psychiatrist office, and other sleazy means to discredit

him.

Nixon was not just a vindictive man; he was a profoundly insecure and suspicious one.

William Safire, a one-time Nixon speechwriter, called the President America’s “first paranoid

with a majority.”62 This temperamental twist was intensified during the re-election campaign of

the 1972. Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President, aptly shortened by many to

CREEP, practiced money laundering, bugging, and other dirty tricks, including COINTELPRO-

style infiltrations dubbed “ratfucking.” CREEP was also largely responsible for the Watergate

break-in whose cover-up eventually forced Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974. Roughly two

years before, in June of 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into a floor of the plush

Watergate building and attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It

61. For scans of original FBI documents, see

http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/COINTELPRO-FBI.docs.html (Accessed
December 2014).
62. Cited in Slocum-Schaffer, 3.
 61

wasn’t until October of that year, a month before Nixon’s landslide presidential victory, that the

Washington Post revealed that this apparently isolated event was the tip of a nasty iceberg of

spying, graft, and sabotage directed by key Nixon staff.

Writing about the Post article just after it appeared, Hunter S. Thompson, who had been

covering the campaign all year and was already dejected by the poll numbers, declared that

Nixon personified the “dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character.” Then,

as if in a vision, Thompson waxed fantastic about the President:

He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into
something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon
comes too close…
At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a
man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of
the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn…pauses briefly to strangle the
Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…towards the Watergate, snarling with
lust, lopping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue…

Thompson immediately dismisses his fantasy as only “nightmares”—the President of the

United States, he writes, would “never act that weird.”63 But Watergate did initiate a period of

reality warp, as the nation followed a complex and bitter drama that lasted almost two years, a

criminal soap opera featuring hush money and wiretaps, evangelical conversions and threats of

impeachment, surreptitious recordings of Oval Office conversations and a mysterious 18 1/2

minute gap in one of the tapes, an analog aporia that Chief of Staff Alexander Haig attributed to

“some sinister force.” Watergate is inextricable from such tropes of the uncanny. As Stephanie

63. Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Summit Books,
1979), 232.
 62

Slocum-Schaffer writes, the Watergate revelations seemed “fictional, incredible, and

unbelievable to most Americans, who still held a great deal of respect—even reverence—for the

president of the United States.”64 In other words, Watergate was weird stuff.

If, as I would like to suggest, the early seventies was a time when fictions took on an

enhanced, world-weaving actuality, we might attribute this reality warp in part to the excessive,

almost dreamlike dimensions of the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s secret actions paradoxically

revealed the mythic sovereign that still lies, in potential, beneath the democratically elected

president, a sovereign with a sacred charge who, in this case, turned to the dark side. If the sixties

began with JFK’s King of Camelot, the era ended with Nixon’s hunchbacked Richard III.

When Ford took the oath of office after Nixon’s abdication, he referred explicitly to this

plane of myth and dream. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he

promised.65 A month later, in the speech announcing his full pardon of his former boss, Ford

returned to this enchanted talk. “My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot

prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me

that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book.”66 With

his garbled syntax, Ford shuttles back and forth between the figures of endless dream and

biblical text, with the pivot of his own decision lying in nothing more apparent than “his

conscience”—in other words, in his exceptional and sovereign power to grant a presidential

pardon.

Ford would spend much of his lame-duck presidency attempting to plug the leak that

Nixon had made in the body politic, a leak that let the dark archetypes of America’s political

64. Slocum-Schaffer, 27.

65. Gerald Ford, “Remarks on Taking the Oath of Office (August 9, 1974)” Miller Center: University of Virginia.
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3390 (Accessed January 2015).
 63

unconscious spill forth. This is why the literary leap that Thompson makes above—the lea from

political journalism to weird fiction—should be seen as something more than a drug-addled

gonzo move. Instead, Thompson effected the kind of genre shift that sometimes becomes

necessary within cultural analysis, particularly when the culture itself grows uncanny and

strange. Indeed, in early 1974, Thompson offered one of the era’s most representative and oft-

repeated quips: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”67

This project aims to track a number of “pro” weirdos who made their way through the

highways and byways of the seventies by plunging ever further into the weird itself (sometimes,

it must be said, getting well more than they bargained for). As such, and for whatever

pathologies stain their path, they should be seen as representatives of a culturally constructive,

conceptually inventive, and in many ways psychologically courageous engagement with the

peculiar exigencies of their times (and their minds).

The secret truth of the early seventies is that its dark politics, its anxieties and

disappointments cloaked an extraordinarily fertile, heretical, and profoundly influential period of

cultural, ecological, technological, and spiritual re-invention. However else the early seventies

are remembered or referenced, they also represent an extraordinary and highly creative flowering

of community arrangements, social movements, ecological relationships, spiritual practices,

“weird” texts, fringe science, expanded visual and aural media, psycho-spiritual experiments,

and the sometimes radical reinvention of sexual identity and practice. For some, the seventies

became a golden if not rainbow-shaded opportunity for high weirdness and all manner of “limit

experiences.” As I suggested in the Introduction, the weird may be peculiar, even traumatic, but

its heresies also nourish novelty, provide an active sense of transformative possibility, and

66. Gerald Ford, “Remarks on Pardoning Richard Nixon (September 8, 1974),” Miller Center: University of
Virginia. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/5598 (Accessed January 2015).
 64

deliver a naturalist mode of enchantment and cultural encounter that can, at the extremes,

become revelatory—even if what becomes revealed is nothing more than the fantastic structure

of the locus of revelation itself: the meta-programming nervous system, the subject

deconstructing itself, that famous oh-so-seventies Self seeking its elusive groundless ground.

The Centrifugal Self

Hunter Thompson’s image of the cresting wave captures the sour and disorienting return

to limits that marked self and society in the early seventies. The collective surge towards

visionary heights had ebbed, and the retreating tide exposed all manner of flotsam and wreckage

in its turbulent wake. Some of the biggest ruins stood in the spots once held to be traditional

foundations of authority. Public institutions were treated with suspicion and contempt, mainline

church attendance declined, and the liberal consensus that supported the Great Society largely

collapsed, especially among the half of the country’s population that were under 25. The citizen

ideal forged in the fifties—the rational individualist, white and male, who blended self-

sufficiency and well-defined social commitments—was dust. With these old models eclipsed,

and the affective unity provided by “the Movement” in deep fade, many Americans—and not

just refugees of the sixties—found themselves adrift in the world prophesied in Yeats’ famous

and oft-cited lines: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

Amidst this unravelling, a decentralized and “postmodern” nation emerged, one whose

social norms, cultural logic, and political policies were increasingly driven by pluralism, the

relativism of values, atomized desire, and the curiously liberated limbo that opens up with the

recognition that the self as well as society are constructed and provisional. This pluralist shift

67. Thompson, Shark Hunt, 49.

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contributed to the “existential” and even nihilistic tang in the era’s cultural atmosphere, but it

also inspired a creative if sometimes desperate inventiveness, one that intensely engaged the

open field of possible identities and emerging “systems” of interaction, transcendence, and

collective becoming. In the words of Stephen Paul Miller, “The undermining of a pre-sixties

American consensus enabled, by the early seventies, a hopping from one performative identity-

position to another.”68

This turn away from consensus contributed to the distinctly centrifugal or “wayward”

dynamic of the era. Constructions of identity, understood as both political and psycho-spiritual

artifacts, were elaborated in a dynamic and pluralistic warp away from the central pivot of

established authority structures. As Bruce Shulman put it, “After 1970, the great American

centrifuge spun freely, distributing visionary communities, new subcultures with newly

discovered identities, across the American continent”; Schulman dubs this process “Inventing

Diversity.”69 Indeed, we misunderstand the early seventies if we play only to the downbeat drift,

and ignore the vital and sometimes ingenious acts of re-invention undertaken by many

individuals and collectives, aspirations perhaps best voiced by the name of one leftist commune

founded near Taos, New Mexico around 1970: the Reality Construction Company. Reality,

which had been expanded and savaged in the sixties, was ready for reconstruction. Falling apart

provided the raw material for novel assemblages that included, as we will see, new modes of

religious practice, empirical metaphysics, and forms of systems thinking that promised to at once

develop or realize the individual self and to dynamically integrate or balance these singularities

within emerging distributed wholes.

68. Miller, Seventies, 19.

69. Schulman, 100; also see the discussion on 68-72.
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The most visible of the new collectivities took the form of identity politics. While the

sixties undermined America’s mid-century norms, it was not until the early seventies that the

politics of cultural pluralism—with its relativistic and multi-perspectival implications—gained a

real foothold in American society. Policy makers, activists, and culture crafters alike engineered

an opening to difference that was in equal parts chaotic and creative. As Miller puts it in his book

on the seventies, “Identity-positions took on more credence, and the United States decreasingly

was seen as a whole, except by the majority white identity-position.”70

Black Power, the most visible identity movement of the sixties, continued to shape

America in the early seventies, which saw the passage of affirmative action policies along with

fierce conflicts over busing and desegregation. Taking their lead from the Panthers and other

black activists, Chicano and Asian groups crystalized around non-majoritarian ethnic and

cultural identities, while Native Americans renewed their struggle for recognition through the

activist occupation of Alcatraz and later the burial grounds at Wounded Knee. The Attica Prison

riots of 1971 drew attention to the Prisoner Rights Movement, while sharply growing concerns

about pollution and overpopulation helped birth the “environmentalist,” which, while not

depending on race or ethnicity, did shift identity towards a global and often systems-based

framework. Gays and lesbians began to protest and parade as a block, collectively performing

“personal” sexual and cultural differences in ways that changed laws and deeply held antipathies.

At the same time, radical feminists continued to foreground the gender politics that had remained

largely unexamined by New Left activists and bohemians alike, and their intense critique of

traditional feminine roles birthed new (and sometimes spiritual) notions of feminine power while

also helping propel the mainline women’s liberation movement through struggles over abortion

and the Equal Rights Amendment.

70. Miller, Seventies, 50.

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One widely shared axiom of the new identity politics, and even of environmentalism, was

the notion that the personal is the political—that the concrete experiences and actions of private

life both support and supplement citizen concepts of political agency. This turn to the personal

can itself be tied, paradoxically perhaps, to the sexual and psychoactive experimentation of the

sixties. If the personal became the political, in other words, it was because the personal itself had

become a site of experimental and sometimes utopian transformation. Sex, alongside or

combined with drugs, blurred the boundaries of personal identity and undermined the norms that

organized pleasure, habit, and social relations, and its ecstasies offered mind-melting glimpses of

a brighter and more vibrant world. Though this Dionysian logic is understandably identified with

the sixties, “It was during the 1970s, not the 1960s, that sex outside marriage became the norm

and illegal drugs became commonplace in middle America.”71 By 1970, 20 million Americans

were smoking cannabis; a few years later, over sixty percent of college students had tried the

weed.72 Open relationships rose, along with divorce rates and the exposure to a myriad of sexual

possibilities.

This latter cornucopia reflected the shockingly permissive policies around sexually

explicit media that were recommended by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in the

summer of 1970. Finding no connection between consumption of porn and misconduct, the panel

recommended a progressive “Danish solution” that included sexual education efforts “aimed at

achieving an acceptance of sex as a normal and natural part of life and of oneself as a sexual

being.” The ideal program, they wrote, “should not aim for orthodoxy; rather, it should be

designed to allow for a pluralism of values.”73 Here we have a classic example of the progressive

71. Beth Bailey and David Farber, “Introduction,” in Bailey and Farber, eds, America in the Seventies (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004), 6.
72. Slocum-Schaffer, 175.
73. Peter Braunstein, ”Adults Only”, in Bailey and Farber, op cit, 131.
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trickle-down effect of sixties excess: a move away from orthodoxy and towards pluralism, a shift

whose explicitly heterodox overtones should not be ignored. After all, the widespread

experimentation with our “hedonic circuits,” which carried forward from the sixties to the

seventies without much diminution, conjured powerful and potentially ecstatic modes of being

that rivaled older religious sources of value. At the same time, the disorienting effects of these

experiences did not give people handy guides to navigate the morning after, which meant that

hedonic and visionary exploits often left spiritual voids hovering in their wake.

The “great American centrifuge” of the era, with its forceful thrust of objects away from

center, provides a dynamic image for two contrasting dimensions of the self that emerges in the

seventies. On the one hand, the decentered self became a charged vector of exploration and

creative re-invention; and, on the other, an aimless and lonely satellite drifting into random

disarray and indifferent passivity. In his 1975 poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which

Miller draws attention to as a key site for seventies identity, the poet John Ashbery evokes the

dynamics of the centrifugal self:

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.74

Ashbery describes a ride—or trip—characterized both by wayward propulsion and cool, even

claustrophobic stasis. An “I” is discovered in this process, but it is discovered precisely in its

74. Ashbery, John, Selected Poems (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1985), 191. I am indebted to Stephen Paul
Miller for insisting on the importance of this poem to an understanding of the seventies cultural milieu.
 69

distance from any possible object of identification or stabilization, even with intimate things like

friends, trees, or one’s own self, glimpsed in a mirror. “This otherness, this / ‘Not-being-us’ is all

there is to look at / In the mirror.” The centrifugal self is at once scattered and singular, and its

paradoxically inertial drive towards freedom throws it into a creative abyss, a perpetual identity

crisis that commercial culture, hedonistic lifestyles, and those alternate reality constructs we call

“new religious movements” or “cults” helped to cushion.

Indeed, one of the ways we keep the deeper implications of the seventies self at arm’s

length is to mock the “Me Decade” for its narcissism without remembering that the “Me” in

question was not so much a triumphant exclamation point as a question mark, the trigger for an

experimental subjectivity, and a potentially endless derive.

In religious terms, this quest produced what the sociologist Robert Wuthnow

characterized as a shift from an spirituality of “dwelling,” associated with home and hearth, to a

more nomadic spirituality of “seeking.” As a self-description for spiritual Americans, the term

seeker was already a century old at this point, an outgrowth of liberal Protestantism’s late

nineteenth-century turn towards demythologized Christianity and religious pluralism.75 In

addition, the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of bohemian, Transcendentalist and

occult modes of seeking that aimed beyond the provinces of Christianity.76 In the seventies, the

explosion of seekers reflected the diversity of the growing spiritual marketplace, as well as the

sixties focus on phenomenological experience and the lingering discontent with any ultimate

75. As Leigh Schmidt argues in Restless Souls, this earlier seeker culture possessed two dimensions: a sympathetic
openness to alterity, and a desire for concordance and unity. The latter impulse developed into the religious
philosophy of perennialism, whose ideas underlie a lot of the counterculture’s experiments with religion. However,
it is the former element that resonates in the seventies: an openness to different perspectives and experiences of
otherness. For more, see Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. HarperOne. 2006
76. See Justin Martin, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians, 2014. Also Michael Robertson,
Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
 70

positions. This relativism and cut-and-paste consumerism contributed to the rise of New Age and

the psychologized “Self spirituality” that lay at its core.77

“You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can

stand in your way,” wrote Richard Bach in the pellucid and whispy Jonathan Livingston Seagull,

whose paperback rights went for a record-breaking million dollars in 1972.78 Indeed, almost 15

% of the best-selling books in the seventies were self-help books like I’m OK, You’re OK, whose

title alone suggested how difficult it was to actually inhabit that true self of absolute freedom for

very long. But the constant iteration that organizes the narrative of seeking was part of the point.

As Tom Wolfe explained in an influential 1976 article on the “‘Me’ Decade,” Bach’s sort of

discourse reflects the widespread assumption that a “Real Me” exists beneath the sham layers of

personality blamed on society and family, and that new psychological and spiritual practices can

reveal this core self. To his credit, Wolfe realized that this search was not just a passive revealing

but an active making as well. “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—

remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and

doting on it.”79

In his writing on Ashbery and the seventies, Miller draws attention to another significant

line in “Self-Portrait,” one that speaks of a time when “something like living occurs, a movement

/ Out of the dream into its codification.” The dream here, for Miller and for me, is the dream of

the sixties, when the dominant accounts of reality were shattered and a temporary sense of

freedom was unleashed, an opening that mutated, in the early seventies, into a more troubling

sort of indetermination, something between a void and an entrepreneurial opportunity. On the

77. See Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity
(Oxford; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1996)
78. Schulman, 79.
 71

one hand, dwindling enchantment impelled an attempted return to real life, or at least “something

like” living. On the other, the fading dream—of freedom, of ecstasy, of new pleasures—was

continued by other means, and especially through its own commercial and religious

“codification.”

In other words, America in the seventies incorporated sixties mores and aspirations while

tamping their subversive or radical potential, a transformation that Miller associates with the

emergence of a new cultural logic: surveillance, and particularly self-surveillance, in the midst of

an economy that was switching definitively to consumer spending (and consumer debt) as its

main driver. “In the seventies the malleable identities and consumer patterns that we use to

survey ourselves were put in place.”80 Shifts in values and personality were increasingly open to

tracking, as new medical technologies like ultrasound and MRI literalized the scanning of the

self. At the same time, “the silent majority as well as consumer-culture dropouts were canvassed

and enlisted in the increasingly centralized marketplace.”81 Credit checks become more

centralized, the UPC symbol appeared, and the productive possibilities of cross-checked

databases were exploited by government, law enforcement, and business. Though technological

tracking enforced its own kind of standardization, the interlocking paradigms of cultural

pluralism and subjective authenticity assured that “a sense of the personal also became more

prominently organized within the marketplace.”82 As with the SX-70 film that Polaroid made

available in 1972, the techniques of identity formation in the early seventies let you see yourself

develop before your eyes.

79. Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” in New York, August 23, 1976.
http://nymag.com/news/features/45938/ (Accessed January 2015).
80. Miller, Seventies, 18.
81. Ibid, 3.
82. Ibid, 10.
 72

The turbulence of the sixties was, in large part, a turbulence of consciousness, as both

personal practices and mediated cultural environments shattered, transformed, and extended the

boundaries of the phenomenological self. This produced a tremendous scattering and dissolving

of subjectivity. By the early seventies, these new zones of experience were themselves

increasingly codified, controlled, and directed through a veritable explosion of new religious

movements, guru scenes, and psycho-spiritual “cults.” These groups were able to sustain and

exploit the sublime cracks in consensus reality forged in the sixties, while, as Tipton showed,

also providing new models of identity and collective belonging that reoriented the centrifugal

self around new and charismatic centers of gravity and value. The explosion of self-help groups

and religious cults in the seventies both intensified and organized the extraordinary experiences

of the sixties, providing templates and rules that exploited their alterity while organizing their

existential chaos. Even some activists heard the call, as two radicals in the celebrated Chicago

Seven—Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin—found their way into spiritual movements in the early

seventies.

Tom Wolfe explained the new spiritual turn through the countercultural obsession with

self and the alchemical quest for the “Real Me.” Wolfe argued that consciousness techniques and

psychological tools like encounter groups could effectively strip away social and familial

imprinting, and therefore open up a fantasized site of freedom and authenticity, one that

Scientology referred to as “clear.” However, as innumerable practices of body and mind drew the

self outside of the self, this process could also simply intensify a sometimes desperate search for

greener grass. In this sense, the “Real Me” was a classic McGuffin, and the flip side of its hoped-

for realization was the somewhat ominous possibility—supported by Buddhism, by psychedelic

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rapture, and by constructivist psychological and sociological concepts—that there is no solid or

substantial Me at all.

This vertiginous existential intimation is the dark secret of seventies narcissism, the

Munch-like scream in the smiley face. Over time, the difficulty in locating or clarifying the

“Real Me” meant that the new movements took on an increasingly “religious” character

dependent on mystery, faith, and submission to authority. Wolfe points to many examples, such

as the transformation of the California drug rehabilitation group Synanon into a religion, as well

as the mystical foundation of many socialist communes. But the supreme example in the early

seventies is the rise of (mostly) Asian gurus, accompanied by repackaged forms of unwavering

spiritual authority.

Wolfe is also one of those great cultural observers who knows his history and knows how

to deploy it to enliven contemporary criticism. In his 1976 article, Wolfe persuasively set the

radical spiritual culture of the seventies within the history of American religion, proclaiming a

“Third Great Awakening” two years before the religious scholar William G. McLoughlin broke

academic dirt with a similar argument in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. Moreover, Wolfe

also stressed the absolutely central role that individual experience played in this awakening, an

experience he cannily if loosely assimilated to the esoteric idea of gnosis. “In one form or

another [the new groups] arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some

1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of

God.” The Real Me was the seventies face of this spark, with the Gnostic hatred and distrust of

matter transmuted into a rejection of the facades of society and the manipulations of other

people—individualistic frameworks that could paradoxically, through some Jung-like

enantiodromia, flip into cult rapture and group minds.

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By establishing seventies spirituality as a gnostic Great Awakening, Wolfe wanted to

both underscore the religious dimension of California human potential institutions like Esalen

and est, and to present a picture of American religion that emphasizes its dependence on

extraordinary individual experience. The first two Great Awakenings in American history, which

took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries respectively, were characterized by a

collective upwelling of extraordinary behaviors and ecstatic states that manifested as everything

from shouts to visions to rolling on the ground frothing at the mouth. These extraordinary

revivals, with their well-named explosions of popular religious “enthusiasm,” both reflected and

fueled the diversity and recombinant creativity of religious forms in the young United States.

They were by no means uncontroversial at the time. What revivalists characterized as the actions

of the Holy Spirit were reframed by outsiders—including more conservative religious leaders of

the day—in more pathological or reductively psychological terms.83 In this way, the history of

religion in America cannot be separated from the history of extraordinary experience in

America—a history of how powerful and novel states of mind and body were cultivated,

integrated, explained, contested, and condemned, both in religious-esoteric and secular-

psychological languages.

The Great Awakenings remain central events in American religious history, and Wolfe’s

insistence that the psycho-spiritual carnival of the seventies constitutes another iteration helps

underscore the dynamic significance of the era. Wolfe argues that new religious movements do

not begin with new theologies or values or cartographies of the afterlife, but with “some over-

whelming ecstasy or seizure, a ‘vision,’ a ‘trance,’ a hallucination—an actual neurological event,

in fact, a dramatic change in metabolism, something that has seemed to light up the entire central

nervous system.” What fueled the Third Great Awakening was the riot of dramatic

83. See Taves, Fits, op cit.

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“neurological” events—or “altered states of consciousness”—that characterized the

counterculture and seventies “Self” religion.

These events were, at the same time, cultivated and mediated through a variety of

registers: biofeedback devices, hallucinogenic drugs, trance rituals, meditational regimes, and

intense psychological therapeutic modalities like encounter groups. The centrifugal force of these

practices—whose attendant events unravel, fragment, or multiply the ordinary “centripetal” self,

opening up a search for a new foundation or norm—opened up the space for the cacophonous

diversity of seventies spirituality. Here Wolfe anticipates the argument that “religious

experience” is a portmanteau concept that laminates neurological phenomena, which can be

transparently described with explanatory terms like seizure and hallucination, with cultural

attributions like “vision” and “trance,” which Wolfe renders in the scare quotes that indicate their

merely cultural contextual force. As Wolfe explains regarding LSD, “It was quite easy for an

LSD experience to take the form of a religious vision, particularly if one were among people

already so inclined.”84

But while Wolfe is willing to deconstruct the experiential foundation of new religious

movements in neurological terms, he did not waver from the notion that religion, or at least

American religion, begins with a religious experience and only later crystallizes into dogma and

institution. In supporting his argument, Wolfe invokes both Max Weber and Joachim Wach, two

scholars of religion that he also employed to similar effect in his 1968 book The Electric Kool

Aid Acid Test, where he argued that acid provided the galvanizing experience that gave Kesey’s

crew a religious character despite their resistance to religious rhetoric or form. But Wolfe would

have been better off citing William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience in many

ways responsible for propagating the notion that “religious experience” is a distinct phenomenon
 76

that can be isolated from the collective and cultural forces of institution, dogma, and collective

practices.

While the modern discourse of religious experience can be traced back to Friedrich

Schleiermacher, James re-articulated the concept in the context of American individualism and

as forms of interiority that can be judged and integrated along pragmatist lines. “Churches, when

once established, live at second-hand upon tradition,” James wrote. But the founders of every

church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the

divine.”85 Indeed, when James famously characterized religion as “the feelings, acts, and

experiences of individual men in their solitude,” he underscored the central role of extraordinary

and direct individual experience in his account. As we will see, this model of original and

immediate religious experience would prove enormously influential, not only on the analysis of

religion but on its active development, particularly within the sorts of experience-hungry

currents—psychedelia, occultism, radical psychology, positive thinking—that would feed both

the intense spirituality and the experimental psychology of the seventies. James’ view, as well as

the radical empiricism and pragmatic pluralism it rests upon, has also come in for increasing and

sometimes vociferous attacks from a variety of angles. Since the problems attendant upon

extraordinary experiences—whether they are considered religious, pathological, or simply

“weird”—lie at the core of this study, we need to return, again, to James, and to the analytic,

historical, and ultimately ontological implications of his still resonating views.

84. Wolfe, “‘Me’.”

85. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 33.
 77

The Varieties of Talking About Religious Experience

Authoritative, accessible, and more wily in its rambles than at first appears, William

James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience remains the single most influential American

scholarly work on religion, and without doubt the most important book on that menagerie of

extraordinary subjective phenomena whose expression and interpretations have so often

demanded religious or mystical language. Making an enormous mark on both scholarship and

the practice of American religion, the Varieties continues to illuminate—or, according to some

critics, to obscure—how we talk, think, and individually relate to the more extreme, and

sometimes extremely meaningful, dimensions of consciousness, perception, and feeling. Indeed,

one of the principal markers of James’ influence lies in the seeming transparency of the notion of

“religious experience” itself: a singular, individualized, and often transformative trans-

psychological event whose immediacy and self-authenticating power clearly separates it both

from the everyday run of quotidian consciousness and from the institutional, textual, and

collective assemblages that constitute religion as a social force.

Indeed, by insisting on this distinction, James helped establish a particularly American

current of informal, experiential, and individualistic spirituality that has congealed in our era into

the massively popular post-religious identity of “Spiritual But Not Religious.” Though rooted in

religious currents already flowing in James’ day, the identity of SBNR can in many ways be

traced to countercultural spirituality, its rejection of mainstream Christianity and (most) religious

institutions, and its embrace of practices that contribute to the sorts of twilight or exalted states

of consciousness that are frequently identified as spiritual, mystical, or indeed, religious.

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The productive religious influence of James’ frameworks—in other words, its

constructive rather than deconstructive power—is one of the reasons that a host of contemporary

critical religious scholars roundly reject The Varieties, which remains popular in religious

studies. As we will see, these scholars raise legitimate concerns about the very notion of

“religious experience,” and later we will suggest that there are more subtle ways of

understanding and thinking through what I will be calling “extraordinary experiences.” That said,

one way of grasping the psycho-spiritual carnival of the early seventies, including the high

frontiers of high weirdness, is to recognize the era as one that took the Jamesian bait: the

Varieties came to serve as a pluralistic model and permissive justification for an experimental

spiritual psychology devoted to exploring and experimenting with “altered states of

consciousness” by any mean necessary.

Based on a series of public lectures given in Scotland at the onset of the twentieth

century, James began his book with a critique against the “medical materialism” of his day. To

clear the air around his topic, James needed to push back against those biological determinists

who insisted on reducing certain psychological phenomena—say, the raptures associated with

revivalism and other forms of religious enthusiasm—to more or less pathological states of the

brain, a reduction that in turn allowed the beliefs associated with or precipitated from those

experiences to be written off as deluded flotsam of the meat-machine. In this view, Paul’s vision

on the road to Damascus is “nothing but” an epileptic seizure, while Saint Francis is a

“hereditary degenerate.” James’ response remains resonant today, a vital riposte to the simplistic

neuro-reductionism of our era’s popular and sometimes scholarly discourse, and one that

strongly informs my own non-reductive but non-essentialist take on “extraordinary experiences.”

 79

Firstly, James noted that all productions of thought, all beliefs and skeptical arguments

and empirical perceptions, are themselves states of the brain. “Scientific theories are organically

conditioned just as much as religious emotions are,” James writes; if we knew all the facts “we

should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does

those of the Methodist.”86 As such, the criteria for taking such productions seriously or not—of

choosing, say, a biological account over a supernatural one—lies outside the domain of strict

biological accounts. For James, we embrace certain states of mind over others because we enjoy

them or because we believe in their “cash value” for life. This, in essence, is James’ version of

pragmatism: the supreme criterion for beliefs is what they do for us. James elaborates his

pragmatist point by underscoring the crucial difference between origins and function.

Analytically establishing the origins of a given trait, belief, or phenomena, in the brain or

elsewhere, does not establish its value, since what is important for determining this value is how

that belief functions in the complex, jury-rigged, and endlessly negotiated field of life itself.

Wrestling in his own way with Darwin, James believed that the conditions of existence itself

exerted selection pressures on beliefs, and that this pragmatic pressure was the closest we get to

“truth.” Playing with biblical language, James defined this “empiricist criterion” as “By their

fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”87

James’ broad definitions of pragmatism and empiricism are certainly debatable—James’

colleague Peirce, who offered a more stringent and logical characterization of pragmatic fitness,

ultimately rejected it. Indeed, in the next section I will suggest that James’ basic orientation is

less pragmatist than pluralist, in that his tolerance for multiple and divergent frameworks of

belief rests on top of an ontological view of an open, evolving, and—most importantly—

86. Ibid, 14.

87. Ibid, 20.
 80

multiplex reality. But James’ attempt to shift the operations of valuation from origins to

functions remains very useful. Within the psychology of religion, this move allows us to avoid a

major problem faced by those attempting to positively evaluate historical or contemporary

spiritual experiences: the evident presence of psycho-pathology within many religious

personalities, and the difficulty in disentangling spiritual or mystical experiences from various

forms of trauma or even psychosis. If we believe that phenomena can be reduced to their origins,

then the sorts of arguments that, say, David Halperin makes in his book on Ezekiel—that the

prophet’s language and visions show clear signs of psychosis—are sufficient to relieve us from

the burden of trying to take the text seriously in its own terms.88 This sort of analysis is common

found in skeptical arguments about religious believers or mystics proffered by scholars and

popular pundits alike.

However, if we shift attention to the function of beliefs within individual lives and

communities, the mere presence of pathological origins no longer intrinsically demands that we

discount more potentially constructive or emergent forms and meanings. In fact, as Jeffrey

Kripal decisively argues, something like trauma or pathology may be a necessary or at least

highly correlated contributor to the most extraordinary visionary or noetic events, which he reads

under the signs of the paranormal (and that I would categorize as weird) and what he calls the

“traumatic secret”. “Psychopathology and the paranormal go just fine together, as do mushrooms

and religious revelation, or madness and holiness, or car wrecks and near-death experiences, or

mystics and sexual trauma; once the ego is dissolved, however it is dissolved, the imaginal, the

supernormal, and the spiritual can come rushing in.” 89 This point will be crucial later on, since

our avatars of high weirdness at times display unquestionably pathological symptoms and

88. See David J. Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (Penn State Press, 2010).
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excesses, and it is vital to resist the understandable tendency to reduce the complexity of their

tales by writing them off as “nothing but” druggies or nuts.

Equally important for our discussion is another consequence of James’ pragmatism,

which we might call the “fictionalist” or fabulated character of religious consciousness. James

insists that value emerges when our concepts and beliefs engage the sensory, empirical world,

and therefore that abstract concepts of incorporeal entities like “God” and “soul” are, in

themselves, meaningless or vapid. “Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our

practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she

were full of special designs…”90 As we will see, many gods and monsters lurk in this “as if,”

which is really not so far from the science fictional “what if?” This should be no surprise. For

though James was attempting to underscore the value of pragmatist criteria, whereby the value of

a belief can be judged by the effects it has on life, his “as if” also opens up room for what

scholars now recognize as one of the fundamental threads of postmodern religion: the relative

unconcern with veracity, and the corresponding willingness and exuberance to invent and inhabit

belief structures that are, in origin or form, indistinguishable from fictions.

As we will see, while the imbrication of religious forms and conscious fictions has a long

history, it comes to the fore in certain streams of countercultural fabulation that feed directly into

the literature and experience of high weirdness, which draws a great deal from popular genres

like science fiction and fantasy. Though this turn towards fabulation and “spiritual metafiction”

certainly reflects the erosion of absolute truth claims in the west, we distort this development

when we reduce it to an irrationalist or nihilistic “anything goes” sensibility. Instead, social

agents recognize that fictions can become the site of a creative, self-consciously constructionist

89. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 100-101.
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practice—a practice that, in addition, may reveal unintended and tricksy ontological encounters

over time. While some of these fabrications originated as manipulative lies or psychotic

delusions—as critics of new religious movements would have it—their constructive and often

collective characters are often difficult to extricate from a larger constructionist continuum that

embraces social experiment, mythic theater, positive thinking, infinite games, and subcultural in-

jokes. Beliefs, in this view, are valuable only to the degree they are operationalized; they are not

so much “believed” as experimentally “held” as opportunities to produce creative effects in

minds, bodies, and social situations.

James already points us in this direction through the first-person language he uses in the

citation above. Beliefs not only produce effects for those others who hold them as absolutely

true, but can retain a strange efficacy even for those of us that constitute the “we” that remains

conscious, like James, of their “as if” status. In this, James was simply paying attention to the

creative religious movements of his day: mind cure, New Thought, Christian Science, and other

groups and individuals who developed the metaphysical pragmatism that has come down to us

today as self-help psychology and the New Age notion that “we create our own reality.” These

movements, which all redeploy the arguably “magical” notion that thought itself is causative,

very much shaped James’s understanding of psychology and religion alike. His qualified

embrace of such popular strategies reminds us of a fundamental bivalence in all accounts of

reality: whatever the quality of their propositional content, such accounts are always also

symbolic constructs that organize social, cultural, and psychological existence.

One crucial consequence follows from this interlocking field of social realities: all

available accounts or scripts become potentially useful in the negotiation of the sorts of

extraordinary events that are often considered “religious experiences.” This very much includes

90. James, 55.

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scholarly accounts. The best example of this circular influence is none other than William James,

whose Varieties was arguably designed to escape into popular discourse and authoritatively

carve out room for other thinkers and seekers to pursue or shore up their own radical

experiences. Along with “teaching both social scientists and religious individuals what it means

to have an experience,” Courtney Benders argues, James produced a “pedagogical textual

environment in which it is expected that readers will encounter the residue of others’ strongly

resonant, singularly authoritative experiences and thereby seek their own.”91 James’ solitary

vision of religious experience and mysticism produced models that were equally available to

secular thinkers (psychologists and historians of religion especially), to religious liberals, and to

the emerging culture of seekers; as Taves notes, James’ arguments basically gave “carte blanche”

to the New Thought movement, with its supernatural vision of positive thinking. The “self

religion” of the New Age begins here, with the notion that the source of power lays within the

individual. This attitude, in turn, stages the epistemological relativism that, as described by Paul

Heelas, remains one of the distinguishing characteristics of the New Age—an arguably

vertiginous condition that is “shored up” though the intensified appeal to and reification of

individual psychological experiences as furnishing—in contrast to social demands and religious

dogmas—the most reliable basis for spiritual authority.

Indeed, James casts such a long shadow over contemporary religious developments,

including the emergence of the category “Spiritual But Not Religious,” that the calls to retire him

and the Varieties from the discourse of religious studies are guaranteed to fail, simply because

he has written himself into the deep cultural discourse that in many ways structures modern

91. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 69-70.
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spirituality.92 By fashioning concepts with existential appeal and remarkable cultural force,

James’ can-do religious pragmatism proved a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Both countercultural spirituality and the experimental psychology that emerged from it

can be considered as returns to James. There are many reasons that James was beloved by heads

and researchers at the time: his emphasis on personal experience, his openness of mind, and his

profound—and profoundly American—pluralism. Another reason was that he was a highly

regarded psychologist and philosopher who took drugs and talked about it. Though peyote left

him with little more than a hangover, James’ intake of nitrous oxide produced an experience of

“infinite rationality” in which all contradictions revealed themselves to be merely differences of

degree in the “unbroken continuity” of being. Far from fetishizing this vision, however, James

saw it as an expression of the errors of Hegelian philosophy, which too quickly papered over real

distinctions in its quest for the synthetic absolute. For James, nitrous intoxication was not an

92. In his essay in the reader Religious Experience: A Reader, Craig Martins closes with an almost strident plea:
“While it may be the case that there could be something of value in James’ Varieties or James’ legacy for religious
studies in general, I propose that his canonical status be retired at present; given the ease with which his work is
appropriated into what amounts to vulgar rhetoric, it should be relegated to the status of….a historical curiosity that
is interesting in so far as it has informed the field of religious studies in the past, but—due to its embedded
ideological assumptions—presently not of much use to critical scholarship on religion.” See Craig Martin, “William
James in Late Capitalism: Our Religion of the Status Quo,” in Martin, Craig, Russell T McCutcheon, and Smith,
Religious Experience a Reader (Sheffield; Bristol, CT: Equinox Pub., 2012), 196. Some of Martins’ concern with
James clearly lies with how his theories can be and have been appropriated within more “vulgar” discourse,
including the discourse of “Spiritual But Not Religious” and the divide so many liberals make between (good)
spirituality and (bad) organized religion. The term “vulgar,” however, I read as something of a slip, since the notion
of a “vulgar” deployment of an explanatory theory is most solidly welded, within social theory, to two faults:
“vulgar materialism” and “vulgar Marxism.” The former sort of “medical materialism” was very popular in the
nineteenth century, and forms the principle object of critique in the remarkable opening lecture of James’
Varieties—a critique whose continued relevance only underscores how little public discourse has changed when it
looks for biological explanations for complex social, psychological, and arguably “spiritual” phenomena. Vulgar
Marxism in turn represents those materialist critiques of the existing social order that too crudely insist on the
determining force of economic and material “base” over the cultural, intellectual, and psychological world. The slip
here, again, is that it is precisely these two discourses—a biologically-based materialism, and a sociological
determinism of cultural scripts—that are most often resorted to by thinkers, inside and outside the academy, who are
interested in the deconstruction of “religious experience.” Since Martin’s theoretical orientation lies within the
Marxist stream of dialectical or cultural materialism, it is ironic that it is precisely the potential “vulgarity” of
popular discourses about religious experience that becomes the justification for his own ideological house-cleaning.
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avenue toward true revelation but a procedure in the “experimental metaphysics” that his

pluralism demanded. Discussing his nitrous intoxication in Varieties, James proclaimed that

our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special
type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there
lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without
suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there
in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have
their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be
final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard
them is the question -- for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet
they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region
though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our
accounts with reality.93

This passage frequently appears in the movement texts that establish the “consciousness

culture” of the seventies, almost as a sort of mantra of permission. It is crucial for me as well,

and for some of the same reasons. For one, James refuses the discourse of pathology while

generously holding out the possibility that even highly discontinuous forms of consciousness

have their “field of application and adaptation.” In other words, the proper philosophical attitude

towards extraordinary altered states is not the deconstruction of their phenomenology so much as

an experimentation with possible fields of application. Moreover, James is deliciously

ambivalent about the ontology of these matters. While the outlandish “types of mentality”

discovered through psychoactive drugs or mystical experiences can certainly be induced through

psychobiological triggers—the application of the “requisite stimulus”—they are also, in some

93. James, 283.

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irreducible or at least unavoidable sense, part of the pluralistic manifold of the universe itself.

Unusual modes of consciousness are about the world as much if not more than they are about the

brain: they perform work, they “open a region.” This is a perfect example of what G. William

Barnard called James’ “incomplete constructivism,” a methodological principle that Barnard

characterized as “James’ willingness to claim that we discover the world as much as we create

our experience of it.”94

Finally, as with James’ Varieties in general, the passage is also designed to exert a

practical effect among readers. James is essentially giving permission to potential radical

empiricists, encouraging them to both open up and experiment with their own consciousness and

to take reports of other people’s extraordinary experiences, not literally, but seriously. This

stance in turn accords with James’ pluralism. In the late essays collected in The Pluralistic

Universe he argues that, regardless of the ultimate status of the universe as a single entity, its

manifold character, which is abundantly evident, argues for a methodological approach which

stresses the open-ended, ontologically variable, sometimes contradictory character of our models

and descriptions of existence. This philosophical stance—which is really a kind of relational

method or ethics more than a systematic structure of propositions—is itself rooted, at least in my

view, in James’ embrace of the full gamut of extraordinary and empirically available dimensions

of consciousness, forms which are of course always coupled to an environment or “region” that

lies beyond the boundaries constructed through their particular activity.

94. Cited in Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion
and Other Special Things (Princeton University Press, 2009), n.3, 92.
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Illuminating Differences

James’ pluralism does not deflect the considerable problems that remain with the

category of “religious experience.” For some scholars of religion, in fact, the category itself is

already too much of a fiction to be of much analytical use, and in fact obfuscates or disguises as

much as it reveals or clarifies. (Others, as we will see below, say the same thing about

“experience” itself.) The core argument is simple: there is nothing inherently “religious” about

any sort of experience. Whatever sort of experience arises—a sense of profound identity with the

cosmos, a cognitive fusion of subject and object, an ecstatic immersion in an affectively charged

image—it only becomes “religious” after the fact through a process of social, cultural, or

linguistic attribution. In James’ own terms, the idea that “religious experience” is a stable, well-

bounded category is an “over-belief”: a well-developed and socially established “top down”

conceptual framework that relies more on cultural code than empirical encounter. As such, the

category of religious experience can be used as a sort of dodge or cover, since the identification

of an experience as “religious” immediately throws up a block against rival explanations,

especially reductionist accounts based in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, or sociology. As

Wayne Proudfoot argued, to characterize any experience as a “religious experience” is to sneak

in an explanation under the guise of a mere description.95

Essentialist arguments about religion, definitional or otherwise, are luckily not our

concern here. Indeed, many countercultural seekers and consciousness movements—as well as

our avatars of high weirdness—should be seen as exploring the unstable zone that is opened up

when the panoply of extraordinary experiences available to some humans are detached or ripped

95. See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xi-xix.
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from the rhetorical and institutional authority of (largely Christian) “religion.” Critics of the

concept of “religious experience,” however, are not just concerned with the adjective religious;

they also have some issues with the noun.

The very notion of experience itself plays a heated role in the contests between faith and

freethinking that have been waged during the last few centuries. Proudfoot reaches back to

Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German theologian who, in an influential apologetic 1799 text

specifically targeting the “cultured despisers” of religion, turned to individual experience as an

affective counter to disbelief. Schleiermacher argued that religion is ultimately not a matter of

doctrine or ethics, but of feeling and intuition, an experiential site that is, in a proto-Jamesian

move, characterized as individual, set apart, and perceptually “immediate.”96 Schleiermacher’s

account, heavily influenced by both the emerging aesthetic spirit of Romanticism and the

emotional Pietism of Schleiermacher’s own youth, attempted to respond to Enlightenment

critiques, especially those of Kant, by shaping religious sentiment into an unassailable

foundation of individual religious life. In the wake of Schleiermacher, Proudfoot argues,

religious experience became a site whose appeals to immediacy, ineffability, and affective power

acted as smokescreens thrown up against an encroaching skeptical critique represented, in the

nineteenth century at least, by Darwin and the “masters of suspicion” Nietzsche, Freud, and

Marx. Even as the doctrine, ethics, and historical veracity of the Bible were deconstructed, this

story goes, the subjective stream of interiority within the self would safeguard the spirit and

those infinite realms whose visceral intuition would enable individuals to, in Olav Hammer’s

words now, “peek beyond the edges of the limitations set up by Kant.”97

96. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893), 26.
97. Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden;
Boston: Brill, 2004), 338.
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In the Victorian America of William James, the move away from Christian doctrine

towards individual experience took the form of a number of extremely liberal forms of Protestant

religiosity—Emersonian Transcendentalism, New Thought, Unitarian Universalism, and other

so-called “metaphysical” religions. These developments, which were paralleled in various ways

by more bohemian and “esoteric” currents, abandoned many if not most forms and markers of

conventional Christian belief and embraced an increasingly pluralist framework that allowed for

all manner of individual aesthetic, contemplative, and increasingly psychologized experiences.

Though more philosophically sophisticated than most of his brethren, James himself must be

considered part of this radical Protestant current, one that the historian Leigh Eric Schmidt

argues in Restless Souls is exemplified by the emerging spiritual category of the “seeker.” As

such, the Varieties can and have been read as a defense and extension of a stream of Protestant

spirituality that was attempting to navigate an increasingly secular modernity with modes of

description and explanation—like psychology—that still might conserve what James called “the

immediate content of the religious consciousness.”98 For these reasons, the Varieties is

sometimes written off as a kind of crypto-theology of Romantic individualism.

However, a more capacious constructivist account of James would recognize the

Varieties as responding creatively and productively to the modernist recognition that subjectivity

is an active biological, psychological, and social process. As Charles Taylor has shown, the

peculiar interiority and reflexivity of the modern subject develops historically, especially through

evolving practices of reading, writing, and thinking, including reflexive thoughts about the

source of subjectivity itself. Here the materialist imagination helps us: the flux of subjectivity

itself can be seen to be molded and shaped by those media, practices, and social networks that

compose its context and much of its content. The modern self therefore is not simply an

98. James, 12.

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ideology, or a pure effect of social forces, or a tool of the emerging global market, but an

emergent or constructed bio-psychological agent operating within a pluralistic matrix composed

of these and other fields of force and interaction.

In this sense, James was not simply defending or protecting a trace of religion by storing

it in an ideologically bounded rhetoric of ineffable experience. He was also affirming—and in

part participating in—the constructionist framework of the modern self as an individuating

singularity condemned to find and make itself out of its own contingency in the face of social

complexification. In accord with the expansionist pluralism that structured his thought, James

also suggested through the Varieties that the ontological questions closed by many materialists

were still open, and that a capacious acknowledgement of the wide range of religious

experiences suggested that there were modes of phenomenological encounter that demanded a

much fuller accounting than they had received.

For James, the supreme example of such an encounter lies in mysticism. James declared

that mysticism is the “root and center” of personal religious experience, a phenomenon of “inner

authority and illumination” that he characterized according to four conditions that shifted the

category, again, away from particular doctrinal positions. The first condition is the ineffability of

the experience, its essential resistance to the transparency of language or expression. The second

is its noetic quality; though elusive in expression and deeper than discursive reason, the mystical

event nonetheless takes the form of insight, a kind of experiential knowledge very much captured

by the esoteric term gnosis. Thirdly, James emphasized the usually rapid transience of the

experience, and fourthly, its passivity. Though mystical states might be triggered through

“preliminary voluntary operations,” the experience itself arises without decision, beyond will.

(Here we can recognize the continued operation of Protestant notions of grace.) Though
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acknowledging the pathological dimensions of mysticism, James was also keen to purify his

category. While James noted that mystics experience many visual and auditory hallucinations, as

well as a variety of “automatisms” and other marvels, he made a strong distinction between such

phenomena and mysticism as such, whose “essential marker” he believed was the

“consciousness of illumination.”99 There is much that could be said about this term and the

religious and philosophical currents of light and fire it implies; here we need simply to note that

illumination, unlike realization or insight, implies an external (or deeply unconscious) source, an

Outside encountered by consciousness through a medium that radiates through cognition and

“visionary” sensation alike. Despite its ancient roots, illumination is also a powerfully modern

image; it stands as a principle term for gnosis within modern esoteric currents like Freemasonry,

while also invoking, at least by James’ era of filament bulbs, a technical or technological process

of incandescence.

By distilling a model of core religious experience from various psychological, cultural or

doctrinal contexts, James also created a conceptual template whose referential power that

allowed for a new way of comparing different religious and spiritual paths across cultures. As

such, James’ portrait of mystical experience proved enormously influential on scholars,

psychologists, and spiritual seekers alike. The full flowering of this comparativist drive in the

twentieth century appeared as newly refashioned forms of “perennial philosophy,” an

understanding of religious and particularly mystical experience that was adopted by many

thinkers who held great sway over the psychedelic and spiritual counterculture, including Aldous

Huxley, Carl Jung, and Huston Smith. These modern perennialists hold that beneath the world’s

various religions and spiritual paths lie a set of generalizable core experiences that are not only

independent of creed and cultural location but can be robustly compared with one another in

99. James, n.253, 299.

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order to reveal essential and inherent human spiritual potentials.100 Such notions also became the

dominant view among some scholars of religion, especially the Chicago school represented by

Mircae Eliade, who himself strongly influenced the operating concepts and exploratory panache

of the countercultural religious quest.

Among contemporary scholars of religion, however, the perennialist portrait of a sui

generis mysticism, which might stand apart from religious tradition and serve as a point of

comparativist contact, has taken a heavy toll. The barrage began in the late seventies, when

Steven Katz fundamentally shifted the discussion by contesting the unifying moves of mystical

comparativism in the name of cultural difference. Rather than being “immediate,” mystical

experience is, like everything else, mediated, especially by language, cognitive templates, and

socio-cultural networks of influence and practice. Crucially, Katz was not content to point out

the differences in the language crafted by mystics in different cultural locations, but insisted that

these differences marked the wet clay of experience itself.101 Katz’s concern was in some sense

conservative, in that he wanted to preserve the autonomy of different mystical traditions by

isolating them from one another, such that one could no longer legitimately compare—except by

way of contrast—nondual Vedantic accounts with Jewish Kabbalistic ones. For other scholars

following in Katz’s wake, the notion of an essentialized and sui generis view of religious or

mystical experience was perceived as an act of discursive violence that seemingly unites diverse

100. Though rooted in antiquity, the modern expression of Perennialism emerges from a variety of currents and
conditions, most notably the deepening mutual encounter of world religions in an era of intensified industrial
globalism, a process that radically increased the availability of texts and teachers while also staging the emergence
of notions of unity or tolerant interdependence that might mitigate the inevitable conflicts. Though the experiences
themselves were rarified, possibility of articulating a shared religious experience provided an even more direct
discourse of global unity than the logic of tolerance and dialogue associated with ecumenicism.
101. One problem with this account, of course, is how to account for and compare mystical experiences that occur to
individuals without religious training. More fundamentally, it is difficult to see how this model could account for the
creativity and eccentiricity of much mystical discourse, since it is hard to account for the generation of novelty
within and around the mystical moment with such a conservative model of cultural programming. This problem
becomes much more glaring in a “postmodern” (or what Deleuze would call postsignifying) domain like early
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phenomena only through a kind of conceptual colonialism. Instead, these scholars suggest, we

need to return to the field of historical differences and to assert the local dominance of culture

and language over even the most ineffable and intangible experiences. Some extreme proponents

of this view suggest that the whole notion of “experience” adds little to the discussion, since it

amounts to little more than a site of inscription for power. As Craig Martin and Russell

McCutcheon describe this ultimate Katzian position, “the available language one uses to explain

one’s experience may in fact have produced the experience.”102

Later we will discover ways in which a more complex form of this recursive, self-

programming pattern informs the dynamics of psychedelic experience and the high weirdness of

Philip K. Dick in particular. Here however I want to stress its existential inadequacy. For many if

not most of us, the notion that our phenomenal experience is simply a product of language would

have to be classed as a rather “mean” account of experience, in the sense of being at once stingy

and abrasive—two tones that are too often confused, at least in social science, with the tang of

truth. It seems self-evident to many of us that the hunches, novel sensations, aesthetic thrills,

intuitive convictions, dreamscapes, and other powerful but inchoate experiences that arise within

the flux of our lives are ill-served when seen as epiphenomenon of linguistics. As historically

constituted identities, we may live in the prison-house of language, but consciousness as a

phenomenological field appears to host encounters with all manner of nonlinguistic others: the

sunbeams and gamma waves and odors of garbage that leak through the barred windows of talk.

Moreover, even if we embrace the cause of reductive physicalist explanations, we may have

rigorous reasons for keeping the question of consciousness radically open; indeed, Daniel

seventies America, to say nothing of California. What contexts dictate the fabrication of mystical experience when
the maps and models are provisional, mixed and matched, and changing on the fly?
102. Craig Martin and Russell T McCutcheon, eds., Religious Experience a Reader (Sheffield; Bristol, CT: Equinox
Pub., 2012), 110.
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Dennett to the contrary, many cognitive scientists and philosophers do not believe that

consciousness has been—or even can be—adequately explained.103 I offer nothing like a theory

of consciousness here; my point is simply to resist rhetorical and ultimately authoritarian

attempts to “close our accounts” with extraordinary experiences by papering over the

philosophical and scientific issues that surround the open question of consciousness itself.

Here I cannot resist citing one such attempt, which is particularly relevant to the esoteric

formations of extraordinary experience that concern us here. In Claiming Knowledge, a

formidable text that extensively criticizes the “strategies of epistemology” employed by modern

esotericists from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer suggests that modern esoteric

thinkers who attempt to authorize their world-views generally appeal to one of three rhetorical

sources: tradition, science (or “parascience”), and personal experience. Hammer has many

insightful things to say about the latter, but in the midst of one argument, he offers up the

remarkable assertion that “within the last few decades, the epistemological validity of personal

spiritual experience has come to be successfully deconstructed.”104

Now, there are different ways to define “epistemological validity” of course. If one

considers beliefs or insights that crystalize out of personal spiritual experiences to be purely

propositional claims, than their validity might be judged along the strictly rationalist or logical

103. Here we need only mention the persistence of what the cognitive scientist and philosopher David Chalmers has
famously dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. Chalmers argues that there are many operations of conscious
experience that can be explained—the focussing of attention, reports on mental states, acts of discrimination, the
control of behavior—but that these are all comparatively “easy problems.” The hard problem is simply why we have
phenomenal experience in the first place at all. “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?”
Chalmers asks. This inner life is the home of what philosophers call qualia—the redness of red, the precise taste of
beer, and any number of intimate and extraordinary experiences. To answer the hard problem, Chalmers argues that
consciousness may be an irreducible part of the universe, a “panpsychist” take that must be considered a growing
minority position. One outcome of this position is epistemic—“qualia” are not simply mirage-like effluvia of the
meat machine, but in themselves speak directly to the constitution of reality as, at least partly, a field of experience.
In addition, some philosophers and cognitive scientists who have no sympathy with panpsychism suggest, with a
certain melancholy, that the human mind is, because of its own embeddedness in consciousness, constitutionally
incapable of solving the hard problem. See David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal
of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), 1995: 200–219.
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lines that, in essence, already undergird a world reframed and reduced to a series of propositions.

A stronger claim, worthy of such a triumphant note, would be the explanatory reduction of

personal spiritual insights or encounters whose noetic or “gnostic” transcendence of

propositional rationality provides more general knowledge about existence itself, including the

constitution of the “knower” as she furthers her own ongoing engagement with the conundrum of

reality. This is obviously not to argue for the acceptance of every religious or mystical

“proposition”; instead, it is to emulate James’ open-minded, pluralist, and ontologically

vertiginous approach to features of experience, including beliefs and remarkable

phenomenological events, that are poorly treated by considering them only as propositions, and

not also as pragmatic forms of life, as productions of immanence, as bootstrapped frameworks of

novelty and surprise.

Indeed, to pretend, at our current moment, that we have “successfully deconstructed”

anything fundamental about experience, including the sometimes apparently certain insights or

radical intuitions of extraordinary experience, is a bit of slight-of-hand every bit as disingenuous

as the religionist retreat into a walled-off category of ineffable “religious experience.” Hammer

has certainly done his skeptical homework, but there are any number of outsize questions and

zones of investigation that must be ignored or rendered cartoonish to make such confident

claims.

Recall the basic socio-cognitive argument that, in the wake of some extreme experience,

individuals locate the source and meaning of such experiences according to their personal

symbolic frameworks, their available language, and their social position vis-a-vis various

authorities who legitimate particular explanations. These days, of course, these authorities

include those offering reductionist or rationalist accounts, especially popularized scientistic

104. Hammer, 338.

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arguments that unquestionably function as social mythologies. But even good scholars like

Hammer play the same sort of game: the language of outside authorities, working in other

disciplines, is appropriated to fill in the enigmatic gaps of consciousness with explanations

whose legitimizing presence serves to shut down alternatives—not only alternative explanations,

but alternative ways of engaging and practicing with the residuum of experience.

In other words, just as the ineffability of spiritual experience can be used as a bulwark

against sociological and scientific explanations, so too can the mere existence of rationalist

explanations, however provisional and philosophically naive, act as a bulwark against the

ontological, epistemological, and ethico-pragmatic problems raised by the striking

phenomenological events that arise within and sometimes puncture the field of consciousness.

James did not just bracket “medical materialism” out of respect for the singularity and actual

diversity of experience; he also did it out of his respect for the multiplicity and necessary

variability, even contradiction, of all our accounts of experience. “The fact of diverse judgments

about religious phenomena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire

to attain the irreversible.”105

Again, this does not mean that the experiential claims of mystics or saints need to be

accorded the weight of self-authenticating propositions. James is far too pluralist for that. James

assured non-mystics, for example, that they were under no obligation to accept the authority of

such experiences. At the same time, however, the noetic events of mysticism also undermine the

“pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictator of what we may believe”—

a pretension that, among many new atheists and skeptics today, takes the form of an almost

religious militancy. James admits how “anarchic” his position sounds. And yet such a radical

105. James, 333.

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pluralism is, as we will see in a moment, the necessary precipitate of a commitment to radical

empiricism.

Reconsidering Religious Experience

In his portrait of religious experience, James erred in excessively isolating individuals

“in their solitude” from the surrounding networks of language, cultural influence, and the

vagaries of the flesh. Rather than wall off “religious experience” from such socio-cognitive

frames of reference, what we need is more nuanced, capacious, and complex accounts that

underscore how such experiences are constructed both socially and autopoetically, accounts that

moreover do not paper over the unknowns surrounding the nature of extraordinary

phenomenological experience.

Here Ann Taves’ recent text Religious Experience Reconsidered proves extremely

helpful. In a turn both critical of and continuous with James, Taves argues that we need to

“disaggregate” the concept of “religious experience” into “experiences deemed religious” (or

“mystical,” “visionary,” spiritual,” etc.). This distinction founds her “building block” approach,

which in turn carries forward James’ important distinction between origin and function. In this

approach, two crucial moves are identified: one is the initial act of setting aside a certain

experience as being worthy of note, and the second is the further elaboration and embedding of

this unusual experience into various discursive, symbolic, conceptual, and enacted registers. The

first Taves identifies as ascription, which assigns qualities to experience in ways that may elude

conscious intention, and the second is attribution, whereby causal explanations are elaborated to
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contain or render experiences meaningful. What results then is a layered and sometimes intense

negotiation between attribution and ascription, mediation and a rhetoric of immediacy.

Ascriptions of specialness may take place below the threshold of awareness; when this
happens, it tends to make things seem inherently special. People can decide, upon
reflection, that things that seem special are more or less special that they initially seemed.
In the process of reflection, special things may be caught up in preexisting systems of
belief and practice, may generate new or modified beliefs and practices, or may lose their
specialness and become ordinary.106

Taves’ favored term for unusual experiences is “special,” and experiences become special

for one of two main reasons: either they seem ideal—a sense of absolute peace, for example—or

they are anomalies. Examples of the latter include many of the “building blocks” of high

weirdness: hallucinations, near death experiences, alien abductions, apparitions, and oracular

dreams.

Since I am particularly interested in this weird stuff here, I prefer to use the term

“extraordinary” rather than “special.” For one reason, extraordinary possesses a higher affective

charge, one that suggests an overwhelming and unescapable salience rather than the calmer,

more cultivated selection of “special” things. On a more literal or etymological level,

extraordinary also suggests an event or episode that pops out of the quotidian grind precisely

through its novel distinction, statistical or otherwise, from the ordinary run of causality, affect,

symbolic consistency, or self-constitution. More than special, extraordinary also locates an event

in a threshold of the Outside, and gestures toward an open ontology capable of handling the

intense alterity of such “miraculous” or at least deeply peculiar encounters.

106. Taves, Religious Experience, 162.

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Given the dominance of contextualist and historicist models of understanding cultural

experience, the constructionist process of attribution does not rock the theoretical boat.

Ascription, however, is a subtler operation. Ascription can be seen to happen almost

immediately, and this transparency abruptly raises the problem of how, and through what

processes, experience is mediated in the first place.

Taves’ term ascription is fortuitous here, for it contains within it a scrap of “script,” a

term whose polyvalence itself becomes a signature that binds together multiple domains of the

scripting process. A script is the material body of writing, in an almost Derridean sense: a

network of marks or incised differences that always already implicate and constitute the subject

in a differential matrix of signs that severely complicates, without entirely erasing, native

perceptions of agency and self-presence. Ascription is always inscription, an iterative riff or

repetition on the codes that constitute subjectivity.107

At the same time, if we are to grant any substance at all to extraordinary experience, we

need to suggest the dramatic ways and places that such codes bind with phenomenologically

meaningful human events. Here, ascription is something more like the script of a play: an already

composed text that not only prepares speech acts but the persona who does the speaking. In this

sense, scripts are performed, followed, and embodied. Finally, a script is, in coding lingo, a

modest program or list of commands that are executed, or “interpreted,” by other programs rather

than the computer’s own processor—a “cybernetic” overtone of the scripting process that will

become more important down the line.

What comes from all this is a more operationalized image or model of what “cultural

influence” amounts to. Many social constructionist accounts offer abstract generalizations about

107. To extend the Derridean theme, a script also refers to a prescription; that is, an inscription that provides access
to the pharmakon, to the poisons we live through.
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experience that give concrete actors little room to maneuver. By insisting on the deployment of

the social scientific notion of the script, both overt cultural scripts used in attribution and the

quasi-unconscious templates of ascription, we focus more tightly on the way various agents read

as well as become written or conditioned by localized and often materially inscribed symbolic,

narrative, or discursive “texts.” However, the language of script also helps clarify one of the

more unusual elements found within seventies spirituality and the psychedelic and occult

currents it to some degree rests upon: the intentional and sometimes ludic exploitation of the

scripting process itself.

To understand the peculiar warp this introduces into the discourse and practice of

spirituality, it is helpful to turn to a classic bit of anthropological jargon: the difference between

the “emic” or folk discourse of those embedded within a field of interest, and the “etic” or

professional discourse of those scholars describing or rendering an explanatory account of the

field. What is a “demon” in emic speech might be paired with “hallucination” or “cultural script”

in an etic one. The distinction, which seems common-sensical enough, is more squirrelly than it

first appears. As a distinction made by scholars, the difference between emic and etic restates a

more fundamental division in the field of knowledge: the basic division between subject and

object that structures Western knowledge. This dualism, as such, fundamentally structures etic

discourse—which, after all, represents the striving for an objective discourse that can both

account for and distance itself from more embedded and symbolically overcoded phenomena.

The social scientific model of scripting quite clearly belongs to the etic domain of discourse: it is

useful for naturalist and functional accounts of phenomena often described by insiders in far

more ontologically robust terms, especially regarding extraordinary “religious” experiences.

Moreover, the concept of scripting also offers itself not only as a description but as an
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explanation along more-or-less scientific lines that build on previous explanatory theories and

can to a certain degree can be tested and falsified. At the same time, however, the emic/etic

distinction by no means functions “emically,” since many of the religious, esoteric, and

indigenous phenomena covered by that term often suggest far more permeable and hybridized

membranes between subjects and objects.

Within the milieu of the sixties and early seventies, however, a peculiarly reflexive twist

occurred: etic psychological and social scientific concepts and methods became hijacked for

experimental, ecstatic, or reflective purposes by the experiencers themselves. In other words, a

powerful element of reflexivity or self-reference enters into the emic discourse and practice of

extraordinary experience. The clearest example is one of the most dominant operational dicta of

psychedelic discourse coming out of the sixties: the notion of “set and setting,” first voiced by

Timothy Leary and his co-authors in The Psychedelic Experience (1964). “Set” refers to the

user’s conscious intention and unconscious dispositions and beliefs, while “setting” refers to the

particular cultural and physical environment staging the experience; both are considered to

actively shape if not significantly produce the trip.

Here the social and psychological scripting process that as it were brands extraordinary

experience by determining its signatures is embraced as a phenomenological engine, a kind of

“consciousness hack,” rather than an instrument of impersonal analysis and ontological deflation

(although it sometimes serves those purposes as well). In a paradoxical half-turn reminiscent of a

Mobius strip, the etic language of scripting thus becomes incorporated into the emic script, in

which it is deployed not to sustain the rigid distinction between subject and object, skeptical

outsider and naive insiders, but to precisely probe and scramble these distinctions in an empirical

test of phenomenological possibility. As such, an in a move that Niklas Luhmann just might
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describe as “re-entry,” the fundamental (Western) distinction between subject and object

subdivides in turn the object of anthropological knowledge, such that the object circulates both

the “folkloric” emic language and the formal discourse of scholarship, destabilizing both

discourses as well as the relationship between them.

In a sense, this splice simply demonstrates the degree to which countercultural

spirituality, like much of the New Age, is directly indebted in both form and content to the

language of psychology.108 As Hanegraaff and Taves have shown, modern currents of occultism,

Theosophy, and the New Age can be seen as liminal zones that mediate between religion and

science, saving and transforming elements of the former while appropriating or at least

mimicking elements of the latter. James plays a significant role in this process, as his apparently

“etic” discourse was, as we have suggested, also designed in part to feed and encourage the

meaningful development of religious experience in people’s lives. One of the most important

mediating concepts in this process is, of course, the unconscious itself, particularly in its

nineteenth century guise of the subconscious or Fredric Myers’ “subliminal” consciousness.

What I want to emphasize here, though, is not the way that psychology can perform a sort

of ideological cover for religion, as James’ empirical discourse of “religious experience”

arguably did for liberal Protestant subjectivity. Instead, I want to underscore the potentially

operational character of such social and psychological knowledge from a practical and emic

perspective. What is at issue here is less theory than techne. The reductive psychological model

of scripting or “programming” becomes appropriated and adapted by those seeking to explore,

intensify, and extract meaning from extraordinary experience itself. As with most reflexive

108. See Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought
(Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1996), esp. 482-513.
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operations, the recognition and self-conscious adaptation of the scripting process introduces

unique instabilities. These pregnant curiosities will be dealt with as they arise.

Bottoms Up

Taves’ distinction between overt cultural processes of attribution and the subtler domain

of ascription refines the texture of our accounts of “religious experience.” Nonetheless, these two

analytic categories still can be assimilated to the general category of “scripts,” which therefore

occupy a liminal space between unconscious operations and intentional or at least socially

located hermeneutic work. But as Taves refreshingly insists, scripts do not tell the whole story.

Though Taves gives plenty of room for the sort of socio-cognitive accounts of religious

experience offered by many contemporary critics of James, she also remains within the

expansive and empirical current of the Varieties by insisting that, at least some of the time, such

extraordinary experiences cannot be reduced to pre-existing cultural scripts. In the face of the

more extreme forms of social constructionism represented by Katz, Taves underscores the role

that nonlinguistic forces play in the production of experience, forces that she associates with

embodiment, affect, and, most interestingly, the “unconscious.” Avoiding the usual temptation to

insist on binaries when gradients and differential values are more appropriate, she contrasts the

“top-down” processes invoked by strict social constructionists from “bottom-up” processes that

arise for the individual subject in an unwilled and unpredictable manner that sometimes radically

exceeds their cultural expectations. “We need to abandon the constructivist axiom that beliefs

and attitudes are always formative of, rather than consequent to, experience in any strong sense,
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in favor of a model that takes ‘bottom-up’ or unconscious processing more seriously.”109 Taking

bottom-up processing seriously means, at the very least, taking the body more seriously: its

sometimes intense and ecstatic energies and affects, as well as that menagerie of sometimes

inordinately bizarre and extraordinary nervous system flowerings we now know, somewhat

ineffectively, as “altered states of consciousness.”

By paying attention to bottom-up processes, including potentially traumatic and

overwhelming ruptures, scholarly accounts can begin to pay attention to something far too often

lost in social constructionist accounts: creative novelty. Scripts are iterative, repetitive in force if

not in every detail. By accepting a nonlinguistic unconscious and its potentially disruptive

effects, we can “be more sensitive to experiences that are genuinely creative and generate new

insights and, in some cases, entirely new meaning systems.”110 Such novelty was of great

importance to James, who looked to the unconscious in part as a source for evolutionarily

adaptive concepts, images, and affects. Such an embodied, emergent, and novelty-sensitive

approach is particularly appropriate for the milieu of countercultural spirituality, in which

individuals relentlessly pursued intense and sometimes shattering hedonic, pharmacological, and

otherworldly experiences within often highly informal and eclectic scripting environments that

include various (and variously sophisticated) religious, physiological, and social scientific

discourses. At the same time, the emerging heterodox and bohemian spiritual marketplace

rewarded those “spiritual virtuosi” who offered novel and creative formulations of practice,

philosophy and cosmology. For both personal and social reasons, many individuals had a great

deal of reasons for pursuing raids on the ineffable, and returning with novel goods, either to

109. Taves, Religious Experience, 93. Taves acknowledges that earlier scholars, especially Wayne Proudfoot,
though emphasizing top down, also highlight the bottom-up force of affect: states of arousal to which we ascribe
emotional labels that in turn may support religious accounts.
110. Taves, Religious Experience, 99.
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answer their own existential questions, to confirm alternate belief systems, or to assemble such

systems and present—or sell—them to others.

This leads, of course, to another sort of reflexive loop between the domains of script and

experience: the fact that, in the countercultural spiritual milieu and the New Age that sprouted

from it, extraordinary experience itself became a script. For all its relativism and pluralism, the

New Age that emerges from the chrysalis of the early seventies can be seen as a consistent

religious culture running certain well-defined and programmatic scripts about the desirability,

value, narrative form, and practical deployment of personal visionary encounters and other

mystic experience.

In her contemporary ethnography The New Metaphysicals, Courtney Bender directly

addresses this feature of New Age religiosity, showing in both subtle and sometimes uncharitable

ways how social processes and narrative expectations shape and structure the supposedly

ineffable singularity of individual mystical experience. Bender performed her fieldwork among

New Age practitioners in Cambridge, Mass, which serves as a kind of geographical riposte to

James’ individualist and sui generis account of religious experience. Part of her work analyzes

the rhetorical templates that organize accounts of spiritual events, showing how the authority of

experience is built within narrative, and how, for example, assertions of embodied knowing or

emotional intuitions serve to “minimize the role of prior cultural or religious knowledge as well

as social ties and relationships that might challenge the claim to a direct, unmediated

experience.”111

Though I believe Bender over-emphasizes the degree of scripting involved in these

experiences, Bender’s attention to the various voicings of these accounts draws attention to an

important aspect of their constructed character: their iterative, enigmatic and on-going
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production of novelty and potential meaning. “‘Experience’ was not just something that people

had,” Bender writes, “but…something that they made again and again.”112 In essence, my

concern is simply with this “made”: what materials and practices it involves, and how it changes

over time, and in light of time. Accounting for the open-ended quality of this ongoing

construction project, Bender notes how “the open possibility, or even expectation, of interpretive

uncertainty drives and galvanizes mystics’ interests in their stories, and is evident within (and

expressed in ) their attention to the ways that new experiences, events, and ‘insights’ change not

only the meaning or past events but, at times, even their status as religious experiences

altogether.”113 In other words, “religious experience” for these children of countercultural

spirituality already contains, though its very openness to the future, the possibility of its own

collapse.

Though Bender does not make the connection, the role of uncertainty and revision in this

ongoing process of interpretation is, at least in some cases, directly related to another important

observation she does make about the singularities of New Age accounts of experience.

According to Bender, “the study of contemporary spirituality is made more difficult by the fact

that the practice and self-understanding of many spiritual practitioners is already engaged at

some level with scholarship and scientific research projects.”114 The re-entry of scholarly

discourses into experimental spirituality—typified by James himself—recalls the recursive re-

embedding of etic discourse within the emic quest described above, a strange loop that raises a

number of fascinating ethical and philosophical problems. These remain largely unaddressed by

Bender, for whom this circular appropriation produces “difficulty” because it blurs the clear

111. Bender, 63.

112. Ibid, 87.
113. Ibid, 81.
114. Ibid, 18.
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distinction between insider and outsider that sociological discourse, however ethnographically

sensitive, depends upon. Saying more than I suspect she intends through her own sticky

metaphor, Bender writes that “professors and researchers are caught in particular ways by these

imaginative webs.”115

I appreciate the granular attention Bender pays to New Age narratology and interpretive

strategies, including the open-ended rules that govern the ongoing construction of extraordinary

experience. But her account remains blinkered by sociological assumptions that reduce

psychological novelty and ignore the nonlinguistic forces Taves highlights above. “While

acknowledging that claims of novelty are culturally associated with authenticity within certain

contemporary movements,” Taves argues, “this should not preclude the attempt to understand

how experiences might arise that are genuinely beyond the grasp of the experiencer.”116 In other

words, the subject is still bound, at least potentially, to a convulsive novelty. However much the

language, cultural dispositions, and operative self-concepts of any given subject result from

socio-cultural scripts, the phenomenological intensity of extraordinary experience possesses the

capacity to jam, interrupt, and radically distort such scripts, a trauma and ecstasy that may

suggest meanings in their wake, and that sometimes demand a re-assemblage of fundamental

conceptual and affective patterns. Experience has the potential to refract and rupture the

constitution of the self at the edge of its own autopoetic boundaries, and to do so in surprising

ways—perhaps wonderful, perhaps pathological—that exceed the predictable redundancies of

cultural texts and sociological imprints.

Rather than focusing on etic explanations removed from the scene, the tack I will follow

sticks closer to the phenomenological accounts, turning our attention to the production and

115. Ibid, 16.

116. Taves, Religious Experience, 114.
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dynamics of such experiences themselves, including their paradoxical and sometimes chaotic

instabilities. While we need to track those cultural scripts and frameworks that condition, stage,

invite and articulate extraordinary experiences, we must at the same time “be more attentive to

situations in which people’s ability to explain breaks down.”117

When Taves cites experiences that are “genuinely beyond the grasp of the experiencer,”

the key word, for me, is beyond, which I cannot help but link to the related term outside. Both

the beyond and the outside are important features of the discourse of the weird, and particularly

of H.P. Lovecraft. But the somewhat dramatic or poetic qualities squeezed from these ordinary

prepositions should not blind us to their pivotal role in the discussion of extraordinary

experience. There are many ways to conceive or think about these prepositions, even as a

paradoxical gestures or tokens within discourse that point beyond, or outside, that discourse.

Hypostasized into a sort of unbounded boundary that might be diagrammed, the beyond or

outside suggests the far side of a sort of membrane that surrounds the autopoetic field of

consciousness, a surface that allows impressions from some barred noumenal realm, exterior to

our system of representations and even spacetime coordinates, to register themselves. One of

Philip K. Dick’s hypnagogic voices speaks of “perturbations in the reality field.”

Whether or not this Beyond is conceived in idealist or materialist terms, as a screen for

signatures or an external chaos we organize on the fly, whether its perturbations are read as

intelligent signals or iterative irritations, and whether we are dealing with a subconscious that

speaks or an unconscious that merely repeats—in all these cases, the erasure of the outside or

beyond from our accounts of extraordinary experience, “religious” or otherwise, simply

impoverishes those accounts, submitting them to a closed model of circulation with no potential

for rupture or rapture. This failing becomes particularly glaring is we are looking at

117. Ibid, 99.

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countercultural spirituality during its weirdest years, when, as we will see, the experimental

psychology of altered states exploded in the wake of psychedelia and the discursive domain of

available scripts was an unruly, highly eclectic, and heretical assemblage undergoing constant

construction.

The Altered States of America

In 1979, two Harvard psychology PhDs edited and published a collection of articles,

through a mainstream press, entitled Consciousness: the Brain, States of Awareness, and

Alternate Realities. The title alone captures a perfectly “seventies” triangulation of biology,

psychological experience, and esoteric possibilities, and the range of writers represented—

neuroscientists, psychiatrists, journalists, scholars of religion, spiritual leaders—reminds us how

capacious a tent “consciousness” became in the era. Articles on shamans and schizophrenia,

methamphetamine psychosis, daydreaming, Buddhist cosmology, and action potentials not only

speak to the varied interests of a public hungry for stories about the experiential self, but to the

capacity of consciousness discourse to mediate between enchantment and disenchantment, the

subject of spirituality and the object of experimental psychology. And while versions of this

alchemical marriage have existed throughout modernity, particularly in esoteric currents that

aggressively appropriated science and psychology, it was only in the seventies that this chimera

“consciousness”—part spirit, part matter, part process—became a mass portal of mediation

between different cultural stories and practices.

In the more “expanded” or populist edges of psychological practice, the floodgates

opened to a whole host of occult, mystical, and non-western religious ideas and techniques. At
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the same time, an empirical psychological discourse arose as a sort of double that shadowed this

spiritual counterculture. For many seekers (including many transpersonal psychologists), this

discourse did not so much provide naturalist critique as the operative permission to keep

exploring. Experimental psychology therefore had less to do with the confirmation of the

metaphysical claims of occultists and mystics that its own commitment to construct knowledge

(and pleasure) out of altered states in light of that expanded cultural field.

The curious caduceus of consciousness studies in the seventies, interweaving sacred and

materialist discourses, was launched in 1969 with another compendium that, though more

hardheaded than Consciousness, was also more popular and far more influential. Edited by the

experimental psychologist Charles Tart, then at the University of California at Davis, Altered

States of Consciousness addressed all manner of what I am calling extraordinary experiences:

lucid dreams, the cannabis buzz, transcendental meditation, hypnosis, hypnogogia, and exotic

phenomena associated with Eastern terms like “zazen” and “samadhi.”118 Here EEG studies of

yogis sat alongside anthropological accounts, therapeutic protocols, and drug experience reports.

More important than any single article, however, was the title of the book, which no doubt

contributed greatly to its commercial success. The very notion of Altered States of

Consciousness (ASC) became a flag to rally around, conjuring up an alternate country of mind,

one whose landscape, as varied as California’s, somehow overlaid and interpenetrated the

everyday world of “consensus reality,” another, more sociological term that first rose to

prominence in the seventies.

With some exceptions, most of the states that the volume drew attention to had been

pathologized by psychologists or ignored as “superstitious” holdovers from a less enlightened

era. Instead, Tart invited peers to study them using scientific methodology and analysis, but also
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to recognize that ASCs possessed qualitative as well as quantitative characteristics that needed to

be explored and characterized phenomenologically. As such, Tart’s volume initiated a more-or-

less above-ground process that Jorge Ferrer identifies as “inner empiricism,” an attempt to bring

a scientific spirit of rigor and analysis to the borderzones of the internal world.119 Rather than

strictly differentiate his volume from the counterculture, Tart recognized that the empirical study

of altered states he was calling for followed the rise of psychedelia and the youth movement’s

experimental interest in the ASCs associated with sensory awareness, dream interpretation,

Asian spiritual practices, and group encounter. As Tart makes clear in his 1971 introduction to

the second edition, his work was designed not only to rigorously expand the domains of

experimental psychology, but also to explore and speculate in ways that would shed light on the

seeker culture, and especially to provide correctives to the “psychopathology” that haunted the

spiritual path.

Though alternative terms have since been offered for the twilight zones of the mind,

“altered states of consciousness” continues to hold sway, suggesting one way in which today’s

far more reductionist and contested consciousness milieu is still shadowed by the seventies

moment. By underscoring the multiplicity of such “states,” the term popularized by Tart suggests

the centrifugal, differentiating, and open-ended possibilities of the mind. Moreover, the adjective

“altered” implies, even when describing states like dreams that arise spontaneously, one of the

key implications of the emerging consciousness culture: the capacity to actively cultivate and

catalyze these experiences through various practices of body and mind.

That said, there are problems with Tart’s term. Many have pointed out that “altered”

suggests that these phenomenological zones are distortions or malformations of a baseline state

118. Charles T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings (New York: Wiley, 1969).
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that anchors all the other transformations, rather than experiential domains with their own

autonomy and integral character. The anthropologist Michael Winkelman has suggested

“alternate” in its place, but either way, we still have, with the term, an essential affirmation of

alterity. From the perspective of baseline consciousness, many of these states are not just

different but other, an otherness that often extends to the subject itself. Indeed, part of the value

of these states—very much including their entertainment value—is the transformation of the

subject’s own conceptual, affective, and sensory set into an unexpected cognitive assemblage

with new (and sometimes very weird) affordances. Though what one might call the “gamespace”

of such states are generally recognized, organized, and routinized over time, such familiarity

itself requires time and practice, and some states—lucid dreams for example, or high-dose

psychedelia—rather reliably stage intense novelty. As such, altered states still imply, not just a

shift from baseline, but a more existential immersion into alterity itself.

There are problems with “states” as well. Tart’s project partly reflects a cartographic

desire to map these nebulous features of consciousness, and maps imply bounded territories. But

though qualitative distinctions and autopoetic boundaries are crucial, “states” is arguably too

static and imperial for experiences so often characterized precisely by their capacity for

deterritorialization. Indeed, the dynamism of so many ASCs is perhaps better diagrammed

through a dynamic “phase space”model, such as the three-dimensional “AIM” model offered in a

2001 book by the neuropharmacologist J. Allan Hobson, whose three axes include Activation

(high-low), Input-output grating (external or internal information), and Modulation (by chemical

amines or cholines).120 One earlier, lower-dimensional example of such a consciousness space is

119. Jorge N. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory a Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), esp. 2-4, 42-44.
120. See J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore Chemically Altered States of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2001)
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provided by experimental psychologist Roland Fischer in a 1971 diagram published in Science,

which places an array of states on a continuum of arousal, ranging from ecstatic “ergotropic”

intensities to meditative states of “trophotropic” hypoarousal.

In keeping with the tenor of the times, Fischer’s map includes Asian terms—zazen and

samadhi again—whose particular cultural origins are erased through the perennialist

presumption that these terms refer to measurable, universally accessible states capable of sitting

alongside Goldstein’s “coefficient of variation” (whatever that is) and the usual EEG brain wave

ranges. At the same time, Fisher’s diagram cheekily suggests the paradoxical limitation of

quantification, and the warping, if not rupturing return of a Beyond. At the bottom of the

diagram, Fisher unites the two polar extremes of hyper-aroused ecstatic rapture and tranquil

samadhi with an infinity symbol, a mathematical glyph that also functions as a place-holder for a

zone of consciousness that, in some distant echo of Cusa, exceeds quantification and

mysteriously unites opposites. This, we might say, is what some psychologists of the seventies
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came to refer to as the transpersonal dimension of experience, a domain of consciousness no

longer framed by the subject.

Of course, things are trickier than implied in Fischer’s or Dobson’s diagram. Even if we

acknowledge the problems of perennialism and the adoption of complex cultural practices like

“zazen” as if they were relatively discrete “states,” we are still left with the issue of mapping

ASCs with any sort of reasonably referential language. As Wouter Hanegraaff laments, there

isn’t much agreement among social scientists on how to name or define these states—what an

anthropologist calls a “trance,” a psychologist might call “dissociation,” or a scholar of religion

“participation mystique.”121 Over forty years after Fisher’s drawing, there is still little agreement

on how to study even those ASCs that lend themselves most easily to measurement, to say

nothing of the various epistemological problems that are opened up when the measurement and

representation of brain states are involved in the constitution of cultural and psychological claims

about experience.

Nonetheless, in this text I will continue to use “ASC,” though I would like the encourage

the acronym to wobble. At times, “states” may become “stages,” and “altered” become

“alternate” or even “altering,” all of which suggests more dynamic conditions. The most radical

rewrite of the acronym, which I also should resound here, was suggested by anthropologist

Robert J. Wallis. Discussing the shamanic recourse to non-ordinary mindstates, Wallis argues

that “Adjusted Styles of Communication” is a more anthropologically generous and accurate

account of the situation.122 Here modes of experience are considered not so much as discrete

internal states, but rather as transitive modes of engaging or interfacing with an Outside whose

121. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London; New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013), 96.
122. See Robert J. Wallis, “Exorcizing ‘Spirits’: Approaching “Shamans” and Rock Art Animically,” in Graham
Harvey, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013), 315-316.
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own communicational capacities are themselves reconfigured with the emergence of the ASC in

question.

Wallis’s suggestion shifts the discussion from the qualitative and quantitative

descriptions of the state itself toward both the active agency of the experiencer and the

communicative substance or “information” that appears, or calls, at the membrane of experience,

where visions, discursive “downloads,” and even encounters with beings take place. Wallis’s

term reminds us that, from an anthropological perspective at least, non-ordinary mindstates can

also be treated and understood the way that some experiencers themselves treat and understand

them: as modes of mediation. As we will see in a later chapter, this expanded notion of

consciousness as “media” that can tune into “alternate realities” (and technological media as a

portal to such realities as well) is itself part of the Zeitgeist of the early seventies, and

significantly informs the practice and rhetoric of high weirdness and the emerging New Age.

By organizing novel assemblages of memory, perception, and symbolic processing,

ASCs are not only associated with alternate modes of experience but with the possibility of

alternate modes of knowledge about reality (or “alternate realities”) as well. In a 1972 article on

the emerging science of ASCs, Tart called this the “state-specific” dimensions of consciousness.

There may be certain memory functions or sensory modalities, for example, that are accessible in

certain states and not in others. For Tart, this raises the possibility of a “state-specific science.”

In such an undertaking, scientists would themselves become proficient in navigating ASCs from

the inside; in addition, they would need to articulate, collaboratively and self-critically, new

forms of verification, conditions for observation, and even “state-specific” logics.

Whether or not such forms of verification are possible, Tart makes a sharp and intriguing

distinction between his state-specific science of ASCs and religion, whose history and
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institutions are of course saturated with protocols and methodologies for the production and

interpretation of ASCs. Tart notes the similarity between the two endeavors, but with religion, he

asserts, “what we have is a state-specific technology operated in the service of an a priori belief

system.”123 In other words, religions contain technical protocols or technologies for producing

ASCs, but introduce them along with explicit and even authoritarian interpretive keys or

symbolic overlays that confirm and construct those experiences into quasi-empirical

confirmations of the symbolic assertions in question. In contrast to the religious technician of the

sacred, the inner empiricist is called to emulate the self-critical and always evolving character of

science by constantly reexamining his or her own biases, constantly refining models, and

submitting findings to a network of like minds.

Tart’s vision raises a number of complex questions about the nature of scientific inquiry

and method; here I simply want to note one significant issue. Inner empiricism erodes,

necessarily, the crisp distinction, available to baseline consciousness, between subject and object.

For some, this passage through the looking glass, which necessitates both an intense reflexivity

and a degree of constructionism, means no more science.

The issue is excellently posed by the psychopharmacologist and chemist Alexander

Shulgin, whose careful, methodical, and courageous exploration of novel psychedelic inventions

makes him one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most influential inner empiricists. While

continuing to work for decades in industry, Shulgin and a tight-knit coterie of peers developed a

variety of protocols for synthesizing, ingesting, and assessing the effects of newly invented

psychoactive compounds, though the most famous Shulgin compound—MDMA, also known as

“ecstasy”—actually represented the re-synthesis of a previously-invented compound. In the

123. Charles Tart, “Scientific foundations for the study of altered states of consciousness,” Journal of Transpersonal
Psychology 3(2), 112.
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introduction to his text PiHKAL (1995), written with his wife and fellow explorer Ann, Shulgin

reflected on the pressure his manner of research placed on the traditional stance of scientific

objectivity. Since what was being tested were unmeasurable psychoactive effects that unfolded

only within a person’s inner sensorium, the most basic axiom of pharmacological research—the

necessity of blind studies—is, strictly speaking, impossible. For one thing, it is generally quite

obvious who did or did not receive the drug. For another thing, it is potentially unethical; the

initial risk, Shulgin believed, should be born by the inventor. As Shulgin recognized, his inner

empiricism introduced a Mobius-strip like twist in the traditional distinction between the

observing experimenter and the subject of research. In his research, “the subject is the observer,

and objectivity in the classic sense is impossible.”124

Perhaps it was the sense that he had left the confines of “classic” science that also gave

Shulgin, who was no New Ager, the courage and space to risk religious or mystical language in

the accounts of his experiences, language that, moreover, showed the fingerprint of the seventies

consciousness movement. With his coterie, Shulgin developed a rating scale that judged the

subjective effects of different doses of a given compounds at a given time. Plus-one (+) indicates

that activity is definitely noticeable, but its specific character remains difficult to assess. Plus-

three (+++) indicates that the subject is totally involved in the chronological unfolding of an

experience whether they want to be or not. But Shulgin also made room for a Plus-four (++++), a

category of experience that emerges beyond the empirical register of the other categories, “in a

class by itself.” A Plus-four is, importantly, no longer a matter of causal attribution. “It is a

serene and magical state which is largely independent of what drug is used—if any drug at

all…It cannot be repeated at will with a repetition of the experiment. A Plus-four is that one-of-

124. Alexander and Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story (Berkeley, CA: Transform Press, 1991), xxvii.
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a-kind, mystical or even religious experience which will never be forgotten. It tends to bring

about a deep change of perspective or life-direction in the person who is graced with it.”125

Thankfully, it is not my business to assess whether Shulgin’s “report” of Plus-four

experiences truly constitute “data,” or whether Tart’s “state-specific science” is an incoherent

concept, or whether an authentically self-correcting inner empiricism is, or is not, truly possible.

These questions lead us into philosophically vexed, passionately controversial, and acerbic

political arguments that, if I may say so, in the end often boil down to a conflict of axiomatic

positions that are themselves resting on top of an abyss of contingency. Throughout this work, I

will be speaking about empirical and naturalistic attitudes and practices, but I want to insist that I

am not interested in assessing the methodological purity or theoretical sophistication of the

“inner empiricists” I will be studying.

Similarly, I will not be spending much time adjudicating the more “religious” or occult

claims of psychedelic freaks or other fellow travelers in the consciousness movement, or in

trying to offer the sorts of robust sociobiological “explanations” for these experiences that

constitute, for some anyway, the end of the matter. Instead I am interested in how the essentially

secular cartography of “altered states of consciousness,” and the inner empiricism it implied, was

operationalized by thinkers, seekers, and explorers working outside—sometimes far outside—

conventional scientific institutions. In this process, something like “science”—taken here, more

than anything, as a provisional, empirical, and expansively naturalist attitude—was directed

towards experimental states of consciousness that, at the same time, were already or were

becoming embedded in rival religious, mystical, perennialist, and popularly psychedelic

discourse. By emphasizing how these notions were operationalized—that is, articulated self-

125. Shulgin, xxv.

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consciously through practice, and therefore productive regardless of their objective merit—we

leapfrog over the problem of their truth in light of the reality of their constructive vigor.

Magnetic Currents

The intensely hybridized “consciousness culture” of the early seventies, which

established an open circuit between altered states and the maps and models different actors use to

organize them, did not arise in a void. In fact, it describes only the latest twist in a story of

science and spirituality going back at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The current

kicks in with the magnetic researches of Anton Mesmer and the more sedate hypnotic practices

associated with his student Puységur, practices which opened up access a strange new continent

within (and beyond) the mind. Throughout the long and tangled history that followed, which

included the popular rise of stage-show mesmerism and the Spiritualist seance, various twilight

states of consciousness were triggered, probed, and identified in the various names of naturalism,

spiritism, and entertainment alike. Throughout this long and highly contested encounter with the

far side of consciousness, the fluctuating boundaries between skepticism and faith, physiology

and psychology, and psychology and the occult were regularly redefined and reframed.

For example, addressing the rise of physiological analyses of mediums that came to

prominence in the 1880’s, Anne Taves shows how neurologists like George Beard helped define

their own emerging profession through a critique of Spiritualism that divided the phenomenon of

mediumship into valid and invalid objects of study. “Trance” was a physiological if pathological

fact, while clairvoyance was nonsense. However, rather than disappearing, this rejected

remainder—the second sight—simply migrated into the emerging world of the “occult.” By the
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end of the century, psychological thinkers like James, Théodore Flournoy, and Frederic Myers,

who worked under the aegis of the Society of Psychical Research, had embraced the capacious

concept of the “subconscious” in order to hold space for the varied phenomena of consciousness

reported by mystics and psycho-physicists alike. As such, the subconscious became what Taves

calls a “mediating” concept, an “open” concept that allowed for interdisciplinary exchanges and

ontological ambiguities. Taking a page from Myers’s notion of the “subliminal,” James

suggested that the vast underbelly of consciousness is itself, at least potentially, linked to more

supernatural and even divine possibilities.

The occult possibilities of extraordinary experiences came into their own in the latter half

of the nineteenth century, which was a particularly transformative era in the western history of

esotericism. Though the term gnosis has only become a central part of esoteric discourse in the

twentieth century, it remains the best word to characterize the extraordinary noetic and visionary

experiences—often brought on by specific psychophysiological techniques—that have been

described and proscribed in esoteric and mystical texts since antiquity. By way of example,

Hanegraaff points out that the ancient hermetic writings, whose rediscovery helped catalyze the

emergence of modern esotericism in the Renaissance, continuously refer to “specific bodily

conditions combined with unusual states of consciousness.”126 In addition to being anomalous—

notice Hanegraaff’s dependence on the term “unusual”—these states of consciousness are

historically as well as psychologically significant.

Indeed, Hanegraaff places gnosis alongside faith and reason as one of the three

foundations of knowledge in the West.127 In the early modern period, he explains, these

foundations were often in harmony, with mystic illumination crowning the valid claims of

126. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism, 95.

127. See Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism, especially 86-93.
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religion and science, and occult practices like alchemy and astrology inextricably interweaving

elements that today we would disaggregate into “science” and “superstition.” In the late

nineteenth century, which saw a highly influential “occult revival” and the esoteric beginnings of

the New Age, the appeal to gnosis becomes more central to esoteric writers and practitioners, a

shift that itself speaks to the changing role that “experience” itself played as a bulwark against an

increasingly disenchanted world. In the late nineteenth century, whose own “occult revival” was

marked by Theosophy, Eliphas Levi, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Symbolism, and emerging

Western forms of yoga and sexual magic, esoteric currents increasingly casts themselves as

“countercultures” providing an experiential alternative to the rationalism or dogma pushed by

reason and faith.

At the same time, many if not most esotericists and occult thinkers began appropriating,

engaging, and parasitizing aspects of science—drawn from physics, biology, and psychology—

in a more or less conscious attempt to mediate between an emerging naturalist order and a

continued spiritual or transcendental current of extraordinary experience. As such, esotericists

used science as both a foil and a base of support, at once a source of naturalistic confirmation of

belief and a more ambivalent indication that the holistic integration of religion and science has

yet to arrive—or, better yet, could only be achieved through the development of the esoteric

current in question. Though it is hard for us to recognize today, the seances of Spiritualism were

considered by many to offer empirical proof and energetic confirmation of the capacity of altered

states to tune into reality of spirits. Another crucial example here is Madame Blavatsky, the co-

founder of Theosophy, whose vision of cosmic “evolution” offered an esoteric rejoinder to

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Darwin, and whose texts hitched various occult entities—the Fifth Element, the Akasha, the

anima mundi, etc.—onto the now-discredited concept of the interstellar luminiferous ether.128

In Claiming Knowledge, Olav Hammer frames modern esotericism as a paradoxical

product of post-Enlightenment in that “it rests on the very pillars of secularization that it overtly

rejects: anti-Christian rhetoric, confidence in science, the unproblematic adoption of experience

as a litmus test of true faith.”129 In this light, his text offers an extensive critique of the esoteric

turn to science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a source of legitimation. Most

esotericists, he writes, understand “science” as “the body of statements, the terminology and/or

the technical applications of science.”130 Unfortunately, this largely ignores what Hammer and

others argue is the most crucial characteristic of science: its method of inquiry. Defining this

method as “intersubjective, repeatable, and error-correcting,” Hammer cites Carl Sagan: “the

method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings

of science.” Although studies of science in the wake of Thomas Kuhn have significantly

qualified Hammer’s idealized Popperian view of scientific progress (especially in regard to the

concrete practice of falsification), the scientific method remains intrinsically open, self-

correcting, and essentially provisional.131 And it is this method, Hammer states, that one “rarely

if ever finds in Esoteric movement texts.”132

Historically speaking, Hammer’s claim is not entirely convincing. One of the most

influential manifestations of esotericism in the immediate wake of Theosophy was the “Scientific

128. See Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis unveiled: a master key to the mysteries of ancient and modern science and
theology (San Diego, CA: The Aryan Theosophical Press, 1919), especially 310-322, 340-349. 393-397.
129. Hammer, 322.
130. Hammer, 204.
131. Also see T.M. Luhrmann’s brief but insightful discussion in Luhrmann, T. M., and Tanya M. Luhrmann,
Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Harvard University Press, 1991), 123-
125; also Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge [England]&;
New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 140-154.
132. Hammer, 204.
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Illuminism” of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley cut his magical teeth with the

floridly esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn, but he was also heavily influenced by William

James and experimental psychology, and the motto of his magical order the A.’.A.’, founded in

1907, was “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion.” On the surface, this is not terribly far

from William Q. Judge’s roughly contemporaneous claim that Theosophy was a “scientific

religion and a religious science.”133 But there is an important difference between these claims.

Crowley believed that it was possible to base an experiential spiritual school like the A.’.A.’. not

on theory but on “practice and methods.”134 This pragmatic methodology was, he claimed,

sufficient to achieve Illumination, or “Spiritual Experience.”

As a methodology, of course, this does not resemble normative applications of scientific

method—as with Shulgin’s mysterious chemicals, “results” imply an ineradicable subjectivity

that challenges notions of repeatability falsification. Nonetheless, Crowley’s invocation of

“practice and methods,” and his sometimes highly reductionist neurological language—he once

referred to the dark spirits of Goetia as “portions of the human brain”—represent a reflexive,

pragmatic, and quasi-naturalistic attitude toward esoteric claims and evidence, and stands as one

of the earliest articulations of an esoteric inner empiricism. We will return to Crowley’s

Scientific Illuminism later in this book, as he cast a long shadow over the early seventies.

Overall Hammer’s claim is true: most esotericists and occultists in the twentieth century

turned to science for its language and the metaphysical wiggle-room or the resonance afforded

by its most cosmic and outlandish concepts. This helps us understand one of the unique features

of the seventies, when some seekers and experimenters, probing a multi-dimensional spectrum of

ASCs that included mystical experience, psychedelics, eros, and the paranormal, brought

133. Cited in Hammer, 222.

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something of science’s “intersubjective, repeatable, and error-correcting” attitude to their

explorations. I want to insist that, again, I am more interested in this attitude than in adjudicating

the adequacy of these attempts from some academic position as a gate-keeper of authentic

science. Such policing functions are not, in my opinion, a particularly worthy or noble goal for a

historian of religion, despite the righteousness with which it is frequently deployed. Instead, I am

interested in how this loosely “skeptical” attitude, which translates into concrete practice and

concepts about practice, transforms the fundamental nature and meaning of what a comparativist

like James would identify as a religious or mystical experience. This seems to me to be of great

significance, even if the “inner empiricism” of the seventies was rarely rigorous, and generally

fell short of even Tart’s somewhat unclear notion of “state-specific science.” That said, it is

crucial to identify a current of experimental, naturalistic, or skeptical consciousness culture

whose discourse and practices needs to be distinguished from the more devotional or

obscurantist ideas found among followers of Oriental mysticism or the various new religious

movements of the era.

The Third Great Awakening—and the spiritual marketplace of books, lectures, and

spiritual centers that supported it—opened up a Pandora’s box of religious or spiritual practices.

At the same time, many of these practices were disaggregated from traditional texts or practice

forms and reframed and recombined along more informal, secular, and sometimes hedonistic

lines. Rituals became practices, and practices protocols. As a paradigmatic example, one might

look at Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, a popular 1972 publication issued by the

psychologist Robert Masters and Jean Houston, who had already made an important early

intervention into consciousness movement with their Jamesian 1966 text The Varieties of

134. Aleister Crowley, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, The confessions of Aleister Crowley: an
autohagiography (London: Arkana, 1989), 296.
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Psychedelic Experience. Mind Games presented a host of spiritual and psychological practices,

including enhanced sensory awareness, self-initiated trance-induction, meditation, dreamwork,

fasting, music, chant, and intensified imagination. David Toolan, comparing the text to Patanjali

and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, described it as “a ritual manual and an encyclopedia

of spiritual disciplines, much as if Mircae Eliade’s Patterns of Comparative Religion were

translated into a ‘how to’ book.”135 By reframing the spirit as “mind,” and religion as “games,”

Masters and Houston helped transform spiritual disciplines into what George Leonard would

identify as “methods and tools” of human potential.

The notion of “human potential” played a key role in the secularization or

operationalizing of extraordinary mind states in the seventies. We owe the concept to Aldous

Huxley, whose 1960 lecture on untapped “human potentialities” greatly impressed Richard Price

and Michael Murphy, who would go on to found the Esalen Institute, a veritable cornucopia of

extraordinary experience and consciousness hacking. There Huxley’s belief in transhuman

possibilities would merge with the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow’s influential notion

of “peak experiences”—experiences that were not only beyond the normal run of a person’s

psychological life, but possessed the enormous transformative potentials that Huxley invoked.

Initially, most Esalen workshops were led by intellectuals like Maslow or Gregory

Bateson, but within a few years after its founding in 1962, the offerings had largely shifted

towards the production of extraordinary experience: the terrors of encounter groups, the Freudian

Zen of gestalt, tai chi, yoga, art, meditation, and, tucked away in the background, psychedelics.

Most of these practices were deeply psychologized, which placed their catalyzed states on more

or less the same plane of immanence as the techniques that produced them. At the same time,

135. David Toolan, Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness (New
York: Crossroad, 1987), 81.
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many of these experiences were functionally “transcendent” in their creative, uncanny, ecstatic

and sometimes traumatic encounter with the Outside. For all its California hedonism, immanence

alone would not do. As Murphy himself said, “Only practices that enhance our psychological and

somatic functioning while making special ‘drafts upon the Unseen’ are likely to facilitate a

balanced growth of our greater capacities.”136

In his history of the institute, Jeffrey Kripal identifies the psychological current of Esalen

as the confluence of two lineages, a “psychoanalytic stream” that involved occult and erotic

understandings of embodied energy, and a “gestalt stream” that focused on the construction of

reality and the awakening of consciousness.137 For Kripal, the dynamic intertwining of these two

streams helped forge an ecstatic and expanded culture of the bodymind that, fired up with

inspirations and yogic traditions from Asia, becomes a kind of American Tantra. Here Tantra

does not simply to refer to erotic ritual or the raising of sexual energies—though these energies

are crucial sources within the counterculture. For Kripal, American tantra is a “psychedelic

orientalism” in which “the American visionaries saw their own altered states accurately,

fantastically reflected in the mythologies and mystical systems of Asia.”138

Though such reflections and appropriations worry many scholars today, in part because

of the comparative operations they rest upon, we might consider such “dangers” simply as

indices of the fundamental heterodoxy of the Esalen mission. For as Kripal points out, the Asian

tantric traditions being sampled and remixed were in many ways already heretical vis-a-vis their

own cultural locations, especially in Hindu India.139 That said, Esalen was also defined by its

136. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 423.
137. Ibid, 138.
138. Ibid, 127.
139. Indeed, the extreme psycho-spiritual bodymind practices of Esalen in the early seventies was nowhere better
mirrored than at the tantric rascal Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s ashram in Pune, India. For Rajneesh’s debt to the
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quite intentional rejection of the formal structure of a guru-led ashram. A deeply devoted

meditator, Murphy had spent some of the fifties at Auroville, Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in Tamil

Nadu, which ultimately convinced Murphy that gurus were not the path. At Esalen, then, there

was no single authoritative ideology, but a constant conversation and often explicit rivalry of

views about method and theory. As Murphy often put it, “no one captures the flag.” In this game,

the secular orientation of psychology proved a perfect nondogmatic cover for the mediating

space of practices that Esalen had created between the academic world of professional research

worlds and the romantic and phenomenological wilderness of the counterculture.

In the game of not-capture-the-flag, authority is, ideally, distributed through a mobile

assemblage of focii rather than congealed into an institutional hierarchy. While this ideal may

not reflect the reality of Esalen’s institutional politics, it does express the increasingly

relativistic, pluralistic, and multi-perspectival turn that comes to characterize the New Age and

postmodernism alike. This organizational pattern announces the paradigm of the network that

begins to emerge in the seventies, but here I wanted to emphasize that this open-ended (and

deeply Jamesian) approach is articulated partly through the analogy and practical distribution of

psychological techniques, spiritual regimens, and other praxis-oriented “mind tools.” The

reframing of spiritual practices as “tools” is part of an expansive postwar humanist technical

culture that embraced both the mainstream consumer culture, which multiplied gadgets

throughout domestic and leisure space, and the counterculture, in which Stewart Brand’s Whole

Earth Catalog remains paradigmatic, as well as the reframing of religious traditions as containers

of mind tools, “techniques of ecstasy” and other discrete practices of altering consciousness or

divining information.

human potential movement, see Hugh Urban, “Osho, from Sex Guru to Guru of the Rich,” in Thomas Forsthoefel
and Cynthia Ann Humes, Gurus in America (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 169-192.
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There are many consequences of this shift toward tools. In From Counterculture to

Cyberculture, Fred Turner traces Brand’s hippie technophilia use to the cultural politics of

Wired, and the growth of the libertarian neo-liberalism that Richard Barbrook and Andy

Cameron refers to as the “California ideology.” The specific notion of psycho-spiritual tools also

fits all too comfortably into an increasingly commercialized spiritual marketplace, where discrete

packages of appropriated material are sold and where expensive retreat centers like Esalen are all

too easily seen as manifestations of “spiritual privilege.”140

However, economic questions only get us so far towards an understanding of the

“cafeteria religion” of contemporary syncretism, in which seekers pick and choose from a myriad

of options, paths, teachers, texts, and systems. Addressing such “mystical cosmopolitanism,” for

example, Courtney Bender argues that the “the recent focus on contemporary spirituality’s

connection to consumerism (in the ‘spiritual marketplace’) as the engine of appropriation only

gets us so far toward understanding the logic of spiritual borrowing.”141 By giving into the

imperialism of the marketplace as the supreme conceptual fetish, scholars of religion obscure

non-market factors and create too sharp a divide between contemporary conditions and the

eclectic syncretism, romantic othering, and cultural appropriations that characterize religion in

earlier eras. Indeed the notion of “cafeteria religion” is perhaps better thought of as “tool-box”

religion. Here a variety of discrete practices, gods, artifacts, and micro-belief systems are

collected together or assembled into novel configurations in order to achieve productive and

transformative effects, rather than the pure consumption implied in the cafeteria analogy. Spirit,

here, is not found in the cafeteria but in the workshop.

140. See Marion Goldman, The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege, NYU Books, 2012.
141. Bender, 154.
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Self Tech

The notion of a “tool-box religion,” in which techniques for navigating or “hacking”

consciousness are drawn from a variety of sources, also helps us bang together a connection

between the countercultural and New Age framework of spiritual tools to Michel Foucault’s

notion of the “technologies of self.” An important conceptual operator for this project, Foucault’s

notion emerged is his late career against the backdrop of his earlier and vastly influential theories

of power. Throughout the course his writings, Foucault had for the most part gave pride of place

to what he called “technologies of domination”: concrete institutions and discourses (or, earlier,

“epistemes”) which deterministically constitute the subject through various assemblages of

power, knowledge, and biopolitical regulation.

In the mid-seventies, when he began spending a significant amount of time in California,

Foucault embarked on a history of sexuality that in turn staged a significant turn in his thought,

away from structures of domination and towards an analysis of those methods and practices

whereby individuals actively participate in their own subjectification. Foucault focused his

research in late Antiquity, and particularly in the tension between the Stoic “care of the self” and

a subsequent Christian “truth game” that subjugated the self in light of a confessional logic of

transcendence and juridical asceticism. In both cases, Foucault insisted that knowledge and belief

are not separate from specific practices or “technologies of the self,” which he defined as those

“techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations

on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner
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to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness,

purity, supernatural power.”142

Such techniques do not only help engender the subject; they also contribute to what

Foucault calls “forms of experience.” Though the postwar French analysis of the subject that

Foucault participated in had moved decisively away from phenomenology, the study of sexuality

and the “aesthetics of existence” encouraged Foucault to subject the events of experience

themselves to his archaeological method. In order to avoid producing yet another determinist

deconstruction of consciousness, Foucault had to establish an operator or singularity that,

without invoking phenomenology, remained “irreducible” to “the concrete determinations of

social existence.” For Foucault, this operator was thought itself. “There is no experience that is

not a way of thinking and cannot be analyzed from the viewpoint of the history of thought.”143

Indeed, experience as such only steps away from the matrix of social determinations by way of

“the forms, transformations, and events of thought.”

As such, thought can be conceived, not as abstract cognition, but as a framework of

subjectification that runs on three axes, each of which imply articulation, decision, and what

Niklas Luhmann would call the “cut” an observer makes in order to establish distinctions. These

axes consist of “questions of the true and false, of the acceptance or rejection of rules, and of

relations to the self and others.”144 While these three axes are of course intimately intertwined

with various social, institutional, and discursive assemblages, Foucault’s historical identification

of “technologies of the self” suggests that the subject is, to use a contemporary term, also able to

142. Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Paul Rabinow, ed, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, (New York:
New Press, 1997), 177.
143. “Preface,” in Ethics, 201.
144. Ibid, 201.
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hack itself, to mobilize the reflexivity of thought by putting its own contingent determinations to

the test in an iterative process of training or learning.

For a historian of religions, Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self” provides an

exceptionally tempting tool of analysis. In You Must Change Your Life, to take a recent example,

Peter Sloterdijk modifies Foucault’s concept into the notion of “anthropo-technics.” Essentially,

by anthropo-technics, Sloterdijk means practices that, over time, transform the practitioner in an

iterative fashion. “Practice is defined here as any operation that improves the actor’s

qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or

not.”145 Though Sloterdijk designed his concept to cover regimens we now recognize as secular,

such as athletics and acrobatics, he uses it principally to revise what we mean by religion.

Provocatively, Sloterdijk argues that religions as such don’t exist; what exists “are variously

misinterpreted anthropo-technic practice systems and sets of rules for molding one’s inward and

outward behavior.”146 These “spiritual regimens,” which the cybernetically-canny Sloterdijk also

characterizes as forms of feedback, help humans construct and maintain “symbolic immune

systems and ritual shells.”147 In so doing, they also shape, stimulate, and articulate the varieties

of religious experience. These include, again according to Foucault, transhuman models of

perfection, hedonic goals of happiness, as well as the potentially paranormal experience of

“supernatural power.”

In his late studies of antiquity, Foucault pays little attention to hermeticism, mystery

religions, or Gnosticism—currents whose visionary and “mystical” anthropo-technics would of

course seed and inspire the various revivals of occult thought and practice in the modern era.

That said, in a 1982 lecture at the College de France, Foucault did offer some intriguing

145. Sloterdijk, 4.
146. Ibid, 84.
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comments on the Neoplatonic tradition. Foucault writes that the Neoplatonic “care of the self”

finds realization in self-knowledge, but specifically in a knowledge of the self as divine. As such,

this particular technology of the self becomes an access point to a more mystical apprehension of

sacred reality. Neoplatonism’s anthopotechnics become therefore “the leaven, the soil, the

climate” for a range of spiritual movements, including Gnosticism. This is all well known. But

Foucault also makes an intriguing observation about Neoplatonism’s “double game,” which

plays spiritual experience and the question of knowledge off against one another. The double

game is effected by “continuously and repeatedly raising the question of the necessary conditions

of spirituality for access to truth and, at the same time, reabsorbing spirituality in the movement

of knowledge alone, of knowledge of the self, of the divine, and of essences.”148 As we will see,

such a game can be played seriously, but it can also be played skeptically, or perhaps playfully,

creating a ludic tension between esoteric experience and “knowledge alone.”

However you parse his biography, Foucault’s “late turn” cannot be seen apart from his

own exploration of altered states of consciousness, or what he famously termed “limit

experiences,” a number of which he first underwent while living and working in California in the

late seventies and early eighties. Here Foucault dropped LSD for the first time and explored the

“creation of new pleasures” through “postsexual” S&M practices, which included the inculcation

of extreme, drug-fueled hedonic states. In visits to Japan, Foucault also submitted in the

disciplinary rigors of Zen meditation in order to understand how its “driving forces and rules”

eroded individuality within the subject; the philosopher declared the practice simply as “very

hard.”149 While Foucault insisted at the time that his new object of study was precisely not the

147. Ibid, 3.
148. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-1982 (New York:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 76-78.
149. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 310.
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“California cult of the self,” I believe he was rejecting the essentialism and rhetoric of

authenticity that marked so many New Age and sexual-identity currents, rather than those

California technologies of the self whose operations and results embraced more critical, hedonic,

and inventive experiences.150 Something like this is certainly the case in his 1984 interview with

the Advocate, wherein he criticizes the personal quest for sexual identity and the “liberation” of

desire, and offers instead a discourse of erotic “innovations,” “good drugs,” and friendship

through pleasure.151

Foucault’s critique of the California self, like many of the attacks on the narcissism of the

age, reflected the assimilationist or normalizing rhetoric of these movements more than the

wilder facts on the ground. To discover a more intimate resonance between Foucault’s

experimentalism and the culture of high weirdness, we need only turn to his introduction to the

second volume of The History of Sexuality, where Foucault discusses his own obstinate curiosity.

This is “not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which

enables one to get free of oneself.” While such limit experiences were hardly the dominant

expression of countercultural psychedelia or the human potential movement, they do remind us

that, as we will see, LSD and other consciousness practices directed attention towards the games

of truth that constitute the subject. Foucault is not speaking of himself alone when he artfully

summarizes the desperation as well as the desire that opened up the Pandora’s box of altered

states for some: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think

150. See Michel Foucault, “On the Geneology of Ethics,” Ethics, op. cit., 271. For further reflections on Foucault in
California, see Josef Chytry, Mountain of Paradise: Reflections on the Emergence of Greater California As a World
Civilization, (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 110-118.
151. See Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Ethics, op. cit., 163-173.
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differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one

is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”152 And one of those times, clearly, was the seventies.

152. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, 8.
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CHAPTER TWO. MAGIC MOLECULES:

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHEDELIC OCCULTURE

In 1975, in an attempt to clear the air from the miasma of Watergate, the Senate tasked

the Church Committee with investigating America’s major intelligence agencies—the CIA, the

FBI, and the then rather faceless NSA—for evidence of illegal activities and other abuses of

power. Amongst a treasure trove of malfeasance, the Committee revealed the existence of a long-

running CIA program known as Project MKUltra, a remarkable human research operation whose

raison d’etre lies encoded in the program’s name—Mind Kontrol, ultra-size.

The project started in the early 1950s, when fears of Chinese Communist “brainwashing”

techniques were running high. Whatever actuality they reflected, this discourse indicated a

significant shift in the postwar mindscape: the notion that intimate and significant modes of

thought and awareness could be directly controlled or created using new technologies, drugs, and

psychological techniques. MKUltra explored the radical modification of human thought and

behavior through a variety of extreme, baroque, and sometimes impressively nefarious means

that many of us would classify as forms of abuse and torture.

But these means also involved strategies that targeted the twilight zones of human

consciousness, which in some fundamental sense were operationalized in the postwar theater of
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political, ideological, and corporate struggle. Subjects were subjected to sensory deprivation,

hypnosis, and strategies of isolation, as well as a wide range of drugs, some of which were used,

without knowledge or consent, on military personnel, mental patients, and even the hapless johns

in a San Francisco brothel. Among these chemicals, which included heroin, amphetamine,

mescaline, and sodium pentothal, was a newcomer to our planet’s extravagant pharmacy of

psychoactive agents: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25.

The story of LSD is a paradigmatic narrative of the postwar world, one that links

together, in an almost synchronistic web, discourses and practices related to madness, mysticism,

mind control, and revolutionary ontology. Though other psychedelics will play an important role

in the second half of this book, LSD’s mimetic drift helps set in motion one of the key dialectics

of weirdness: the tension between religion and secular accounts of extraordinary experiences

that, at the very least, resemble the sorts of visionary journeys and noetic insights recorded and

elaborated within the discourse of religious experience, mysticism, and shamanism. After all, the

acid experience itself gave immediate evidence of the transrational capacities of consciousness,

states that might range from a sense of unitive vibratory fusion with the cosmos, to a

mythopoetic explosion of visionary symbolism, to a perceptual merry-go-round of trickster

synchronicities and paranormal possibilities. Acid undermined the instrumental schemes of

individual agency, and it returned many users to baseline with a growing taste for loosely

associational thinking, ecstatic states, and the resplendent overtones of sensory experience. As

we will see in the next section, the use of LSD and other drugs also encouraged a kaleidoscopic

engagement with spiritual practices, metaphysical systems, and occult arcana, all of which came

to supplement, refract, and to some degree substitute for acid’s unsustainable noetic raptures.
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Though elements of these esoteric discourses are apparent in Albert Hoffman’s account

of his first LSD trip, LSD nonetheless arrived in the world more or less as a blank slate,

springing like Athena from the modernist brow of European industrial chemistry.153 Unlike

organic compounds with similar phenomenological properties known at the time, like the

mescaline found in peyote, LSD had no recognized ethnobotanical context. As such, its early

history provides a clear reminder of the complex imbrication of culture and chemistry in the

construction of the effects—and therefore the meaning—of psychoactive drugs. Sandoz

originally marketed the substance to psychiatrists under the trade name Delysid, which was

advertised as a “psychotomimetic” capable of unleashing unconscious materials in patients and

producing a “model psychosis.” Importantly, this first “frame” of LSD stressed its mimetic

qualities—LSD was valued for its capacity to produce similitudes so intense they became

simulacra.

As such, when the UCLA clinician Sidney Cohen first took the compound in 1955, he

expected a phantasmagoric horror show. Instead, he discovered “a majestic, sunlit, heavenly

inner quietude”—a discovery that helped inspire another ten years in LSD therapy.154 These sorts

of sublime peaks and noetic insights complicated the picture generated by acid’s early clinical

trials, not to mention MKUltra’s clandestine experiments in lie detection and cognitive

modification. The personal experience of Cohen and other fifties researchers, in other words, set

in motion a contest over the functional characterization, pharmaceutical profile, and

phenomenological understanding of LSD. Indeed, within a few decades of its discovery, the drug

153. The story of LSD’s discovery by Albert Hoffman at the Sandoz Laboratory in Switzerland has been told too
many times to bear repeating. Within this vast literature, the two best book-length accounts of LSD remain Jay
Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987); and Martin
A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD!: The CIA, the Sixties, and beyond
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992).
154. Novak J., Steven, “LSD before Leary: Sidney Cohen's Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research", Isis,
Vol. 88, No.1 pp. 87-110.
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would come to be seen, not only as a simulator of psychosis, but as a facilitator of

psychoanalytic insight, a cure for alcoholism, a truth serum, a liberating agent of revolution, a

repressive tool of counter-revolution, an aphrodisiac, a cognitive amplifier, a creativity booster, a

holy sacrament, a profane sacrament, and a compound with no “currently accepted medical use”

and “a high potential for abuse” (the definitions of Schedule One substances in the United

States).

With its conceptual and phenomenological plasticity, LSD gives clear evidence of a

conditions that in some sense implicates all drugs, but especially psychoactive ones: what is the

relationship between the material and its particular effects in any given psyche or cultural group?

The usual approach to such a question is to draw a distinction between a drug’s hard-wired

pharmacological effects or potentials and the various ways that different human agents or

institutions construct or frame those effects. This may not be the most helpful ontological

template, however. In a remarkable article on the difference between methodone and heroin,

subtitled “Six Effects in Search of a Substance,” the science studies scholar Emilie Gomart

questions “the assumption that drugs are non-temporal [and] un-changing while human uses and

strivings are historical and temporary.”155 Gomart compared two different studies, one in France

and another in America, that looked at methadone’s effects on heroin addicts. The studies offered

quite different portraits of methadone, and Gomart wanted to understand how this difference

emerged from the two studies.

There are two conventional ways of considering this difference. The naturalist

perspective appears the most like “common sense”—in this view, one or perhaps both studies

have misrepresented an unchanging historical substance. The “social constructionist” position,

155. Emilie Gomart, “Methadone: Six Effects in Search of a Substance,” Social Studies of Science vol. 32 no. 1, 94.
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now de rigeur for much of the humanities and social sciences, would insist instead that different

cultural perspectives and interpretive frameworks had constructed the same substance in various

ways, even in the supposedly rigorous scene of science. Both positions, Gomart argues, rest on

the idea that the substance in question is without history, and that its inherent properties should

be more or less comprehensible through either good science or good stories.

Rather than talk about what a drug “is,” Gomart instead employs the actor-network

theories developed by Bruno Latour and other science scholars in order to portray how different

research methodologies and laboratory practices actually constitute the drug by staging its

emergence or performance on different sorts of historical stages. The point is not to essentialize

the drug, which Gomart considers a kind of “entity” with its own sort of open-ended agency, but

to see the compound as a co-operative partner in the collaborative production of events or

effects.

This approach draws attention to what Gomart calls the “set-up” or dispositif, a term that

Michel Foucault adapted from film theory in order to refer to the implicit and often hidden

apparatus of institutional practices and conceptual operators which are coextensive with the

control of living beings and the social production of knowledge. Agamben, for example, has

defined the disposatif as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient,

determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of

living beings.”156 With this mediating dispositif in mind, as Gomart puts it, the focus of analysis

“switches to these actions that localize, temporize, embody, subject, ‘frame’ the entities in

question.” In this sense, a drug’s effects precede their causes; it is only after the fact that the

cause of an event—the drug, or its social construction—is selected as a causal agent out of the

156. Giorgio Agamben, "What is an Apparatus?" in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 14.
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multiple points of activity that surround and implicate the drugs’s register of effects. This reverse

causality is not unrelated to the question of extraordinary experience posed in the previous

chapter, where events are attached to causes—mystical or otherwise—through a constructive

process that follows their punctuation of individual experience.

While her study is restricted to the laboratory, Gomart’s approach is particularly

amenable to LSD and other psychedelics, whose famously wide-ranging effects have long been

attributed not to the “drug in-itself” so much as the matrix of expectation, protocol, and

environment that stage the emergence of its effects for any given voyage. This matrix has been

enshrined in psychedelic lore—therapeutic and countercultural alike—in Timothy Leary’s

famous notion of “set and setting,” a notion that remains perhaps the most consistent conceptual

framework for understanding and staging psychedelic phenomenology. As mentioned earlier,

“set” refers to the user’s conscious intention and unconscious dispositions, while “setting” refers

to the tripper’s particular cultural and physical environment. In essence, “set and setting”

singularizes or individualizes the social notion of the dispositif in the construction of psychedelic

experience. Rather than providing an essentialist template of the direct effects of a drug “in

itself,” “set and setting” points to a second-order effect: the staging of a metabolic theater of

transformations that unfold potentials already implicated by the “set and setting” of the subject

coupled with the drug and his/her environment.

Here we discover the subtle distinction that David Toolan makes in his incisive and

critical reflection on the human potential movement: LSD does not act as a “causal agent” but a

“catalyst,” which we might understand in systems theoretical terms as an external irritant that

provides the opportunity for a self-regulating homeostatic system—the body-self-mind—to

reflect, magnify, and intensify its own dispositions, dispositions that are themselves, to a degree,
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embedded in collective and social processes. The fundamental circularity of this situation

introduces two important consequences. One is that, as Shulgin noted, even the most rigorous

investigation of the compound’s effects on humans necessarily and structurally erodes the crisp

distinction that (supposedly) underlies the experimental division of subject and object. The other

consequence, related to this, is that the constitution or investigation of a psychoactive compound

begins with the necessarily relational form of an encounter. Shulgin, who invented and

subsequently characterized whole classes of psychedelic compounds, claimed that “It is only

with the development of a relationship between the thing tested and tester himself that [the

characteristics of the compound] will emerge, and the tester is as much a contributor to the final

definition of the drug’s action as is the drug itself.” This recursion, however, is not static, but

produces through the dynamics of encounter a new and emergin construction. “The process of

establishing the nature of a compound’s action is synonymous with the process of developing

that action.”157

All this of course leaves open the question of what exactly is subject to psychedelic

catalysis within us. Here we might recall Janiger’s etymology for the word psychedelic, a term

we have been using unreflectively up to this point but which remains, for my money, the best

overall term for the class of compounds that includes materials like peyote, psilocybe

mushrooms, DMT, ayahuasca, ketamine. In contrast with the later term “entheogen,” which

contains its own god or “theos,” the use of psychedelic requires assent to nothing more

demanding than psyche or “mind.” This allows psychedelic discourse to place one foot firmly in

psychology. This basis allowed Stan Grof, one of the crafters of transpersonal psychology and a

clinician who oversaw thousands of aboveboard psychedelic sessions, to define LSD as an

157. Shulgin and Shulgin, Pihkal, xxi.

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“unspecific amplifier of mental processes.”158 For Grof, however, these processes emerged

largely from the “unconscious,” a term he understands in both Freudian and Jungian registers,

the latter of which ultimately propels his texts beyond the boundaries of biological psychology

into a “transpersonal” ontology that includes cosmic planes of visionary reality inhabited by

incorporeal agents.

The point here is not to defend or critique this view, which we will be playing with

through this book. Instead, the point is to track how concepts create their own operative links and

portals that recursively shape the phenomenology in question. As Anne Taves has persuasively

argued with respect to William James and Fredric Myers, two earlier phenomenologists of

extraordinary experience, the definition of “the unconscious” can become so capacious (and so

proximate to spiritual or supernatural realities) that it functions as a “mediating concept”—in

other words, a placeholder or rhetorical “amplifier” for other forces and concepts, in this case,

religious ones. With these ideas in mind, we can understand the vertiginous implications of LSD,

not so much as a chemical catalyst, but as a medium or “amplifier” that intermediates another

medium: the mediating space of the unconscious, criss-crossed by pathologies, fixed ideas,

cultural scripts, cognitive templates, symbolic archetypes, and, possibly, avenues toward other

domains of being.

With the widespread acceptance of the doctrine of “set and setting,” psychedelic

discourse embraced an element of self-reference whose recursive logic, with its emphasis on

construction, mediation, and expectancy, directs us toward a particularly cybernetic account of

psychedelia. At the same time, these modern metrics were superimposed upon a conceptual and

phenomenological space with a very different etiology: “religious experience.” In the rest of this

chapter, we will show how LSD helped install a model of psychedelic mediation whose psycho-

158. Toolan, Facing West, 57.

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cybernetic formalism renegotiated the boundaries of religion and particularly religious

experience in ways that not only amplified a variety of “occultural” discourses and esoteric

practices, but reframed extraordinary experience as a new sort of gnosis, a meta-function lodged

somewhere on the middle way between biological reduction and religious overcoding.

Good Friday Any Day

Before it crossed Albert Hoffman’s blood-brain barrier for the first time, LSD-25 was not

only a tasteless and colorless compound lurking in a laboratory, but remained fundamentally free

of associations with religion or mystical experience. Nonetheless, Albert Hoffman’s account of

first strong trip, on April 19, 1943, includes witches and demons, and the passing

phantasmagoric conviction that he had already died. Though devoid of specific religious content,

we should underscore the upwelling of such weird and imaginative phantasmagoria, which here

we might simply consider as “weirdness.” Hoffman’s account was not published until the late

1970s, of course, and it appeared in a book that made Hoffman’s own poetic nature mysticism

and transpersonal leanings quite clear.159

The timing was right. Twenty years after Hoffman’s legendary trip, LSD was enveloped

in a language of grace, cosmic unity, metaphysical insight, and visionary encounter. From its

initial characterization as a psychotomimetic, LSD underwent a kind of mimetic drift in the

fifties and sixties, and became attached instead to some of the more sublime and consternating

states of consciousness in the human arsenal. LSD’s visionary similitude in part rests on the

more concrete fact that, pharmacologically and phenomenologically, LSD is something like the

159. See Albert Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science (Los
Angeles; New York: J.P. Tarcher&; distributed by St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
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psilocybin found in some mushrooms, the DMT found in yage, and, to a lesser extent, the

mescaline found in peyote. Yage, mushrooms, and peyote were all plants or plant preparations

deployed for magical, medical, and visionary ends within indiginous contexts that were, in

various ways, considered to fall under the broad category of religion. At the same time, it is very

clear that, with a few important exceptions, mysticism was not part of the picture associated with

these LSD-like hallucinogens before the war. In his thorough study of drugs and literature,

Marcus Boon notes that, aside from ethnographic accounts of peyote use among American

Indians, the vast majority of psychedelic “experience reports” written before World War II are

cast in aesthetic, phenomenological, and pathological terms rather than religious or mystical

ones.160 And yet, psychedelics became one of the most significant discursive sites in the postwar

and countercultural period to explore, contest, and reconstruct the boundary zones between

nature and gnosis, between sacred and profane, between psychology and transcendence.

The literature on this topic is immense and complex, and here I only want to suggest

three cultural strategies for navigating the relationship between drugs and religion, which I will

identify as perennialist, prankster, and shamanic.

Perennialists

The perennialist account of psychedelic mysticism begins with Aldous Huxley’s game-

changing The Doors of Perception (1954), in which an afternoon on mescaline in the Hollywood

Hills becomes the occasion for an immensely influential meditation on consciousness that is

deeply informed by religious and mystical literature, along with poetry and Western art. A major

concern of Huxley’s essay is the character of “is-ness” or spiritual immanence radiating through

160. Boon, The Road of Excess, 232.

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ordinary objects, like flowers and the folds in a trouser leg. Huxley ably captures this

confounding of sacred and profane with his assertion that “Of course the Dharma-Body of the

Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden.” Huxley’s experience, or rather his account

of his experience, is laminated with mystical discourse, and particularly with the allusions and

resonances echoing from Huxley’s own earlier and influential research into comparative

mysticism. This work, which followed years of personal searching and research, took shape in

Huxley’s 1945 The Perennial Philosophy, a book whose immense erudition and grace is

somewhat drowned out by its now roundly criticized thesis: that beneath the world’s various

religious paths, and buried deep in the psychological self, lies a universal and ineffable

experience of Reality that is, with a little luck, available to those willing to commit themselves to

ethical behavior and spiritual practice.

Though The Perennial Philosophy aspired to the sort of global view offered in William

James Varieties, Huxley’s own biases—rooted partly in the spiritual smorgasbord of Los

Angeles and partly in his own misanthropic distrust of human personality—lay towards the

impersonal and nondual modes of mystical experience exemplified by neo-Vedanta and

Buddhism. That said, while it is important to emphasize that Huxley’s very big brain was already

“pre-loaded” with mystical material, these concepts had an operational rather than interpretive

effect within his mescaline swoon. As Boone put it, “Huxley was proposing an experiential

model of the imagination and the imaginal realms that ran counter to the symbolic,

representational structures that had governed Western thought for centuries.” This shift from

symbol to experience implied a shift from systems of representation towards pragmatic effects

that depend upon a “theory of consciousness that was at once materialist and cosmic.”161 The

core of this theory relied on Huxley’s “reducing valve” model, wherein ordinary mind is viewed
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as a reduction of a larger field of consciousness made necessary by evolutionary constraints and

the exigencies of a precarious existence. However, these valves also can be opened, revealing

religious or mystical ontologies whose seeds lie in potentia within all human beings—including,

it seems, human beings on a decent dose of mescaline.

Establishing a mimetic or analogic relationship between psychedelic experience and

religious mysticism is one thing; establishing or grounding this connection is another. For the

philosopher W.T. Stace, who developed a seven-point model of mystical experience that is still

used by some researchers today, argued in 1964 that psychedelic mysticism was not just

“similar” to traditional mystical experience but “is mystical experience.”162 For some critics and

religious thinkers, this too-easy correspondence and its materialist implications proved rather

threatening in its establishment of a continuum between nature and transcendence.

In his 1957 book Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, the Catholic religious scholar R.C.

Zaehner attacked Huxley’s perennialist drift by insisting on the wide variations within mystical

experiences, texts, and underlying ontologies. Zaehner’s motivation was to immunize theophanic

Christian mysticism from its less authentic rivals. As such, Zaehner restricts the vision

vouchsafed by mescaline to “nature mysticism,” a profane experience of unity or depersonalized

identification with the material cosmos. Zaehner also finds these visionary experiences, which he

identified with the manic side of bi-polar psychosis, among poets and madmen. For more sacred

types of mysticism Zaehner turns to Christianity and Hinduism, which was his academic

specialty. Here too he finds crucial distinctions between the cold “isolationism” of Samkhya or

the impersonal monism of Vedanta and the theophanic mysticism of Islam and Christianity, in

which the self as person encounters his or her transcendental ground in a relationship of love. As

161. Ibid, 252.

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such, Zaehner underscores the impersonal register of Huxley’s experiences, in which the folds in

a pair of trousers possess more interest than the other people in the room. In later writings on

mysticism, Zaehner will also approvingly cite Martin Buber’s distinction between experience,

unitary or otherwise, and genuine encounter, which always involves an “I-You” relationship.

Intriguingly, Zaehner does not discount Huxley’s mescaline experience as ersatz mysticism or

mere derangement, but rather considers it an authentic expression of a “nature mysticism” that

involves a psychophysiological capacity to manically and impersonally identify with the natural

world.

Zaehner was spitting into the wind, since Huxley’s visionary perennialism set the stage

for the florescence of psychedelic mysticism in the sixties. Indeed, the “Asian” flavor of so much

psychedelic mysticism to come can in some ways be tracked back to Huxley’s own predilection

for nondual philosophy and comparative religion, whose threads are embedded in the discursive

warp and woof of The Doors of Perception as well as The Perennial Philosophy. Relatively early

into his mescaline experience, Huxley confronts a garden chair whose radiant and absolute

beauty absorbs him into an “event” so wonderful it becomes terrifying. Huxley considers the

possibility of madness, at which point the chair transforms into something like “the last

Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with

considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair.”163 Huxley panics, a panic he later limns as the

inevitable outcome of man’s petty ego confronting the divine light.

Moving outside the Judeo-Christian frame of judgment, Huxley then compares the

writhing chair to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a highly influential collection of texts from the

Bardo Thodol whose translation and considerable repackaging had been effected by the

162. In Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1966), 234.
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independent scholar and sometimes Theosophist W. Y. Evans-Wentz in the twenties. These texts

of Tibetan tantra, presented in the form of scripts to be read out loud to the newly dead, outline

the series of bardos or liminal “in-between” states that, upon the death of the body, confront the

mind-stream with ferocious phantasmagoria and opportunities for transcendence. This cross-

cultural literary artifact was this theater conjured up by Huxley’s chair, especially the scene

wherein the soul, newly freed from the body, shrinks in agony from the Clear Light of the

Absolute and seeks shelter instead in the “comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human

being.” Whether Huxley actually thought of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time of his trip

or later is unclear. In the narrative, his narrative his wife Maria attempts to calm him of his

terrors by suggesting he try and “fix your attention” on the Clear Light, which is one of the more

memorable admonitions found in Evans-Wentz’s text. “Only if there were somebody there to tell

me about the Clear Light,” Huxley responds. “One couldn’t do it by oneself.”

Religion also played a major role in the only psychedelic publication in the fifties that

matched The Doors of Perception for impact: R. Gordon Wasson’s legendary 1957 Life

magazine story about the Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina and the “magic mushroom” cult in

Oaxaca, Mexico. Given the great deal of evidence we have for the ritual use of Psilocybe

mushrooms in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Wasson, who was an obsessive and learned

mycophile as well as wealthy banker, believed that he had discovered the smoldering embers of

an ancient tradition. This evidence in turn fueled Wasson’s overriding intellectual agenda, which

was to prove that the roots of religion lay in the Paleolithic use of psychedelic mushrooms,

including both Psilocybe and the more harrowing red-and-white capped Amanita muscaria.

Largely using the associative and data-dense armchair methods associated with James Frazer’s

Golden Bough, but publishing his lavish books on his own dime, Wasson went on to argue that

163. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (HarperCollins, 2004), 56.

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psychedelic fungi contributed the secret sauce for soma, the mystical brew lovingly described in

the Vedas, as well as for the kykeon consumed during the ancient mystery rites of Eleusis. The

details of these arguments are not important here: what is of note is that the magic mushroom

entered the modern Western imagination as an icon, or idol, of ancient world religion, a vision

constructed, at least in part, with the popular tools of comparative religion.

As Andy Lechter convincingly argues in Shroom, his controversial and rather unforgiving

account of modern mushroom lore, Wasson went to Huautla expecting a benign religious

experience, and a benign religious experience, at least to judge from Wasson’s classic account of

his trip, was what he got. Becoming an Emersonian “disembodied eye,” the banker soared over

exotic landscapes, beheld the Platonic forms, and arrived at the dark gates that concealed “the

presence of the Ultimate”—gates that, as most future shroomers would not be surprised to learn,

remained closed. But as Lechter argues, Sabina’s velada, though it included prayers to Catholic

saints and censors sputtering with copal, was not about propitiating the Ultimate but about

healing maladies or finding lost objects. “To find God, Sabina—like all good Catholics—went to

Mass.”164

With its grandiose sacred claim, however, Wasson’s account struck a chord, and trickle

of intellectuals and bohemians made their own treks to Mexico to sample the mushroom,

including Harvard professor Timothy Leary. After his life-changing experience there, Leary

returned to Cambridge to kickstart the Harvard Psilocybin Project, a series of psychological

experiments that used synthetic psilocybin pills, based on Wasson’s samples and produced by the

same Sandoz Corporation responsible for LSD. However, even before psychedelics were

scheduled, Leary’s research project and the emerging youth drug culture soon fell head over

164. Andy Letcher, Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (New York: Ecco, 2007), 104.
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heels for LSD, which was considered by many heads—incorrectly—to provide a more powerful

trip.165

Leary’s career at Harvard also shows how the discourse and ethos of comparative

religion helped transform an atheistic social psychologist and elite intellectual into a psychedelic

change agent. Leary’s first book, 1957’s The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, offered a

dense personality typology cast in terms of social roles and established interpersonal scenarios

that both resisted and absorbed the reigning behaviorist models of the day. In 1960, he

discovered psilocybin mushrooms, and began the transformation that, in just a few years time,

would see him emerge as a grinning psychedelic guru openly cannibalizing the sorts of texts—

like Lao Tzu, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the I Ching—that characterized the emerging

postwar canon of spiritual seeking. What enabled Leary to embrace the game of “applied

mysticism” without entirely abandoning social psychology or naturalism was a version of

Huxley’s perrennialism.

In addition to a friendship with Huxley, Leary became pals with Huston Smith, a media-

savvy MIT professor of religion whose work—especially his 1958 text The World’s Religions—

became one of the more important vectors of perennialism in the history of comparative religion

in America. Indeed, psychedelics play a privileged if under-acknowledged role in the ascendency

of perennialism in the American discourse of comparative religion in and outside the academy.

Though perennialism certainly was well-established before the postwar turn towards

psychedelics, drugs helped propagate the notion, and not simply by providing experiences that, at

least with the proper expectancy, lent themselves to reframing through a variety of different

religious or mystical lenses. More operationally, the relationship between the material drug and

165. See Patrick Lundborg, Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life (Stockholm: Lysergic, 2012),
173-181.
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the individual’s trip modeled the assumed relationship between an underlying perennial stratum

and a localized “cultural” interpretation of those effects.

As a young man, Smith made a pilgrimage to visit Huxley; by the time he met Leary,

Smith had, while remaining a Christian, adopted a meditation practice, joined the Boston

Vedanta Society, and talked about yoga on television. But only when he took LSD with Leary in

1961 did Smith finally drink down the full-blown mystical experience he had been searching

for—a fact he would continue to acknowledge throughout his successful academic career and

bestselling books, even while later finding fault with Leary and the drug culture. In 1962, Smith

participated in the so-called Good Friday Experiment, a legendary research project directed by a

graduate student at Harvard Divinity School named Walter Pahnke under the auspices of Leary

and the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Pahnke wanted to see if psilocybin could induce an

unqualified mystical experience when taken in a religious setting by people who were spiritually

inclined. Later researchers would find fault with the methodology of the double-blind

experiment, especially concerning the problem of expectancy, or the tendency to shape an

experience through expectation or “leading.” That said, a follow-up study of sixteen of the

original participants conducted by Rick Doblin in 1984 found that most still held their

experiences to have been “genuinely mystical,” though without a thorough critical engagement

with the adjective “genuine,” this finding still begs many questions.166

Shortly before his death in 1963, Huxley met with Leary and suggested that he write a

psychedelic guidebook based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. After getting booted out of

166. In 2006, a more rigorous study by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins seemed to confirm essentially the same
result: psilocybin can facilitate something like religious experience with lasting positive effects for a significant
percentage of properly predisposed subjects. Critics have pointed out that the study still begs the problem of
expectancy, and that the questionnaires used to establish Griffiths’s conclusions featured a perennialist bias.
Griffiths, R.R., Richards, W.A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion mystical experiences
having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268-283.
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Harvard, Leary began working on the text with his colleague Richard Alpert and his student

Ralph Metzner. According to Metzner, Leary said “Let’s take the text of the Tibetans and strip

the particular cultural and religious language and rewrite it as a manual.”167 Translating the texts

into “psychedelic English,” Leary and team mapped the stages of a generic psychedelic trip onto

the various Tibetan bardos. On the surface, this seems clear support for the Buddhist scholar

Donald Lopez’s argument that Leary’s rewrite was an aggressive act of “radical

decontextualization” that rested on a perennialist, quasi-scientific “theology” of culturally

unmarked and therefore universal mystical states.168 True enough, but Lopez misunderstands the

pragmatic thrust of Leary’s text, which had much less to do with establishing the timeless basis

of Tibet’s complex visionary ontologies than with rendering some basic tantric notions

operational for psychedelic experimentalists.169 Though Leary’s model has not aged well, and the

vast majority psychedelic therapists prefer much less heavy-handed “games,” The Psychedelic

Experience was quite influential during the early years of mass psychedelia. If nothing else, the

text helped solder psychedelic experience onto the loosely “Asian” or Hindu-Buddhist spiritual

template that provided the “go-to” ontology for many mystic trippers during the heyday of the

counterculture.

The Psychedelic Experience also introduced one of the most influential technical

principles in the design of psychedelic protocols: the afore-mentioned notion of “set and setting.”

Again, this principle holds that the content and dynamics of a trip are fundamentally reflexive;

that is, they depend on one’s conscious and unconscious expectations and state of mind (set) in

167. Nicholas Schou, Orange sunshine: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its quest to spread peace, love, and
acid to the world (Macmillan, 2010), 28.
168. Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (University of Chicago Press,
1999), 71-85.
169. The irony is that the initial context for the Tibetan texts rested on a fundamental ambiguity between the literal
understanding of their descriptions as a guidebook for the newly dead, and the visionary or operational use of these
scripts as tantric rehearsals of bardo experience undertaken by advanced yogis.
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synergy with the material, atmospheric, and aesthetic conditions of the environment (setting).

This model bears comparison to Foucault’s notion of disposatif, and it reminds us that the tools

to deconstruct the “immediate” phenomenology of a trip after the fact were already contained

within psychedelic protocols. But Leary also recognized that such reflexivity could also be

exploited to “construct a ‘program’” for a trip in advance.170 “One can envision a high art [of]

programming psychedelic sessions, in which symbolic manipulation and presentations would

lead the voyager through ecstatic visionary Bead Games.”171 Such a design program—coupled

with the psychoactive chemical catalyst—can certainly be seen as a Foucauldian “technology of

the self” in the sense of an anthopo-technics that allows humans to participate in their own

subjectification. Leary’s use of the term “ecstasy” here also reminds us that, for him, this “high

art of programming” lies on an erotic or neo-tantric continuum with Leary’s more demotic and

utilitarian notion of “hedonic engineering,” which he once defined simply as “designing one’s

life for pleasure through chemical turn-ons and turn-offs.”172

Leary’s interest in religious rhetoric had an even more practical basis in legal strategy.

When he founded the cheekily-named “religious” organization League for Spiritual Discovery in

1966, Leary wanted to reframe LSD as a legitimate and constitutionally protected religious

sacrament for those seeking the “divinity within.” The legal precedent here—which was not

reflected in any concrete gestures of political solidarity with American Indians—was the Native

American Church, which had incorporated in Oklahoma 1918 partly to protect the right of

practitioners to ritually consume peyote.

170. Timothy Leary et al., The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New
York: University Books, 1964), 139
171. Ibid, 139; the Bead Game is a reference to a visionary and intellectual game played in Herman Hesse’s novel
Magister Ludi (1943), an important source for Leary’s comparativism and ecstatic notion of game-playing.
172. Cited in Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991),
119
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And Leary wasn’t the only one who recognized that psychedelicists might take advantage

of the state’s biopolitical establishment of certain marginal religious rights by underscoring the

religious dimensions of tripping. Arthur Kleps, who lived at Millbrook during Leary’s reign,

founded the Neo-American Church in 1966 to similarly assert psychedelic use as a religious

right. But unlike Leary, Kleps also used to occasion to satirize religion and society with the sort

of psychedelic humor that, as will see, characterized Discordianism and, later, the Church of the

Subgenius. The heads of Kleps’ church were called “Boo Hoos,” their mascot was a three-eyed

toad, their house organ called Divine Toad Sweat, and their supreme goal the “bombardment and

annihilation of the planet Saturn.” That said, Kleps was no mere sarcastic hedonist—he sincerely

accepted the metaphysical and mystical sublimity of psychedelic experience, but he questioned

the usefulness of religious models and the “programming” proffered by Asian gurus. Instead, he

wrote that his followers were inheritors of a “more honorable (if less popular) western history of

visionary and mystical experience coupled with the vigorous advocacy of human liberty and

political radicalism of every kind.”173 All of our avatars of high weirdness, as we will see, belong

in this particular current.

Pranksters

With its blend of satire and organized intent, Krebs’ church stands closer to the anarchic

and carnivalesque style of psychedelic culture associated with Ken Kesey and the Merry

Pranksters than with the Leary team’s reverent and perennialist appropriation of Eastern religious

forms. The Pranksters, of course, emerged in the Bay Area, and they brought an absurdist,

173. Kleps, Art, The Boo Hoo Bible; the Neo-American Church Catechism (San Cristobal, N.M.: Toad Books,
1971), 22.
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experimental, and willfully demotic attitude towards psychedelic ecstasy that drew more than a

little from California’s hands-on, hedonic, and DIY approach to subcultures. Though the

East/West tension between Leary and the Pranksters has certainly been overplayed (by Tom

Wolfe and others), the difference remains instructive, particularly in terms of their diverging

relationships with religious and mystical material. The Prankster ethos is a crucial reminder that,

alongside the perennialist construction of psychedelic spirituality, there were other cultural forms

that cultivated the extraordinary and even mystical phenomenology of LSD and other drugs

within an essentially freethinking, anti-authoritarian, and absurdist-existential framework.

Like Krebs, the Pranksters mocked or side-stepped the perceived seriousness of religion;

Wolfe reports, for example, that when the Pranksters visited Millbrook, Ken Babbs dismissed

Leary’s fascination with the Tibetan bardos as a “crypt trip.” In contrast, the Prankster diagram

for transformative psychedelic experience, which was reproduced through the legendary and

influential acid tests the crew staged around the West Coast in the mid-1960s, represented an

improvised scrambling of cultural codes and techniques rather than a disciplined, quasi-scripted

transcendence. Indeed, their collaborative experiment in consciousness mutation was in some

sense premised on the explicit evasion of obvious forms or mimetic models, religious,

psychological, or otherwise. When an interviewer from the Haight street rag The Oracle asked

Kesey about Leary’s League and their attempt to define LSD as a sacrament, Kesey responded

that “It can be worse to take it as a sacrament.”174 As Wolfe explained in his portrait of the

Pranksters, “That in itself was one of the unspoken rules. If you label it this, then it can’t be

that…”175

174. Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 26.
175. Ibid, 112.
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That said, Wolfe perceptively identifies the Pranksters as a “true mystic brotherhood.”

The group never used the words “religion” or religious” to describe their trip, but there was an

“unspoken thing” that they refused to put into words. On the one hand, then, the Pranksters

avoid and reject religion—there is no ism, no explicit dogma, and even the charismatic Kesey

served only as a “non-navigator” who offered his crew little more direction than enigmatic quips

like “You’re either on the bus of off the bus” and “Nothing lasts.” On the other hand, there is an

experiential mystery at the heart of the scene: the “Now” of the LSD trip, understood and staged

through improvisatory multimedia performance and a rhetoric and practice of spontaneity and

willful, synchronistic juxtaposition. Even the raucous laughter and joshing of the Pranksters is

laced with “a precognitive Early Churchly Gnostic note” according to Wolfe, who historically

frames the singular and ambiguous hijinks of the Pranksters in terms lifted from the decidedly

square religious scholars Joachim Wach and Max Weber. 176

The basic notion here is that the great religions began, not with a new theology, but with

a “an overwhelming new experience.” There are different names for such experiences of

course—Wolfe tries out ecstasy, kairos, “the flash”—but the notion here is that religious

movements begin when such novel events are shared among an early in-group of initiates, those

who are “on the bus.” Over time, such passionate sects either dissipate or congeal into dogma, as

charisma is handed off to more impersonal institutional mechanisms. This underlying

framework, which Wolfe is correct to ferret out as a working assumption if not an accurate

account of all religious formation, helps us understand the complex phenomenon of psychedelic

humor vis-a-vis sacred topics.

For the Pranksters, the Neo-American Church, and the Discordians, the ironic

juxtaposition, metaphysical evasion, and rank silliness surrounding religious topics and images

176. Ibid, 164.

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do not simply express irreverence, skepticism, or the sort of satire that the British call “taking the

piss.” In addition, these are apotropaic or protectionist gestures that aim to prevent the reification

of extraordinary experiences into congealed concepts and institutional forms. This sort of dodge,

of course, can itself become a form, and moreover can be recognized against the backdrop of

old-time American religion. As discussed above, the very move toward “experience” that

William James effects, and that underlies a figure like Kesey, is, despite its veneer of empirical

psychology, a characteristically American religious stance that reiterates the Protestant sectarian

gesture of returning to an original intimacy or transparent encounter with the spirit. In this light,

it is important that Wolfe spends a chapter dwelling on the curious connections that emerged

between the Pranksters and the “Young Turks” among the Unitarian Universalist church, one of

whom hosted an (officially) LSD-free “acid test” at a Unitarian church in the San Fernando

valley.

One of the key sites for locating experiential spirituality of the Pranksters lies in their

sensitivity to, and intentional production of, those serendipitous eruptions of meaningful

coincidence that have come to be called synchronicity. For the Pranksters and many of their

acolytes, synchronicity—the term is used by Wolfe, not Kesey—was experienced and interpreted

as a kind of psychedelic grace, a sometimes shared phenomenon that slyly suggested or referred

to a paranormal network of meaningful interconnection attributable, if such attribution was

necessary, to what Kesey calls “cosmic control.” Wolfe lists a number of examples of this “weird

shit,” like the time Neal Cassady ran out of gas driving the bus into the lonely High Sierras, only

to encounter, the next morning, a Chevron gasoline tanker which stops and gives them a tankful

of gas before heading further up the isolated road.

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Synchronicities of sufficient magnitude disrupt the attribution of conventional causality,

which opens up cracks in quotidian reality where alternative metaphysics sprout. While the

vision of cosmic control suggests determinism (or, in possibly more appropriate Christian terms,

predestination), “one could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with the flow!—and

accept it and rise above one's immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger

pattern and grooving with it.”177 This is not the only way to interpret synchronicities, of course.

Art Kleps, for example, for whom synchronicities also served as a central vehicle of

metaphysical revelation, rejected the notion of a cosmic controller for the assertion that

synchronicities are evidence that waking reality is nothing but the individual’s solipsistic dream.

One of the many weird paradoxes of synchronicity is that, while it suggests that

everything is written, those perceptions themselves can be cultivated and, if not exactly

produced, then at least staged or nourished. The Pranksters accessed these perceptions

principally by taking LSD, which reliably catalyzes the perception of synchronicity in many

users, particularly as doses and circumstances rise towards high weirdness. There are other tools

as well. As with many beatniks, hippies, and freaks, the Pranksters were enormous fans of the I

Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle book that, in its legendary Wilhelm/Baynes edition, was

accompanied by the Jung essay in which he announces the concept of synchronicity. As such, the

I Ching was perhaps the most reliable disseminator of “meaningful coincidence” throughout the

occult revival of the sixties and seventies. Equally important, and deeply significant, was the

deployment of media technologies in nonlinear arrays that staged serendipity. In their private

parties, bus trips, and acid tests, the Pranksters creatively deployed a kaleidoscopic assemblage

of sound and light technologies in order to both scramble and magnify the cross-talk between

177. Ibid, 143.

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various media and perceptual streams while forming larger nonlinear “media ecologies.” Here,

for example, is Wolfe’s description of the multimedia array at the Trips Festival in 1966:

Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows
how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over
the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers,
strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to
play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful
Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards
leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles…

Events like this can be understood as social synchronicity machines—an immersive,

cybernetic, and McLuhanesque celebration of Burroughs’ cut-up war on control.178 Similarly,

Art Krebs set up more humble multi-media environments that exploited the potential for

synchronistic connections. For gatherings of Boo Hoos, he suggested setting up “three, six, or

nine television sets, with sound off,” and then distributing a variety of texts to be read, randomly,

out loud, including SF novels, fantasy books, and the I Ching, which itself can be considered a

kind of synchronicity machine. Indeed, this Boo Hoo practice—with its half-ironic, half-serious

mixture of imaginative literature, esoterica, and media jamming—can be considered emblematic

of the weird mutations that extraordinary experience undergoes in the sixties and seventies as it

approaches but resists “religion.”

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Ride The Snake

Alongside the perennialist mysticism of Leary and the sacred irony of the Pranksters and

their ilk, there is a third mode of psychedelic religion that comes to the fore in America in the

sixties and seventies, a mode that is at once the most traditional and the most fabricated. The best

term for this mode is “shamanic,” recognizing that the anthropological term itself arguably

reflects a perennialist bias in the sense that it presumes to identify a shared function across a

dizzyingly wide variety of magical and healing traditions found in archaic, aboriginal, and

hunter-gather communities around the world.

The prologue for the refashioning of this current in the modern West occurs when the

investment banks and amateur mycologist Gordon Wasson publishes his legendary 1957 Life

magazine story that announced the discovery of a sacred “mushroom cult” among the Mazatec

Indians in Oaxaca. Here Wasson introduced the world to the curandera Maria Sabina, a living

traditional healer who employed hallucinogenic substances in magical rites. As explained, he

also directly tied these rites to the ethnobotanical origins of religion, with the mushrooms giving

insight on everything from the soma described in the Vedas to the mysterious contents of the

kykeon in the Eleusinian mysteries, which would become a major topos of psychedelic

spirituality.179 As Andy Lechter tartly argues in his controversial critique of Wasson, the

banker’s view was not only indebted to deeply speculative works of comparative religion—

especially Frazer’s Golden Bough and the work of Wasson’s friend, the poet Robert Grave—but

also ignores the way in which Sabina’s practices were themselves only partially “religious.”

What Wasson wanted to see “as a form of proto-Christian mysticism, with mushrooms

178. The dialectic is paradoxical: if conventional media are vectors of conventional social control, the cut-up
liberates the space for another order of “cosmic control” to operate, or at least appear to operate.
 161

foreshadowing the sacrament of blood and wine,” was in reality a healing ceremony that had

little or nothing to do with either worship or mystical experience. While traditional Mazatec

practices were infused with prayers and mythopoetic material, the notion of an “ancient

mushroom cult” unfairly distorted the enthographic situation to fulfill comparative religion’s

speculative quest for an underlying anthropological basis for religious mysticism.

Many hippies made pilgrimages to Oaxaca or to the more northern lands of the peyote-

using Huichol Indians, an influx whose motivations uncomfortably blended a hunger for

traditional earth wisdom with a desire to score. But the most significant and influential shamanic

model of psychedelic religiosity that emerged in the sixties was, of course, Carlos Castaneda’s

bestselling 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan. Here the UCLA anthropologist began a

multi-volume account of his initiation into Native American sorcery by the Yaqui “Man of

Knowledge” Don Juan Matus. Though the initiation was supposedly completed in 1965, the most

important volumes in the series came out in the seventies and remain signature signposts to the

decade. Initially accepted by most readers as authentic accounts, Castaneda’s pretense of

anthropological realism eventually fell under critical scrutiny, which revealed his books to be

artful pastiches of fiction, anthropological material, and a host of mystical texts from around the

globe. While some inveighed against Castaneda for exploitation and fraud, others accepted the

dubious ontology of his texts as a form of trickster wisdom whose delivery could have no better

form than a half-fiction fused into fact.

Along similar lines, Dan Noel has characterized Castaneda’s books as metafictional

“shamanovels” that seamlessly juxtapose multiple genres and draw from the Jungian depths in

order to bring “nonliteral reality” into the dream of textuality.180 Moreover, Castaneda’s texts

179. See the discussion on Wasson in Lechter, Shroom, 88-113.

180. Noel, Daniel C, The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (New York: Continuum, 1997).
 162

were stuffed with practices and operative concepts like “seeing”; many readers embraced them

as practical manuals and metaphysical trainers as much as entertaining narratives. As such,

Castaneda’s influential and popular oeuvre—which included some of the most important occult

texts of the occult-saturated seventies—is a crucial exemplar of the blurring of fact and fiction

that takes on increasing importance in counterculture religion, and that deeply informs the

dynamics of high weirdness.

It is important to emphasize that the fictional character of many of Castaneda’s details do

not obliterate the ways in which his tales were rooted in the general anthropological discourse

surrounding indigenous Southwest shamanism. As such, their immense popularity (and hands-on

occult practicality) helped install a neoshamanic or animistic cosmology into Western

psychedelic culture. An example of such discourse in a contemporary anthropological context

can be found in a 1975 text on Native California shamanism by Lowell Bean, a well-regarded

anthropologist who studied shamanism at UCLA alongside Castaneda, who himself may have

based some of Don Juan’s datura lore on a native California informant. (It should be noted that

Castaneda did not speak about “shamans” in his early texts, since, as he later explained, Don

Juan did not care for the imported term.) The central concept in Bean’s account is power, a

potential to act that is widely and dynamically distributed between various agents throughout

three major levels of reality: the upper world, home to celestial entities and often the spirits of

the dead; the middle world, inhabited by humans and various non-mortal powers; and an

underworld filled with reptilian and often malevolent beings.

One key element of this cosmology is the distribution of active and ambiguous agents

throughout all three levels of reality. Rocks and plants are potential agents of power as well as

animals and disincarnate beings, but neither their presence nor their intentions are easily
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detectable, since such powers are “capricious, unpredictable, and amoral.” Agents need to be

tested by “empirical indicators,” and they may deceive; as such, humans live in a profoundly

ambiguous world where power is always being contested. “While there is constant opposition

between power sources and a struggle among them to acquire more power, no one source of

power has the ability to obtain ultimate superiority or to alter the condition of the universe so

long as man conducts himself in a manner that aids in maintaining the equilibrium.”181

In 1971’s A Separate Reality, the second and highly popular volume of the series,

Castaneda establishes this model in relationship to psychoactive drugs. In the book, the

“druggiest” of the series, Don Juan introduces Castaneda to a number of “allies,” including

datura, peyote, and hallucinogenic mushrooms, all of which reveal slices of “nonordinary

reality” that stage an enigmatic interpersonal encounter with nonhuman persons and forces. In

particular, Don Juan speaks of the entity “Mescalito,” a benevolent plant teacher or protector

spirit associated with peyote whose independent ontological status becomes, within the narrative,

increasingly convincing to the reader despite the protests of the ever-skeptical Castaneda.

The journey from Don Juan’s paperback brujeria to today’s global ayahuasca shamanism

is a rich and complex story of psychedelic construction and encounter, but here it is important to

emphasize two key elements that will play a role in the high weirdness of the seventies. One is

the mercurial, morally ambiguous, and sometimes treacherous world created by shape-shifting

agents and allies struggling for power in a networked universe of real differences. The other is

the irreducible ontological presence of distinct agents, entities who are difficult to assimilate

either to internal psychological frameworks (with the possible exception of Jung) nor the

Manicheaen moral polarities of the Western religious imagination. If we recall R.C. Zaehner’s

181. Lowell Bean, “Power and Its Application in Native California,” in Lowell Bean, ed., California Indian
Shamanism (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1992), 23.
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critique of Huxley, the significance of this “shamanic” move grows clearer, since the animist

world of power suggests neither the impersonal unity of the Zen acid-head nor the monotheistic

love fest of the Christian mystic; instead there is a polytheistic cosmos of multiple others and

perspectives.

The mythopoetic stakes of this worldview are brought to the fore by a famous story told

by the anthropologist Michael Harner, who later become a key figure in the growth of (non-

psychedelic) neo-shamanism in the seventies. In the early sixties, still an “atheist

anthropologist,” Harner drank ayahuasca with a Conibo elder. During the trip, which he believed

took him to the edge of death, he encountered huge gloomy dragons who told him their cosmic

secret: they had fled to the planet Earth from deep in the cosmos and had become the hidden

masters of the world. Soon afterwards, the somewhat disturbed Harner felt compelled to relate

this information to some missionaries in the area, who immediately identified the dragons as

fallen angels, proof of satanic command over the local native medicine. Then Harner told the

story to a blind shaman in the village; not possessing a Conibo word for “dragon,” he described

them as “giant bats” who said they were the overlords of the world. “Oh they are always saying

that,” said the smiling fellow. “But they are only the masters of outer darkness.”182 Since Harner

had not told the man about their claims of cosmic origin, he felt a chill along his spine, as if the

man’s speech confirmed the independent character of the entities he had glimpsed.

Here we have one “synchronistic” characteristic of high weirdness: a level of

confirmation that implies that visionary experience transcends the boundaries of the individual

imagination into a greater objective collectivity. But even more important, at least for our story,

is the shift between the settled moral narrative of the Bible and the far more ambiguous,

182. Harner, Michael J, The Way of the Shaman: The Definitive Handbook (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2009), 9.
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situational, and ecological perspective of the shaman, for whom even fallen angels are just

hucksters holding down one corner of the scene with a good rap.

During their postwar fluorescence in the West, psychedelics worked to confound the

distinctions drawn in so many ways between sacred and profane, religious and secular, mystical

and material. From the perennialist framework, which itself emerged as a way to manage the

complexities of religious difference in a global world, the noetic and aesthetic power of

psychedelics pointed towards a universal, quasi-scientific essence within human psychology that

affirmed the value of diverse forms of religious mysticism while simultaneously relativizing the

exclusive claims of any particular path. Such religious or mystical phenomenology was also

recognized by what we can call the Prankster perspective, but there the content and affect of

religion were far more intensely relativized and even mocked through irony, satire, and a strategy

of disavowal, misdirection, and evasion. Finally, shamanic models, rooted in but also fabulated

out of the ethnographic realities of aboriginal New World psychedelic use, underscored the

ambiguous and animistically enchanted ontological openness of psychedelics, which acted as

portals into a “nonordinary reality” populated by incorporeal and nonhuman entities with their

own agendas, tricks, and blessings. In all cases, psychedelics opened up a cultural space that both

appropriated and resisted religion. But they did so by providing access to an even more

aboriginal phenomenon, something not yet marked in either sacred or religious registers, and

which for the sake of simplicity we can simply characterize as the state of being high.
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Mystic Sixties

A week or so before Halloween in 1967, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including

New Left activists, pacifists, and hippies, massed in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam

war. The final rally staged during the weekend stands out not only as the most surreal

demonstration of the sixties, but as the one that most reflected the peculiar role that the occult

played in the counterculture: the mass attempt to levitate the Pentagon. After hearing speeches

on the Mall by civil rights leaders and Dr. Benjamin Spock, around 50,000 people set off

towards the Pentagon, a crowd that included what the East Village Other enumerated as

“witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours,

minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen.”183

The very diversity and excess of this sacral list already tells us something: not only were

spiritual practitioners present in force, but they were present though an imaginative,

heterogenous, and history-hopping performance whose “madness” tells us something about the

era’s spiritual politics. Allen Ginsberg led Buddhist chants, Hare Krishnas danced with their

ringing chimes, the New York underground folk group the Fugs led a (partly?) tongue-in-cheek

exorcism, while the West Coast experimental Kenneth Anger performed hidden magickal rites

without the slightest bit of irony.184 The crowd attempted to surround the ominous, five-sided

seat of military power, but were arrested or cut with bayonettes. The building, it need to be said,

did not budge, but something else had been shaken up: the idea that serious political protest

183. Cited in Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture; Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its
Youthful Opposition. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 124.
184. Norman Mailer told part of this story in The Armies of the Night; History as a Novel, the Novel as History
(New York: New American Library, 1968). For a particularly rich oral history of this event, see “Out, Demons, Out!
An Oral History of the 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon and the Birth of Yippie!,” Arthur 13, November 2004.
 167

needed to be serious. Instead, the event became an icon for a heterodox politics of consciousness

that was at once enchanted, oppositional, satirical, and ludic.

This march was the Yippie brain child of Abbie Hoffman, whose emerging brand of

politics was driven by a desire to bring together the two wings of the counterculture—the Fists

and the Heads—into a yin-yang expression of cultural struggle that mixed absurdism and

activism into guerrilla theater. The attempted levitation of the Pentagon—which somehow also

involved turning the building orange—fits in very well with what Todd Gitlin described as the

Yippie “politics of display,” of ludic and media-savvy pranks. A couple months before the march

on the Pentagon, Hoffman had dawn a lot of attention by organizing a crew of hippies to release

a flood of dollar bills onto the trading room floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Beneath the pranks and their obvious media hooks, something more significant was going

on. One of those things was psychedelics: the development of the Yippies and their confreres is

impossible to imagine without the Prankster legacy of psychedelia described above. Though the

Pranksters themselves were not activists, their aesthetic and metaphysical style could be

appropriated in more clearly politicized situations. Historian Julie Stephens describes the Yippies

as representatives of a new “anti-disciplinary politics,” a style of activism that not only rejected

hierarchy and organizational leadership, but “was distinguished from the New Left by its

ridiculing of political commitment, sacrifice, seriousness and coherence.”185 In their work to

performatively break down the distinctions between politics and everything else—art, sex,

dream, popular culture—these groups and individuals also gave a decidedly psychedelic twist to

185. Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
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a protest movement that was aimed not only at political structures but at forms of rationality and

psychology which supported the Establishment.186

As Theodor Roszak argued in his classic 1968 book on the counterculture, the occult was

one of a number of strategies that actively undermined scientific rationality and “assualt[ed] the

reality of the ego as an isolable, purely cerebral unit of identity.”187 Witchcraft fit in fine

alongside rock’n’roll, free love, and psychedelics as Dionysian theaters that rejected the

technocratic logic of mainstream institutions and gestured towards the emergence of new forms

of being and perceiving that would, in essence, fill out the “personality structure and total life

style that follow from New Left social criticism.”188 In other words, psychedelic and occult

consciousness alike became modes, even instruments, of politics, ones that probed beyond or

beneath ideology to confront and recode fundamental forms of being in the world. By attempting

to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise the war machine, the Yippies were drawing on currents of

occult and esoteric lore that saturating the counterculture. Public media and private lives alike

were populated with zodiac signs and secret mantras, Tarot cards and I Ching hexagrams,

Eastern meditations and Western magics, parapsychological tests and rumors of UFOs. In 1968,

Time magazine declared that a “mystical renaissance” was at hand.189

How do we account for this upsurge? Since its origins, the United States has played host

to divergent and sometimes contradictory cultures of alchemy, mysticism, gnosis, and popular

186. Stephens goes on to make an intriguing argument that the anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties set in motion,
for better and worse, many of the features of cultural politics that later came to be called “postmodern”: the erosion
of the line between aesthetics and politics, the widespread sampling from popular culture, the rise of parody and
irony, all of which ultimately contribute, against their more liberating impulses, to the political impasse of the
postmodern moment. I am not convinced that the zaniness of the Yippies were responsible for the exhaustion of
postmodern cultural politics. But the connection between postmodernism and Yippie-style politics is tight, tight
enough to suggest that we must see psychedelics themselves, not simply as tools of social disruption, cultural
imaginings, and spiritual reinvention, but as a catalyst for the postmodern condition itself.
187. Roszak, 55.
188. Ibid, 66.
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magic.190 Many of these ideas and practices found a welcome home in bohemian scenes and

artistic avant-gardes, including the counterculture’s immediate cultural ancestors: the Beats. Jack

Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Gary Snyder were all seekers and

visionaries of one sort or another, and their earnest explorations of Buddhism, Scientology,

magic, tantra, Zen, psychedelics, and Hinduism helped provide models and templates for the

sixties generation. It is important to note that these men were all writers, because, despite the

importance of music and especially visual art to the modern occult, the most tangible cultural

products that fueled the occult revival in the late sixties were books: works of comparative

religion, psychology, mysticism, and fiction that hurtled out of McLuhan’s supposedly fading

Gutenberg galaxy. By the late sixties, hundreds of “metaphysical” bookstores had popped up in

urban areas, often near campuses, and they did good business. In 1969, over 350 titles related to

astrology, parapsychology, and the occult sciences were published, almost 200 more than in

1967191. Even more important are the paperback numbers, perhaps because, in McLuhan’s view,

the inexpensive and mobile “mosaic” of the pocket book satisfied the new taste for “depth

experience.”192 In 1968, publishers issued 169 occult paperbacks, a number that jumped past 500

the following year, when Anton LaVey’s bestselling The Satanic Bible went through the first of

its many printings.

Beyond this literary upsurge, the late sixties birthed a universe of objects, fashions, music

recordings and visual art that communicated or played with esoteric material, including both

novel cultural productions and the intensive mediation and repurposing of existing sources.

189. Marcello Truzzi, “The Occult Revival as Popular Culture: Some Random Observations on the Old and the
Nouveau Witch,” in The Sociological Quarterly, 13(1), Winter 1972, 17.
190. For a solid overview of this story, see Mitch Horowitz, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism
Shaped Our Nation (New York: Bantam Books, 2009). Also see Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic
World View (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1987); and Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the
American Renaissance (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
191. Truzzi, 17.
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Though explicit occultism and non-Christian spirituality were, like drugs, more apparent in the

music of the seventies than the sixties, the well-known sixties high-points remain significant,

whether or not they were gimmicks: the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, the Hendrix

cover that apes Krishna’s vishvarupa or “universal form” appearance in the Bhagavad Gita, the

enchanting koans of the Incredible String Band, and of course the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, with

Aleister Crowley and Paramahansa Yogananda on the jacket and Harrison’s sitar on the wax.193

Other important sources of imagery were rock posters and underground comix, notably the work

of Rick Griffin, whose posters featured Native American imagery, and whose kabbalistic designs

were set alongside scatological pirate yarns in the influential Zap comics. At the same time, it is

important to recognize that the esoteric products that fed the occult revival were by no means

restricted to the counterculture. Indeed, the most visible mystic science of the sixties and

seventies—astrology—was already well ensconced in middle America, with sun sign columns

peppering American periodicals long before head shops started selling zodiac ashtrays or the 5th

Dimension love-bombed the radio with “The Age of Aquarius.”194 Perhaps the most mainstream

occult commodity that boomed at the time was the Parker Brothers corporation’s Ouija board, a

low-seller for forty years until, in 1967, over two million units were purchased, outpacing even

Monopoly.195

All this might lead some to think that the occult revival was simply the result of changes

in cultural production. But that would be to forget the other actor on the stage: not culture, but

192. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media; the Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 284.
193. Here we need to add a fannish shout-out as well for Coven’s 1969 Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls.
194. Key astrologers for the counterculture included the Haight resident Gavin Arthur—who contributed to the
Haight Street Oracle—and Dane Rudhyar, who decisively shaped modern astrology by introducing more humanistic
and Jungian interpretative conventions. At the same time, the Republican governor of California, future President
Ronald Reagan, chose the time of his inauguration based on an astrologer’s advice. See Truzzi, “Occult Revival”, n.
10, 19.
195. Truzzi, 16-17.
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consciousness, and particularly consciousness’s capacity for extraordinary experiences. The

occult revival is part of the larger stream of esotericism in the modern west, and esotericism

cannot be reduced to texts or cultural products, but must also be seen as a historically malleable

current of practices that seek an escape from history through the staging of extraordinary

experiences that, for the sake of simplicity, we can call gnosis. In the sixties, various threads of

this earlier occult counterculture were revised in a bohemian context that juxtaposed the

extraordinary experiences associated with esotericism and the extraordinary experiences

associated with hedonism—in other words, the triumvirate of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.

Already in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, from 1958, the Bay Area hipster Japhy Ryder (based on

Snyder) is offering hints about the Tibetan tantric position yabyum; by the end of the 60s, sex

clubs were hosting black masses, and a myriad of adventurers were exploring the delights of

coitus reservatus, group fertility rites, and “tantric” techniques of ritual sexuality.

Rock shows themselves grew more ritualistic, as changes in technology, musical forms,

and audience expectations encouraged “Dionysian” collective events that were both ecstatic and

ceremonial, a commercialized derangement of the senses. And pot and psychedelics, sometimes

unintentionally, brought many minds to the verge of the gateless gate, as psychoactive users

uninterested in the history of religions discovered profound noetic insights, complex

“archetypal” visions, and sublime emotions in the midst of their melty pleasures.

As Camille Paglia explained in her robust overview of “cults and cosmic consciousness”

in the decade, the widespread valorization of sex and the “concrete power” of rock music

“redefined heaven as present sensual ecstasy.” The result of this was the emergence of what we

can only call spiritual hedonism, an occult stance in which the difference between the sacred and

profane was, if not exactly abrogated, then alchemically transformed: “The sixties at their most
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radical collapsed spirit into matter.” 196 The occult was valued not only for its descriptions of

extraordinary altered states, or its cosmological concepts, but for the capacity of its protocols to

amplify, thicken, and unfold sensory experience. In other words, the occult not only provided a

variety of uncanny maps to organize reality and identity, but amplified realtime experience

through mysterious resonances and synchronistic references. For many, the occult was not just

about going in, or heading far out, but about getting it on.

Head Masters

Though the occult sixties was not a primarily intellectual revolution in religious

sensibility, there were a number of scholars and writers who definitively influenced the turn

towards Eastern mysticism and Western esoterica. One major figure was Carl Jung, whose

highly original texts and psychological theories underpinned much countercultural religiosity and

stimulated all of our avatars of high weirdness to varying degrees. In the early 1950s, Jung’s

collected works began to be translated and published in English through Princeton University

Press and their remarkable Bollingen Series, which also published the first major edition of the I

Ching. As a psychologist blazing his own trail in the wake of Freud, Jung was able to gain a

foothold in a country then ruled by an ego-centered version of Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung

enjoyed wearing the mask of the scientist, and worked hard to maintain an aura of technical rigor

around theories and texts that were fundamentally inspired by the the lore and ethos of

esotericism. By the early sixties, Jungian ideas about the persona, the archetypes, the collective

unconscious, and synchronicity were seeping into the vocabulary and worldview of seekers and

scholars alike. These notions encouraged a fresh appreciation for the creative potential of the

196. Camille Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s,” Arion 10:3, 98.
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“psyche”—even in its pathological dimension—as well as offering a way to embed personal

issues within cross-cultural symbolic networks that helped frame ordinary complexes and lend

them imaginative context and greater resonance.

In contrast to his one-time mentor Freud, who held that a resigned acceptance of

repressive social regulatory forces was the best shot we had as screwed up human animals, Jung

encouraged individuals to withdraw their investments in the social mask he called the persona.

This release would then open gates to the collective unconscious, an uncanny carnival of

phantasms, creative urges, and weird if not paranormal phenomena that uncovered, beneath the

messy Freudian basement, the more archaic and collective strata of the archetypes—the anima,

the shadow, the wise old man. Discovering and engaging these patterns set the individual on the

path towards the psychological integration that Jung called individuation. It was no easy

journey—Jung described it in decidedly occult terms as a “longissima via, not straight but

snakelike, a path that unites the opposites, reminding us of the guiding caduceus, a path whose

labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.”197

The good doctor knew of what he spoke. Following his famous break with Freud, Jung

spent over half a decade wrestling with spectral imaginal figures, precognitive dreams, and

“rampages of fantasy.” Jung feared that he was slipping into psychosis, but he also recognized

the lineaments of the mythopoetic imagination in his visionary upsurge, material he had become

familiar with during the deep reading into the history of religion and mythology that informed

1912’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. Overwhelmed by his own mental productions,

unable to read scientific literature, he resorted to what he referred to as an “experiment”: rather

than try to ignore the figures who seemed to be vexing him, he developed imaginal relationships

with them—principally with a young woman named Salome and an old man named Philemon,
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who became a kind of guru figure. Following these encounters, Jung would then attempt to step

away from the phenomena and interpret them from a more detached perspective, a process that

became “the matrix for the formation of the ideas that composed his original psychological

system.”198 This particular imaginal two-step—one step forward into the depths of extraordinary

experience, and then two steps back to a more aesthetic or critical position—is key to the weird

reframing of religious experience we will be exploring. To respond to his experiences without

pathologizing them, Jung also turned to artistic practice, and produced the remarkable designs

and vital visionary text that finally saw light in 2009 as The Red Book.

Like psychedelic discourse, Jung’s analytic psychology wavered ambiguously over the

question of the ultimate ground of extraordinary experience. In order to engage with figures like

Philemon and Salome, Jung accepted them initially as external entities rather than talking

phantasms. On the one hand, this was not necessarily the “religious” move of a potential

believer—as a reader of William James, Jung followed radical empiricism’s call to stick to the

phenomenological surface of even the strangest fringes of consciousness.199 However, this more

empirical angle of approach did not diminish Jung’s more theoretical hunch that these figures

expressed archetypal patterns—like the wise old man and the anima in this case—that lurked in

potentia in a collective unconscious that exceeded the boundaries of the individual psyche. By

locating the collective unconscious (somewhere) outside the individual ego (though still “within”

the subject), Jung was able to attribute an ontological density to these inner Others that would

otherwise have been quite a tough sell. By the time he was deep into his alchemical studies, in

197. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy ([New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 6.
198. Peter Homans, Jung in Context: Modernity and the Making of a Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979), 81.
199. Though Jung found James’s attention to phenomenology a great help in approaching unusual states of
consciousness from a non-pathological perspective, he also found pragmatism overly “business-like,” preferring a
more creative response rooted in Romanticism. For more on James influence on Jung, see Sonu Shamdasani, Jung
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the forties, he had embraced a more hieratic language on top of this speculative realism. “In so

far as the standpoint of analytical psychology is realistic, i.e., based on assumption that the

contents of the psyche are realities, all these figures stand for an unconscious component of the

personality which might well be endowed with a higher form of consciousness transcending that

of the ordinary human being.”200 In other words, the archetypes are not only Outside, they are

potentially Above.

Again, I am not so interested here with the “truth” of this approach as I am with its

practical entailments. Given that Jung considered the collective unconscious to be a species-wide

phenomenon reaching back into the archaic roots of civilization, its exploration counciled a

certain method. When confronting the unconscious—a process Jung acknowledges can convince

even a “hard-boiled rationalist” that they are going mad—one needs to contextualize and

elucidate its wild and threatening images. This process, even from the perspective of secular

pathology, “leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology”—in other words, into

the interpretation and orchestrated resonance of gods, stories, and tropes discovered in the

world’s store of mythology, folklore, and religious imagery. As such, Jung’s authority became a

portal for many readers and seekers to discover the cornucopia of comparative religion.

Indeed, with the extensive legend tripping he took through the symbols and artifacts of

the human imagination, Jung resembled no-one so much as his sometime Eranos colleague

Mircae Eliade, the Romanian historian of religion whose vibrant and impressionist cross-cultural

studies of mythology and religious patterns were, like Jung’s work, extremely popular and

influential in the sixties and seventies. Eliade wrote rich and definitive tomes on two topics dear

to the counterculture’s heart: yoga and shamanism. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, which was

and the Making of Modern Psychology the Dream of a Science (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); also Eugene Taylor, “William James and C.G. Jung,” Spring (1980), 157-67.
 176

partly based on Eliade’s personal experience as a yoga student, exhaustively connected Indian

philosophy with tantric practices and psycho-physiological techniques of transformation, while

the shamanism study furnishing a term—the “techniques of ecstasy”—that almost seems

designed to be appropriated by young freaks—despite Eliade’s insistence that the use of

psychoactive plants represented a “degenerate” form of shamanism.

Eliade also fundamentally broadened the meaning of “religion” by providing sympathetic

portraits of archaic, indigenous and tantric traditions as complex and sophisticated bodies of lore

and practice. Though Eliade and the comparative enterprise was later harshly castigated as an

ideological mask for colonialism, his work must also be seen as a strong and deeply influential

turn away from the cultural superiority of the Christian West and towards the possibilities of

spiritual difference. In some sense anticipating Latour’s ontological generosity, Eliade believed

in a plurality in the modes of being, and that religious material, like works of art, “exist on their

own plane of reference, in their particular universe.”201

In his foundational Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade attempts to establish the

validity of comparing traditions separated by space and time by focussing on the physical

environment all humans find themselves in: a world of time and space, of sky, sun, moon, rocks,

water. Eliade argues that these various elements possess certain core structural characteristics

that authorize scholars to elaborate a symbolic morphology that can cross continents and span

time, even resonating with what Eliade saw as a benighted secular West. The moon, for example,

is a particularly dynamic natural symbol, since it presents an image of change with a regular

pattern, a basic template that can be shown to underlie many different mythic formations whose

recurrence might at first seem synchronistic. So, for example, Eliade shows that the connection

200. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 290.

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between the moon and the snake—which he finds in various locales—can be understood in light

of their shared transformative character. While the sheer mass and variability of human cultures

can always be set against such generalizations, the notion that humans share cognitive templates

based on our shared biological experience of earthly life is proving to have considerable staying

power, even if few dare to whisper Eliade’s name.

Along with laying out a possible morphology of symbols, Eliade also introduced his

powerful notion of hierophany, a much-needed revision of the more theologically bound

category of theophany. A hierophany, as a manifestation of sacred power, is, in Eliade’s vision,

capable of being revealed—or, more accurately, concealed and revealed at the same time—

anywhere. This is a stance he insists on at the very outset of his foundational work, and it is a

point that his critics too often either ignore or misunderstand in their quest to condemn Eliade as

an essentialist. Hierophanies, as different “modalities of the sacred,” can happen anywhere, and

in anything: what is crucial is not the thing that manifests the sacred, or even, arguably, the

sacred “itself.” What is crucial is the capacity of this event to happen anywhere, a relativism that,

as Bryan Rennie rightly argues, places Eliade closer to many postmodern thinkers than is usually

supposed (as does Eliade’s insistence on the related, and rather weird, ambivalence between the

differential categories of sacred and profane). In part because Eliade wanted to bridge the gap

between the ancients and the “existential” moderns, Eliade sought to remain within the immanent

dimension of our cognitive and embodied situation, and for the most part resisted establishing a

transcendent cosmological code or principal. That said, he was interested in the way that such

possibilities—stirred up by exposure to other traditions, or by the peculiarities of

consciousness—might rupture the only apparently continuous flow of mundane secular history,

201. Mircae Eliade, “History of Religions and a New Humanism,” History of Religions, vol 1, no. 1, Summer 1961,
5.
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and therefor produce transcendental or transtemporal events capable of galvanizing a

transformed view of time and cognition alike.

Despite the towering role that both Eliade and Jung played over a generation of scholars,

readers, and seekers, their thoughts and works have lost a great deal of their shine in the halls of

humanistic academia. One of the strongest complaints that self-consciously “critical” scholars

have is that both men were practicing a sort of crypto-religion defined by intellectual hubris,

colonialist entitlement, and sneaky ontological commitments.202 Eliade did feel that modern

humans were lacking something that archaic and non-Western humans had access to, and he

hoped that his hermeneutical prowess and immense and highly networked erudition could re-

awaken sacred forces that are only “camouflaged” in the scene of modernity. Jung also wanted to

rescue modern man from anomie, and his own trial by visionary fire unquestionably left him

with a rather inflated image of himself as a sort of solar prophet resparking the pagan fire

smoldering in the souls of Europeans only then throwing off the smothering blanket of a dead

Christianity.

For the mystic sixties, of course, these sorts of aspirations—which started within a

critique of modernity and gestured towards the breakthrough of spirit without reverting to

dogmatic religion—went down like organic honey. Besides bringing some scholarly authority to

bear on the exploding interest in exotic spiritual practices, archaic religions, and altered states of

consciousness, Eliade and Jung acted as psychopomps for the Pandora’s box that had been

opened up. Jung in particular played the trustworthy curator, providing introductions to crucial

202. For a particularly nuanced deployment of these critiques, at least from the perspective of a historiography
sensitive to esotericism, see Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 277-314. For attempts to resurrect Jung for humanistic
scholarship, see Roderick Main, The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western
Culture (Psychology Press, 2004); for Eliade, see Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of
Religion (SUNY Press, 1996).
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texts like the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as the Taoist classic The Secret

of the Golden Flower, and Paul Radin’s study of North American coyote lore. With their images

and generous citations, Jung’s books on alchemy were essentially alchemical works themselves.

With the illustrations and accessible language in Man and his Symbols, whose Dell paperback

edition, as Gary Lachman notes, became a “campus craze” in 1968, Jung also helped turn

attention toward precisely the sort of visual language—magical glyphs, mandalas, and

surrealistic alchemical diagrams—that resonated with the exploding visual universe associated

with psychedelia and psychedelic art. But even more importantly, Eliade and especially Jung

gave people permission—permission to explore the possibly traumatic shadowlands of

consciousness, to search helter-skelter through the growing global archive of “archetypal”

images and esoteric lore, and to construct comparative assemblages out of their own melange of

sacred and profane.

In “Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions,” written in the seventies, Eliade for

once turned his eye on contemporary Western culture and decided to “decipher some hidden

meanings” from some current “fashions.” He chose the evolutionary mystic Teilhard de Chardin,

the structuralist anthropologist Levi-Strauss, and the influential and popular French magazine

Planete, “a curious mélange of popular science, occultism, astrology, science fiction and spiritual

techniques.” Eliade reads Teilhard and Planete as both offering a sort of literary escape from the

grim historicism of existentialism and Marxism that then dominated the university Zeitgeist.

Instead, these texts “presented a living, fascinating and mysterious cosmos in which human life

again became meaningful and promised an endless perfectability.”203

The irony is that Eliade was himself on the edge of becoming another one of these sixties

cultural fashions, and one whose influence similarly radiated from his own personal and
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intellectual attempt to flee the prison-house of history and scientific language by remaining

within the intellectual shadows of sacred possibility. Like Jung, as well as William James, Eliade

himself manifested the weird modern oscillation between sacred and secular registers by writing

books that crossed over from the university to the spiritual public, books that ultimately had as

much if not more influences on seekers than on scholars. As part of the older generations who

served as an intellectual cover for the wayward dreams of the sixties and seventies, all three men

helped carve out a lasting cultural (and countercultural) space for a “spiritual but not religious”

sensibility that could thereby fortify itself on the gathered lore of anthropology, Asian religion,

and esoterica.

Media Mysteries

The occult revival was well established by the end of the sixties, propagated and

supported through music, popular art, head shop paraphernalia, and book publishing. So what

happened in the early seventies, with the great ebbing of the messianic tide? Magic and

mysticism did not go the way of peace buttons or the New Left—if anything, the occult revival

only intensified. Indeed, just as the hedonic ways of the sixties avant-garde spread into

mainstream culture in the early seventies, so too did the occult go pop. While a number of

popular television shows in the sixties featured occult powers—examples include the gothic soap

Dark Shadows (1966-1971) and the comedies I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970) and

Bewitched(1964-1972)—the mediascape of the seventies was saturated with supernaturalism and

mysticism. Whole new genres, like heavy metal and progressive rock, tapped occult themes,

while the spiritual journeys of major rock stars brought gurus and mystic associations to FM

203. Mircae Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 10.
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radio.204 Comic books, poster art, science fiction, fashion, and even the demotic arts of

airbrushing advanced an increasingly cosmic and trippy iconography. Esoterica was becoming

big business—major publishers like Doubleday established occult imprints, while the UK’s BPC

Publishing released the remarkable Man, Myth & Magic encyclopedia. The Thoth Tarot Deck,

created by Aleister Crowley and Freida Harris, was first issued to the public in 1969; two years

later, US Games issued their enormously popular (and exclusively copyrighted) version of the

famed Rider-Waite Tarot deck. A riot of publishing also marked independent and underground

outfits already identified with the spiritual counterculture: Llewellyn issued an American witch’s

version of Gerald Gardner’s legendary Book of Shadows in 1971, while the Church of All

Worlds and other nature religions developed Goddess and Pagan discourse through a lively

network of periodicals, the flagship being Church of All Worlds’ Green Egg magazine.

During the early seventies, the explosion of occult materials—books, oracular tools,

popular narratives, ephemerides, etc.—helped shaped the deterritorialized flux of counterculture

consciousness as it engaged a darker and more paranoid era with its yen for enchantment and

altered states very much intact. At the same time, a far more intense and organized response to

the same flux was manifest in the extraordinary rise of so-called “new religious movements,” the

explosion that Tom Wolfe rightly pegged, in 1976, as the “Third Great Awakening.” Facing

what Wolfe called the decade’s “Grim Slide,” individuals sought a kind of symbolic immunity in

religious identities and novel psycho-spiritual practices. Droves of people, deeply alienated from

a sluggish System, and frequently disoriented from years of sexual, political, and psychoactive

204. For more on this story, see Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, (New
York: Tarcher, 2014).
 182

chaos, sought structure and value within a fertile and inventive field of gurus, radical self-help

therapies, ecstatic and other collective experiments.205

Many of these movements were explicitly or what one might “paranormally” secular.

From the perspective of the history of religions, however, the most notable development was the

unprecedented growth of what came to be called new religious movements, like the Unification

Church, Siddha Yoga, and a wide variety of Jesus People sects, as well as earlier groups like

ISKON (aka the Hare Krishnas) and Scientology. Usually led by charismatic teachers or gurus

and sometimes relying on the counterculture’s already established ecstatic and occult

sensibilities, these movements internalized the era’s utopian and collective expectations while

providing crystallized social and metaphysical structures in the place of existential drift or

hedonic confusion. Protean organizational forms simultaneously intensified, collectivized, and

routinized extraordinary experience; even those groups that offered an ascetic rebuttal to

countercultural hedonism, like the Moonies and the various sects of the Jesus Movement, still

affirmed the core claims of experience, ecstasy, and inner knowledge.

At the same time as they produced extraordinary experience, however, many of these

groups tightly managed them as well, providing authoritarian moral or cosmological frames of

these events. Some experiments grew exceptionally rigid, others aggressively antinomian, and

these sometimes pathological excesses catalyzed anxieties about “cults” fomented by the usual

fear-based media. Most of these concerns revolved around the apparent loss of agency among

followers, whose seemingly mindless devotions conjured fears of “brainwashing” that in turn led

to a fad for aggressive “de-programming” measures to reintegrate individuals into mainstream

205. Again, perhaps the most classic sociological account of this process remains Steven Tipton’s Getting Saved
from the Sixties, which showed how three spiritual movements—the Jesus Freak church, the San Francisco Zen
Centre, and the Erhardt Training Seminars (est)—offered a moral rudder to refugees from the sixties. See Tipton, op.
cit.
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society. Indeed, with its secular insistence on cultural “programming,” the anti-cult movement of

the seventies marks another ambiguous space where religious and secular narratives clashed and

flipped into one another.

There is an enormous literature on NRMs in the seventies, but we misunderstand the

spiritual movement of the era if we concentrate too much on organized collectives and formal

institutions. This is particularly true for the story told in this book—with only a few important

exceptions, all of our avatars of high weirdness had little contact with either new religious

movements or explicitly sectarian communities, though some were interested in certain occult

schools. Like many of the spiritual seekers of the era, they are better seen as singularities, though

singularities who define themselves through and with a broad and heterogenous range of

materials that draw from the same well as many novel religious collectives or occult groups.

Indeed, we will never understand the spiritual counterculture unless we make as much room for

such singularities as we do for collective social forces.

To clarify the spiritual atmosphere of the early seventies, we need to develop a better

sense of this “well,” and to do so we should invoke perhaps most helpful sociological concept

that emerged during the early seventies to understand the era’s peculiar religious dynamics. This

is the notion of the “cultic milieu” developed by the British sociologist Colin Campbell in 1972.

Campbell wanted to map the forest rather than the trees: not so much the “cults” (which he

meant in a nonjudgemental sense), or even the core beliefs that drew people into these groups,

but “the collectives, institutions, individuals and media of communication associated with these

beliefs.”206

206. Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in
Britain, SCM Press London, 1972, 122.
 184

In other words, Campbell wanted to characterize the vast sea of methods, media, and

memes within which a wide variety of actors—including cult leaders and followers, but also all

manner of individuals—swam. Campbell derived his concept in part from Ernst Troeltsch’s

notion of mystic religion, which was set against Troeltsch’s famous sociological distinction

between churches, which are conservative establishments, and more innovative (and divisive)

sects. Neither of these institutional forms, however, encompass what Troeltsch describes as the

“radical religious individualism” associated with mysticism and Protestant Dissent. “This type

had no desire for an organized fellowship; all it cared for was freedom for interchange of ideas, a

pure fellowship of thought, which indeed only became possible after the invention of

printing.”207 As we’ll see, Troeltsch’s attention to the constitutive role of media in the emergence

of the modern Christian “mystic” is key, but what is important here is the emphasis on his or her

singularity and intellectual freedom. “The isolated individual, and psychological abstraction and

analysis became everything.”208

Of course, these individuals are not perfectly isolated, but located within loose networks

of conversations, cultural artifacts, texts, public lectures, and all manner of institutions. This, for

Campbell, is the cultic milieu, a concept that covers both the recombinant diversity of

esotericism, and the more immediate informality of countercultural activity in the sixties and

seventies. Indeed, it is Campbell’s amorphous milieu, rather than specific institutions, lineages,

or even books, that form the context of high weirdness in the seventies. Elements of the milieu

will be dealt with in the individual sections in part two of this book, and, given the creative

freethinking that characterizes all our avatars, particular attention will be played to the texts,

media, and concepts drawn from the ambient cultural stew. In this light, though, it is perhaps

207. Troeltsch, Ernst, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. (New York: Harper, 1960), 377.
208. Ibid.
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helpful to replace Campbell’s somewhat awkward phrase with Christopher Partridge’s more

resilient notion of occulture. A term first used by Genesis P. Orridge, a potent carrier of high

weirdness memes and practices, occulture is defined by Partridge as “the contemporary

alternative religious milieu in the West,” a zone “includes often hidden, rejected and oppositional

beliefs and practices associated with esotericism, theosophy, mysticism, New Age, Paganism,

and a range of other subcultural beliefs and practices.”209

I prefer this intentionally capacious notion of occulture to the “cultic milieu” for a

number of reasons, not least of which is its diminishment—but not removal—of the controversial

term “cult.” The spiritual media, practices, ideas, and collective forms that constitute the milieu

are all satisfyingly classed as culture; indeed, they are perhaps best scene as a kind of marginal or

recondite dimension to a popular culture that itself increasingly absorbs this esoterica until

occulture finds itself riding its contemporary paradox of being both “alternative” and pervasive.

Finally, “occulture” has a wider connotation than the cultic milieu, which can be more narrowly

seen as the environment out of which more formalized New Age or other alternative sects and

practice communities crystalize. Occulture, on the other hand, overlaps with the more

consistently informal and piece-meal nature of popular culture in general, and gives far more

room for a variety of relationships—belief, fascination, amusement, entertainment—that people

develop with occult material.

209. Christopher H. Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular
Culture, and Occulture (London; New York: T & T Clark International, 2004), 67-68.
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Seventies Occulture

At once heterodox and heterogenous, early seventies occulture is a particularly

challenging spiritual domain to parse. On the one hand, religious currents within the sixties

counterculture are both fragmenting and reconstellating, while the “New Age”—which

Hanegraaff defines as the cultic milieu becoming “conscious of itself as constituting a more or

less unified ‘movement’”—has yet to fully emerge.210 (Hanegraaff dates its emergence to 1975;

others place it in the eighties.) As such, the early seventies must be seen, esoterically, as a rich

and turbulent time when traditions, texts, practices, and identities were all in flux. When the

sociologist Marcello Truzzi tried to get a handle on this occult upsurge in a 1972 essay, he

defined five distinct areas: astrology, parapsychology, witchcraft and Satanism, Eastern religion,

and a “waste-basket” that contained things like the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, Nazi lore, and the

prophecies of Nostradamus211. These are in some ways unhelpful categories, but their difficulties

in a sense reflect the challenge of categorizing a moving mutant target, and the importance of all

of these threads—with the exception of astrology—to the high weirdness ahead makes them

worth briefly discussing.

The notion that “Eastern religion” is part of the modern occult, for example, raises a

number of problems, some of which have, admittedly, been overstated. On the one hand, in the

guise of neo-Vedanta and a variety of Buddhisms, “Eastern religion” had established itself in the

United States in distinctly religious forms long before the early seventies. Institutions were

formed, canons of “classics” were presented, and Asian spiritual leaders developed devotional

210. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 17.

211. Truzzi, “Definition and Dimensions of the Occult,” op. cit.
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followings; these processes would in turn explode during the seventies efflorescence of New

Religious Movements.

At the same time, Western forms of Asian religion and mysticism often drew from

western materials like Transcendentalism and liberal Protestantism which are only marginally

engaged with the occult proper. Making this division also accords, to some degree, with those

scholars of religion who insist that esotericism is an implicitly Western current, rooted in

historical dynamics that go back to Antiquity.212

At the same time, other scholars argue that the Western embrace of Hindu, Buddhist, and

Taoist practices and concepts are best seen, not as transplants, but as signs of a Western

Romantic idealism that has been projecting its dreams—including esoteric ones—eastward since

well before the nineteenth century.213 And indeed, many dimensions of “Easternization” during

the countercultural period represent less the importation of Asian traditions than the projection of

Western categories, although the appropriateness of classing these mirror tricks with “the occult”

remains unclear. On the one hand, many freethinking countercultural readers were influenced

philosophically by Asian texts, by the Upanishads, Zen and the Taoist texts of Lao Tzu and

Zhuangzi especially. On the other, many spiritual libertarians appropriated Eastern practices with

the intent of developing esoteric powers or communing with oracles. Here the supreme example,

which runs throughout our otherwise rather western story of high weirdness, is the widespread

use of the I Ching.

212. See Wouter Hanegraaff’s discussion of definitions in Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the
Perplexed, 1- 17. For an extensive discussion of the “Easternization” thesis, see Partridge, Re-Enchantment of the
West, Volume 1, 87-118. Though arguing from a perspective less grounded in the historical current of Western
esotericism, Partridge also agrees with Hanegraaff that the modern occult revival should not be seen as an instance
of “Easternization.”
213. Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume 1, 89.
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Another, more interesting problem lies with the category of parapsychology, a problem

that in an oblique way points to ontological and discursive ambivalence that, I believe, drives

much of the complexity of the zone we are investigating. While the occult has long attempted to

appropriate the concepts and ambiguities of modern science for its own ends, the protocols of

knowledge production among occultists—diviners say, or astral pathworkers—are generally

divergent from those public and more narrowly empirical procedures of data collection,

theoretical production, and dissemination that constitute institutional sciences in the twentieth

century. Of course, the earliest proponents of “psychical research” considered their work

scientific, or at least psychological, and establishing and maintaining that credibility was vital to

many subsequent researchers, particularly the school established by Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke

University in the twenties. After weathering decades of critique and skepticism, the field of

parapsychological research could, by the postwar period, almost be defined by the attempt to

adopt (or simulate, skeptics would say) precisely those procedures, discourses, and forms of

agreement that would inoculate it from attack.

In the seventies, the widening discourse of altered states, Asian meditation, and other

extraordinary psychospiritual possibilities meant that research parapsychology itself expanded

beyond the intentionally dry and boring boundaries set by Rhine and company. At the same time,

an explosion of the sort of popular literature that Truzzi considers plunged even deeper into the

fantastical, and provided plenty of support for the skeptical position that parapsychology is

“really” just the occult in pseudo-scientific disguise. However, this blurring of boundaries also

invites us to recognize that, in the seventies at least, the umbrella of the “occult” stretched

beyond the boundaries of the numinous to encompass the zone we have previously identified as

weird naturalism—a zone of materialist indeterminacy, already suggested in the occult’s

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historical roots in the “secrets of nature,” whose recourse to experimental protocols and bio-

physical theories complicates a strictly mystical or supernatural identification of the field.214

This dimension of the seventies occult alerts us of a very important point: while

commentators like Roszak emphasize the anti-technocratic “irrationalism” of the new mysticism,

parapsychology also needs to be seen as an ontologically open or permissive mode of

empiricism, a complex meshwork of psychological practices, experimental protocols,

anthropological frameworks, and weird—or paranormal—phenomena, all knitted together, more

or less, through various alternative or “bastard” modes of logic, physics, biology, and modes of

causality. While, as Hanegraaff and Hammer have shown, the modern occult is in some sense

constituted by its quasi-parasitic relationship to the discourse and practice of science, the

parapsychology of the seventies is far more deeply woven into the apparatus and protocols of

science, particularly through its imbrication with the disciplinary space of experimental

psychology and its concern with ASCs.

If the category of parapsychology shows us that the boundaries of the seventies occult

extends beyond sensationalist supernaturalism towards a weird materialism, so does Truzzi’s

category of “witchcraft and Satanism” show an almost reverse boundary dissolution in the

direction of pure fiction. Indeed, the peculiar ambiguity of high weirdness partly represents the

widespread commingling of esoteric materials with fabulous narratives drawn from weird

fantasy, comparative mythology, poetry, and science fiction. This proximity produces the

second-order problem of where to draw the line between actual occult forces and freely invented

214. For my money, the single best account of the socio-cultural complexities of parapsychology and the paranorml
lies in George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Corp., 2001). For an account
of the paranormal as a contemporary reformulation of the religious discourse and confrontation with “the sacred,”
see Kripal, Jeffrey John, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press,
2010).
 190

fictions, but it more intriguingly suggests that a powerful imaginal charge lies in the

“postmodern” suspension of that very difference.

The modern revival of witchcraft can be said to have begun with Gerald Gardner’s

publication, in 1954, of Witchcraft Today, in which he related his experiences of the New Forest

Coven and his initiation into the ancient witch cult by a certain “Old Dorothy.” Though scholars

now consider much of this account a fabrication, Gardner’s presentation and enthusiastic

reception depended strongly on the second-order “myth” that his presentation reflected an

authentic and actual historical tradition. When witchcraft entered the United States in force in the

1960s, home-grown groups began to pop up alongside the proliferating lineages of British

Wicca. By the seventies, these mutant witchcrafts would come to be classed within a broader

“Pagan” movement—a term that was first used, in this modern context, by an early architect of

high weirdness and invented religion, the Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley.215 Among

these Pagans were groups who did not ground their legitimacy in tradition and transmission, but

explicitly and unabashedly appropriated some of their religious lore from fiction and mythology,

and especially from the fantasy and science fiction novels whose consumption and attendant

fandoms have long overlapped with occult and witchcraft practitioners. The Church of All

Worlds, an early Goddess religion, based some of their rituals and cosmology on Robert

Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, while, in San Francisco, the New Reformed Orthodox

Order of the Golden Dawn freely acknowledged the role of fictional bricolage and the creative

imagination—however divinely inspired—in the composition of liturgies whose authenticity was

rooted in their power to effect rather than their historical origins.

215. See Adler, Margot., Drawing down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in
America Today (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 293-94.
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Similarly, contemporary Satanists, especially the media-savvy Church of Satan leader

Anton LaVey, quite consciously played with the “fictionality” of the occult imaginary. LaVey

naturalized the ontology of Satanic ceremonies by describing them as forms of “psycho-drama”

whose purely performative elements nonetheless possessed to power to effect psychological

transformation. Helping to define one of the pre-eminent currents of occulturally appropriated

fictions, LaVey also included, in his popular 1972 manual The Satanic Rituals, ceremonies that

drew and adapted from the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft.216 LaVey was not the only occultist to

fold Lovecraft’s fictions into “actual” occult discourse and practice—Kenneth Grant had claimed

some rather fanciful connections between Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley in 1972’s The Magical

Revival. Unlike LaVey, who was always smiling out of the corner of his mouth, Grant’s degree

of irony or meta-fictional play was more usually opaque. As we will see, Robert Anton Wilson

also drew heavily from Lovecraft (and Crowley) in his Illuminatus! trilogy, wherein the

infectious potency of the weird fiction writer’s work also serves as a “second order” reflection on

one of the novel’s themes, which is the very impossibility of distinguishing fiction and actuality,

particularly in those zones of culture and consciousness associated with occultism and

conspiracy theory.

Fabulations, and those more communal fictions we call “modern folklore,” also play a

role in Truzzi’s final category, the open-ended “waste basket” overflowing with weird things like

the Loch Ness Monster, Nostradamus, Nazi sorcery, and UFOs. Compared with Truzzi’s other

categories, the waste basket most clearly reflects the informal, marginal, and heterogenous

character of occulture. That said, it too emerges from specific historical precedents.

216. These were principally the work of LaVey’s disciple Michael Aquino. See my “Calling Cthulhu,” in Erik
Davis, Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esotericism (Portland, OR: Yeti, 2010), 114-135.
 192

The immediate point of origin for this weird and paranormal lore vis-a-vis the

counterculture is the work of the Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, who ran

Planete magazine and wrote Les Matins du Magiciens, which appeared in the U.S. in 1964 as

The Morning of the Magicians. The book, which Eliade discussed in an essay described above,

included a rich smorgasbord of speculations and lore about pyramid power, alchemy, Gurdjieff,

hollow earth theories, super-consciousness, Nazi occultism, Easter Island, and the Nazca lines,

whose important implications of ancient astronauts Erich von Daniken would later, in 1968’s

best-selling Chariots of the Gods?, take all the way to the bank.

With the spirit of surrealism very much in mind, Pauwels and Bergiers dubbed their

approach “fantastic realism,” which they claimed represented not an escape into exotica or

imagination but an attempt to understand the fantastic as an aspect of “natural law.” More

specifically, fantastic realism depended on experience: it was “an effect produced by contact

with reality—reality perceived directly and not through a filter of habit, prejudice,

conformism.”217 This strategy—which of course proferred the MacGuffin of “reality perceived

directly”— allowed The Morning of the Magicians to combine a rather sensationalist obsession

with marginal or repressed cultural histories, conspiracies, and other esoteric enigmas with a

more spiritual or transpersonal concern with “ultra-consciousness and the ‘awakened state.’”218

However, though The Morning of the Magicians is an important precursor, it seems more

fitting to lay the waste basket of fantastic realism—or weird naturalism—at the feet of one of the

heroes of Pauwels and Bergier’s book: the American writer and “collector of coincidences”

Charles Fort, who died in 1932 in the Bronx.219 An independent researcher, polymath, and

217. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), ix.
218. Ibid, ix.
219. For a marvelous discussion of Fort in light of the sacred character of the paranormal, see Kripal, Authors of the
Impossible, 96.
 193

satirist, Fort compiled tens of thousands of examples of anomalies, oddities, and other wild facts,

drawn from scientific reports, newspapers, and other testimonies. He called this data “damned”

because it contradicted or escaped the explanatory regimes of the sciences of his time, and was,

for this reason, largely ignored. While the substance of many of Fort’s speculative models read

like Radium Age science fictions, his Mencken-like satire of arrogant scientistic cant and his

overwhelming “procession” of enigmas helped create a crack in the dominant materialism

spilling out of the nineteenth century. Fort showed that science, like all “systems,” strives to

maintain and extend itself in part by managing its boundaries, and this involves excluding

material that cannot be assimilated into what Thomas Kuhn would later characterize as its

paradigms. “Science is not objective” explain the Forteans Pauwels and Bergier (who was a

chemical engineer). “Like civilization, it is a conspiracy.”220

By tracking and compiling counter-normative evidence—most of Fort’s first book is

devoted to peculiar things falling from the sky—Fort tried to chase this conspiratorial

mechanism out into the open, where its power bid for clarity and control could be set against

what Fort believed was the fundamentally indeterminate character of reality. Though Fort’s

selection was qualitative, he also proceeded quantitatively, as it was the sheer mass of similar

reports, often from farflung places, that suggested to him that more than fancy or delusion was

involved. Like a statistician, and like a diviner, he searched for patterns that transcended mere

coincidence, even if those patterns themselves could not be pinned down.

Fort’s metaphysic is worth touching on briefly here, as it undergirds high weirdness.

Sounding like a propounder of Buddhism’s theory of dependent co-arising, Fort argued that, at

root, the objects, processes, and beings in reality are essentially interdependent, only different

expressions of “an all-inclusive cheese.” Nonetheless, these appearances are continually striving

220. Pauwels and Berger, 92.

 194

to achieve an independent and full existence capable of transcending our uncomfortable quasi-

reality, which Fort characterized as an “intermediate” zone between Order and Disorder, the

Universal and the Local, the Absolute and the Relative. Appearances pursued their quixotic quest

for individuation by drawing boundaries around themselves, and excluding or “damning”

elements of the inevitable Outside that remains.

This metaphysic suggested a particular (and peculiar) Fortean approach to knowledge, an

ethics of the marginal well limned by Jeffrey Kripal. “If Truth lies outside every system, if every

system is only an approximation or partial actualization of this Truth, then a better approach to

the Truth can only be had by going outside the present system, that is, by transgressing the

proper order of things.”221 For Fort this transgression translated into a sociological,

philosophical, and ultimately quotidian practice, one that, in contrast to mystical wool-gathering,

directly confronted ordinary life and the bizarre things that keep puncturing that ordinariness.

Moreover, because the world of appearances is only quasi-real, it possesses an “essential

fictitiousness,” an element of fabulation that had significant consequences for Fort and his

closest readers. Linking together the impossible data in his archive of damned facts, Fort wove

imaginative patterns and scenarios that would later be developed by science fiction writers. More

importantly, however, he drew attention to the essential ambivalence earlier identified as the

ontological pivot of weirdness, one that eludes conventional naturalism and religious mysticism

alike, just as it eludes truth and fiction. One of Fort’s many marvelous quips points to this

indetermination, and grounds it in the pragmatic experience of an irredeemably indeterminate

221. Kripal, Authors, 106.

 195

life. “I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with

either.”222

Fort’s wacky humor, his transgressive suspicion of both religion and science, and his

taste for cosmic “truth-fictions” endeared him to the counterculture. In 1973, the British fringe

researcher (and science fiction fan) Bob Rickard began publishing The News, a “miscellany of

Fortean curiosities” that continues to this day as Fortean Times, the best print magazine source

for “the world’s weirdest news stories” (and one of the most entertaining magazines of the

period). While modern Forteans are, by and large, more naturalistic and skeptical than Fort

himself, they nonetheless continue to speak for the potent role of anomaly in the constitution of

reality. Leaving issues of rationality and transgression aside, one might instead speak of the

temperamental difference between, on the one hand, those who view anomalies as something to

be avoided if possible and explained if necessary, and, on the other, those who view anomalies as

a kind of raison d’etre of thought, research, and even experiential practices. Fort, and all avatars

of high weirdness, speak for the latter.

Indeed, when the sociologist Truzzi attempted to tie together his somewhat scattershot

account of seventies occultism, he characterized the objects of occult knowledge and experience

as “things anomalous to our generally accepted cultural-storehouse of ‘truths’.” As such, the

ambiguous site of anomaly became an almost structural location capable of characterizing the

highly heterogenous contents of occulture. In Truzzi’s decidedly sociological account, anomalies

derive their frisson and their aura of inexplicable mystery, not from any essential characteristics

of their own, but precisely and solely from their degree of divergence from more conventional

222. Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort (New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), 864.
 196

and “establishment” social systems and cultural narratives.223 In other words, the seventies occult

is best defined by something like Malinowski’s “co-efficient of weirdness,” a measure that must

always in turn be measured against some sort of norm. This sort of differential analysis also

accords with some of the best modern historians of the occult.

The pioneering British writer James Webb, for example, defined occult lore as “rejected

knowledge” in his watershed 1974 book The Occult Underground, which traced sixties-style

countercultural esotericism—in which occult material interacted with avant-garde politics and

art—back to the nineteenth century. More recently, Wouter Hanegraaff, who persuasively

identifies esotericism as a “third stream” of Western culture that shadows and to some degree

mediates the two more visible streams of faith and reason, has provided an archaeology of what

he also calls the “waste-basket.” In Hanegraaff’s view, the construction of the esoteric and the

occult have largely resulted from strategies of scholarly exclusion that emerged in the West

following the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient hermetic texts.224

All of these definitions of the occult depend on a purely “negative” sociological or

discursive characterization, one that marks the esoteric as a form of knowledge and practice that

absolutely depends on conventional discourses for their very definition. On the one hand, we

have here an admirable example of the interdependence of our intermediated world. At the same

time, and following Fort, I would like to make a slightly more ontological suggestion: anomaly is

a necessary zone of the real, or rather, of our various constitutions of the real. Whatever

frameworks of explanation are brought to bear on experience—cultural narratives, common

sense, statistical analysis—we seem to inevitably encounter data, events, claims, and apparent

evidence that resist, undermine, and escape those frameworks, if only temporarily.

223. Truzzi, 245-6.

224. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy.
 197

Anomalies are avatars of the “Outside” that is produced through any act of demarcation,

the potential rupture or crack in any boundary that organizes the real, from scientific accounts to

the structured dance of our quotidian perceptual habits. Here we might think of Derrida’s

insistence that a vein of differance at once parallels and undermines all systems of clarified

distinctions, or Lacan’s insistence that any symbolization of the Real leaves a remainder, or

shard—an unassimilable, traumatic kernel that resists symbolization. One name for this

resistance, I would suggest, is anomaly, and the uncanniness that radiates from the damned data

of psychedelic occulture in part reflects the ontological ambivalence introduced by the directly

indirect “pointing out” of these indeterminate cracks in the real (or the accounts of the real). As

such, we should resist the idea, pervasive in conspiracy culture and the New Age alike, that

individual anomalies offer privileged access or “proof” about an essential or substantial order of

the real that can be definitively established. Instead, and like Fort, I suggest that we suspend the

aspirations of those systems of knowledge that promise to expunge or solve paradoxes and

anomalies, and instead carve out an almost phantasmic opening for Fort’s procession of the

damned—the “naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the

insincere, the profound and the puerile.” In other words: the weird.
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CHAPTER THREE. LA CHORRERA:

THE SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE OF THE BROTHERS MCKENNA

On February 5, 1971, when Apollo 14 finally made it to the moon, its lunar module

landed with something of a cultural thud, evincing little of the dazzle sparked by Neil

Armstrong’s giant leap less than two years before. Both cosmic highs were delivered by

America’s aero-space industry, of course, and the grim inertia of the Vietnam war may have

throttled down public exultation in America’s military-industrial prowess on all fronts. The

technological audacity of the Apollo program, with its largely symbolic payload, was also

sinking into the trivialization that Guy Debord had identified the decade earlier as the underside

of the spectacle, whose repeated gestures of mediated novelty become, through that very

repetition, a TV rerun devoid of surprise. When commander Alan Shepherd strapped a six iron to

a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became,

in a sense, the typical tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as

Debord writes, is “nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”225

225. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Black and Red,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
 199

That said, the cosmic is not so easily put down, especially, perhaps, in the early seventies.

During the voyage home, Shepherd’s fellow astronaut Edgar Mitchell, drifting into a weightless

contemplation of the onrushing earth, performed unofficial ESP experiments with planetside

comrades-in-PSI. He also experienced an ecstasy of “universal connectedness,” seeing, with an

intuitive clarity deeper than rational calculation, that his body and the spacecraft were alike

composed of molecules forged in the maw of stars, that the current incarnation of these

molecules as a manned space vehicle was part of an unfolding and intelligent cosmic process,

and that the universe was “in some way conscious.”226 Months later, after diving into the sort of

esoteric literature served up so readily by the publishing houses of the day, Mitchell came to

identify his epiphany as savikalpa samadhi, a mode of transcendental consciousness, widely

described in Vedantic literature, that preserves a degree of duality between knower and known

within the otherwise nondual condition of absolute consciousness. However, before Mitchell

employed the slippery tools of religious comparison to identify and ground his singular flash in a

particular cultural map of stages and states, he was floating, and feeling, without a net.

Mitchell’s extraterrestrial peak is a fit standard to fly over the far more obscure journey

that is the subject of this chapter, a journey that began a day after the lunar landing when a

handful of young Americans left the gritty Columbian river town of Puerto Leguizamo for the

remote jungle village La Chorrera. They were embarking on a mission that could be described at

once as hippie escapism, an ethnobotanical expedition, and an errant metaphysical derive. The

instigators of the voyage were Terence McKenna and his younger brother Dennis, both of whom

who would eventually leave significant marks on psychedelic culture, both above and

underground—Terence as a popular raconteur, celebrated for his entertaining speculations and

226. Mitchell, Edgar D, and Dwight Arnan Williams, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey
through the Material and Mystical Worlds (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996), 16.
 200

apocalyptic obsessions alike, and Dennis as an ethnobotanist and neuropharmacologist who

studied ayahuasca and other Amazonian psychoactive preparations. In 1971, however, the

McKennas were just a couple of intellectually precocious and highly imaginative young

psychonauts mutually obsessed with botany, alchemy, science fiction, Marshall McLuhan, and

mind-bending drugs (which, it is important to emphasize up top, very much included the

associative engine that is cannabis). The experience they were about to stage in the jungle—an

epic Sci-Fi psychedelic operation that came to be known as “the Experiment at La Chorrera”—

would change the direction of their lives, inspire the domestication of Psilocybe cubensis

mushrooms in America and, through, Terence’s widely distributed psychedelic raps and rants,

kickstart the millennial return of the Mayan calendar that became the 2012 phenomenon.

We have three published accounts of the McKennas’s Columbian adventure. In 1975, the

brothers put out The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, a formidable

and arcane monument of speculative weirdness that includes two chapters on the concepts,

protocols, and psychological after-shocks of the Experiment. In stark contrast to the dry and

abstract tone of that text, Terence McKenna stretched out in his 1993 book True Hallucinations,

an evocative and playful narrative that indulges in descriptive exuberance and funny lines.

Dennis’ solo contribution was the memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life

with Terence McKenna, which he self-published, not coincidentally, in 2012. That was the year

that Terence, who died in 2000, had selected as the most likely date for the apocalyptic

culmination of the historical process whose secret structure, which he came to call the

Timewave, was his central revelatory “take-away” from La Chorrera. All three texts in essence

mediate one another—Dennis and Terence both cite Dennis’ 1971 diaries, Dennis quotes (and

for the most part agrees with) his older brother’s account, and the theories in their joint text are
 201

illuminated by the back story provided in the later memoirs. This meshwork is appropriate, for,

as we will see, the Experiment was hardly a linear operation of strictly causal operators; instead,

it mobilized and unleashed the sorts of inter-mediating network of resonances that pass back and

forth between times, concepts, practices, and artifacts.

However, instead of plunging into the ontological maw of their preternatural encounters,

I would like to begin with a more modest map of this network, with its building blocks and

circuits of reference and feedback. I am interested, first of all, in the diagram of texts, cultural

mores, and empirical practices that led them to the jungle in the first place, and that subsequently

enabled them to build the protocols for the experimental invocation of what they called the

Other. As one of the primal scenes of what Wouter Hanegraaff calls “entheogenic esotericism,”

this “Experiment,” with its appropriation of occult, electronic, pharmacological, and fictional

discourses and practices, also stands as a supreme example of weird naturalism, in which the

orientation towards the fantastic holds fast to a materialism at once biological and alchemical.

Freaky

Early in True Hallucinations, before the crew head off to Columbia, Terence makes a

telling comment to Vanessa, one of his companions on the voyage. “The political revolution has

become too murky a thing to put one’s hope in. So far, the most interesting unlikelihood in our

lives is DMT, right?”227 We will turn to the peculiar phenomenology of dimethyl-tryptamine in a

moment; here, it is important to foreground the youthful radicalism that fed Terence’s project.

227. McKenna, Terence K, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the
Devil’s Paradise (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 21.
 202

Unlike most of the classic sixties psychedelic narratives, including texts by the likes of

Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Tom Wolfe, the McKennas were baby boomers

who came of age in the bloom of the counterculture. Though most of their reflections were

written far after the fact, their accounts provide a remarkable insight into that peculiar moment

when, as discussed in an earlier chapter, esoteric and psychoactive experience were woven into

radically emancipatory politics that came to express itself ontologically.

Terence arrived at Cal in the fall of 1965 during the Free Speech Movement, and as an

Ayn Rand fan, he soon found himself “fighting the police at the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-

shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian Fuckers and the Acid Anarchists.” Later he

participated in the Human Be-In and the “rolling orgies of the Summer of Love in the Haight.”228

These cultural imprints force us to reconsider, once again, the overplayed distinction between the

“Heads”—which Terence most certainly was—and the “Fists.” As mentioned, groups from the

Yippies to the Weather Underground combined activism and LSD, birthing a creature that Jerry

Rubin called “Marxist acidheads.” But though highly scornful of the Establishment, Terence was

not so much a man of the collectivist left as an anti-authoritarian “ontological anarchist” for

whom technology, esotericism, and psychedelics were all crucial vectors aiming toward “the

most interesting unlikelihood”: a revolution in reality itself.

In that sense, Terence is less of a head or a fist than a freak, a self-description adopted by

many outliers in the era and one that, unlike hippie or radical, embodies a weird ambiguity at

once political, cultural, and hedonistic. In True Hallucinations, Terence refers to his group of

friends more frequently as “freaks” than as anything else, which makes the term worth

unpacking here.229 The groundbreaking 1966 album Freak Out!, by the Mothers of Invention, is

228. Ibid, 185-86.

229. “Heads” and “hippies” get only one instance each.
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the clearest point of origin for the term’s leap from the deviant spectacles of the circus sideshow

to the emerging underground. The LP included an uncharacteristic and rather unfreaky exegesis

by group leader Frank Zappa: “On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an

individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in

order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure

as a whole.”230

In Zappa’s LA, freaking out was also associated with a specific ecstatic practice: a wild

style of free-form dancing devised by the charismatic beatnik Vito Paulekas, who would bring

his crew of young, sexy, and outrageously costumed dancers to clubs along the Sunset Strip. In

1967, some sociologists working on the Haight also drew some impressionistic distinctions

between heads, who used hallucinogens or possibly meditation “as a means of self-realization or

self-fulfillment,” and freaks, who were more interested in drug kicks as such, and whose

excesses could lead toward undesirable bouts of “freaking out.”231

A year later, Tom Wolfe gave a different spin, writing that freak referred to the

outlandishly stylish or the obsessive, as in “a Tarot freak.”232 The profane irreverence of

underground comix, including Zap and Gilbert Shelton’s less pornographic Fabulous Furry

Freak Brothers, helped solidify the sensibility, which rejected straight reality but equally dodged

the belief systems associated with new religious movements. By the early 70s, freak had a strong

connection with various psychedelic, urban underground, and progressive rock scenes, and was

even claimed, with a doubled act of reappropriation, by the anti-drug “Jesus freaks.”

230. The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! (Verve, V6-5005-2, 1966). The term did not arise with Zappa but with
Vito Paulekas.
231. Fred Davis with Laura Munoz, “Heads and freaks: patterns and meanings of drug use among hippies", in Lee
Rainwater, Deviance and Liberty: Social Problems and Public Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1974), pp.
88–95.
232. Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid, 11.
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I offer this excavation of a slippery term to point towards a different way of conceiving

the relationship between psychedelics, consciousness, materialism, and politics, one that places

less stress on the stereotypically hippie ideals of peace and love—and their corresponding

spiritual rhetoric of unity and harmony—and more on the radical and sometimes mocking

subversion of reality itself, a subversion I will suggest is perhaps better seen as “occult” than

“spiritual.”

In his 1972 book Freak Culture, the sociologist Daniel Foss deploys the term freak as an

“ideal type” to cover both the early hippie scene and the wilder New Left agitators like the

Yippies, both subcultures united in their desire to effect the “complete discontinuity with the

conventional reality.”233 One sign of this, according to Foss, was “an assertion of self-conscious

weirdness directed at the disorientation and destruction of [the mainstream] culture,” an assertion

expressed not only through scandalous modes of dress and comportment, but also though “the

annihilation of meanings, the scrambling of communication, and the repudiation of culturally

accepted principles of causality.”234 Hedonic excess, ridiculous satire, and general weirdness

effect these goals in a secular or naturalistic vein. But so can many of the ideas and practices

associated at the time with witchcraft, occultism, and shamanism, all of which repudiated

“accepted principles of causality” not by rejecting causality altogether but by offering archetypal

and esoteric alternatives to the idea of individual agency, Aristotelian logic, and science’s

disenchanted billiard-ball universe.

The idea that the romantic woolyness and hardened street politics of the sixties youth

culture share an overlapping cognitive orientation—and that this shared rejection of the

technocratic System deserves the name “counterculture”—we owe to Theodore Roszak’s justly

233. Daniel A. Foss, Freak Culture; Life-Style and Politics (New York: Dutton, 1972), 132.
234. Ibid, 154.
 205

famous book. Making this link, Roszak concluded that the counterculture was therefore opposed

to reason and technology, and devoted to the “subversion of the scientific world view.”235

Indeed, this opposition is retained in the stereotypical image of the hippie, with his organic food,

pre-modernist identifications, and hazy, “mystical” discourse. Today, due to pioneering work by

historian Fred Turner and many others, we have come to recognize the opposite point: that

important countercultural actors and events were deeply marked by technological values and

proved highly influential on a wide range of emerging technological “systems” and media

practices that come down to us today.236 This hybrid consciousness was also evident in the case

of Terence McKenna, whose ontological radicalism and interest in extreme states of esoteric

consciousness was fused with an abiding interest in natural science, physics, and the visionary

potential of a technological future. Even in their freakiest flights from consensus reality, the

brothers McKenna kept a “naturalistic” eye on the ball, an attention to method and detail that

paradoxically contributed to the intensity of the high weirdness they would face—and

subsequently foment.

Terence fell in love with geology and natural history as a kid growing up in western

Colorado. He collected and machine-polished rock specimens, amassed beetles and butterflies

through the mail, and sometimes let Dennis tag along when he visited the once submerged

badlands outside of town to hunt for fossilized shark’s teeth. Cosmology and natural history

impregnated the imaginations of both brothers with vast evolutionary forces while also

encouraging them to sharpen the sensory capacities required to register the sort of fine details

235. Roszak, 50.

236. Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Also see John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said--: How
the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005); David Kaiser, How
the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011) and
many of the discussions in Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, eds. The Whole
Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press: 2013).
 206

that help identify biological and geological objects. The brothers were also stone-cold S-F fans.

Their bookish father had been a long-standing fan of the pulps, and regularly brought home

copies of Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the more paranormal Fate. The boys read

widely among the mid-century greats who followed the Golden Age of the genre, but Dennis

singles out Arthur C. Clarke, and his two classic novels Childhoods End and The City in the

Stars—of which more in a moment—as being particularly important. At the same time, Terence

(and subsequently his brother) was also drawn to the nightside of reason, and gobbled up the

weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and the even weirder alchemical texts of Jung, which he started

reading while still in high school.

When Terence arrived at Berkeley in his 1965, his roving and arcane intellectual

sensibility and predilection for minting “funny ideas” was already well established, along with an

intense anti-authoritarianism nursed by Ayn Rand and J.D. Sallinger. Terence lucked out at Cal,

where he was invited to join an experimental college run within the university by the political

philosopher and education reformer Joseph Tussman. The two-year program gave no grades, met

in a Tudor Revival house on the edge of the campus, and focused on discussion- and writing-

heavy seminars that encouraged big-picture independent thinking outside of the usual

disciplinary boundaries.237 As much a “great problems” program as a “great books” program, the

college focused on the political tensions in various “cultures in crisis” throughout western

history. But even as the Berkeley campus itself became a culture of crisis, Tussman—whom

Dennis casts as an “intellectual father” to Terence—was no radical, and held that the freedom

necessary for democracy required the moral development of the intellect. Plato was a big part of

the curriculum, a figure that influenced McKenna deeply even as the young man found his own

237. For more on the college, see Trow, Katherine., Habits of Mind: The Experimental College Program at Berkeley
(Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley, 1998).
 207

way into the broiling currents in contemporary thought, discovering many writers who would

fundamentally shape his later ideas, including Mircae Eliade, Husserl, and Marshall McLuhan.238

Terence gained a modest campus following as well, as people began to gather at his flat—

already filling up with his first library of esoterica, Western magic, and Eastern mysticism—just

to hear his freaky pot-fueled raps. As Dennis explained, “Unlike most people, who get high and

grow quiet, cannabis…only made him more articulate, more talkative, and more able to weave

his enrapturing narratives.”239

Though seemingly too unstructured to be of much larger significance, this sort of stoned

conversational gathering, with its labile conversational modes, is absolutely central to the

spiritual and cognitive life of the counterculture. Though the frequent triviality of pothead

“insights” is itself a constitutive feature of cannabis lore, insights are nonetheless made and

reported. Moreover, there are important characteristics of cannabis thinking that would play out

throughout Terence’s thinking life, which was frequently spent stoned. One of the principle

characteristics of “cannabis consciousness” is the rich growth of associational links between

different domains of knowledge and perception. In his 1980 ethnology of American pot users,

William Novak cites one Terence-like subject. “When I'm high, the ideas just keep on coming.

Sometimes I wonder whether marijuana actually creates these ideas—or whether, perhaps, it

functions more like a magnet, drawing together the various iron filings of thought from different

parts of my mind (and perhaps elsewhere) and bringing them together at the same time and

place.”240

238. Though Dennis implies that Terence discovered these authors directly through the Tussman program, a
syllabus included in Trow, op cit, suggests that these more au courant thinkers were supplementary to the main
curriculum.
239. McKenna, Brotherhood, 147.
240. William Novak, High Culture: Marijuana in the Lives of Americans (New York: Knopf , 1980).
http://www.psychedelic-library.org/high_culture8.htm (Chapter 8, accessed November 2014).
 208

The religious scholar Robert Fuller links this intriguingly “magnetic” action to the

experience that users often report of connecting the same sensory data to two or more distinct

sets of concepts. Fuller argues that this appreciation for “multiple perspectives” in turn informed

the “unchurched spirituality” of the postwar era and its underlying pluralistic and eclectic

embrace of alternative worldviews. “Informal gatherings of marijuana smokers provided a forum

for the transmission of the various mystical philosophies that made up the era’s alternative

spirituality…The ‘increased conviviality’ and ‘feeling of enhanced interpersonal rapport and

communication’ associated with marijuana use grounded these newly acquired beliefs in a sense

of community and thus gave them greater credibility or support.”241 Cannabis not only bathed

these new ideas in convivial credibility, but staged the resonant and playful dance of comparison

between ideas. As Novak noted, “for some, marijuana has served as a teacher whose principal

lesson has been that life holds multiple forms of reality.”242 This dance was itself part of the

freak art of bending and blending consensus, a cognitive labor aimed at both revolutionary and

otherworldly possibilities, and one that Terence perfected like few of his generation.

Crypto Rap

After completing the two-year Tussman program in 1967, McKenna left Cal and hit the

global hippie trail. Like many of his wandering peers, McKenna’s pop existentialist sensibility

led him to see exotic travel as a vector of both personal authenticity and what Ben Brazil

241. Fuller, Robert C, Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
2000), 146.
242. Novak, High Culture, http://www.psychedelic-library.org/high_culture1.htm
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describes as an “idiom of fantasy.”243 He wound up in the Seychelles, where he holed up and

wrote his first book, a short visionary rant called Crypto-Rap: Meta-Electrical Speculations on

Culture. A fascinating and sometimes erratic combination of radical social criticism, psychedelic

esotericism, and S-F media theory, Crypto-Rap crystalizes McKenna’s first Berkeley phase, and

lays down many of the conceptual circuits that would help construct the Experiment at La

Chorerra (and the interpretations of that experiment), as well as establishing some of the major

themes of his later public career.244

Reflecting McLuhan’s powerful media-centric influence on the text, McKenna offers an

early “stylenote” to the reader. Here he explains the “discursive and conversational” qualities of

the text by referring it to his own preferred medium: the verbal “rap.” Terence characterizes the

rap as “mercurial and elusive, yet illuminating.” Because of its evanescence, live conversation is

“humble and electric,” and its audience “a matter of synchronicity, being chosen by the

constituents of the moment.”[i] Though prioritizing voice over writing, McKenna is less interest

in full presence of speech then in the shifting and unexpected emergence of meaning and

associations from the particular embodied situation of dialogue—a preference that is impossible

to separate from his own enjoyment of cannabis-fueled vectors of eloquence. Nor was this the

only way that cannabis, which he defines here in no uncertain terms as “psychedelic,” informed

Crypto-Rap. As Dennis relates, when Terence arrived at the Ile au Cerf, he decided to plant a bed

of cannabis seeds and write until both the book and the crop had reached maturity. This

intertwining of text and psychoactive biology had an almost recursive effect, as one stream of

mind-craft bled into another. When the grass was ready, Terence got totally stoned and decided

243. Ben Brazil, “Making Fantasy Real: Youth Travel Culture and Alternative Realities in the 1960s and 1970s,”
presented at American Academy of Religions, San Diego, CA, November 2014.
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that what he had written was terrible. And so he kept smoking, day and night, as he rewrote the

text over a month of extended stay on the island.

No publisher was interested in the resulting book, something that Terence eventually saw

as a good thing. Dennis similarly and accurately characterizes the text as “the kind of book that

an intense, angry young intellectual, fueled by psychedelics and radical politics, would write in

the waning years of the 1960s.”245 Crypto-Rap includes references to Cream, Dylan, and Syd

Barrett’s “The Gnome,” along with occasionally histrionic lines like “Stop the bullshit, the

warmachine, the hatemachine, the deathmachine.” [67] Indeed it is Terence’s anger at America’s

“Bullshit” (often in caps) that is perhaps the most important affective take-away from the text, a

key towards understanding the intensity of McKenna’s own psychedelic escape velocity. At the

same time, and perhaps reflecting Tussman’s influence, Terence rejected Marxism and the New

Left as well as the pastoral ideals of the “hip community” associated with the Haight. “Sacrality,

return to nature, and introversion is not an answer at all…We cannot turn away from our science

and our technology—we must purify ourselves so that we can magically and intuitively apply

these things for the force of Good.” [117] Terence called his own radical ethos “crypto-

anarchism,” whose radical transcendence of history would take place “through love, cybernetics,

alchemy, idealism, and Tantric Philosophy.” [1]

An eschatological, “metapolitical” process, crypto anarchism appears as a sort of fusion

of psychedelic experience, various esoteric traditions of consciousness transformation, and the

radical technological possibilities of media, whose developments Terence understood largely

through McLuhan. Like many of his youthful peers, Terence shared a fascination with the trendy

244. As of this writing, Crypto-Rap remains unpublished per the author’s wishes. For one afternoon, the McKenna
estate graciously provided me limited access to a copy of the original typed manuscript. I have opted to include page
citations to the original manuscript in brackets inline.
245. McKenna, Brotherhood, 177.
 211

Canadian media theorist, who announced the arrival of an electronic media universe whose

kaleidoscopic sensations and tribal resonances were eroding the linear perspective and rationalist

individualism he famously tied to the Gutenberg era of print. For McKenna, McLuhan provided

a literate and historically-informed discourse that did not reject technology, but insisted on its

active and reflexive role in the construction of reality and human perception. “Man is modeled

by his symbols and his tools,” Terence wrote. “Both are forms of media.” [26] If human reality is

recursively dependent on media technology, then the technological transformations of the latter

would shake up the possibilities in the former—releasing, for McKenna, potential states of

mystical consciousness and communion hinted at and described in esoteric texts East and West.

McLuhan’s approach to media was also informed by a deep if mischievous

traditionalism. In contrast to the dominant tendencies of modern thought—whether understood as

rationalism, empiricism, or the abstract dialectics of philosophy—McLuhan was an avowedly

analogical thinker, which means that he saw himself in the tradition of those grammarians

devoted to the “allegorical exegesis of natural phenomenon.”246 Nature, in this view, is a text to

be interpreted, not a mute object to be analyzed or a chaos to be mastered. As such, McLuhan

was quite sympathetic to the revival of pagan humanism in the Renaissance, which turned away

from the dry logic of medieval scholasticism and embraced the juicier—and sometimes hermetic

and esoteric—interpretive frameworks that tied the cosmos into resonating networks of

correspondences and analogies. Such analogic thinking deeply informed McLuhan’s media

ecologies, and particularly his characteristic figure-ground reversal of form and content. The

legendary slogan “the medium is the message” folds the content of media back into its form,

whose technical, sensory and cognitive characteristics act as analogic templates for shifts in
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consciousness and perspective that occur outside or through the parsing of any particular set of

messages or explicit meanings. For example, by leading the eye towards visual gestalts and

multi-dimensional figures, television was supposedly crafting a new cognitive capacity that itself

could be read as a symptom of larger changes in consciousness and culture.

With their imaginative punch and visionary, even apocalyptic undertow, McLuhan’s

ideas were superficially easy to assimilate into the druggy discourse of the youth culture. At the

same time, it’s important to note that drugs also inspired McLuhan’s pronouncements on the

electronic age. In his 1969 Playboy interview, for example, McLuhan characterized

hallucinogens as “a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an

environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.” Using the same sort of “mystical” language

adopted by many acidheads, McLuhan declared that LSD mimes the “all-at-onceness and all-at-

oneness” of the new media environment of saturated information; that it “revive[s] senses long

atrophied;” and that it gives a youth generation already “retribalized” by media technologies like

television and transistor radios a further intensification of communal experience.247 Terence

agreed, arguing that with the emergence of electrical media and cybernetic computers after

World War II, the “eschatological rapport with the alchemical idea of the Spiritus Mundi” was

re-established after centuries of interruption. [87]

As such, crypto-anarchism represents “a mysticism of electric culture,” the mercurial

manifestation of an “electrically collectivized humanity.” [56] But it remains, for all its

allegorical resonances, technological and material. Indeed, alongside calls for de-urbanization

and gardening, the crypto-anarchist program that McKenna offers at the end of his text includes a

246. See McLuhan’s discussion of grammar (interpretation) in his dissertation, published as Marshall McLuhan, The
Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte
Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2006), 16.
247. Marshall McLuha, “The Playboy Interview,” Playboy Magazine (March 1969)
 213

number of specific engineering goals: global standards for electronic components, the

development of holography, a computerized library capable of cybernetically automating

scholarship, and an “All Media Recorder” that would enable the recording and sharing of

individual experience. Presciently, Terence also notes the radical implications of the ongoing

miniaturization of electronic components, a vision that helps explain the origin of one of his

more charming later prognostications: a totally electrified world saturated with devices so small

that, “to the observer, the citizens of that collectivity appear to live in a sacral, nature-dominated

world that is totally lacking in machinery or technical accretions of any kind.” [135] McKenna

even gestures towards a kind of transcendental eugenics, envisioning the moment when

humanity can “scrap all our machines, all our cybernetic equipment, and place the means of the

God consciousness and eschatology within our own genetic material.” [161]

While these technological visions are not terribly surprising coming from a serious S-F

fan, McKenna also tied them to a radical countercultural metapolitics. He did so, moreover, years

before Timothy Leary made his early own seventies shift towards “Psi Phy” futurism. At the

same time, Crypto-Rap is also saturated with esotericism, including some important early

influences that largely disappear in Terence’s later raps. For example, Crypto-Rap carries on an

extensive and reasonably well-informed engagement with the “uncorrupted and unfragmented

tradition of gnosis” contained in the Tantra Shastras, which he read through Herbert Guenther,

Arthur Avalon, and less scholarly writers like Lama Govinda and Evans-Wentz. At the same

time, and with the great exception of the I Ching, McKenna’s heart lay in the West, with the

traditions of hermetic gnosis, Neoplatonism, Renaissance magic, and alchemy. Here, however,

he makes an important—though hardly original—distinction between the harsh anti-materialism

of gnostic dualism and the pro-cosmic orientation of hermeticism and alchemy, expressing,

http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm (Accessed January 2014).

 214

unsurprisingly, a distinctly “tantric” preference for the latter. One of the central tropes of the text

is the Neoplatonic One, a “nexus of logic and intuition” he contrasts with the Many. [39] In an

Eliadean twist, McKenna also links this emanated multiplicity to the sweep of mundane history.

All history, the fall of light in a Van Eyke[sic], the dreams of Luther, Rome burning—all
is about the One; its drive to appear in the material matrix, and the mercurial shifting of
that matrix as it refuses to mirror the One, its scattering and reflecting, playing our the
vast worlds of Maya. It is the stilling of that surface and its perfect mirroring of the One
that makes all things become possible to the perceiver. [42-43]

The notion of history as the tension between the many and the One helps us understand

the topology, if you will, of one of Terence’s most central ideas: that a kind of realized object, a

perfected culmination of the “material matrix,” might fulfill history by merging with the One. In

another text from the era, “stilling the surface” might refer to the sort of mystical illumination

granted in yoga or zazen. But here the image is operationalized in a technological form. Terence

tells us that the ultimate machine, the philosopher’s stone at the end of time, is “solid state.” In

contrast to vacuum tubes or electro-mechanical devices, the moving electrons in a solid state

device are entirely confined to the fixed materials that make up the apparatus. The transistor, the

first breakthrough solid state device, was invented a year after Terence’s birth and a decade later

bloomed into the first integrated circuit, which kickstarted the miniaturization of digital

computers. As a technology nerd, Terence would have known about these developments, but his

insistence on “solid state” also derives from his love of Arthur C. Clarke’s aforementioned 1956

novel The City and the Stars. In the novel, the homeostatic city of Diaspar is run on a largely

hidden Central Computer that has reached what Clarke describes, in a brief précis on the
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evolution of technology, as the “ideal of the perfect machine.” This ideal was important enough

for Clarke to italicize it in the text: “No machine may contain any moving parts.”248

This technical vision of mechanistic perfection, with its invocation of the unmoved

mover, was then “esotericized” by Terence through exposure to McLuhan’s poetic media theory.

For McLuhan, the formal, visible and structural characteristics of a given medium produce a sort

of hermetic signature that expresses itself through and around the internal “content” carried

through the medium—the famous “medium is the message.”249 In this profoundly analogical

view, all electronic media share something of electricity’s particular signature, which McKenna

associated with mercurial flux and the creative feminine. Electricity needs a form or body,

however, and for this other side of the polarity, McKenna looked to solid state components.

In one passage, McKenna argues that the “Two sulphurs” described in some alchemical

texts can be seen as, on the one hand, “the shakti-like mercurial element, the electrically

circulating gnosis of the One,” and, on the other, “the heavy, Saturnine and Shiva-like, earthy

cybernetic component.” The linking of these two sulphurs is accomplished through the

intercession of an organic component—in other words, the human artificer. [88] Even as

McKenna overlays electronic, alchemical, and tantric polarities, however, he makes a crucial

operational distinction between technological and esoteric expression. McKenna argues that, in

the past, eschatological consciousness depended on psychological constellation around rituals,

metaphors, and symbolic systems. Technology, on the other hand, holds out the possibility of

creating a kind of post-metaphorical media. “Electrical solid state eschatologies however, by

248. I thank Finn McKenna for pointing out this connection to me.
249. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault explains the logic of the hermetic signature: “The system of
signatures reverses the relation of the visible to the invisible. Resemblance was the invisible form of that which,
from the depths of the world, made things visible; but in order that this form may be brought out into the light in its
turn there must be a visible figure that will draw it out from its profound invisibility.” Foucault, Michel, The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 27.
 216

investing the symbol in an electro-material matrix having no moving parts, creates a self-

sustaining symbol that is not dependent for its purity upon the transmission of a ritual or an

ideology.” [133] In this way, crypto-anarchism is able to instantiate, or “electrically numinize,”

older magical metaphors into hardware.

This solid state philosopher’s stone also owes a lot to McKenna’s long exposure to the

alchemical studies of Carl Jung. As with most of Jung’s work, Jung’s alchemical writings are

now strongly criticized by many scholars of religion and esotericism, but he deserves credit, at

least, for making the ancient art a topic of modern intellectual study. Where historians of science

saw the deluded chicanery of mountebanks, Jung found instead a visionary religious literature

and iconographic universe that staged and reflected the multi-phase work—or opus—of

individuation, the core self-development process of Jung’s system. In Psychology and Alchemy,

which the teenage Terence devoured, Jung argued that even as the alchemists explored the

transformative chemical potentials of matter with their retorts and sublimations, they were also

staging a parallel psychic process through their experiments. “Everything unknown and empty is

filled with psychological projection,” Jung explains. “It is as if the investigator’s own psychic

background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is

chiefly the data of his own unconscious.”250

Two crucial points are important to note here. One is that Jung was not, as his more

recent critics sometimes forget, interested in “spiritual alchemy” alone, but rather in the

mobilization of psychic processes through laboratory practices and a confrontation with

enigmatic or anomalous matter.251 (In fact, Jung suggested that alchemy entered into decline

when it became decoupled from actual chemical transformations.) The second is that, whether

250. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 218.

251. See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 289-291.
 217

considered as a mystical or physical operation, the opus is not proscribed according to a

standardized ritual form. Instead, it requires an “experimental” attitude towards the unknown

potentials of transformed matter, an experimentation that includes a necessarily singular

conceptual assemblage. “Every original alchemist, as it were, builds himself a more or less

individual edifice of ideas, consisting of the dicta of the philosophers and of composite analogies

to the fundamental concepts of alchemy.”252

This construction is not just conceptual but semiotic and procedural, as much a work of

mediation as of materiality. In Jung’s idealist account, the investigator’s psyche, or imagination,

constitutes the “necessary medium” of the work, but also serves as its “cause and point of

departure.”253 Jung casts this recursive process in the language of film projection, with the

camera-mind’s images “mirrored in the darkness.” Here subjectivity establishes and propels its

new “existential territories” recursively, though what Felix Guattari calls the “power of self-

positioning, self-production, and a capacity to secrete one’s own referent.”254 Defending the

claim that some early alchemists were aware of this process of psychic projection, Jung points to

the “Liber Platonis quartorum,” a text contained in the seventeenth-century Theatrum Chemicum

but of considerably older origin. Here we find the insistence that the operator must himself

recursively participate in the work (“oportet operatorem interesse operi”), a self-referential

gesture captured by the alchemical symbol of the ouroboros and condensed in the artifact that the

“Liber Platonis” author suggests as the ideal vessel of transformation: a human skull.255 Less

252. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 277.

253. Ibid, 258.
254. Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
18.
255. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 255.
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ambiguous is the early modern cry of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn, also cited by Jung:

“Transform yourselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones!”256

If one of the features of science fiction as a genre or semiotic engine is the concrete

literalization of metaphor, then we can say that Terence and his brother squeezed science fiction

from a fusion of their esoteric sources and McLuhanesque media theory. As the literary critic

Seo-Young Chu notes, “Every science-fiction world is a metaphysical conceit literalized as

ontological fact within a narrative universe.”257 And the core metaphysical conceit of Crypto

Rap, an invention that profoundly informs the Experiment at La Chorrera, is the living, if solid-

state, philosopher’s stone. During the run-up to the Experiment, as the crew were plunging into

psychedelic ideation of the mushroom trance, Ev had a vision of an “elf-like creature” rolling a

polyhedron whose every facet opened like a window onto a distant time or place. In a striking act

of comparison—which could also be seen precisely as the literalization of a conceit—Terence

connected this vision to the lapis philosophicus of his alchemical studies, a connection that in

some sense initiated the La Chorrera crew, imaginally at least, into a current of material

metamorphosis. “I could feel the golden chain of adepts reaching back into the distant Hellenistic

past, the Hermetic Opus, a project vaster than empires and centuries; nothing less than the

redemption of fallen humanity through the respiritualization of matter.”

However, in order to grab ahold of this golden chain, McKenna also had to twist it, to

render old alchemical dreams into a specifically science fiction vision: “the image of the

philosopher's stone as hyperdimensional jewel-become-UFO—the human soul as starship.”258

Though claiming that he had “never seen or imagined” the lapis in this manner, he was not the

256. Ibid, 256.

257. Chu, Seo-Young, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010) , 12.
258. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 77.
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first to make space opera from the highly polyvalent symbol of this “stone, which is no stone.” In

his prescient 1959 book on UFOs, which the McKennas were very familiar with, Jung linked the

lapis to the mandala, a symbol of the individuated Self whose upwelling from the collective

unconscious he directly linked to the forms and behavior of flying saucers. Jung’s cosmic pulp-

culture act of comparison, amplified with a shamanic and science-fictional overlay that we will

later unpack, directly contributed to the McKenna’s belief that the end result of the Experiment

would be the creation of “the ultimate technological artifact,” an apocalyptic device similar to

“starships, time machines, crystal balls, magic mirrors.”259 Note here the roping together of

“science fictional” and “esoteric” devices, which can also be seen as the combination of

technologies that penetrate space and time with those that mediate different ontological orders of

reality.

However, the McKennas’ stone has a further, “living” twist: it is, at least in part,

biological and metabolic. In contrast to Jung’s understanding of alchemy as a purely psychic

operation of projection onto passive matter, or of UFOs as nothing but symbols of the collective

unconscious, the McKennas wanted to construct a “biophysical technology,” one that would

enable them to build an apocalyptic lapis, as Dennis put it, “out of our own bodies.”260 This

respect for the productive forces and even agency of matter partly reflects the hedonic approach

to consciousness expansion that marked their generation, which saw no conflict between spiritual

and metaphysical pursuits and the exploration of pleasures, intensities, and corporeal, even erotic

energies. More fundamentally, this visionary materialism encoded the brothers’ profound respect

for the transformative effects of certain anomalous alkaloids, molecules whose metabolic action

in the human body is inextricable from an ontological order of visionary encounter.

259. McKenna, Brotherhood, 135.

260. Ibid, 134.
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Pharmakon

Though Terence enjoyed talking, thinking, and reading about drugs as much as he

enjoyed taking them, they don’t make an appearance in Crypto-Rap until the second half of the

text, when he offers up a metaphysical hierarchy of psychoactive substances. Cutting against the

grain somewhat, Terence places mescaline and synthetic psilocybin above LSD, while “still

higher up the tantric scale towards the One” is DMT, a potent hallucinogenic tryptamine that

Terence had first tried in Berkeley in 1966. Though rather widely distributed in the natural

world, the DMT in Terence’s day was generally restricted to synthetic powder or gum. When

smoked in a glass pipe, DMT rapidly plunges the smoker into a vividly seething, intricately

patterned, and cognitively overwhelming domain, only to return the user almost equally rapidly

to baseline well within the hour.

Dennis writes that there is often the sense of crossing a distinct threshold, both sonic and

visual, “of briefly poking one’s head into a parallel dimension where the most astonishing things

imaginable were going on, all in a frenetic, circus-like atmosphere of hilarious ecstasy.”261

Terence compared the experience to “an audience with the alien nuncio”—an image whose

crucial note of hieratic science fiction complements the Lovecraftian adjectives he regularly uses

to characterize DMT space in True Hallucinations: “elf-haunted,” “unambiguously peculiar,”

“hair-raisingly bizarre,” “titanically strange.” One thing is clear: with the metabolized molecules

of DMT, or at least the DMT in Terence’s nervous system, we have entered the domain of the

weird.

261. Ibid, 156-57.

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Though DMT was marginally available in the underground throughout the sixties, the

compound is largely absent from most sixties discourse, in part, perhaps, because many people

found it a bit too much to take. In a 1966 article on the substance, Timothy Leary reports that

William S. Burroughs hated it, and that Alan Watts compared it to being “fired out the muzzle of

an atomic cannon with neon-byzantine barreling.” One psychiatrist Leary met had provided over

100 people with DMT, and only four of them had a positive experience. (Leary, needless to say,

had a blast.262) The McKennas were enraptured with the stuff, and their rapture, in turn, led to

them to Columbia. The specific object of the their quest was an indigenous, DMT-containing

concoction of Virola sap known as oo-koo-hé, which they had read about in a recently published

Harvard Botanical Museum paper by the remarkable Amazonian ethnobotanist Richard

Schultes.263

While various DMT-containing snuffs were known to exist throughout the Amazon, oo-

koo-hé was that rare Virola preparation that was orally active, which implied that it provided a

more slowly metabolized and consequently less overwhelming journey into the bejeweled

wonderland of DMT. In his article, Schultes explained that DMT was generally assumed to be

pharmacologically inactive when orally consumed unless accompanied by monoamine oxidase

inhibitors. The Banisteriopsis caapi vine found in ayahuasca, he explains by way of example,

allows the DMT in the brew’s admixture leaves to become psychoactive, significantly enhancing

and extending the visions. The McKennas were already familiar with ayahuasca, or yagé, from

William Burroughs, who had come to the same depressing Columbian river town in the 1950s to

262. Timothy Leary, “Programmed Communication During Experiences with DMT (dimethyltryptamine)”
Psychedelic Review, 8, 1966, 83-95. http://deoxy.org/h_leary.htm
263. DE PLANTIS TOXICARIIS E MUNDO NOVO TROPICALE COMMENTATIONES V: Virola as an orally
administered hallucinogen
Richard Evans Schultes, Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, Vol. 22, No. 6 (June 25, 1969), pp. 229-
240.
 222

find and drink the brew. But the McKennas were more interested in the oo-koo-hé, in part

because of a peculiar detail offered by Schultes’ Witoto informant, who explained that oo-koo-hé

allows one to “see and converse with the little people.”264

This last line “rang a bell” with Terence, one of those resonances that sound the uncanny

networks of correspondences that drive both the perennialist spirituality and comparative religion

of the sixties and seventies. McKenna knew the lore of the little folk through his reading of The

Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, a collection of folkloric accounts of fairies gathered by the

independent scholar, Theosophist, and Tibetan Buddhist popularizer W.E. Evans-Wentz in the

twenties. Evans-Wentz’s text also proved to be of pivotal importance to the UFO researcher

Jacques Vallee, who heavily influenced Terence with his argument, in the 1969 book Passport to

Magonia, that the bizarre behavior associated with UFOs and their occupants may have less to

do with outer space that whatever braided strands of culture and consciousness led to the often

strikingly similar narratives and images of fairy lore.

These suggestive acts of comparison were, in Terence’s head anyway, magnified by his

repeated empirical impression that the DMT space was inhabited by creatures he memorably

characterized as “self-transforming machine elves.” In True Hallucinations, Terence describes

one early DMT trip in which “dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling

Fabergé eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true

poetry.”265 We will be returning to the “technopoetic,” S-F enigma of such entity encounters

throughout this chapter and this book, but here it is important to note that Terence was and is

hardly alone. In his own DMT account, Leary also reported “a band of radar-antennae, elf-like

264. Ibid, 232.

265. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 7.
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insects merrily working away.”266 Though influenced no doubt by Terence’s colorful

testimonies, Dennis’ first DMT trip also staged an encounter with cartoon-like entities who

seemed to welcome him—“so happy to meet you, meat-worm”—and invite him to join the

cavorting.267 As a number of studies have since shown, entity encounters remain a persistent

feature of DMT experience reports, even among users largely free of such expectations.268

Schultes wrote that oo-koo-hé was restricted to a few Witoto tribes in the Columbian

Putumayo region, near the mission town of La Chorrera. And so, with an audacious sense of

daring-do not unmixed with a naive sense of entitlement, the young men set their sites on La

Chorrera. The brothers were still grieving for their mother, who had died the previous fall, a fact

that may help explain why their father allowed Dennis to take a break from his freshman year at

the University of Colorado. Terence flew to Columbia directly from Vancouver. He hadn’t

stepped foot in America since the low-key hash-smuggling enterprise he had been operating

from India had been discovered by the Colorado authorities in 1969. With his name on Interpol’s

rolls, Terence had been living like a fugitive; before arriving in Canada with a false passport, he

had spent a long and lonely stint hunting butterflies in Indonesia. This isolated work allowed him

to combine his love of Nabokov with his romantic attraction to natural history, and especially to

the Victorian naturalist, evolutionary theorist, and sometimes Spiritualist Alfred Russell Wallace,

who also explored the Indonesian archipelago.

Accompanying the McKennas on their “expedition” were three folks that Terrence calls,

in True Hallucinations, “Vanessa,” “Dave,” and “Ev.” Vanessa was a Tussman friend from Cal,

266. Timothy Leary, “Programmed Communication During Experiences with DMT (dimethyltryptamine).” Though
noting the presence of these “elves,” as well as various insect creatures (“Venutian crickets”, lobsters, etc), these
play a relatively minor role in his experience.
267. McKenna, Brotherhood, 157.
268. See Strassman, Rick, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research Into the Biology of Near-
Death and Mystical Experiences (Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 2000). Also see Luke, D. (2011). Discarnate entities
 224

while Dave was a “gay meditator” that Terence had met hitch-hiking around Berkeley. The crew

had met Ev and her boyfriend Solo in Columbia before arriving in Puerto Leguizamo. The

couple were white-robed fruitarians, members of an obscure “religious happening” known as the

New Jerusalem. Ev was breaking up with Solo, and afterwards hooked up with Terence; Solo,

who sometimes claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, Lucifer, and Hitler, and who

communicated regularly with the “Beings of Light,” joined the expedition for a short time as

well.

The crew thus made up a singular but still representative spore print of young

countercultural values—values that were also announced through their expeditions’ cargo list,

which included tape recorders, botanical guides, copies of the I Ching and Finnegans Wake,

peanut butter, and lots of dope. Like hordes of young Western travelers finding and making the

“hippie trail” across the globe, they were exploring the exotic backwaters of the globe in search

of something hovering between enlightenment and fantasy, an arguably exploitive appropriation

of otherness that nonetheless recognized the value of the encounter with worlds and cultures

relatively untouched by western capitalism. Although the obscurity and remoteness of their

destination was impressive—a town mentioned in a scholarly article, requiring multiple river

hops and a four-day slog through the jungle—their search for a rare psychedelic El Dorado

resounds with the echoes of colonialist natural science. Their expedition was certainly a

romance, but it was as much a romance of science as of spirituality.

Equally explicit, and certainly more playful, was the phenomenological resonance

between edge travel and visionary experience, a topography of the derive that in some sense

underlies the construction of the whole global hippie trail. As their boat left Puerto Leguizamo,

and dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, phenomenology and ontology. Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research, 75, 26-42.
 225

puttering onto the broad expanse of the Putumayo, Terence noted the deliciousness of the

moment “when one has done all that one can for a journey and is at last in motion, no longer

responsible, since that burden has been given to pilot or engineer, boatman or ground control.

The world one is leaving has been truly broken away from and the destination is still

unknown.”269 In The Psychedelic Experience, Leary had already described the function of a trip

guide as “ground control,” so Terence’s analogy was clear: their river trip was setting the

metaphoric stage for another trip deeper along, one that required a release of any cybernetic

controls. At the same time, flowing in a kind of reverse current, Terence recognized that the

Outside, when truly faced, ultimately defeats analogy.

The unfamiliar was everywhere, drawing inane analogies into common conversation. The
Putumayo is like the Holy Ganga…The sky is similar to the skies of the Serengeti Plain,
and so on. The illusion of understanding was a lame way of getting one’s bearings. The
unfamiliar does not give up its secrets in this game—the Putumayo does not become like
the Ganga. The unfamiliar must become known as itself before it is correctly recognized.

Here, as he sets off onto the river of psychedelic Romance, McKenna acknowledges the

stark limits of the imagination. As Patrick Lundborg points out in Psychedelia, Terence’s words

also stand as a perceptive reaction to the wide varieties of institutional, countercultural, and

psychological analogies which, by 1971, had attempted to conceptually wrangle psychedelic

experience over the previous two decades. As noted earlier, psychedelics had already been

constructed as psychotomimetics, as weaponized brainwashing agents, as dress rehearsals of

tantric bardo journeys, and as percolators of revolutionary subjectivity. But though Terence and

269. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 17.

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Dennis carried many such building blocks with them, the McKennas had yet to construct the

vessel, or the athanor, of their encounter.

Arriving at La Chorrera, a paradisal bug-free oasis near a gushing cataract, the crew

discovered to their amazement that the cow dung strewn throughout the cattle pastures abutting

the village hosted a riot of Stropharia cubensis, the “magic mushroom” species now known as

Psilocybe cubensis. Terence had stumbled across one of these Columbian mushrooms before

arriving at Puerto Leguizamo, after a more knowledgable freak pointed it out. He enjoyed a

mellow experience, bookmarked the possibilities, but moved on to La Chorrera, hardly expecting

to find cows—and the coprophagic fungi—in such a remote backwater. With no sense of dosage,

the crew immediately started munching pairs of mushrooms.

In his journal entry of February 23, Terence describes his “gentle and elusive” trip in

terms that waver between the animistic and cosmic. On the one hand, the mushroom is

benevolent and, like peyote, “teaches the right way to live.” On the other, the mushroom is

depersonalized, a “transdimensional doorway” left open by even more spectral Others. This latter

sense of the psychoactive flora as a medium rather than a messenger was underscored a few days

later, when the addition of smoked shavings of Banisteriopsis caapi to their mushroom

explorations gave rise to a phenomenon the crew dubbed “vegetable television.” However far

they believed themselves to have come from civilization, they brought their technological

frameworks with them, along with the McLuhanesque reminder that form and content were

folded within one another.

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Shroom With a View

Today the magic mushroom has become such a ubiquitous logo of psychoactive

tomfoolery that it is hard to remember that, in 1971, very few heads in North America had much

knowledge or experience of them.270 Despite the lore about Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina that

Wasson had leaked into the world, the pride of place in the underground imagination of the

sixties went to LSD, which was considered by many heads—incorrectly—to provide a more

powerful trip271. While recognizing the logistical and market forces involved in this modest

erasure, Lundborg wonders whether some of it might be chocked up to what Wasson identified

as the long-standing human ambivalence around fungi and their liminal and vaguely animistic

“behavior.” Mushrooms, we should remember, pop up profusely out of nowhere, often emerging

from rot or turd, in damp caves or along dead tree stumps—in worlds, that is, that lie between

life and death, animal and plant.272 Given how peculiar and suggestive their bodies often appear,

is it hardly surprising that so many cultures, making their way through the enchanted landscapes

of life before science, associated mushrooms with the uncanny, with mischief and sorcery, with

spirit transport and immortality.

A far more pressing source of ambivalence is the fact that these evocatively flavored

morsels—or their indistinguishable cousins—could sometimes kill. Wasson argues that folk

270. Never easy to procure, mushrooms fell out of symbolic favor when LSD hit the underground. Though some
Canadians were caught intoxicated on local shrooms in 1965, it wasn’t until the early seventies that psychedelic
users began to realize that psilocybin-containing mushrooms naturally grow across north America. And nobody had
figured out a good way to cultivate them.
271. See Patrick Lundborg’s discussion in Psychedelia, 173-181.
272. The mushrooms that do show up on the surface of things, we know now, are themselves just transient
representatives of a more lasting organism: the branching tangle of multi-cellular fungal threads that lies hidden
beneath the soil. Under certain conditions of temperature and moisture, this network of mycelium—sometimes vast,
and sometimes very, very old—sends up fruiting bodies like periscopes in order to distribute reproductive spores.
The mushroom, then, is already an icon of itself, appearing in our visible world of fields and forests like an avatar of
some more incorporeal spirit.
 228

taxonomy records the attempt to resolve this ambiguity by distinguishing edible “mushrooms”

from toxic “toadstools.” But this distinction is challenged in turn by nonlethal but psychoactive

fungi, since the question of whether to classify their nauseating, disorienting, and sometimes

terrifying effects as poisonous or not is to some degree a cultural affair—in other words, it

partakes of the ambiguous logic of the pharmakon.

Some of the effects of Psilocybe mushrooms were recognized by Europeans no later than

the fifteenth century, but there is no evidence they were consumed by Westerners intentionally

until the twentieth. As Lechter argues, “for a psychoactive plant to become legitimated or even

institutionalized there must also exist a culturally agreed context into which the strange

experiences it elicits can easily be slotted, and thus made meaningful and comprehended.”273

Indeed, despite the healthy distribution of Psilocybe and other psychedelic mushrooms across the

planetary surface, there is very little evidence, with few exceptions, that nearby human beings

did anything other than opting to take a pass.

The Witoto who lived in and around La Chorrera, for example, certainly had room in

their shamanic pharmacy for powerful hallucinogenic tryptamines like DMT, which possesses a

strong structural similarity to the psilocybin and psilocin tryptamine alkaloids. Their apparent

lack of interest in the fungi lends some support to the possibility that the cubensis was a recent

arrival to the region, having followed the excrement of the zebu cattle, who of course were

following humans settling into agriculture. Recognizing the Witoto’s indifference to the marvels

in their midst, Terence makes a very telling remark in his February 23, 1971 journal: “This

particular mushroom species is unclaimed, so far as I know, by any aboriginal people anywhere

and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are exploring.”274

273. Letcher, Shroom, 30.

274. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 40.
 229

At first glance, this statement is both unwarranted (the Mazatec tribe that Wasson visited

used cubensis) and domineering—the arrogant thrill of the colonialist, delighted to stumble upon

undiscovered terrain or a raw material unexploited by the benighted natives. At the same time,

we should at least note how remarkably far Terence is here from the stereotypical Rousseauian

hippie-seeker, searching the landscapes of exotica for a wise master or noble savage. For

Terence, the plant and not the man is the “teacher,” which is why he just wanted to get his hands

on the goods directly and to examine them (and the dimension they open) on “neutral ground.”

Whether or not we believe that neutral ground is a real possibility for us perspectival

humans, it is clear that Terence’s desire gestures towards natural science’s objective gaze and

rhetorical degree-zero, and thus, once again, suggests a romance of science, or a romantic

science, rather than the romance of religion or even shamanism. (Here we should recall how the

chapter headings and subtitle for True Hallucinations—“Being an Account of the Author’s

Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise”—allude to nineteenth-century natural history

narratives.) Not unlike Jung’s analytic psychology, Terence’s psychedelic “science” is romantic

in an almost topological sense.

For one thing, it requires the vector of empiricism and “exploration” to turn within, and

to affirm extraordinary subjective experience as “data.” At the same time, such experiences have,

in Terence’s view, a collaborative effect as their accretions partly construct the dimension

encountered. Notice that Terence grants that the indigenous relationship with plants is a real

claim that has real effects, effects that go beyond the usual understanding of cultural narratives as

subjective, psychically localized projections onto an outside “natural” phenomenon. Instead,

Terence implies that cultural practice and scripts, in mediating a particular species of psychedelic

material, change the phenomenology of the “medium” for all future consumers of the material—
 230

even for those outside and even unaware of that cultural “set.” Psychedelic phenomenology is

therefore inseparable from a realist anthropology of the human imagination. In Crypto-Rap,

Terence had already declared that “Objects, thought, dreams, hallucinations, metaphors and

memories—all are real.” [20] As such, the extraordinary subjective experiences of psychedelics

become framed within a natural (rather than supernatural) matrix, one characterized by multiple

“planes of experience” or Latourian “phenomenological modes”—modes that Terence connects,

not so much with tantric or even shamanic universes, but with the mathematical and science-

fictional discourse of “other dimensions.”

This is the “weird naturalism” that the McKenna brothers brought to La Chorrera: a

framework of radical empiricism and speculative excess that authorized their extreme and

innovative attempt to cobble together, in real time, a schema worthy of their experiences. In his

memoir, Dennis McKenna reminds us that he and Terence believed themselves to be quite

different than more typical freaks like Ev and Solo, who used a wooden knife to cut their fruit

rather than a metal one, “lest the blade destroy the fruit’s etheric body.” For Dennis, this crossed

the line into “hippy-dippy foolishness,” compared to which, he says, he and Terence were

“hidebound rationalists.”275 The older Dennis, writing in 2012, is being ironic here—as a

professional ethnobotanist and trained chemist, his older eye recognizes how mythopoetic his

and Terence’s ideas were at the time, and that the line they drew then between foolishness and

reason was already already off the rails.

But this crucial qualification does not negate the elements of “rationalism” that helped

organize the brothers’ perceptions, at least as they conceived and practiced them. Though

Terence was hardly systematic in his account of rationalism, it certainly involved elements of

skepticism (questioning appearances, and especially supernatural claims), empiricism (paying

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close attention to phenomenological detail), and realism (the dimensions and particularly the

entities encountered have some sort of ontological consistency). That these different orientations

led to contradictory positions is inarguable; the point is that, in contrast to many young

countercultural seekers, Terence’s dominant metaphors for the search for “higher knowledge”

were, with the important exception of alchemy, not drawn from religious or esoteric mysticism,

but a naturalistic S-F-inflected media theory keyed towards Fortean anomalies, visionary

possibilities, and the ontological warp of limit experiences. As Terence once said, long after La

Chorrera, “I think the proper way to contact the Other is with hard-headed rationalism exercised

under weird conditions.”276

In contrast to most psychedelic thinkers of the era, the McKennas did not adhere to a

single conceptual model of psychedelic experience as being “tantric” or “shamanic” or even

“Jungian” or “transpersonal.” Instead, they extracted elements from all these discourses and

more to experimentally construct a conceptual, ritual, and pharmacological apparatus for

encountering that intensive degree of alterity they dubbed the Other. As Lundborg explains,

“Instead of trying to fit the contents of the trip into some presumed parallel from the field of

religion or psychology, their novel ideas had been developed inside the psychedelic

experience.”277 Where Wasson expected to find the affective and even philosophical source of

human religion in the mushroom trance, the McKennas expected to confront an ontological

“Other” capable of radically undermining expectations. While the “Unknown” or the “Other” or

275. McKenna, Brotherhood, 230-31.

276. Cited in Lechter, 260. One of the later Terence’s most consistent pieces of advice for the prospective tripper
was to “pay attention”—not the meditator’s open field of consciousness, but the rock collector’s sharpened eye,
maintaining perceptual coherence amidst the maelstrom. Terence would often deploy skepticism, history, and
naturalism to distinguish himself from currents of the spiritual counterculture that flowed closer to his own work
than was comfortable. In his later public career, for example, he regularly ridiculed “nuts and bolts” UFO believers
and New Age mystics, even as he promoted tales of extraterrestrial mushroom allies and glittering transcendental
objects sucking us towards the end of history. To his credit, Terence was aware of the irony.
277. Lundborg, 44.
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the “Outside” are all different templates that come pre-charged with their own logics, they

establish a clearing for the appearance of an incomprehensible alterity that nonetheless possesses

real effects, including the radical transcoding of cultural scripts and the uncanny possibility of

encounter—an encounter that is, moreover, always relational. The McKennas’ orientation

towards the unmarked, though itself a mark, therefore stages its own set of possibilities, a

template whose ontological tension between natural facts and the fabulous Beyond mark the

particular dynamics of the weird.

In other words, the McKennas’ romance of the Other derives less from a religious faith in

incorporeal beings and more from the transversal thresholds in imaginative fiction. In The City

and the Stars, for example, the young Alvin attempts to escape the city Diaspar, a utopian

arcology whose inhabitants are terrified by the planet and cosmos beyond the city’s sealed

boundaries. The topography of Diaspar reflects Clarke’s study of information systems and

cybernetics, and cleverly stages the crucial distinction between a homeostatic system and the

surrounding environment, while exploring the effect of perturbations in the boundary that

dynamically links the two. Early in the novel, Alvin climbs the Tower of Loranne with a friend

to show her one of the few places in the city where the surrounding desert and stars can be seen.

His friend is too terrified to look, but Alvin peers though a stone grille that caps the end of a long

tunnel. He sees a vast desert of dunes whose wind-carved whirlpools and gullies are so striking

that “it was sometimes hard to realize that none of this sculpture was the work of intelligence.”
278
The nonhuman Outside, glimpsed in fragments between the hardened filter of human

categories, is, it seems, ghosted by the Other. And indeed, when night falls, Alvin sees a

perfectly elliptical constellation of stars in the sky—a star group that, the reader will eventually

discover, is actually a center of galactic intelligence.

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This concern with the Outside also deeply animated another one of the McKennas’

favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft, whose weird fiction blended elements of fantasy, horror, and

science fiction into a strikingly original and infectious narrative universe characterized by occult

grimoires, atavistic cults, and a swarm of bizarre extraterrestrial pseudo-gods inimical to human

life. In contrast to the supernatural ambiance of most ghost stories or gothic tales, the

metaphysical background of Lovecraft’s stories is, ultimately, a “cosmic indifferentism” not so

far removed from the nihilistic naturalism that Lovecraft himself took as his philosophy. The old

symbolic universes still have some meaning, however, since ceremonial magic and the archaic

rites of primitive cults encode, amidst their degenerate drivel, implacable truths about the

cosmos. These truths include the existence of hidden dimensions of reality, whose quasi-

believability Lovecraft was able to suggest by parasitizing on the increasing bizarreness of the

actual astrophysicists of his day, such as the non-Euclidian geometry used to describe

Einsteinean space-time, deployed to to such great effect in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The

Dreams in the Witch House.”

Alongside rituals and forbidden texts, Lovecraft’s portals to the Outside also included

specific technologies, or what Eugene Thacker calls “weird media.” These are apparatuses whose

mediation “only indicates a gulf or abyss between two ontological orders;” such media do not so

much communicate as reveal “an absolute impasse” that communicates only through a kind of

excommunication.279 In 1934’s “From Beyond,” for example, the scientist Crawford Tillinghast

builds a device whose resonating waves, registered on the ear as a drone, stimulates the human

pineal gland, allowing it to tune into domains of existence normally hidden from human

perception. At first this new visibility appears as a “kaleidoscopic” whirlwind, a psychedelic

278. Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (London: Millennium, 2001) ebook, location 457.
 234

“jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions.” This vision then gives way to a

vision of semi-incorporeal jellyish entities filling all of space with their woozy mutual

penetration.280 However, as Tillinghast warns a friend, the most frightening thing about the

medium is that it stages, not just vision, but encounter: “in these rays we are able to be seen as

well as to see.”281

The key element here is not the horrors that lurk in visionary consciousness but the

Lovecraftian equation of knowledge and trauma. In his tales, the pursuit of hidden realities,

through scientific or other means, often lead his characters to madness if not towards the possible

destruction of mundane reality. These are primordial scares, of course, as well as primal scenes.

As kids, Terence and Dennis loved this sort of thing—“or at least we loved scaring ourselves

with the notion that just beyond the veil of the mundane world were multiple realities that could

manifest themselves at any time.”282 Terence used to torment Dennis with whispered late-night

stories of the gruesome “No-body People,” invisible wraiths who haunted the shadows in the

corner of their shared bedroom.

This youthful dalliance with spectral ontologies also came to mark their generation,

whose psychoactive explorations of liminal consciousness helped charge protocols and

metaphors lurking in weird media—including the S-F pulp horrors of Lovecraft and other weird

fiction writers, whose paperback reprints through Lancer and Ballantine helped fuel the occult

279. Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media
and Mediation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 133.
280. Interestingly, this progression—from abstract visual “noise” and distorted form constants to realized
iconographic beings—reflects some of the constants of human trance. See J. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the
Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), esp. pp. 101-135.
281. H.P. Lovecraft, “Of Beyond,” accessed January 27, 2014,
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/fb.aspx
282. McKenna, Brotherhood, 121.
 235

revival.283 Indeed, the leap of ideas, images, and characters from fictions towards metaphysical

or psychedelic possibilities, glaringly obvious in Crypto-Rap, was a signal feature of the

countercultural imagination. Such imaginal samplings set the stage for the emergence of

“postmodern religion” as a self-consciously “fabulist” mode of spirituality able and willing to

overtly appropriate fictions for its work of building invisible worlds. But while weird fiction

informed the McKennas’ construction of their fantastic apparatus, the operation was even more

informed by a “weird naturalism”: a conviction that, for all the vagaries of psychedelic

mediation, the Outside was real, and able to make its own marks.

Grammatology

Nearly a decade before the book True Hallucinations was published in the early nineties,

Terence’s account of La Chorrera appeared as a collection of cassette tapes. This reminds us that

no account of McKenna’s cultural production is possible without acknowledging that his main

expressive medium was his own weirdly charismatic vocal performances—“raps” and “raves”

that, when the tapes first appeared in 1984, were beginning to crystalize into public and

eventually profitable performances and audio recordings. Given the multiple mediations of the

Experiment and its apparatus (fantastic or otherwise), it is important here to draw attention to

McKenna’s singular relationship with the spoken—and sometimes recorded—word. Though

Terence wrote influential and fascinating books—including the two texts he wrote with his

brother Dennis in the seventies, the head classic The Invisible Landscape and the pseudonymous,

game-changing handbook Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide—Terence’s practice as

283. See Gary Lachman, Turn off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (London:
Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001), 39-79.
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a writer needs to be put into strong, unresolved tension with his role as a speaking thinker and an

often improvisatory raconteur. This tension not only informs his creative production, but more

important for this study, it points toward an underlying metaphysical instability between speech

and writing that informs both the protocols and interpretation of the Experiment.

These days, the tension between spoken and written language cannot help but invoke the

specter of Derrida, whose entire project begins with a grammatology—a study of writing systems

or scripts—aimed at dethroning the “metaphysics of presence” associated with the spoken word.

Deconstruction seeks to dissolve the “logocentric” drive to discover philosophical foundations in

the spoken word into the distributed and iterative networks associated with writing’s inscription

machine, a post-metaphysical materiality of marks whose endless webwork of semiotic

differance necessitates a perpetual game or deferral of meaning that refuses to align with a world

of things or resolve into a stable meaning. Though “the Logos” was a key topos for Terence and

his brother, his metaphysics moves in a somewhat more jumbled direction. On the one hand, as a

child of McLuhan—who, along with Walter Ong, pursued a less critical form of

grammatology—Terence was comfortable with the concept that the technical or formal

dimension of a medium fundamentally shaped and constrained its expressive or even ontological

possibilities. On the other hand, he did hold out the possibility of a direct, “post-symbolic”

contact with the Logos, a notion grounded both in traditional Western metaphysics and his own

psychedelic experiences, particularly while smoking DMT.

That said, Terence’s vision of the Logos was principally that: a vision rather than a

conceptual system or even the hearing of a call. With smoked DMT, he emphasized, “language

was transmuted from a thing heard to a thing seen,” as “syntax became unambiguously
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visible.”284 Terence in turn hitched this revelation of language’s inner code to the ocular bias

that historians of philosophy have traced back at least to Plato. In Invisible Landscape, for

example, Terence and Dennis cite the philosopher Hans Jonas’ account of Philo Judaeus, the

thinker who fundamentally shaped Christian theology by bringing together Greek philosophy

and biblical hermeneutics under the sign of the Logos. Discussing Philo’s allegorical gloss of the

word “Israel” as the one who “sees God,” Jonas describes the idea that a “a more perfect

archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by

the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by

the mind as the truth of things.”285

Terence’s most famous analogy for such “post-symbolic” mediation was the vibrant,

signifying skin of the octopus—a pure surface of expression that in essence turned the mind

inside out, freeing it from the sort of “depth” associated with the layered and displaced meanings

of words and symbols.286 Such post-symbolic communication is the mode of mediation that

Alexander Galloway characterizes as “iridescent” rather than “hermeneutic:” a rainbow-like

effulgence of immanent intelligence that manifests as an “ecstasy of immediacy, producing a

short circuit of hyper-communication.”287 It is this ecstatic, rather than philosophical, sense that

McKenna meant when he described “the Logos” as a source or channel of information.

In the La Chorrera tale, the voice represents something trickier than vision, actually a

polyphony of voices that reverberate, call, and interfere. Along with the seductive narrative voice

of Terence on tape, we have the keening voice of Dennis, whose “machine-like” squeal catalyzes

284. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 16.

285. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966),
238.
286. McKenna, Terence K., The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual
Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 22, 231-32.
287. Galloway, et al, 28-56.
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the Experiment, as well as the mysterious Voice of the Other who appeared within the flow of

their own internal conversations with an alterity impossible for them to ignore. But this trial by

voice begins with a more humble and playful scene of inspired if not exactly Socratic dialogue.

The associative logic of cannabis conversation, already well practiced by the McKennas and

their friends, was only amplified when the group began spicing up their diet with the cubensis

mushrooms found in the fields. In his memoir, Dennis describes their effect on conversation:

“Puns came easily; our conversation was threaded with merriment and cleverness, all spilling out

spontaneously, with no apparent effort.”288

As the substance intensified the associative ping-pong of conversation, the McKennas

also found that their “funny ideas” were becoming increasingly arcane and speculative. Half-

remembered botanical articles triggered leaps into weird physics, ceremonial magic,

anthropology, and personal trip tales, with the result that the outline of the psychedelic

philosopher’s Stone and the experimental protocols to forge it began to appear. This was, it is

important to emphasize, a collective dialogic operation: while many components from Crypto-

Rap re-appeared, Dennis was more than capable of keeping up with Terence, and would take the

lead in the technical fabrications to come.289

The circuit of their wild theorizing ramped up to the point where they began to sense that

an “other” was present for their conversations, a kind of ontologically independent overtone of

their dialogue—or, arguably, a mascot for their growing folie a deux. Dennis writes that this

Other seemed to lead them in some “nonverbal or perhaps metalinguistic” way toward certain

conclusions. “We came to think of this other as ‘the Teacher,’” he writes, “though it was unclear

288. McKenna, Brotherhood, 234.

289. In Brotherhood, Dennis also mentions the influential friend John Parker, who befriended Terence in high
school, corresponded intensely with Dennis, and whose wide-ranging interests in magic, drugs, and biology, along
 239

whether that meant the mushrooms themselves, or if the mushrooms provided a channel for

communicating with some unidentified entity.”290 As noted in an earlier section, their accounts

of this Other are unstable; sometimes it appears to speak, other times to communicate in

“nonverbal or perhaps metalinguistic ways”; sometimes it seems to be the animist spirit of the

fungi, at other times a far more galactic intelligence streaming through the portal of the

compound.

Resonance

By this point, the Experiment was already being prepared, and with it the inevitable

question of psychopathology. The undomesticated storm of ideas spilling out of the two brothers

led to a significant social divide in the group, as Vanessa and Dave, holding to their skepticism

and uncomfortable with the increasingly feverish tenor of the talk, moved their accommodations

while the brothers and Ev continued their mushroom explorations. In a sense this social break

prefigures the one that impressed on all hearers and readers of this tale, which like most accounts

of high weirdness tends to polarize audiences between pathology and poetry, diagnosis and

delire, explaining and listening. Here, however, listening is the line in.

One evening in their hammocks, after consuming a hefty pile of nineteen fresh fungi,

Dennis described an inaudible buzzing in his head that reminded him of some of the glossolalia-

like phenomena Terence had reported on DMT. Terence asked him to imitate the noise, but

Dennis demurred. As Terence narrates,

withis “hashish-filled conversations”, minted “many of the ideas that Terence and I would later call upon to force
open the portal to hyperspace at La Chorrera.”
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While we talked, the drizzle lifted somewhat, and we could faintly hear the sound of a
transistor radio being carried by someone who had chosen the let-up in the storm to make
his or her way up the hill on a small path that passed a few feet from our hut. Our
conversation stopped while we listened to the small radio sound as it drew near and then
began to fade.
What happened next was nothing less than a turn of events that would propel us into
another world. For with the fading of the radio Dennis gave forth, for a few seconds, a
very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment's
silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. “What happened?” and,
most memorably, “I don't want to become a giant insect!”291

This blast of high weirdness kickstarted the Experiment proper, unleashing a flood of

conceptual production in Dennis, and giving the McKennas the core theoretical and expressive

element of their protocol: resonance. Before we continue with the story, we need to briefly

address this concept, which, as noted earlier, itself reverberates across and between mythic,

discursive, physical, and technical registers.

Recognizing the central importance of resonance to La Chorrera, Dennis provides a

formative example in Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. During high school band practice,

his instructor demonstrated the principle of sympathetic resonance: plucking the pitch (or

frequency) of A on a bass string caused cause nearby strings tuned to A to vibrate as well. When

the first string’s vibrations, rippling through the fluid-like air, encounter an energetic system

tuned to that same frequency, its oscillations feed energy to the second system, causing it to

sound in sympathy. Resonance here means two systems entering into energetic relationship

mediated by frequency, a mutual oscillation that, once begun, allows the second string to

continue to sound even if the first string is dampened. The phenomenon of resonance also allows

290. McKenna, Brotherhood, 246.

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a powerful singer to, at least theoretically (or in advertisements from the seventies), shatter a

wineglass by singing at a frequency that produces a standing wave in the vessel that produces

enough energy to put stress on flaws in the glass. Such a standing wave is known as the glass’s

“resonant frequency,” which is that particular frequency that causes a physical system to oscillate

with a self-reinforcing—or recursive—amplitude.

The phenomenon of resonance operates in many different physical systems, among

molecular particles, in neural tissue, and in a host of electronic technologies, and can therefore be

seen as one of the fundamental figurations of a cosmos that vibrates as much as it does anything

else. But resonance also resounds within symbolic, philosophical, and phenomenological

registers. The term derives from resonantia, the Latin “echo,” and one thing that physical

resonance echoes is earlier magical doctrines of sympathy, which Kocku von Stuckrad describes

as “a fundamental motif of esoteric discourse.”292 Among the Pythagoreans and Stoics, the

doctrine of sympatheia establishes linkages between different parts and planes of the cosmos,

and it also undergirds the famous correspondence between macrocosmos and microcosmos

established in the hermetic doctrine “As above, so below.”

This essentially erotic model of the cosmos, centered on attractive conjunctions and

networks of intimate relations, re-entered European thought through Marsilio Ficino in the

fifteenth century to eventually become part of the modern hermetic underground as well as a

significant topos for Romanticism. This resonant legacy took a particularly fascinating turn in the

nineteenth century, when the scientific investigation and theoretical description of the

electromagnetic spectrum laid the ground for a shift in esoteric language. Practitioners of

mesmerism and hypnotism spoke of the necessary rapport or sympathy between operator and

291. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 53.

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subject, while Theosophists began painting and describing astral “vibrations,” a term that itself

would be recoded by later New Agers as “frequency.”293 Indeed, one generalization one might

make about contemporary esoteric and New Age currents is that they frequently stress, in both

theory and psychophysical practice, a vibrating realm of “energies” that simultaneously follow

physical wave dynamics while eluding the measurement devices that normally detect such

frequencies. As such, despite their at least tacit relationship to a phenomenology of resonance

and other wave relationships, contemporary spiritual or esoteric discourses based on “energies,”

“vibrations” and esoteric “frequencies” are frequently discounted as pseudo-science. But

sometimes, as with the McKennas, a zone of indeterminacy is reached, where the systems that

are set in resonance cross multiple fields of physics, sound, symbol, and phenomenology.

And as the musicologist Veit Erlmann notes in his book Reason and Resonance, even the

physical phenomenon of resonance seemingly presents a challenge to the rationalist legacy of

modern philosophy. With its notorious ocular bias, the rationalist tradition frequently

characterizes the mind as a kind of mirror capable of capturing accurate representations of the

outside world while retaining separation from that world. “Resonance is of course the complete

opposite of the reflective, distancing mechanism of a mirror,” Erlmann writes. “While reason

implies the disjunction of subject and object, resonance involves their conjunction. Where reason

requires separation and autonomy, resonance entails adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of

the boundary between perceiver and perceived.”294

Erlmann explains that the dichotomy between the resonating string and the mirror of

reason lies at the root of some conventional models of historiography. These include both

292. Stuckrad, Kocku von, Western esotericism: a brief history of secret knowledge (London; Oakville, CT:
Equinox Pub., 2005), 19.
293. For a brief discussion of this term, see Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 238.
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Derrida’s distrust of the “metaphysics of presence” carried by the spoken word, and McLuhan’s

division between a premodern “acoustic space” of oral communication and a linear modern

world based on literacy and visual images. Pointing to contrary traditions like Romanticism and

twentieth-century phenomenology, however, Erlmann sets out to characterize resonance, not as a

vector of McLuhan’s “‘prescientific’ magic,” but as a contemporary feature “inextricably woven

into the warp and woof of modernity.”295 Here, however, McLuhan would agree, since in many

ways he saw and described electronic and electromagnetic media in terms of a paradoxically

resonant modernity, an archaic echo resounding through contemporary technology.

For example, let us look at—or rather listen to—the curious transistor radio that the

McKennas heard that evening. This radio seemed to play a catalytic role in the production of

Dennis’ eerie cry, as if the “small radio sound” filling the air coaxed Dennis’s inner audio—

which he compared in the diary entry he wrote the following day to “a signal or very, very faint

transmissions of radio buzzing from somewhere”—into expression. In Understanding Media,

McLuhan underscored the connection between the radio and the phenomenon of resonance. “The

subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique

drums,” he wrote in 1964. “This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to

turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.”296 Behind McLuhan’s claustrophobic

and colonialist language—with its hint of Jung’s “subliminal depths”—is the specter of Hitler’s

radio performances, and the widespread concern, among Anglo-American intellectuals both

during and after the war, that the fascist ability to mobilize such irrational and seemingly

294. Erlmann, Veit., Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone
Books ; Distributed by MIT Press, 2010), 9-10.
295. Ibid, 15.
296. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 299.
 244

“mythic” identifications on the part of the crowd was directly tied to the medium of radio and the

almost spectral power of the broadcast human voice.

For McLuhan, radio was the ultimate example of the extension of the central nervous

system, one that created “depth involvement for everybody” by echoing and resonantly

distributing the power of the previously most important extension of man: human speech.297 By

intimately and immediately delivering the human voice into the listener’s head, radio created a

condition where “hearing is believing.” McLuhan pointed to Orson Welles’ famous (if overly

dramatized) 1938 broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” as an example, though science-fiction

phantasms usually took second place in his account to more premodern formulations of unseen

forces, such as astrology and clairvoyance.298 “The effect of radio as a reviver of archaism and

ancient memories is not limited to Hitler’s Germany,” he wrote, perhaps providing the words for

what Terence would much later refer to, far more hopefully, as “the archaic revival.”299

McLuhan uses resonance as a conceptual figure to indicate an immediate sense of

involvement and intimacy that draws multiple individuals into a shared, potentially Dionysian

depth. This “all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness” also recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s frequent but

very different use of the term, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, where it is linked to the

“subjectivity of communication.” Resonance, for these thinkers, is a key engine of stratification,

the process whereby—in their jargon—singularities and molecular intensities are locked into

molar aggregates and larger systems of redundancy, whether geological or social.300 Resonance

is what organizes individual personalities into, for example, a nationalist identity. In addition to

297. Ibid, 299.

298. “The new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where
magic will live again: a world of ESP. The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no
coincidence.” McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview”, op. cit.
299. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 306.
 245

giving them a sonorous code for redundancy, Deleuze and Guattari use the term resonance

because its simultaneously technical, discursive, and mythological force accords with their

overall project, which is to produce transversal concepts that describe patterns and processes that

cut across both material registers (nature and technology) and cultural ones (language and

subjectivity).

This oscillation between material assemblages and psycho-social expressions is, from this

angle anyway, not so far from McLuhan’s own less rigorous characterization of the “subliminal

depths” of the radio. After all, McLuhan’s analogic interpretation of resonance as a conceptual

figure for radio’s power—and what is analogy but a kind of figurative resonance?—is replicated

exactly in the operational domain, since the strictly physical phenomenon of resonance defines

the technological action of radio tuners. That is, in order to select and amplify a single radio

frequency out of the thousands picked up by an antennae, radios use an adjustable oscillating

circuit, known as a resonator, to resound with the desired frequency. Here, then, is the secret link

between Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary: to tune in is to resonate.

In the diary entry he wrote the day after he first made the buzz, on February 28, Dennis

described the sound he heard inside his head: “something like chimes at first, but gradually

becoming amplified into a snapping, popping, gurgling, cracking electrical sound.”301 Such

sounds, again, are a regular feature of anecdotal accounts of psychedelic phenomenology,

especially in response to high doses of the tryptamines like psilocybin and DMT.302 By

300. “Strata are acts of capture, they are like ‘black holes’ or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within
their reach.” Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London:
Continuum, 2008), 40. In this sense, resonance is not a term of liberation but of redundancy.
301. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 68.
302. For accounts of sounds on DMT, see Strassman, R., Qualls, C., Uhlenhuth, E., Kellner, R. (1994). Dose-
response study of N,N- Dimethyltryptamine in humans: II. Subjective effects and preliminary results of a new rating
scale. Archives of General Psychiatry, 51, 98-108. For similar anecdotal material, see Beach, Horace, “Listening for
the Logos - a Study of Reports of Audible Voices at High Doses of Psilocybin’” http://www.maps.org/news-
letters/v07n1/07112bea.html (Accessed 2 February 2014).
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attempting to give physical voice to this virtual or “inner” sound, Dennis had to probe the

resonating capacities of the various cavities in his body in order to find, and construct, a

sympathetic vibration out of his voice.303 Once Dennis began imitating the inner signal, the voice

and the sound “locked onto each other” until “the sound was my voice.” Here we can see how

the nonlinear effect of resonance erodes the question of origins, and stages the conjunctive

relations Erlmann describes as adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the distinction between

perceiver and perceived.

Like the vibrations of an electrified guitar feeding back through an amplifier, the sound

Dennis was making—and that was making Dennis in turn—became “much intensified in

energy.” The mechanistic buzz took on a terrifying life of its own, as Dennis feared he might

somehow “become” the intensely resonating vibratory circuit that he and the sound in his head

were co-creating—a metamorphosis outside of speech and language that he imagined, or bodied

forth, as a giant S-F insect. But just as the concept of resonance operates on at least two levels—

the “a-signifying” behavior of physical vibrations and an analogic hermeneutics of esoteric

echoes—so too did Dennis’ buzz establish a circuit between self and its alterity, between noise

and sense, between a neurological artifact of pharmacological metabolism and the irruption of

the sort of spontaneous meaning-events that Peter Sloterdijk discusses in terms of a “message

ontology.” Dennis’s cry is at once a chaos and a call and response, and the indeterminacy is itself

a vector of the intensity, of the ontological warp. As McLuhan asked in The Medium is the

Massage, “What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?”304

303. Good singers can use the vibratory sensations or buzzes in their head and chest as feedback cues to guide their
vocal performance; in overtone or “throat singing,” these buzzing performances produce eerie higher-pitched wails
that transform a pure physical effect into expressive material that rides adopt the fundamental like a mirage.
304. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967), 12.
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In True Hallucinations, Terence tells us that, following Dennis’ terrifying first encounter

with the buzz, he opted to “calm us all” by telling a story, a narrative from his time in the East

that is presented to the reader as a chapter in his book, the remarkable “Kathmandu Interlude.”

Not only does this metadiagetic narrative embedding subtly draw the reader into the scene at La

Chorrera, placing us alongside Dennis and Ev, but it sets up an act of comparison that suggests

the “universality” of the sort of experience Dennis just had. In essence, Terence attempted to

tame (or amplify) the anomaly through narrative “resonance” across time.

While living in Nepal and studying Tibetan with a lama, Terence took LSD with a British

woman on the roof of his domicile. Smoking a large hit of DMT at the peak of his trip, he hears a

“high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping.” He encounters the “chattering of elf

machines,” which soon give way to a vision of flight over the Great Plains of Shang in the

company of an undetermined number of “silvery disks.” Returning to the roof, he and the woman

unexpectedly make love, howling and singing and devouring one another. “Everything had been

transformed into orgasm and visible, chattering oceans of elf language,” Terence explains. He

then sees something that utterly startles him: an “obsidian liquid” flowing over every nearby

surface, glittering with lights, a surface that seemed to reflect the contents of his own mind.305

Staring into the surface, Terence sees a scene of his Tibetan teacher looking into a mirrored

plate, a mirror he then realizes allows the lama to see him at that very moment. Finally, Terence

looks away.

This story, which mediates the weird events of La Chorrera through its own retelling, is

itself full of mediation, and particularly the fluid destabilization of two different sensory and

semiotic boundaries. One boundary is between a-signifying sound and signifying voice, the

“chattering” of machines and the “chattering” of language. This instability in turn sets up a more
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significant boundary crossing or blurring between speech and the visible—in Erlmann’s terms,

between the resonating string, which takes in every surface through fusion and contagion, and

the mirror of mind that registers a world of external objects.

The striking image of the “obsidian liquid” also tripped something in Dennis, who, in a

bout of journal writing the next morning, connected this material to a peculiar shamanic

substance described in a 1968 Natural History article by the anthropologist Michael Harner.306 In

his article, Harner describes how Jivaro (Shuar) shamans regurgitate “a brilliant substance in

which the spirit helpers are contained,” a material that can be chopped up and apportioned with a

machete.307 Running with the comparativist football, the McKennas blended Harner’s scant

details with alchemical echoes and their own experiences, experiences that were themselves

shaped by a crudely home-brewed ayahuasca the brothers added to their evolving drug regimen

at La Chorrera. Out of all this, they developed the vision of a magical “psychofluid” or

“translinguistic matter” that could extrude itself or leak from the psychedelicized body.

Whatever its degree of coherence, occult or otherwise, the paradoxical notion of “translinguistic

matter” reminds us that the McKennas were plunging into the abyss that conventionally

separates words and things, culture and nature, subject and object.

305. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 60-63.

306. Harner, who published The Way of the Shaman in 1980, went on to play a central role in the development of
(non-psychedelic) neo-shamanism in the seventies and eighties.
307. The use and lore surrounding such “shamanic phlegm” is widespread in the Amazon. See Michael J. Harner,
“The Sound of Rushing Water,” Natural History (July 1968).
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca_writings3.shtml (accessed Feb 1, 2014). Also Stephan
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The Stone

Over the few days following the buzz encounter, Dennis began to compulsively scribble

bio-ontological theories and design protocols in a feverish technical language. This information,

which he believed he was receiving from the Teacher, included the conceptual background and

procedures for a psychedelic operatio he believed would help produce and subsequently fix the

translinguistic substance of the Stone. At the core of these hypothetical protocols lay the

phenomenon—and analogy—of resonance. Dennis believed that the psychofluid could be

generated through the vocal effect he had discovered, a “psycho-audible warp phenomenon” that

generated “a specific kind of energy field which can rupture three-dimensional space.”308

According to this wild theory, the buzz that Dennis heard was caused by the “electron spin

resonance” of the metabolizing psilocybin alkaloids inserting themselves into the base pairs of

his neuronal DNA, a sound that was picked up and amplified through the “antennae” created

through the similarly resonating harmine alkaloids of the internalized ayahuasca. By imitating

this sound with his voice, its harmonic frequencies would be cancelled out, causing the harmine-

psilocybine-DNA complex to drop into a stable, superconducting, hyperdimensional state, with

apocalyptic results.

Though the challenge of understanding this account is in no way assuaged by directly

citing Dennis’ journals, it is worth doing so here in order to note the tone of the language and its

reliance on the physics of resonance as a passage between acoustic, electromagnetic, and psycho-

cosmic registers.

Beyer, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2009), esp. 81-92.
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When the ESR tone of the psilocybin is heard via tryptamine antenna, it will strike a
harmonic tone in the harmine complexes being metabolized within the system, causing its
ESR to begin to resonate at a higher level. According to the principles of tonal physics,
this will automatically cancel out the original tone, i.e., the psilocybin ESR, and cause the
molecule to cease to vibrate; however, the ESR tone that sustains the molecular
coherency is carried for a microsecond on the overtonal ESR of the harmine complex.
This leaves the momentarily electrically canceled and superconductive psilocybin
suspended in a low energy electromagnetic field generated by the harmine ESR. In so
doing, it will regain its original, but now superconductivity amplified, ESR signal, which
will permanently lock it into a superconductive state.

This superconductive condition would produce a standing waveform, a visible translinguistic

object or fluid hologram, that would—again through resonance—begin to broadcast the

information stored in the DNA. “The result will be a molecular aggregate of hyperdimensional,

superconducting matter that receives and sends messages transmitted by thought [and] that stores

and retrieves information in a holographic fashion in neural DNA.” This information would, in

turn, become interactively available to their no-longer-quite human minds.309 Extending the

eschatological speculations of Crypto-Rap, this assemblage of biological, electromagnetic, and

acoustic forces would result in a “solid-state hyper-dimensional circuit” capable of defeating the

tyranny of Time and initiating all of mankind into “galactarian citizenship” in the “hyperspatial

community.”310

308. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 69.

309. The importance of human genetics to the circuit in part reflects Timothy Leary’s own enshrinement of DNA,
which comes to play the role of God or dharma in his visionary materialism of psychedelic rapture. “That
intermediate manifestation of the Divine Process which we call the DNA Code has spent the last two-billion years
making this planet a Garden of Eden….We were all born Divine mutants, the DNA Code's best answer to joyful
survival on this planet.” See Timothy Leary, Start Your Own Religion, (Millbrook, N.Y.: Kriya Press of the Sri Ram
Ashrama, 1967), 1.
310. McKenna, Brotherhood, 256.
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How are we to understand this fantastic apparatus? For one thing, Dennis’ more-or-less

automatic burst of technical writing, scribbled under the guiding hand of the Teacher, offers

further support to Wouter Hanegraaff’s suggestion that the Experiment must be seen, at least in

part, as an instance of modern channeling.311 As Hanegraaff notes, channeling remains a poorly

understood phenomenon, but it can be characterized from a social scientific view as an

automatism that features inspired or articulated communication from higher entities providing

spiritual guidance and education.312 Unlike spiritualist mediums, with whom they heavily

overlap, channelers rarely make contact with the dead, and in this sense the practice is more

harmonically aligned with esoteric and occult traditions of intercourse with angelic, demonic, or

other praeternatural intelligences. There is, in addition, no shaking the technological overtones of

the term channel emerging in the nineteen-fifties, in the middle of the first century of

electromagnetic civilization.

One distinguishing characteristic of modern channeling is precisely the “technical”

quality associated with the term by the UFO contactees who first employed it, and who were

keen to distinguish the ontology of their practices from spiritualist mediumship.313 In the early

postwar years of the contactee movement, figures like George King and George Van Tassell

emphasized the quasi-electromagnetic factors involved in their communications. Van Tassel

311. See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “‘And End History, and to the Stars’: Terence McKenna and 2012,” in Carole M.
Cusack and Christopher Hartney, Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf
(Leiden, NL: Brill, 2009), 301.
312. See Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 23-34. Unfortunately, Hanegraaff does not emphasize the “technical” or
science-fictional aspects of channeling that help to distinguish it from spiritualist trance.
313. Gordon J. Melton, Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 269. The exact
origin of the term is unclear.
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spoke of “vibration reception” and the need to be “tuned in” in order receive “transmissions”;

some other contactees achieved communication through radio-telegraphy.314

Like so many of the esoteric currents of the contactee movement, this language shows the

heavy influence of Theosophy and its discourse of “vibration,” but here there is a more central

focus on the technical mediation and apparatus. Moreover, some early contactees also channeled

technical designs for machines that also frequently relied on analogues of conventional wave

physics. In the mid-to-late fifties, when he also organized the influential Giant Rock Spacecraft

Conventions in Landers, CA, Van Tassel built the still-extant Integratron from instructions

received from the space being Solganda. Though never activated, the barn-sized structure relied

on a Multiple Wave Oscillator to generate ultra wideband EMF signals capable of “resonating”

with and thereby rejuvenating human cells. Other contactees received plans for unusual media

that would, in turn, improve more conventional communication techne. In The Saucer Speaks,

George Williams tells the possibly apocryphal tale of an early fifties ham radio operator who

received channeled instructions for a new antennae, a “screwy kind of skywire, like nothing in

the books.” With his new device constructed, he was rewarded with a conversation with a

Martian.315

The hypothesis and protocols driving the Experiment at Lo Chorrera are far denser and

more intellectually sophisticated than most contactee lore, especially as they are formulated in

1975’s Invisible Landscape, which the brothers penned together. However, in his 2012 memoir,

Dennis writes that while many of his earlier words resemble “scientific jargon,” they are

“nonsense.” Having spent decades as a professor of ethnobotany and a commercial research

314. George W. Van Tassel, I Rode a Flying Saucer!: The Mystery of the Flying Saucers Revealed (Los Angeles,
Calif.: New Age, 1952), 16. Also see George Hunt Williamson, The Saucers Speak. A Documentary Report of
Interstellar Communication by Radiotelegraphy (Neville Spearman: London, 1963).
315. Williamson, 26.
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scientist, Dennis speaks here with the well-earned voice of reason—a voice that I suspect well

have been clamoring in the reader’s head these last few pages as well. The voice of reason here

is the mind in the mirror, the mind whose very capacity to render account of its knowledge of the

natural world rests on the clear separation between subjects and objects.

The younger Dennis’ discourse still speaks with the voice of resonance, a feature of

material existence that—both for the polyvalency of the term and the phenomenological fusion it

represents—erodes the crisp boundaries between subject and object, mind and nature. Though

this language may not be science, the machine that it diagrams is still a machine, a weird or

science-fictional device that, as it were, orchestrates resonance and transversal conjunctions

across a multiplicity of domains, including imaginative ones. Hanegraaff notes the science

fiction here, arguing that Dennis’s language “sounds exactly like the type of technological jargon

familiar from the Startrek (sic) series, which is at the origin of the ‘warp’ terminology as well.”

For Hanegraaff, this S-F language helps underscore the delusional quality of Dennis’ ideation,

though, as he feels the need to reassure the readers, “there is no doubt that the two brothers took

it completely seriously.”316

But this only begs a larger question: what is “science fiction,” and what do we do with it

when we find it within the protocols of extraordinary experience and the language of spiritual

anthropotechnics? Here we are helped enormously by a recent theory of science fiction offered

by literary critic Seo-Young Chu. Chu’s argument inverts Darko Suvin’s influential account of

science fiction as a nonmimetic discourse that produces its effect of “cognitive estrangement”

through the construction of at least moderately plausible imaginative extrapolations. Instead, Chu

argues that S-F, like realist fiction, remains a form of mimesis and representation. What has

changed is the sort of objects represented.

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In contrast to the ordinary objects encountered in realist fiction, like chairs and tables, the

mimetic representations found in science fiction are anomalous but real objects—like cyberspace

or black holes—that “are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging.”317 These estranging and

elusive objects somewhat resemble the “hyperobjects” characterized by Timothy Morton in a

book of the same name, which he defines as objects—like climate change and relativity—that

are so vast in space and time that they severely challenge our normal modes of reasoning about

or picturing that vast category of “objects.” In Chu’s view, then, science fiction is a general

mimetic strategy that attempts “to perform the massively complex representational and

epistemological work” of making inaccessible referents available to our understanding. As such,

she suggests that surrealism could be seen as a mode of S-F whose referent is “the phenomenon

of dreaming.” The referent belonging to fantasy’s is “the prodigious working of the human

imagination” while gothic horror bodies forth “the occulted-yet-irrepressible unconscious.”318

As we saw with Crypto Rap, both Terence and Dennis took the discourse of science

fiction seriously, as both a speculative engine and a representational interface for engaging

cosmic (or naturalistic) alterity. If we read Dennis’ circuit diagram as a science fiction in Chu’s

sense, what elusive object is it attempting to mimetically represent? Beyond the immediate

bizarreness of the mysterious buzz, Dennis’s diagram could be said to provide a fictional

representation of the phenomenological characteristics of the high-dose tryptamine trance itself.

Once again, the medium is the message, and the message, driven by a metabolic compound

perturbing the human nervous system into creative symptomology, is weird. The relatively

stabilized patterns of waking cognition are destabilized into a chaosmos of energetic, perceptual,

cognitive, temporal, and, yes, ontological rhythms and intensities.

316. Hanegraaff, “‘And End History, and to the Stars’”, 299.

317. Chu, 3.
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Many of these phenomena—most obviously perceived in certain audio-visual

phenomenological patterns—feature an iterative, reverberant, and vibratory character that is

rather easily assimilated to the semi-formal language of frequency and signal processing. James

Kent, an independent researcher, has described a number of these effects in his book Psychedelic

Information Theory (2010). Though not a work of peer-reviewed scholarship, and not without its

own science-fiction twists, the text is a deeply researched and largely level-headed speculative

attempt to account for psychedelic phenomenology along neurological lines. Kent too turns to

the language of oscillation, entrainment, and resonance. For Kent, psychedelics destabilize the

top-down control that maintains the continuity of waking consciousness across multiple neural

oscillators; “when the modulatory driver maintaining global oscillator coherence is interrupted,

uncoupled oscillators will naturally fall into synchrony with [the] most energetic periodic drivers

in the environment.”319 This openness to environmental feedback not only feeds cross-sensory or

synesthesiac effects (think “visible language”) but helps explain the often powerfully entraining

effects of external drivers, including many shamanic (and EDM party) techniques. Dancing,

drumming, singing, chanting and rocking back and forth all act as periodic drivers. As such,

Kent writes, “the shaman is the primary energetic driver, or resonator, stabilizing attractors

318. Ibid, 9.
319. James L. Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason (Seattle, WA: PIT
Press/Supermassive, 2010), 51. Kent’s theory has received some support by one of the more significant psychedelic
studies of late. In 2011, Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues used fMRI to show that psilocybin decreases blood
flow to the brain, especially in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. Some
of the heaviest hit regions have been associated with the “default mode network“, often associated with a sort of
resting state of subjective awareness. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs
are strongly correlated with decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of
unconstrained cognition.” Carhart-Harris RL, Erritzoe D, Williams T, Stone JM, Reed LJ, Colasanti A, Tyacke RJ,
Leech R, Malizia AL, Murphy K, Hobden P, Evans J, Feilding A, Wise RG, Nutt DJ (2012) Neural correlates of the
psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109:2138-43.
 256

within the chaotic hallucinogenic interference patterns created in the consciousness of the

subject.”320

The plans for the solid state philosopher’s circuit can thus be seen, in part, as a science

fictional attempt to model the impossibly complex interference patterns and oscillating resonance

effects that energetically characterize high-dose psychedelia, at least “from the inside” (whatever

that exactly means). However, on the eve of their Experiment, Dennis and Terence were not just

speculatively diagramming circuit-board representations of psychedelic limit experiences.

Instead, they were preparing to activate those schema as productive programs within the

vertiginous ontological theatre of metabolizing psychedelic phantasms. As Dennis writes, “The

goal wasn’t simply to test the hypothesis but to fabricate an actual object within the alchemical

crucible of my body.”321

To articulate the creative dynamics of this event, to which we now turn, we need more

than the language of neural oscillators and resonance effects. This is true whether or not such

terms are being used in an “etic” or “emic” sense—that is, as neurological explanations or New

Age codifications. Instead, we need a way to recognize and articulate the specific creative

tensions, anthropo-technical procedures, and cognitive scripts that stage, construct, and crystalize

extraordinary experience on the fly. Given the assemblage being constructed, such an approach

will necessarily be heterogenous, sensitive to both naturalistic accounts of consciousness and the

productive and even ontological dimensions of imaginative discourses like science fiction and

esoteric discourse. In other words, Dennis’ turn to the warp of science fiction—which is also a

turn to the weird—represents more than a tripper’s hazy sampling of a TV show in order to

mimic the authoritative discourse of science. It also represents the selection of a module for a

320. Kent, 55.

321. McKenna, Brotherhood, 246.
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bootstrap program of psychedelic constructionism, and an enunciation of the creative potential of

the weird as both a genre of wayward representation and a practice of unrepresentable wonder.

The Experiment

The Experiment began on March 4th, a date whose homophonic overtone was not lost on

the brothers McKenna. They drew a circle on the floor of their hut marked with the four

directions, and then set drawings of I Ching hexagrams at each of these cardinal points. In the

center of the circle, they set a large fresh mushroom, which would provide the material template

for the holographic Stone. They then suspended the chyrsalis of a blue morpho butterfly nearby,

an ancient archetype for the sort of material metamorphosis they were aiming for. Whatever mad

science was running about in their brains, in other words, their ritual diagram certainly represents

a more than “naturalist” array of figures and forces, however coherent the naturalism. Moreover,

this diagram was to be performed. As Terence noted, “We were operating in a world where

scientific method, ritual, and participation mystique were inseparably intertwined.”322

The protocols and conceptual apparatus of the Experiment unite unlikely electromagnetic

and acoustic wave phenomena, working across vast scales, with explicitly occult designs. How to

interpret this heterogenous and partly fantastic assemblage of forms and forces? Here I am

reminded of the Electric Pentacle that appears in some of the Carnacki occult detective stories

written by the early weird fiction master William Hope Hodgson. In many of the occult detective

stories of the era, investigators solve problems with clever ratiocination, but as Eugene Thacker

explains, Carnacki combines “rational ‘scientific’ thinking with the appropriate tools for the

322. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 94.

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job.”323 These tools include occult devices like the Electric Pentacle, which uses a steampunk

array of battery-powered vacuum tubes to construct a more or less traditional magic circle.

Carnacki’s inspiration for the device, a lecture on “Astral Vibrations Compared with Matero-

Involuted Vibrations below the Six-Billion Limit,” reminds us once again how the fringe

vibration models of Theosophy reverberate in the gap between electromagnetic action and occult

forces. But unlike many traditional magic circles, Carnacki’s Electric Pentacle does not act as a

protective barrier between the natural and supernatural. Instead, it serves to focus and intensify

“the passage between them.”324

The invocation of a fictional device is appropriate here, and not just because the

McKennas took science fiction and supernatural horror seriously as models of the mysteries they

were pursuing. As Thacker notes, Hodgson’s early twentieth-century blend of science and

sorcery is not simply a fictional gesture. At the same time, nonfiction writers like Charles Fort

were plying similar waters, which we might characterize as proto-paranormal, or, truthfully, as

“Fortean.” What unites both fictional and parafictional or paranormal strategies, I would argue, is

the genre or generation of the weird, an uncanny zone of possibility whose play between the

natural and the supernatural already tropes the literary ambiguity between fiction and factual

prose. This zone, in other words, can be approached from the other side, something that Chu

already suggests by arguing that science fiction is a strategy of representing real objects that

otherwise elude representation through their elusive, cosmic, complex, or monstrous character.

In these terms, Hodgson uses the Electric Pentacle to stage a glimpse of the impossible but real

limit of supernatural horror. For Chu this final object suggests the unconscious, while Thacker

323. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Ropley: Zero, 2011), 68.
324. Ibid, 72.
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more intriguingly argues that the object of horror is at root simply the opacity of nature itself, an

occulted world that can never show us anything more than its own hiddenness.

But what were the McKennas attempting to capture or construct with their weird device,

which loops together binary oracles and resonance effects, Attic symbols and alkaloids? One

thing to emphasize is that their goal was not simply or even primarily a matter of the soul or

“spiritual” dimensions—in other words, of interiority. Instead they wanted and believed they

would manufacture an artifact out of material potential; if theirs is still a psychedelic mysticism,

it is an object-oriented psychedelic mysticism.

Faced with these sorts of alchemical claims, many will be led to take the view that, absent

a coherent scientific or even technological orientation, the most such peculiar rituals could

achieve are purely interior psychological effects. Whatever their weird protocols might achieve,

these productions arise only on the inside, making them less a matter of discovery or invention

but a mere phantasm of projection, association, and delire.

There is another approach we might take, however, one that foregrounds the particular

form that characterizes the sort of multimodal assemblages the McKennas had built in their

heads and in their hut: the form of the network. As Bruno Latour remarks, the network approach,

in which every node has a role to play, asks us to replace the binary split between psychological

insides and material outsides with an account of the apparatuses necessary for the “production of

interiorities.”325 In other words, interiority takes place within extensive “psychogenic networks”

that stage subjectivity precisely by crossing inside and outside.326 In his account of such

productions, Latour offers a partial list of interiority networks, which include drugs, television,

325. Latour, Inquiry, 186.

326. Ibid, 188.
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romance magazines, psychotherapy, horror movies and kid’s toys. It is perhaps not accidental

that a number of these characteristic networks rear there heads in the run-up to the Experiment.

In this way we might say that one underlying intuition driving the Experiment is the

active role played by psychogenic networks in the transformation of psychedelic subjectivity.

The alchemical materialism at La Chorrera, with its networked resonance effects jumping scale

between electrons and voice and symbol, could be seen as a kind of allegory for the very

exteriority of the material and incorporeal arrays that help produce, or stage, extraordinary

experiences on the perceptual organ of interiority.

This inside-out move helps explain one peculiar feature—or one particularly peculiar

feature really—of the McKennas’ earlier speculations about translinguistic matter. In their

thoughts, this shamanic phlegm was the result of the “rotation” of tryptamine through the fourth

dimension, such that the resulting “‘trip’ was on the outside of the molecule.”327 In his book,

Dennis attempts to clarify this doozy with the image of the inert molecule as a 3D score that

requires the instrument of the human body in order to unfold into the “pharmacokinetic

symphony” experienced as the trip. A wild, impossible notion for sure, but it also reflects the

dimension of exteriority internal to their experiences, the pharmacological, technological, and

discursive networks that drove their subjective transformation. In this way, their science-fiction

fantasy—their apparatus of weirdness—refuses the usual model of drug action as a metabolic

process internal to the body that triggers endogenous effects in the nervous system. With their

protocols, the McKennas were inserting themselves into an array that stitched together of

biological agents, cosmic resonances, and inherited cartographies, shamanic and fictional alike.

After setting up their ritual array, Ev, Dennis and Terence drank a small amount of home-

brewed ayahuasca, ate some mushrooms, and lay back in their hammocks in anticipation. Dennis
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then performed his vocal operation three times in succession that night, each time releasing an

“unexpectedly mechanical” yowl Terence compares—in the account he gives in True

Hallucinations, which Dennis cites at length in his text—to a bull-roarer, whose vaguely

electronic and undoubtedly ritualistic buzz was first engineered in the late Paleolithic. How

might we characterize Dennis’ catalytic sound? It seems at once a ritual vocalization and an

energetic trigger, an invocation and an amplification, both a reflection of and a technique for

breaking down the difference between his own sounding and the object-sound within.

Here we might recall Felix Guattari’s transversal notion of enunciation, of “enunciative

substances which can be, on one hand, linguistic, but on the other, of a machinic order,

developing from ‘non-semiotically formed matter.’”328 This criss-cross of sign and signal, of

moon-howl and the “unexpectedly mechanical” buzz, installs itself, Guattari says, alongside and

before subject/object relations. For Guattari, this zone of prepersonal fusion—which registers as

empathy, as psychosis, as suggestion and participation mystique—contains the existential seed

for the further production of subjectivity, rather than the usual signifying suspects: cultural or

genetic scripts, or binary codes that obey the law of the excluded middle. Guattari calls this

process “subjectivation,” resulting in a “transversal” conception of subjectivity that emphasizes

both the active rupture of dominant semiotic redundancies and the conjunctive or mutant

crystallization of novel subjectivities at the creative edge of becoming.

As a model of human subjectivity, Guattari’s deeply “interdisciplinary” views may seem

excessively recondite, even eccentric. But they are almost tailor-made for understanding the

protean phenomenology of psychedelic experience, whose pathologies veer into the psychotic

terrain Guattari gestures towards, and that the man was thoroughly familiar with as a practicing

327. McKenna, Brotherhood, 246.

328. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 24. The quote is Hjelmslev’s.
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albeit unconventional psychiatrist. Faced with the high weirdness of La Chorrera, we are, as

interpreters or experts, confronted right off the bat with what Guattari names an ethical choice.

“Either we objectify, reify, ‘scientifise’ subjectivity, or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the

dimension of its processual creativity.”329 This latter path, which emphasizes both singularities

and the multiplicities that stage them, follows an “ethico-aesthetic” paradigm that creatively

relates the project of subjectivity to its emmeshment within external, non-discursive machines

and its investment in new cartographies of forces that emerge from the very diagrammatic

processes that map them in the first place. “One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the

same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette.”330 These creative if abstract

machines move transversally and conjunctively across multiple domains of knowledge and

expression, constructing both “self-referential existential Territories” and new incorporeal

“universes of value and reference.”

These are weird words of course—Guattari writes his own kind of science fiction. But

more simply said, the act of enunciation draws from both discourse and vibration, but most

essentially it acts in a manner that grounds its own referents in the “event of their appearance.”

Enunciation is therefore a bootstrap affair, a “mutation” of subjectivity that generates both new

places to be and “incorporeal domains of entities we detect at the same time that we produce

them, and which appear to have been always there, from the moment we engender them.”331

This doesn’t mean you get the entities you expect. As the third siren-like sound died

away, the brothers and Ev heard a cock crow three times. But despite this spontaneous and

vaguely biblical addition to the resonating network, and despite their conviction that they had

indeed passed into a world-rending novum, the mushroom in the center of the circle did not

329. Ibid, 13.

330. Ibid, 7.
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disappear, or explode, or spontaneously cool to absolute zero, leaving the expected lens-shaped

hologram hovering over the floor. This is almost certainly because, Dennis now says, “such an

event would have violated the laws of physics.”332 However, the two brothers did experience a

shared hallucination, as Dennis gestured towards the stubbornly untransformed mushroom that

appeared to Terence, at that moment, like the big blue marble on the cover of the Whole Earth

Catalog. “It is our world,” Dennis declared. Later, Terence reflected on his own transient

impressions of this moment. “I did not understand, but I saw it clearly, although my vision was

only a thing of the moment.”333

A thing of the moment—what a subtly felicitous phrase. For what is a hallucination but a

“thing of the moment”—an evanescent object whose phantasmic but real existence is marked

precisely through its absence of the usual modes of substantial continuity? A nameless creature

fluttering at the edge of our vision, our own name cried in a crowd, a leering face in the

slipstream cracks of a nap. It is the short duration of such figments that allows them to appear

without needing to be or suggesting anything other than the event of their appearance. It is time,

rather than some manner of substance, that initially lends consistency to anomalous perceptions,

whose duration often determines the degree to which we or anybody else feel compelled to

account for such appearances. To see an anomalous object, like a miniature earth, is one thing if

it is seen but for a moment. To see it for an extended period of time could of course still be

considered as a hallucination or a delusive perception, but it is a hallucination that installs itself

in a continuous enough fashion that both the experiencer and the careful observer have to deal

with it, one way or the other.

331. Ibid, 17.

332. McKenna, Brotherhood, 260.
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Weird Media

For nearly two weeks after the Experiment, Terence and Dennis had a lot of high

weirdness to deal with. Dennis spent most of the time “definitely disengaged from reality,” while

Terence was unable to sleep, and witness to an array of synchronicities, time-slips, paranormal

events, and seemingly posthuman states of cosmic consciousness. In most of these, however, we

can recognize how visionary experience, however novel and striking, offers a play between

present anomaly and past program, or script. Let’s take, as one example, the matter of the silver

key. While Dennis raved, Terence placed himself in the position of alternately egging on and

questioning his brother, even demanding that he produce the Stone as promised. During one

conversation, the brothers recalled a tiny silver key from their childhood, a long-lost item that

once had opened the secret compartment in a box of inlaid wood owned by their grandfather. In

their conversations, it had come to serve as an “alchemical analogue” for the philosopher's stone,

and Terence asked Dennis to produce it as evidence of his new powers. After wrangling back

and forth, Dennis asked for Terence’s opened hand, and then slapped a small, silver key into his

palm.

At the time I was thunderstruck. We were hundreds of miles from anywhere. He was
practically naked, yet the key before me was indistinguishable from the key of my
childhood memories. Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now, in the
middle of the Amazon, to completely distort my notion of reality? Or was this only a
similar key that Dennis had been carrying when he arrived in South America, but that I
had somehow not noticed until he produced it? This seemed unlikely...

333. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 109.

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On stage, in a seance, or in a parapsychology lab, this sort of apport or manifestation

would smack of legerdemain. Out in the jungle, it takes on a more jagged and anomalous

character, one that Dennis does nothing to dispel in his account, which backs up Terence’s story

while claiming total ignorance about how he pulled off the performance. Of course, the tale is

still nothing more than an anecdote, and from less than reliable witnesses at that, splashing as

they were in the deep end of folie a deux. But unlike the purely verbal or semiotic character of

many synchronicities, the physical manifestation of the key adds a concrete twist to the tale,

establishing a “thing of the moment” that stubbornly lingers, both for the McKennas and—unless

we call them liars—us. Perhaps Dennis just happened to have a small, silver key on him. Perhaps

it was a mutual hallucination, whatever that is. In either case, the absence that the key is for us,

reading this report, is inextricable from the presence of an empty lock that remains locked, an

impossible box that no mere razor, Occam’s or otherwise, can open.

The matter of the silver key itself is part of a larger discursive network, as Terence

himself admits ironically. He and Dennis were both fans of H.P. Lovecraft, whose work featured,

as Terence wrote, “many dimensions, strange beings, a cosmic time scale, and reckless, oddball

adventurers like ourselves.”334 One subset of Lovecraft’s stories have been classed by critics as

the Dream Cycle, and some of these tales featuring the the dream adventurer Randolph Carter

concern a silver key. At the beginning of “The Silver Key,” Carter, no longer the great dreamer

he was a youth, has become a dull dreamer and a quotidian mind. “Wonder had gone away, and

he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no

difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to

value the one above the other.”335 In other words, Carter is mired in an everyday rationality that

334. Ibid, 148-9.

335. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key”, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/sk.aspx.
 266

cannot recognize the extraordinary consequences that follow even from neurological

constructionism. In a dream, Carter encounters the shade of his grandfather, who tells him of a

silver key in the attic, a key that when discovered returns Carter to the world of his childhood,

and eventually leads to his physical disappearance. In a later story, “Through the Gates of the

Silver Key,” the peculiar Swami Chandraputra tells the deeply psychedelic story of Carter’s

return to the Dreamlands, a tale “full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which

have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams, and are taken as matters

of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-

dimensional logic.”336 Part of the game of fantastic literature is of course to bring the reader to

the threshold between the two worlds of waking life and dream.

A similar “psychogenic network” of weird tales and paranormal concepts also inform the

remarkable UFO sighting that Terence reports toward the end of their La Chorrera stay. Warned

by the voice that appeared regularly in his head to pay attention to a particular site in the

landscape, Terence was rewarded with the vision of the haze over the horizon separating into

four perfectly similar lenticular clouds that subsequently merged, “as if nature herself were

suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency.” The swirling clouds then coalesced into

UFO shape that sped his way with a high-pitched whine. Terrified, and finally convinced “in all

that had happened to us,” Terence watched as the shape approached him before banking steeply

upwards and disappearing from view. The vision was classic: “It was a saucer-shaped machine

rotating slowly, with unobtrusive, soft, blue and orange lights. As it passed over me I could see

symmetrical indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of

science fiction flying saucers.”

336. H.P. Lovecraft, with E. Hoffmann Price, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,”
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tgsk.aspx
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These genre resonances, however, did not match the peculiarity of the three half-spheres

on the craft’s underside, a detail that rendered the object identical to an infamous George

Adamski photo that was not only “widely assumed to be a hoax” but analyzed by some

debunkers as the end-cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. Terence, who maintained skepticism

about the UFO phenomenon throughout his life, was greeted not only with a vision of a classic

flying saucer, but a vision that simultaneously revealed itself as a script: “Was it a fact picked up

as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories

seem to have been?” Echoing the theories of UFO researcher Jaques Vallee, who argued in the

mid seventies that the meaning of UFO encounters lay precisely in the frequent absurdity of their

details, Terence reckons that it was the ridiculous echo of a pulp culture hoax that, in his case,

“achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely

convincing.”337

Other scripts can be recognized in the background of one of the most central features of

the high weirdness that emerged with the Experiment: the impression that Dennis, or an entity

within Dennis, had access to an “enormous, cybernetically stored fund of information.”338 Within

psychedelic discourse, we can trace this figure to Huxley’s deeply influential account of the

“Mind at Large” in the Doors of Perception. Huxley speculated that, rather than adding new

information to the mind directly, psychedelics simply dampen or block the cognitive filters that

normally restrict the overwhelming manifold of reality to the pragmatic constructs we require to

get through the day. As David Luke explains the concept, “Under such psychedelic disinhibition

of the brain’s inhibiting function, the mind is thereby capable of potentially remembering

337. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 168-9. As Terence himself noted in Crypto-Rap, this dissonant power is itself
related to one of the core polarities of the modern mysteries “Wherever the sacred comes tangential to the profane a
certain cosmic ridiculousness is generated.” [112] This notion bears sustained comparison with Eliade.
338. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 110.
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anything it has ever experienced and sensing everything within its immediate environment.”

Though the uncorked perceptions and memories of a single nervous system might still generate

the impression of infinity, Huxley expanded his notion of the Mind at Large to include a more

mystical and supernormal account of knowledge and consciousness. In this view, consciousness

is not so much generated by the brain as tuned by the brain, a more-than-individualized field that

by its nature has a collective and even cosmic character. By adjusting the frequency of the grey

matter, through drugs or other means of consciousness alteration, Huxley’s expanded Mind at

Large becomes available, and, as Luke says, “is also able to access the entirety of information

available in the universe, even forwards and backwards in time.”339

As students of esoterica, Dennis and Terence would also have been familiar with earlier

hermetic notions of supernormal memory and cosmic knowledge, especially as articulated in

Frances Yates’ influential 1966 histories of Renaissance hermeticism and artificial memory.

They also could easily have been exposed to the Key of Solomon, a text that circulated in

modern occult circles and mostly likely composed during the Italian Renaissance. In the text, the

magus greets and speaks with an angel in a dream: “And when I comprehended the speech with

was made unto me, I understood that in me was the knowledge of all creatures, both things

which are in the heavens and things which are beneath the heavens, and I saw that all the

writings and wisdom of this present age were vain and futile.” 340As I have earlier argued in

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, this hermetic notion of an

expanded god-like mind is not only easy to blend with postwar cybernetic notions of a “cosmic

339. David Luke, “Psychedelics, Parapsychology and Exceptional Human Experiences”, in Adams, Cameron, Anna
Waldstein, David Luke, Ben Sessa, and David King, Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness,
(London: Strange Attractor, 2013), 222.
340. The Key of Solomon the King, trans. S. Liddell Macgregor Mathers (London: George Redway, 1888).
http://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/kos/kos04.htm
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database,” but in some sense are unconsciously booted up by the secular discourse of digital

intelligence.341

As Guattari reminds us, “techno-logical machines of information and communication

operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but

within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms.”342 On the one hand, new technologies

become available as metaphorical supports for the ancient dreams, and possibly experiences, of

radically expanded cognition, especially those dreams that include more or less concrete worldly

knowledge amidst its storehouse of wisdom. Yet the new technological frameworks of electronic

and digital mediation also shift the dynamics of the gnostic vision, placing it onto a more

materialist and “profane” footing, one that also lends an element of absurdity to what might

otherwise be familiar “transcendent” claims of cosmic mastery over space and time. At one

point, for example, the bedazzled Dennis announced that he had discovered that he could cause

any telephone to ring, including any phone in the past. To demonstrate, he called their mother

sometime in the fall of 1953. As Terence reports, he caught her in the act of listening to Dizzy

Dean call a World Series game.

For constructionists, the presence of all these machines, weird fictions, personal

memories, and pop paranormal texts obviously implies that, in their psychedelicized state, the

brothers McKenna were simply running on a mix of previously existing codes and protocols. As

the older Dennis wrote, “We were following a script, but no longer a script we’d written.”343

Cultural programs mished and mashed in their very intelligent and devilishly associative minds

were executing in the free-wheeling perceptual maelstrom occasioned by extreme psychedelic

341. Davis, Erik, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony Books,
1998), especially 198-203.
342. Guattari, 4.
343. McKenna, Brotherhood, 259.
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arousal in an environment of socially isolated exotica. Other reflections from Terence on the

“mechanics” of his experience support this view. “Lines from half-forgotten movies and snippets

of old science fiction, once consumed like popcorn, reappeared in collages of half-understood

associations. Punch lines from old jokes and vaguely remembered dreams spiraled in a slow

galaxy of interleaved memories and anticipations.”

However, Terence offers a radical interpretation of the presence of these scripts, one that,

rather than explaining away the enigmatic patterns swirling around them through the mundane

origins of their elements, once again raises questions of anomalous agency and control. “The

overwhelming impression was that something possibly from outer space or from another

dimension was contacting us. It was doing so through the peculiar means of using every thought

in our heads to lead us into telepathically induced scenarios of extravagant imaginings, or deep

theoretical understandings, or in-depth scannings of strange times, places, and worlds.”344

This is certainly the sort of rationalizing logic that encourages some scholars to reach for

their razors. At the same time, there is an ingenuity here worth lingering over. Terence

acknowledges the existence and influence of material cultural scripts, fragments of images,

concepts, and narratives absorbed through a particular historical moment. In this sense, he is a

constructionist. What lends an otherworldly character to their appearance in cognition is both the

singular arrangements of these materials—scenarios, understandings, scannings—and the

impression that an outside, supernormal agency was performing these collages and

constructions.345

344. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 134-5.

345. It should be emphasized that, rhetorically speaking, a kind of nonhuman agency of a sort is also required and
invoked in conventional sociological or psychological explanations of specific acts of extraordinary cognition, in
that the appearance of specific repressed or cultural scripts is chalked up to the (usually rather vaguely stated) quasi-
agencies on the order of the “unconscious” or “social forces.”
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While this perspective might be understood through an optic drawn from the history of

esotericism, an illuminating literary parallel of McKenna’s preternatural constructionism can be

drawn from the thought of the poet Jack Spicer, one of the more experimental voices in the so-

called San Francisco Renaissance of the fifties and sixties. Rejecting the Beat emphasis on drugs

and Zen, Spicer nonetheless conceived his poetic practice along the visionary and loosely gnostic

lines of a “dictation” he received from what he would call “the Outside.” Displacing the hoary

tropes of Romantic genius, Spicer left the Outside radically underdetermined, emphasizing its

alien or impersonal character. As an analogy for this process, Spicer sometimes invoked

Cocteau’s use of the radio as a medium between realms in the film Orphee, but Spicer’s most

striking figure for the process of poetic dictation was the pop science-fiction image of

“Martians.” In a celebrated talk he gave in Vancouver, Spicer insisted that, while the poet needed

to actively and athletically empty him or herself or personality and desires in order to avoid

interfering with the “invading” poem, there was a limit to this ascetic process, since the

Outside—which was not, Spicer insisted, itself linguistic—still needed to use your language and

your memories.346 He compared the process to a Martian showing up and attempting to

communicate a message with children’s blocks in English: A, B, C, D. In other words, language

was just part of the “furniture in the room” that the Martians rearrange, the material of the host

that the “parasite” poem usurps.

However, though Spicer effected a decided and even prophetic turn away from the

numinous constructs of poetic “inspiration” to the materiality of language, the ontological status

of Spicer’s Outside remains crucially open, a zone of discovery and practice that is never

reduced to language as such. Spicer opined that the Martians—which he insisted were just a

346. See “Dictation and ‘A Textbook of Poetry’” in Spicer, Jack, and Peter Gizzi, The House That Jack Built the
Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Hanover [N.H.]: University Press of New England, 1998), 4-42.
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metaphor—didn’t necessarily care a whit for the poet, and “may be just as dumb in its own way

as you are. The Logos, in this deflating view, became the “Lowghost,” a contingent assemblage

art of phonemes and syllables, puns and what Ginsberg earlier called “images juxtaposed.”

For all their relative skepticism and rejection of hippy-dippy foolishness, Terence and

Dennis were not made of such stern stuff. Even before the Experiment, their messianic turn of

mind increasingly idealized the Teacher who seemed to be playfully leading them on. Even as

many of their wildest expectations were disappointed in the wake of the Experiment, they

continued to cut the Other a great deal of slack. On the one hand, Terence could not confirm any

of the answers he got from Dennis, and Vanessa, the “resident skeptic,” was unimpressed with

his answers to her mathematical queries. On the other, the brothers still felt that the Stone had

truly manifested, not in matter before them as they had expected, but in their minds. Soon the

entity within Dennis became an ongoing presence in Terence’s mind as well. They had planted

their flags, in other words, in the murkiest of soils: a voice in their heads.

Exactly how this McKenna database differed from the mushroom teacher they had

already encountered, or that stayed with Terence off and on in trips for years to come, is unclear,

and it probably makes sense not to split hairs here. The phenomenological situation is that even

before the Experiment, Terence was already having fleeting impressions of conversing with a

seemingly nonhuman, apparently higher intelligence in his head, which if anything only

intensified its messianic garrulousness following the Experiment. However, Terence’s conviction

in the global reality of their breakthrough and the redemptive significance of his internal

dialogue coincided, not coincidentally, with a serious degradation in both the supernormal

datastream and the social communications that held them together as a group.
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Soon Dennis was no longer able to follow the customary rules of discourse. He blurted

out unrelated material in the midst of other’s speech, spoke to himself incessantly, and often did

not respond when directly addressed. Meanwhile, Ev, Dave and Vanessa heard no teacher in

their heads, and the latter two in particular came to suspect that Dennis had gone temporarily

mad and that Terence was being absorbed into a maelstrom of transference. This was the “second

phase” of the Experiment, according to Terence, a time of “confusion for all.” More pointedly, it

was a time when the presence of psychopathology, like the mercurial flicker of the Other, could

no longer be denied.

Latour’s Razor

The elephant in the jungle of La Chorrera is psycho-pathology. Reading through all the

phantasmagoria and synchronicities, the drugs and the rants, many would be satisfied with

Wouter Hanegraaff’s parsimonious characterization of the Experiment’s results as “no more than

a temporary state of psychotic hallucination.”347 The question of psychosis is not just a question

we bring after the fact, but a possibility that was stitched into the core narrative of the McKennas

from the get-go. Even before the Experiment was performed, Terence was already wondering

whether his brother was “going bananas.” Soon both Vanessa and Dave answered this question

in the affirmative, demanding that Dennis—and by extension Terence—get help, and eventually

arranging for an airplane to fly the whole crew out of the remote village.

In every account that the McKennas made of the voyage, separately and together, both

brothers regularly introduce questions if not convictions about certain delusional or pathological

aspects of their experiences, including folie a deux, messianic inflation, suggestion, and other
 274

modern psychiatric categories. At one point in True Hallucinations, the older, narrating Terence

simply declares that his younger 1971 self had simply become “the victim of a cognitive

hallucination.”348

At the same time, both men, in different ways and to very different degrees, use their

later texts to keep open the possibility that, well, something happened, even if the exact nature of

that somethinghood remains out of reach, or intentionally left undefined. Such strategies of

ontological ambivalence remain a tried and true method for moderns wrestling with

extraordinary experience. Yet in their later reflections, when the craziness of youth could easily

be put behind them, both brothers instead continued to lean on stronger possibilities.

As we will discuss in the next section, Terence crystalized the temporal resonances he

experienced in the wake of the Experiment into the formalized Timewave theory he began

propagating a few years later. And despite his empirical training and professional status as a

scientist, the older Dennis also kept the door open on some of his baroque theories of resonant

pharmacological action. In his 1988 foreword to a German edition of Invisible Landscape, he

points out a number of dangling threads that might still be sewn up by science, some of which

are further developed in a speculative science-fiction mode in The Brotherhood of the Screaming

Abyss (2001: A Space Odyssey is mentioned.) But even here, Dennis does not attempt to

authenticate his continued interest in the events of La Chorrera with scientific speculation alone.

Personally and gruffly aware of the limits of scientific knowledge production, he maintains a

more broadly open-minded if somewhat shifty lack of resolution about the cause and meaning of

it all. He refuses to close off the call of the event; the buzz keeps resounding.

347. Hanegraaff, “‘And End History”, 302.

348. Mcenna, True Hallucinations, 111.
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This is not good enough for some readers. In a review of Brotherhood published on his

blog, Wouter Hanegraaff seems actively disappointed, if not annoyed, by “Dennis's inability or

unwillingness, even decades afterwards, to draw the obvious conclusion that what happened to

them at La Chorrera may subjectively have been very impressive…but can quite easily be

explained as a monumental psychedelic delusion supported by wild theories.” Hanegraaff’s

position here is easy to understand; if anything, it is strictly conventional. It must be said,

however, that his use of “delusion” here recalls a discursive strategy that also characterizes the

magisterial history of ideas he tells in his book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected

Knowledge in Western Culture (2012). Here Hanegraaff shows that, for centuries, the established

institutions of modern knowledge production have used “esotericism” as a site of exclusion, a

“wastebasket term” capacious enough to accept a dizzying range of discourses, concepts, and

practices whose very rejection from modern academic institutions helps establish the latter’s

rationalist authority.

Similarly, “delusion,” along with “schizophrenia” and “psychosis,” has long served as

wastebasket terms wherein representatives of rationalism might consign any number of neuro-

divergent behaviors, extraordinary experiences, eccentric cognitions, and singular if wayward

perceptions. Given the profound moral issues raised by theorists critically investigating the

history of psychiatric discourse, to say nothing of the contentious debates over the nature and

definition of consciousness that scientific naturalists continue to pursue among themselves, it

seems we should be wary of resting too comfortably on the orthodox realism that undergirds

terms like delusion and hallucination. Faced with the sort of existential and cosmic rupture the

McKennas confronted, the older Dennis’ bemused open mind still seems appropriate, at least to

this reader. Hanegraaff, however, offers only a tone of impatience and scolding. “I see no good
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reason to make such a big deal of it all, but Dennis seems determined not to apply Occam’s

Razor.”349

Ah, the famous razor. Few implements in the history of thought have the exacting profile

of this noble instrument of rationalist reduction. But how does Occam’s Razor really operate?

What does it feel like in your hand, and what does it make you want to do with it? In his An

Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour offers his own vision of the razor, no longer

the single blade of single vision but “a little case made of precious wood like those once used by

surgeons, in which a great many tools adapted to all the delicate operations of reason lie nestled

in green felt compartments.”350 These many tools are necessary because Latour does not believe

in a single path of optimum reduction, but instead directs his inquiry toward a manifold: not the

emergent layers of a single objective reality bubbling up from the laws of physics, but the

irreducible ontological pluralism of the existence we find ourselves negotiating every day and

every dream-racked night. Carrying forward James’ project of radical empiricism, Latour wants

to articulate and account for a far more multidimensional experience of reality than is available

through the Great Divide between nature and culture. This is still a work of reason, but it is a

capacious and situational reason beyond the limits of the rational. Rather than razor the world

into human subjects and scientific objects, therefore, Latour seeks to tease out, not a single

framework for reality, but a host of ontological modes that, rather than restrict true existence to

the products of scientific research, allow for “more diversity in the beings admitted to

existence.”351

349. Wouter Hanegraaff, “Grand Theories, Feeble Foundations”;

http://wouterjhanegraaff.blogspot.com/2013/03/grand-theories-weak-foundations.html
350. Latour, 19.
351. Ibid, 21.
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In his inquiry, Latour develops a taxonomy of these modes by establishing what he calls

“new felicity conditions” that authorize and establish different relations between language and

existence. The templates he devises—which he insists are not a finalized system but a work in

progress, which in form and content alike are open to collective revision—add ontological heft to

entities associated with specifically human practices like writing fiction and legal codes, while

also rejecting or disentangling previously axiomatic categories like “Nature” and “Matter.” The

apparently smooth and even common-sensical referent of the latter, for example, disguises what

Latour holds is the confusing (and sometimes disingenuous) amalgam of two very different

modes of existence. On the one hand, “matter” includes “beings of reproduction,” like worms

and mountains, who struggle to perpetuate themselves through their incessant and always

hazardous self-replication, a space-time repetition performed invariably with a difference but

usually only a slight one. On the other hand, “matter” in our current sense also involves abstract

“beings of representation” whose referential chains, which link them snugly to entities

encountered in other modes, are generated and sustained through scientific discourse and

practice. By blending these very different modes into one apparently simple category, moderns—

and especially positivists and naturalists—in essence load the ontological dice, establishing what

Latour elsewhere calls the “sovereign right of anyone wearing a lab coat to disqualify all other

access routes” to truth.352

Lab coat or no, one thing most moderns would agree on is that a voice in your head is not

the most reliable access route to truth, especially one you have come to attribute to a disincarnate

or extraterrestrial intelligence. Though the contemporary “hearing voices” movement is now

troubling the dogmatic psychiatric association of internal voices and mental illness, the

352. Ibid, 173. Needless to say, Latour’s argument is considerably more careful and painstaking than I have
captured here. For more, see 69-95.
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phenomenon is so tightly linked to psychopathology that it is easy to forget just how long and

how persistently such incorporeal voices have animated human experience, whether in poetry,

religion, or the occasional quotidian experience of a surprisingly large number of individuals.

The apparent obviousness of its pathological association is, like the concept “esotericism,”

another strategy of exclusion and disavowal. As Terence McKenna noted in the early nineties,

“Science has handled this problem [of discarnate intelligences] by creating a tiny broom closet

within its vast mansion of concerns called ‘schizophrenia,’ deeming it a matter for psychologists,

not the most honored members of the legions of the house of science.”353

For McKenna, this broom closet move, whereby heard voices are ontologically dissolved

into neural misfires or autonomous fragments of the unconscious, seems plausible to people in

direct proportion to their lack of firsthand experience of the phenomena in question. For

McKenna, there are two other distinct possibilities for understanding “disincarnate intelligences

and nonhuman entities.” The second is the cryto-zoological possibility that these entities exist

conventionally but are incredibly elusive, like the giant squid and, just possibly, the yeti. The

third option, which McKenna clearly favors along with the “shamans, ecstatics, and so-called

sensitive types” who often prefer it, is the ontological one. Here these entities carry on an

existence that stands apart from conventional “beings of reproduction” but remains, at least in

some sense, independent of their being perceived by human beings.

Before turning to one ontological template that Latour offers for such beings, we need to

underscore the depth and extent of such daimonic and disincarnate intelligences within the

metaphysics and mythology of the West. As the older Dennis wrote, though he and his brother

353. In Ralph Abraham, Terence K. McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos,
Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World (Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear & Co. Pub., 1992), 95.
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may have been delusional, “we shared that delusion with a long line of spiritual masters.”354

Invoking this immense history of arcana here is not an attempt to sneak in some sort of

comparativist evidence for their “actual” existence; after all, the very persistence of such

encounters might equally serve as the opening move in a naturalist deconstruction of the brain’s

hardwired cognitive fabrications. Instead, the point is to bring onto the stage precisely the sorts

of historical echoes and mythic analogues that might both authorize and retrospectively ground a

contemporary psychedelic experience of hearing voices.

In this light, the voice in Terence’s head is not simply the S-F overtone of a feverish

dialogue between two wild and interwoven thinkers, but a cybernetic rewriting of the older

Neoplatonic legacy of the daimon. Socrates, of course, claimed that a daimonion (“little

daimon”) had accompanied him since childhood, a “sort of voice” that he followed

unquestioningly and who largely restricted itself to telling the philosopher not to do something

he was planning to do, rather than egging him on to do something else.355 Rounding out this

vision, the Symposium explains the cosmological role of the daemoni, who operate as

independent intelligences mediating between humans and ultimate deity. These intelligences are

responsible for oracles and instructive dreams, and the humans who are skilled in communicating

with them therefore become “daemonic men.”356

Plato’s concept proved of great importance to Renaissance humanists like Marcilio

Ficino, who blended the nested cosmic spheres of Plato’s daimons with the hierarchies of Angels

described by Dionysius the Areopagite. For Ficino, daimons proper were elemental intelligences

354. McKenna, Brotherhood, 132.

355. Plato, Apology, 31d. In accounts of Socrates’ daimon offered by his students, the daimonion suggests things to
do as well as not to do, and also offers commentary on other people’s decisions, advice these people were invariably
pleased with. See Xenophan Memorabilia I.I. 2-4.
356. Plato, The Symposium, edited and translated by Suzy Q. Groden and John A. Brentlinger ([Amherst]:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 80.
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who inhabited the sublunary spheres and operated between humans and both planetary

astrological spirits and angelic intelligences. In order to establish oracular lines of

communication with these beings, hermeticists like Ficino often employed the arcana of

correspondences: multimodal associations of scents, metals, starcharts, and images that would

serve to call the appropriate daimon for healing or knowledge. These transversal networks

followed the logic that Foucault identified, in his discussion of the Renaissance episteme, as

resemblance, an umbrella term that included such familiar rhetorical features to our discussion as

analogy and the resonating vibrations of sympathy.357

By reframing and extending existing traditions of magic along Neoplatonic lines, Ficino

helped insure that theurgic ritual and what we might call “psychological” congress with daemons

become a signal leitmotif of a variety of modern esoteric currents. Though Ficino’s Neoplatonic

model largely leaves the problem of bad or lying daimons to the side, such concerns nonetheless

informed daemonic magic in both the medieval and early modern periods, when the contact with

supernormal or preternatural intelligences was often coupled, sometimes quite anxiously, with

strategies for assessing the possible diabolic origins of the entity. A famous example here were

the angelic conversations staged by the English Renaissance magus and mathematician John Dee

and his scryer, the alchemist and rogue Edward Kelley. Though seeking knowledge in a highly

devout manner, Dee and Kelley both were keen to test their conversation partners for any

infernal tendencies, showing that even in the heart of esotericist currents, a kind of skepticism—

or at least wariness—was not uncommon.

Dee was an important and charismatic figure for Terence, one of a number of figures in

esoteric history that he invoked as part of his ongoing interpretation of the La Chorrera

357. Though historians of the Renaissance resist the dominance that Foucault accords the logic of sympathy, his
characterization works wonderfully for the specifically hermetic and esoteric current that concerns us here. See
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experiences. One reason for this special attention, I suspect, was McKenna’s attraction to Dee’s

polyvalent historical and intellectual status—altogether routine for the Renaissance—as both a

scientist and a mage, a mathematician and a sorcerer. This is important because, however shaky

his own devotion to scientific method, neither the young Terence of La Chorrera or the older

Terence of the rave scene was seeking to reject modernity outright in the name of ancient jungle

wisdom or theological faith or a perfected state of consciousness, transpersonal or otherwise.

Instead, he wanted establish, discover, or imagine a parallel or “archaic” modernity that

somehow combined a freethinking temperament with visionary experiences robust enough to

stage an encounter with preternatural intelligences.

This may also be why, of all the historical encounters with disincarnate beings that

Terence could have discussed, the one he turned to most frequently concerned Descartes. In

McKenna’s telling, the young Descartes had a dream in which he encountered an Angel who told

him that “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.”358 McKenna

regularly quoted that line, and sometimes claimed that it came from Descartes’ own hand. But

while Descartes’ philosophical and rationalist vocation was certainly informed by a series of

three extraordinary dreams he had enjoyed as a young man in Ulm in 1619, we do not have

Descartes’ direct account. And the one we do possess features neither an angel nor even a rough

equivalent of that statement, which McKenna rightly dubs the “battle cry” of the science to

come.359

Foucault, The Order of Things, 19-33.

358. Terence McKenna often told this story. See Trialogues at the Edge of the West, 95; as well as the workshop
recording In Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Sounds True, 1992).
359. For a rich and counter-normative account of the religious and metaphysical implications of Descartes’ dream,
see Jacques Maritain, trans. Mabelle L. Andison, The Dream of Descartes (New York: Philosophical library, 2007),
especially 11-30.
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While McKenna’s take on the vision could be said to summarize one of the central

meanings Descartes took from his dreams, we are left with the question of why McKenna

returned so regularly to a story that he seems to have half-fabricated. One thing is clear:

McKenna was not party to the New Age rejection of the scientific method, or the seventies

gesture towards a “new paradigm” that might “unify” science and mystery and finally put down

the influence of Descartes, whose “dualism” so often comes in for attack in New Age movement

texts. Instead, McKenna wanted to locate and confound the origins of the scientific break itself,

and he did so partly by imaginatively fleshing out the origins of Descartes’ geometrical

establishment of the modern subject in an encounter with a transmundane Other who provided a

paradoxically rationalist injunction.

Flickering Beings

Looming over the simultaneous clash and superposition of science and numinous

encounter at La Chorrera was the spirit of Carl Jung, whose own thoughts on daimons and

disincarnate intelligences deeply influenced the mindframes and methods of the two brothers.

While Freud had acknowledged the independence of some unconscious forces, and even the

perverse drive of specific neurotic complexes, Jung insisted not only on the autonomy of many

elements in the psyche, but in their availability for personification as daimons, archetypal

figures, and the spirits of dreams. As William Rowlandson explain, Jung made a strong

distinction between the daimon in the singular and the plural daimons or demons.360 In his

autobiography, Jung writes of the “Daimon” as the libido force that drives an individual life, a

360. See William Rowlandson, “‘Necessary Monsters’: Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and the Ontology of the
Daimonic” in Daimonic Imagination (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 214-218.
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force that can appear as a God image or another archetypal entity but that ultimately announces

the unconscious itself. “We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we

know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its

own accord.”361

However, Jung distinguishes between this alien Daimon and the multiple “daimons” that

he associates with specific psychological complexes that have escaped control of the ego. As an

example, Jung points to the multiple personalities that some hysterics display, often with creative

flair and great coordination.362 But he also warns that these split-off figures can also lead to the

agonies of schizophrenia, wherein “the complexes have become disconnected and autonomous

fragments” that often “assume banal, grotesque, or highly exaggerated names and characters.” 363

In all these instances, however, the autonomy of such figures is in essence the autonomy of the

unconscious itself, and thus bounded by the same ontological shell as the mind that inhabits the

all-too-human side of the modern Great Divide. And this is precisely the perspective that the

older Dennis opts for when he explains the experiences of La Chorrera as the result of

“metabolic processes that caused a part of our brains to be experienced not as part of the self, but

as the ‘other’—a separate, intelligent entity.”364

Of course, in private, Jung leaned much further toward’s Terence’s view on these

phenomena: that they are somehow independent of human perception and consciousness. As

Gary Lachman argues persuasively in Jung the Mystic, Jung’s professional self-presentation as a

scientist in good standing belied the thoughts, feelings, and associations stirred up by the range

361. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 336.
362. One thinks in particular of the remarkable medium “Hélene Smith” studied by Theodore Flournoy in From
India to the Planet Mars (1900), a text that was, along with William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, a
crucial influence on the young Jung.
363. “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” in Jung, C. G., The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease: The Collected
Works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 3, Vol. 3, (Routledge & K. Paul, 1960), 235.
364. McKenna, Brotherhood, 248.
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of extraordinary experiences that marked his personal life and motivated his long-standing

interests in religious and paranormal phenomena. This nightside of Jung—which over time have

helped dethrone him from his perch of academic respectability—had plenty of room for daimons

with fattened-up ontologies. One early example comes from Liber Novus, which was written

during Jung’s own overwhelming “confrontation with the unconscious” in the nineteen-twenties.

Jung records one conversation with Elijah and Salome, two autonomous figures that consistently

came to him in dreams and visions. Jung tells them directly that they are psychic symbols of “the

most extreme contradiction,” but like those ornery characters we sometimes meet in dreams,

Elijah and Salome are having none of it. “We are not symbols,” Elijah replies, “We are real.”365

Decades later, in his UFO book, Jung replays this tension in a more public light. Jung

focuses nearly all of his study on the more interior or nebulous psychodynamic terrain of the

collective unconscious, a conceptual space that allowed him to address the full range of religious,

mythological and imaginal phenomena without having to go to ontological bat. In the final

chapter, however, he turns his attention to anomalous radar readings. This indicates that, though

he saw the saucers as visionary mandalas emerging from the collective unconscious, he also

suspected that they may also possess a material or at least electromagnetic signature, perhaps in

accordance with his curious theory of the “psychoid”—the same concept that folds into the

mind-matter Mobius strip of synchronicity.

Jung’s somewhat cramped and sometimes contradictory attempt to balance the objective

and subjective views of daimonic agents provokes an interesting footnote in the UFO volume.

Here he complains about naturalists attacking him for his metaphysics, and theologians attacking

him for his naturalism. “I am an empiricist,” he declares, “who keeps within the boundaries set

365. C. G. Jung, The Red Book = Liber novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 246.
Cited in Rowlandson, 217.
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for him by the theory of knowledge.”366 As Rowlandson points out, this response only begs

further questions, like what the “theory of knowledge” is. It does however establish two points.

One is that Jung’s entire career can be characterized as an intense and partly submerged

agon between objective and subjective views of the daimonic agencies and other anomalous

phenomena that overwhelmed him during the Liber Novus years. The other point to note is how

an expansive empiricism—particularly, one suspects, William James’ radical empiricism,

another important influence on Jung—shifts attention towards towards phenomena whose sheer

dynamic presence is itself capable of suspending the resolution between skepticism and

superstition. So while we might join the chorus in castigating Jung for his lack of scientific rigor,

or his desire to have his cake and secretly eat it too, we also need to offer a more complex

account of this fundamental ambivalence—an ambivalence that, incidentally, helps explain the

similar oscillation between skepticism and experiential conviction that runs through the reporting

of both McKennas.

Ambivalence, however, is not just a suspension, but an active and dynamic organizing

figure. Like Philip K. Dick, Jung was a dichotomous thinker who populated his sometimes twisty

texts with all manner of contraries, polarities, and paradoxes. “The conflict between the

opposites can strain our psyche to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us

seriously,” he noted in his autobiography. But the intellect itself held no relief. “The tertium non

datur of logic proves its worth: no solution can be seen.” In other words, Jung did not expect

logical or dialectical solutions to the problem of (daimonic) existence. Instead, he held out hope

that by living and even intensifying the contradictions, the antinomy might be resolved and

integrated through the symbolic operation of the coincidentia oppositorum. “If all goes well, the

solution, seemingly of its own accord, appears out of nature. Then and then only is it convincing.

366. Jung, C. G., Flying Saucers (New York: MJF Books, 1996), 328. Cited in Rowlandson, 209.
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It is felt as ‘grace.’”367 However adequate we might judge Jung’s thinking here, we need to see it

as more than a dissimulating faux-positivist “cover” for his occultism.

Similarly, while Dennis and especially Terence can be accused of inconsistency and a

refusal to get down to brass tacks, their own invocation of contrary possibilities can be seen as

gesturing towards a similar sort of impossible integration. Perhaps the challenge here, though, is

not to get too caught up with dichotomies in the first place. Latour founds his ontological project

on dodging the Great Divide between nature and culture, and remapping those relationships

according to a variety of different templates that multiply modes of existence rather than dividing

them into yet another binary set of terms. There are a number of ontological templates that

Latour offers that might help understand the mysterious Other the McKennas encountered, as

well as the larger class of daimonic intelligences that haunt high weirdness. The most relevant

category here is what Latour describes as “beings of metamorphosis,” a category—[MET] in his

argot—that he bases in significant part on the “invisible beings” associated, most visibly, with

the healing rituals of traditional and indigenous communities. He describes these scenes and

practices as “ethnopsychiatry,” a category that should certainly include most shamanism.

To establish the ontology of these beings, however, Latour insists on rejecting the

boundary fetish of Jung and so many doctors of the psyche, with their strict ascription of

invisible entities to interiority, to the unconscious, the neurons, “the twists and turns of the self.”

Whether psychoanalytic or cognitivist, the strictly psychological focus on interiority prevents us

from recognizing the complex agency of the psychogenic networks—texts, practices, drugs,

devices, weather—that help engender subjectivity, that constitute interiority, as it were, from the

outside. And there’s that word again: the outside. Whether its Lovecraft’s Beyond, or the desert

surrounding Diaspar in The City and the Stars, or the media technologies that shape cognition in

367. Jung, Memories, 335.

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its essential operations, the Other and the Outside meet within the network topology of an alterity

that at once eludes and constitutes the subject.

The other problem Latour has with psychology is that it obscures and distorts what one

might call the particular (and peculiar) ontological “style” of the beings of metamorphosis.

Indeed, Latour calls these beings “invisible” not to contrast them with a separate world of

visibility from which they are excluded, but rather to precisely underscore the absence of the sort

of sustained continuity we associate with more familiar objects in our world, like tables or chairs.

These beings do not persist, but they do appear and disappear—not unlike, he says, the special

effects in horror movies. This flicker at the edge of existence, uncanny and potentially ominous,

may tempt us to call these beings “occult.” But Latour strongly insists that their ambiguous

invisibility is not irrational, mysterious, or supernatural. Without “nature,” after all, there is no

supernature. And the rhetorical invocation of Mystery and other hidden powers, he writes, is

simply a rationalization provoked by the loss of the proper “interpretive key” to understand the

beings in question.

For Latour, the flickering ontology of the beings of metamorphosis derives from their

precise mode of articulation or what we might call “presencing.” This mode runs on a logic of

alterity, one that Latour locates in the common human experience of being taken over or

“targeted by” an emotion. However, Latour wants to stress the positive and productive “healing”

dimension of this temporary encounter with otherness as such. However traumatic, this crisis or

fit can pass into the recognition that the affects we believed were targeting us actually allow us to

live, and this perception takes the form of a kind of ensouled alterity. As such “we take them for
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others because they take themselves and they take us for others, thereby giving us the means to

become other, to deviate from our trajectories, to innovate, to create.”368

This capacity for transformation—which explains the role of invisible beings in

therapeutic healing—extends beyond human subjectivity. The beings of metamorphosis [MET]

also cross or disrupt the “beings of reproduction” [REP] described above, those entities like

bacteria and mountains that seek an iterative continuity of being with as few alterations as

possible. In contrast to these more visible beings, beings of metamorphosis seek continuity

precisely through alterity and transformation, a form of persistence “that is obtained by leaps, by

passes, by hiatuses through a dizzying discontinuity.”369 As such, to insist that such invisible

beings are (more or less pathological) products of interiority alone—whether nervous system,

DNA, or the unconscious—is to deny the exteriority that precisely announces their radically

dynamic alterity. In this network perspective, such beings “are no longer representations,

imaginings, phantasms projected from the inside toward the outside; they unquestionably come

from elsewhere, they impose themselves.”370

Though certainly provisional, if not elliptical, Latour’s account of the beings of

metamorphosis comes in handy when facing the sort of extraordinary entities that so regularly

crop up in experiential accounts of shamanistic, esoteric and possibly some psychedelic

practices. His template, however, is in no ways perfect. For one thing, Latour makes a strong and

problematic distinction between the beings of metamorphosis [MET] and the “beings of religion”

[REL]. The former, again, are affective spirits invoked through rituals—and Latour insists that

ritual is necessary to reach them—who are capable of transforming interiority as they

transversally cross us according to their dynamic of constant change. In contrast, the beings of

368. Latour, 202.

369. Ibid, 196. The shorthand is Latour’s.
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religion are principally associated with language, and particularly the capacity to call the subject,

by name, as a person.371 “Whereas the first metamorphoses are not aimed at us, even though they

arouse and transport us if we don’t manage to avoid feeling targeted, the second ones gather us in

and straighten us up by addressing us unmistakably.”372 If [MET] are the animal allies of the

shaman, [REL] are the angels of the Western theological imagination, except that Latour’s

messengers do not carry knowledge or information but rather operational “messages with no

content but transformation of persons.”

Latour’s Catholicism has played an important role in his thought, and certainly arrives

here at this juncture between [MET] from [REL]. Rather than place these differently oriented

others on a spectrum of continuity, Latour’s insistence on the sharp cleavage between them

reduces rather than multiplying the entities that call for ontological pasture. That said, though

Latour’s account is certainly marked with Christian exceptionalism, he does not revert to

anything like theological absolutes in his antifoundationalist account of [REL]. The Logos that is

carried by his beings of religion “cannot rely on any substance to ensure continuity in being.”

Therefore the Logos must be constantly, hermeneutically renewed, in a process that the

logophilic (and once Catholic) Terence would no doubt cheer.

But there’s the rub that puts the lie to Latour’s division between [MET] and [REL]: the

voice in Terence’s head, like the babbling elves of DMT space, are beings of language. In his

Esalen trialogue, Terence argued that “All of these disincarnate entities would be but dancing

hallucinations before us if not for their ability to address us in languages that we can

understand.”373 In order to address the sorts of entities that haunt high weirdness, whether as

370. Ibid, 200-201.

371. Ibid, 295-325, esp. 316-318.
372. Ibid, 302.
373. Abraham, et al, Trialogues, 98.
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aliens or preternatural intelligences or the phantasmic calling cards of certain molecules, the

affective otherness of [MET] needs to cross-breed with [REL]’s logos of knowledge and address.

This assemblage, however, also needs to take in a few twists and turns from yet another of

Latour’s templates: the “beings of fiction” we will turn to in the next chapter. For now we should

accept—provisionally, of course—that the entities whose forms flicker through the labyrinths of

high weirdness show the shifting signs alike of tricksters, aliens, angels. And like the elves and

gnomes that so amused Terence, they may be here “to remind us that, in the matter of

understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery of ontology.”374

The Tale of Two Books

In the years following the Experiment, Terence and Dennis returned to the United States

to pursue their own courses of research and exploration both within and outside university.

Living in Berkeley, Terence became obsessed with the I Ching and began constructing a formal

model of time and history out of the resonant reverberations of his La Chorrera experiences. His

mathematical and intensely apocalyptic speculations were so peculiar—and so feverishly if not

messianically pursued—that he alienated some of his more skeptical friends in the university

town, where he eventually settled after clearing up his legal troubles and briefly returning to La

Chorerra with Ev. In Boulder, Dennis embarked on a study of chemistry and botany that would,

inevitably, compromise (though by no means eradicate) his convictions in the integrity of their

vegetable gnosis—much of which, it bears repeating, he was unable to recall. Terence too would

eventually wind up with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation, but

intellectually and culturally the brothers began moving along different paths.

374. Ibid, 107.

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Nonetheless, their mind-meld re-crystallized into two very different books they co-wrote

and published in the mid seventies. The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I

Ching (1975), stands as a paragon of high-octane psychedelic speculation, a simultaneously dry

and delirious assemblage of anthropology, psychopharmacology, metaphysics and fringe science.

Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide (1976), which appeared pseudonymously under

the names O.T. Oss and O. N. Oeric, transformed the culture of hallucinogenic mushroom use in

the United States and elsewhere by providing the method for a relatively simple process of

cultivating Psilocybe cubensis. For the remainder of this chapter, I would like to look at these

two books in turn, approaching them less as texts in themselves than as devices that allowed the

brothers to continue to work out, work through, and constellate their extraordinary experiences.

Once again, the processes of ascription and attribution—whereby anomalous events become first

isolated and then woven into narratives and conceptual models that give them rhyme and

reason—is deeply related to the practice of inscription, to the acts of writing and publishing that

simultaneously condense and extend the concrete determinations that transform “ineffable”

experience into personal and cultural stories and structures.

Though The Invisible Landscape was not popular when it appeared, it eventually became

a sought-after collector’s item, particularly among readers of drug literature, countercultural

esoterica, and the “freak” canon of conceptually “far out” texts. Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry

Garcia, a more than adequate representative of such Fortean consumers of the weird, declared the

text “one of the most mind-boggling books I’ve ever read.” In addition to offering the first

published narrative of the Experiment, the book explored psychedelic psychopharmacology,

holography, the I Ching, and Whitehead’s process philosophy, as well as presenting surreal but
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highly technical and often abstruse accounts of the production of the Stone and Terence’s

concept of the Timewave.

Here I would like to look briefly at two aspects of the book: its initial engagement with

the concept of shamanism, and its formulation of the Timewave, without doubt the most

important and influential conceptual device in the book. (And I mean device: a visionary

mechanism, an oracular algorithm of resonant time.) Though Terence’s mathematical extraction

of a recursive and self-similar time function from the mechanics of the I Ching is, to be sure, a

somewhat recondite matter, it nonetheless would become highly influential in the popular

millennial counterculture of the nineties and 2000s because of the goal post the Timewave

erected on a now world-famous date: December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan long-count

calendar. In both cases, I am less interested in the conceptual details, however fascinating, than I

am in tracing how these discussions responded to and helped to conceptually “fix”—and

therefore retrospectively construct—the reverberations of extraordinary experience.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the McKennas’ discussion of shamanism is that,

in sharp contrast to the magical authority granted the shaman in more recent Western psychedelic

discourse, the figure of the shaman does not function for the brothers as an pre-modern ground of

authenticity, tradition, and earth wisdom. This is not to say that the McKennas are not

appropriating some of the exotic powers of the figure, which itself is a somewhat hazy

anthropological construct that became problematic, one might say, the minute it left its originally

Siberian locus to encompass consciousness-altering ritualists in Africa or Europe or the New

World.375 Rather that a holder of the ancient balance, the shaman became, for the McKennas, a

figure of modernity—not the benighted one-dimensional modernity of mid-century man, to be

375. For more on this story, see Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination
(London: Hambledon and London, 2001) and Noel, The Soul of Shamanism, op. cit.
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sure, but a possible (trans)modernity capable of integrating and navigating non-rational

experience without retreating into myth.

Clearly drawing from Eliade, the McKennas describe the contemporary subject as

“anguished by the imminence of death, yet trapped in profane, historical time and thus able to

regard death only as nothingness.” And it is from the edge of this abyss, shorn of the “saving

presence of a sacred, transcendent mode of being,” that such individuals “can perceive a useful

role for a modern shamanism.”376 Even as the McKennas look to Eliade’s portrait of these

“technicians of the sacred” to provide meaning for moderns, they also diametrically inverted

Eliade’s own dismissal of drug-using shamans as degenerate representatives of the tradition.

Though the McKennas acknowledge the productive role of trance techniques like drumming and

isolation, they insist that shamanism without the “folk science” of psychedelic alkaloids

“becomes ritual alone, and its effectiveness suffers accordingly.”377 In terms of the anthropology

of indigenous societies, this psychoactive materialism betrays scant regard for the power of

performance and the variability of altered states production in different cultural milieus.

However, it is precisely the fixed action potentials of neuropharmacological compounds that

made their non-mythological construction of a modern shamanism possible. “Because of the

biophysical roles these compounds play at a molecular level, they are the operational and

physical keys allowing access to the powers claimed by the shaman.”378

In opening their wild book with a discussion of shamanism, the McKennas were are also

interested, perhaps more pressingly, in creatively dodging the most obvious rejoinder to the

Experiment: that the two young men had, at least temporarily, lost their marbles. As such, the

figure of the shaman also becomes a way to both address and outflank the diagnosis of

376. McKenna and McKenna, The Invisible Landscape, 16.

377. Ibid, 14.
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schizophrenia. Given that many colonialist accounts of shamans and medicine men had featured

discussions of mental disorders (along with legerdemain), the recuperation of the shaman gave

the McKennas a way to recuperate temporary insanity itself. In Julian Silverman’s 1967 article

“Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,” a central source for the brothers, Silverman makes a

distinction between schizophrenia as an organic disease and a more situational and episodic

phenomena he calls “reactive schizophrenia.”

This category is in turn further divided between “essential schizophrenia”—in which “the

profoundest of emotional upheavels and…religious and magical ideation unfold under

conditions of marked environmental detachment”—and “paranoid schizophrenia,” in which the

spread of such magical connections is recognized as the work of an outside agency, and is

therefore tied directly to the environment rather than the self. With these clarifications in mind,

Silverman outlines a multi-phase model of pathological process that, to a certain degree,

characterizes both schizophrenics and shamans—who, it is important to recall, often do not

choose or inherit their roles but are given them based on relatively unusual and sometimes

asocial psychological features they exhibit.

Clearly drawing from the hero’s journey structure found in Joseph Campbell and Mircae

Eliade, Silberman describes the earlier stages of this process as a self-rending descent into chaos

that manifests as the “fusing of higher and lower referential process” and includes automatisms,

archaic ideation, and transpersonal forces. This descent is then followed, hopefully, by a

“cognitive reorganization.” It is at this point, however, that cultural conditions force the shaman

and the schizophrenic to take different paths, since the latter’s society has no use or sympathy

with the creative possibilities of reactive schizophrenia. “The essential difference between the

378. Ibid, 14.

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two lies in the degree of cultural acceptance of the individual’s psychological resolution of a life

crisis.”379

Silverman was still at the National Institute of Health when he published his article, but

he soon found himself working at the Esalen Institute. Here he played a central role in one of the

Institute’s central psychological agendas, which was to recode insanity as an essentially episodic

process of psychic reorganization that roughly followed the same death-and-rebirth model found,

it was claimed, in both strong psychedelic experience and many esoteric initiations. Working

with Esalen co-founder Richard Price, who struggled with mental instability throughout his life,

Silverman helped construct radical methods of treating schizophrenia at the Agnews State

Hospital in California in 1968. While Silverman’s work should be seen as part of the wider anti-

psychiatric psychology of the day, the creative recuperation of schizophrenia—a highly

polyvalent term I will thankfully leave unexamined and uncontextualized here—can be traced

once again to Carl Jung.380

In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which appeared in 1961, Jung

described the “confrontation with the unconscious” he experienced as a young man just after his

break with Freud, a deep dive into psycho-pathology that, as noted above, essentially laid the

groundwork for all his later work as a psychologist, theorist, and a modern mystagogue whose

personal plunge into the collective unconscious authorized his healing work returning balance to

modern souls. The British analyst D.W. Winnicott unambiguously characterized Jung’s crisis as

a successful encounter with a schizophrenic process, a position that was later radicalized in the

379. See Julian Silverman, “Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,” in Goleman, Daniel., and Richard J. Davidson,
Consciousness, the Brain, States of Awareness, and Alternate Realities (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979),
120-125.
380. For a good overview of the evolution of schizophrenia in the twentieth century and its role in understanding
high weirdness, see Roger Luckhurst, “Diagnosing Dick,” in Alexander Dunst and Stefan Schlensag, eds, The World
According to Philip K. Dick (Palgrave, 2015), 13-29.
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sixties and seventies by the American Jungian John Weir Perry. Perry held that analysis itself

was a guided psychotic process, and that psychosis in general should be seen as part of an

organic dynamic of healing rather than an illness or aberration.

These and other sixties critiques of conventional psycho-pathology, particularly those

mounted by R.D. Laing, helped set the stage for young men like the McKennas to plunge into the

nightside of reason, a mass experimentation occasioned in part by a distrust of modernity that

was not dissimilar to Jung’s. In contrast to the normalizing logic of orthodox Freudianism,

Jung’s creative engagement with the roiling maelstrom of the underworld within suggested that

even the most challenging and seemingly insane elements of psychedelic experience could be

framed within a narrative of personal growth and integration, if not of spiritual encounter and

transcendence.

The difference the McKennas establish between the shaman and the schizophrenic recalls

the famous distinction Jung made between James Joyce’s experiments in recombinant language

and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia’s invention of portmanteau words and other word salads.

They “were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”381

For the McKennas, the difference was similarly about conscious intention and an operational

savoir-faire—in other words, the values of technique. On the one hand, the shaman

“manipulates” the maelstrom “for culturally valid reasons and with techniques of proven

efficacy.” On the other, “The schizophrenic is an unwilling victim, a traveler through what to

him is a terrifying landscape.” As part of the framework that I am calling scientific romance, the

381. Richard Ellman, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 679. At the time Joyce defended the
artistic merit of his daughter’s linguistic productions.
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McKennas “sought to carry ourselves, as modern humans, into the same numinous landscape and

to offer a report of interest to empirical investigators.”382

The empiricism, here again, is radical and realist: there exists a realm outside of the

individual mind, an “invisible landscape” to which both shamans and modern psychedelic

practitioners have access. And that realm can be encountered, observed, and, in some empirical

sense, described. As such, the McKennas were not just replicating some psychopharmaceutical

folk science of shamanism. By presenting their “report,” they were also participating in the

establishment of the very social context (“empirical investigators” of the psychedelic domains in

the seventies of “altered states”) that, as they had learned from Silberman and anthropologists

like S.F. Nadel, made all the difference between the social construction of healing and the social

construction of madness. Only this time, the positive context would not found itself on myth but

along more-or-less modern and freethinking lines.

That said, the difference between shamans and madmen was not solely a matter of social

reception. It also involved refining the dangerous art of traversing the invisible landscape, a

sometimes chaotic realm of automatisms, archaic forces, and metamorphically altered belief

structures. We have already cited the McKennas’ image of this art in the introduction:

The shaman's psychic life is not unlike the unnaturally dexterous dances he performs at
the height of his ecstasy; it is a constant balancing act, as though he were a psychic tight-
rope walker on the razor's edge between the external world and the bizarre, magical, often
terrifying world within.383

382. McKenna and McKenna, Invisible, 98.

383. Ibid, 25.
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As mentioned earlier, this image recalls a more recent use of the acrobat or tight-rope

walker by Peter Sloterdijk. For Sloterdijk, the tight-rope walker or acrobat represents one of the

most fitting figures for humanity’s active, anthropotechnical response to the “vertical tension” of

existence. Again, this tension tugs us above the habitual fog of human life, an existential vector

that has frequently been recoded into the works of transcendence. However, while religious

practices respond to this vertical tension, so do philosophy, art, and even sports. For example,

Sloterdijk traces the emergence of Greek philosophy itself to the pre-Socratic equation of

wakefulness and thinking, an equation that leads to a vigorous (and sometimes vertiginous)

practice of “waking thought” that he characterizes ingeniously as “an acrobatics of

sleeplessness.”384

There is a certain weirdness faced by Sloterdink’s existential acrobats as well. Even as

she resists the gravity of slumber, habit, and common realism, the acrobat must embrace a

“primal surrealism”—a surrealism that characterizes both the bizarre extravagance of so many

religious practices and the wayward poetics of so many post-religious avenues toward more-or-

less aesthetic self-making. With both Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Foucault in mind, Sloterdijk

characterizes the modern acrobat as a spiritual athlete capable of dexterously navigating the void

by committing herself to those training regimens that allow humans to participate in their own

singular subjectivation without the need for any metaphysical sky-hooks.385 From this

perspective, psychedelic explorations on the scale of the Experiment have as much to do with

extreme sports as they do with religious mysticism.386 In contrast to the “acrobatics of

384. Sloterdijk, 171.

385. As Daniel Dennett memorably calls them.
386. Here we should also recall the acrobatics and other playful improbabilities sometimes associated with the
entities of tryptamine space, whether Terence’s DMT machine elves or the “impish” mushrooms spirits that writer
and poet Henry Munn described as “embodiments of merriment, tumbling figments of the spontaneous, performing
incredible acrobatic feats.” See Henry Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” in Harner, Michael J., Hallucinogens
and Shamanism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 110.
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sleeplessness” in early Greece, however, modern psychedelic shamans might be said to practice

an acrobatics of delire.

There is still more for us in this image. For if modern psychedelic neo-shamans are a

pack of acrobats or tight-rope walkers, what, then, are the forces balanced in the act? And what is

the nature of the (almost inevitable) fall? What the McKennas describe as the “razor’s edge”

between external reality and the uncorked unconscious can also be seen as a sort of tertium non

datur between skepticism and credulity, a middle path that, as in Keats’ famed definition of

negative capability, allows one to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any

irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The rope, here, is something like radical empiricism, a

phenomenological vector of ontological tensions from which one might diverge or fall in any

number of ways.

One is a descent into psychosis, understood here as a non-episodic rupture with social

reality of the sort that seemed to have swallowed Dennis up in the two weeks following the

Experiment. A less drastic slip, we might say, would be a fall into the sort of manic inflation that

some of Terence’s friends suspected him of succumbing to in his obsessive theorizing in the

months following his first trip to La Chorrera.387 But perhaps the trickiest tumble is into belief,

understood not as the sorts of tacit concepts and dispositions that inform all our actions but as

well-articulated organizations of concepts and convictions that crystalize into congealed

frameworks or idées fixes that fundamentally constrain if not collapse the open-ended stance

required for radical empiricism. Such beliefs, whether individually or socially based, often play a

strong role in both the ascription of extraordinary experience and the attribution of such

experiences to explicitly religious or occult entities or forces. But these beliefs can also take less

387. Indeed, it is inflation rather than psychosis that may be the most seductive pathology for psychedelic athletes.
See McKenna, Brotherhood, 302-04.
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supernatural forms, especially when they arise in the sorts of wild interzones between natural

science and paranormal consciousness plied by the McKenna brothers in Invisible Landscape. At

the extreme, such forms may take on the strange fringe-science systems found in some “crank”

literature.

Time Waves For No One

Terence’s Timewave is by far the most influential concept in The Invisible Landscape,

and one that takes up roughly the second half of the book. Briefly described, the Timewave is a

mathematical object that Terence managed to extract—and-or construct—from the I Ching, one

of the towering texts in the freak canon. The oracle consists of sixty-four hexagrams, each of

which is made up of a unique stack of solid and broken lines that individually represent a

snapshot of the constantly fluctuating cosmic forces of yin and yang. By using chance

operations—most simply, a series of coin tosses—specific lines and hexagrams are generated,

and these numbers and figures in turn refer to archaic core texts and “Ten Wings” of later

commentaries.

But Terence did something else. By multiplying the number of hexagrams by the number

of lines in each hexagram, Terence came up with a number—384—that is nearly equivalent to

the number of days—383.89—in a thirteen-moon calendrical period. This suggestive

similarity—to my knowledge, unremarked as far as I know by scholars of the I Ching—

encouraged Terence to look for even deeper patterns of time that might be discovered by

multiplying and permuting this and other numerical structures found in the oracle. By further

multiplying 384 by 16, for example, Terence “discovered” a cycle of time—67.29 years—that
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would become instrumental in his later assignation of the notorious date of 2012. Another

numerical curiosity in the I Ching that caught Terence’s fancy was a particular series of the

sixty-four hexagrams known as the King Wen sequence, a series that does not follow an

obviously quantitative logic. By counting the number of lines that change between each

hexagram in the sequence, and then variously mapping the resulting values, Terence graphically

constructed a peculiar mathematical object: the Timewave.

All this might seem like a strangely quantitative attitude towards an ancient oracle book

heavy on nature symbolism and obscure pronouncements like “Oppression at the hands of the

man with the purple knee bands.” That said, as a venerable matrix of archaic images, cosmic

correspondences, and numerical relationships, the I Ching almost demands such arcane and

esoteric systemic elaboration, and Terence was hardly the only person, nor even the first

Westerner, to start playing with the possibilities.388

At the very least, his respect for the technical savvy of the codifiers of the I Ching—or at

least the King Wen sequence—reflects the high regard in which the text was held by many

Westerners in the postwar period. Beats and seekers and hippies—including Philip K. Dick—

were all taken with the oracle, particularly in the Wilhelm/Baynes Bollingen edition, first

published in two volumes in 1950 and later in one, yellow-cloth volume in 1967, which was

almost certainly the version the McKennas brought with them to Columbia. This Bollingen

edition featured an introduction by Carl Jung, in which Jung linked the oracular logic of the

hexagrams, not to the “magic spells” of archaic wizards, but to a sophisticated qualitative model

of time. “Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain

388. For example of Westerners investigating the I Ching as a mathematical structure, see Charles Ponce, The
Nature of the I Ching (New York: Award Books, 1970); Martin Maria Schönberger, The I Ching and the Genetic
Code: the Hidden Key to Life (New York: ASI Publishers, 1979), originally published as Verborgener Schlussel zum
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moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time.” More than the hours of the

clock or the divisions of the calendar, the hexagram thrown at a given instant was “the exponent

of the moment in which it was cast.”389 Attempting to explain this possibility in terms that both

paralleled and outflanked scientific causality, Jung invoked his recently-minted idea of

synchronicity, the “acausal connecting principle” that he believed tied together the psychology of

meaningful coincidence to the new probabilistic and statistical model of reality emanating from

quantum physics.

Terence too understood the I Ching as containing a qualitative and quantitative model of

time, but his understanding was, like the theory of the Stone, rooted in the phenomenon of

resonance. One afternoon during his days of sleepless cogitation that followed the Experiment,

Terence inscribed an ampersand in the dirt, noting that the figurative loop of the logogram

seemed to be a “natural symbol for a four-dimensional universe somehow bound into a 3-D

matrix.” The apocalyptic implications for the figure, a “basic unit of time” that he began to call

“the eschaton,” turned on its capacities for generating reverberant interference patterns. “The

combination and resonance among the set of eschatons in the universe determined which of the

possible worlds allowed by physics would actually undergo the formality of occurring.” Here, in

the phrase “formality of occurring,” we can hear the echoes of Whitehead’s notion of

concrescence, the processual emergence of an actual entity from a variety of virtual possibilities.

However, the ampersand also set up the apocalyptic possibility of a conclusion of the sequence:

Leben (Munchen: O.W. Barth Berlag) in 1973; and Lama Govinda, The Inner Structure of the I Ching, the Book of
Transformations (New York: Weatherhill, 1981).
389. Carl Jung, Introduction, in Wilhelm, Richard, and Cary F Baynes, trans, The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes.
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). http://www.iging.com/intro/foreword.htm. (Accessed June
2015).
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the end of days became that moment when “all the eschatons would resonate together as a unity

and thereby create an ontological transformation of reality.”390

In Columbia, as Dennis gradually returned to consensus reality, Terence became

increasingly obsessed with “resonances, recurrences, and the idea that events were interference

patterns caused by other events temporally and causally distant.”391 Though Terence does not

stress the mathematical connections between the sixty-four hexagrams and the sixty-four

possible arrangements of DNA’s base pairs—which had already been noticed by some Western

students of the I Ching—it seems that the contemplation of this connection did lead to his

mathematical elaboration of the King Wen sequence. But if the Timewave models something

that varies over time, what is that feature? Riffing more on Whitehead, who developed a process

metaphysics for describing the emergence of new entities into actual temporal existence, Terence

decided that this feature was novelty.392

The Timewave was a map of the variable degree of historical transformation over time,

as well as a formal characterization of the apocalyptic finale when novelty would go asymptotic.

The intensity of this point—which bears comparison to the more contemporary discourse of the

Singularity—is, again, partly a product of resonance. In Terence’s conception, the Timewave

featured self-similarity across scale, so that the various cycles of time, from the cosmic to the

momentary, reflected the same jagged shape. (With good enough reason, Terence redubbed this

self-similarity “fractal” for the 1994 version of the Invisible Landscape.) By combining this

fractal structure with the notion of a hard end-point, Terence found himself with a device capable

390. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 107.

391. Ibid, 126.
392. Terence was not the first to use temporality to connect the I Ching with Whitehead’s metaphysics. See Lik
Kuen Tong’s 1974 article “The Concept of Time in Whitehead and the I Ching,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy,
vol.1 issue 4, 373-93.
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of both drawing transtemporal correspondences between different cycles and formally

characterizing the culmination of the wave as a kairos point of ultimate novelty.

Even without invoking mathematical problems with the derivation of the Timewave first

raised by Mathew Watkins, there are many problems and peculiarities with Terence’s bid for an

objective “theory” of historical novelty.393 In his 2012 account, Dennis himself harshly critiques

the Timewave he had tacitly signed off on in 1975. The central problem that Dennis notes is the

extreme difficulty in quantifying novelty; without such a measure, the Timewave can never be a

falsifiable scientific theory. “It is a speculation, an interesting idea, a hallucination, a fantasy—

but not a theory.”394 The arbitrariness in Terence’s understanding of novelty became abundantly

visible when he attempted the operation necessary for the Timewave to have predictive value:

the selection of strict correspondences between the peaks and troughs of the wave object and

actual dates in history—and, in particular, the date of the final spike in novelty.

The establishment of this date—bolstered by one rather synchronistic reverberation—

kickstarted the 2012 phenomenon. Reflecting his tautological sense that the acceleration of

technological and historical forces in recent history indicates the final stage of the “ingression of

novelty,” Terence elected to set August 6, 1945—the date that the atomic bomb was dropped on

Hiroshima—as a point of maximum novelty. Adding on the 67.29 year cycle he had discovered,

he came up with a final end date in November, 2012. After the publication of the first edition of

the Invisible Landscape, Terence discovered that the final date of the long count of the Mayan

calendar landed on winter solstice of 2012. So he bumped his kairos moment back a few weeks.

393. The mathematical criticism of the Timewave began with the so-called “Watkins objection,” which Terence
initially published in the late 1990s on his own website under the heading “Autopsy for a Mathematical
Hallucination?” See https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/autopsy.html. In 2010, Watkins wrote a more unforgiving
account of Terence’s attempts to rescue his theory in “2012 and the ‘Watkins Objection’ to Terence McKenna's
‘Timewave Theory’.” See http://www.secretsofcreation.com/2012.html. For more on the Timewave, see Hanegraaff,
“And End History”, op cit.
394. McKenna, Brotherhood, 316.
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When The Invisible Landscape was republished in 1993, the Timewave chapters were

revised to reflect support for the theory provided by both the Mayan calendar synchronicity and

the “time maps” generated by the Timewave Zero software coded by programmer Peter Meyer.

(Interestingly, it was the open source code for the program that first revealed some of the

mathematical problems with the theory.) In any case, Terence’s polished up “novelty theory”

was well-placed to influence the growing millennialism of the psychedelic revival then unfolding

through the electronic dance music, neo-tribal, and emerging research chemical underground.

Throughout his curious career, Terence continued to present the Timewave as a theory

largely supported by current events, including the acceleration of technological developments

and the systemic shifts in the modern subject’s processing of time and duration. As such, and

leaving aside its mathematical claims, it is not hard to consider the Timewave as an oracular or

poetic mirror of postmodern time. But for Terence it was more than this, and we therefore need

to recognize the rhetorical and psychological role the mathematical theory played within

Terence’s ongoing scientific romance. As Hanegraaff argues, the Timewave can easily be seen

as “resulting from a stubborn refusal to dismiss the La Chorrera revelation as no more than a

temporary state of psychotic hallucination.”395 In other words, poetry alone would leave Terence

holding the psychopathological bag; ironically, this most enchanting of story-tellers needed to

construct and offer something more than a story.

Hanegraaff also underscores the specifically religious vision of redemptive radicalism

that feeds the Timewave with a sense of both global crisis and the wish to find meaning in time.

He points to one particular statement in the Invisible Landscape that both summarizes the

messianic hopes of the young men, and reminds us that their exotic psychedelic plunge was, in

their eyes anyway, an extension rather than a retrenchment of their hopes for global change. “We
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believe that by using such ideas as a compass for the collectivity, we may find our way back to a

new model in time to reverse the progressively worldwide alienation that is fast turning into an

ecocidal planetary crisis,” they write. “A model of time must give hope and overcome entropy in

its formal composition. In other words, it must mathematically secure the reasonableness of

hope.”396 The further irony, of course, is that the messianic literalism of the Timewave as

presented precisely cancels out this reasonableness, at least for many readers.

There was another spur for the Timewave, however, one that makes itself known through

one of the occasional footnotes in True Hallucinations. While narrating his discovery of the

apocalyptic eschaton figure in the days after the Experiment, Terence adds an extra-diagetic note

that his thoughts at the time were later formalized in Invisible Landscape, and continued to be

refined afterwards. However, it is clear from the note that Terence did not take credit for the

concepts. “It took years of reading and self-education to keep track of the things that the internal

voice was saying,” he writes, acknowledging the construction that necessarily comes after the

visionary fact. Terence then admits to the “presence and persistence” of the voice over the years,

indicating that the daimon stuck around, at least during subsequent psilocybin trips. But in La

Chorrera, the voice possessed a particularly “holistic, systems-oriented approach to things,” a

powerful and technical vision of the nested integrity of the universe that reminded the young

Terence that “the ideas I was producing were coming fully organized from somewhere else.” As

such, “I was nothing more than a message decipherer, hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult

incoming code.”397

395. Hanegraaff, “‘And To the Stars”, 301-2.

396. McKenna, Invisible Landscape (1993), 174.
397. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 134. Hanegraaff suggests that, for these reasons, McKenna’s mushroom Other
should be placed in the contemporary context of channeling, a term that is particularly appropriate here, given the
systematic and abstract nature of the code demanding to be deciphered.
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McKenna’s language here reminds us that, as readers, we find ourselves at the end of a

chain of decipherments that originates in the Beyond. The Timewave represents the translation of

daimonic voice to concepts, the concepts to the page, and the page before our now rather

bemused brains. But one thing is most certainly lost in translation: the uncanny presence—there

is no better word—of the voice as an intimate internal other whose eruption as an enunciation

communicates more cosmos-rattling information than whatever flowcharts, alchemical protocols,

and time diagrams it downloads. Terence was self-critical enough to recognize that the voice as

such could not be expected to hold any authority or explanatory value—after laying out Dennis’

pharmacological speculations at the end of Invisible Landscape, the brothers declaim that “it is

upon this theory, and not as reporters of paranormal events, that we wish to be judged.”398

But the sheer tenacity with which Terence clung to his theory in the face of its

considerable problems indicates more, I believe, then simply a refusal to write the whole thing

off as jungle loony tunes. This persistence also speaks to the weird circuit of reciprocity and

respect booted up by the existential encounter itself. If the conditions of this encounter remind us

of more explicitly spiritualist channeling, so should Terence’s sense of obligation recall the

dynamic negotiations of the pact, whether seen through an occult or shamanic lens. But in his

texts, Terence could not bring this voice forward as itself. And so the theory—rickety, but

formalizable in marks and algorithms—had to serve as its avatar, a seal of trust in the Outside.

Guides

For all the dry discursive armature of The Invisible Landscaepe, the wild voice of the

Other was not to be contained, as it soon inscribed itself in the very interesting handbook that the

398. McKenna, Invisible Landscape, 102.

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brothers next turned their attention to. As a handbook, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s

Guide may well have proved as influential as Terence’s elliptical seeding of the 2012

phenomenon. After his second visit to Columbia, Terence returned with spore-prints of

Stropharia cubensis in hand, and eventually the brothers set themselves the tricky task of figuring

out how to reliably cultivate the shrooms. As Terence tells the story, his own manic attempts to

grow the mushroom in a shed in Berkeley took place during a period of intense personal turmoil,

which led him at one point to abandon his attempts to grow the mushrooms on rye in canning

jars. Returning one day from a desultory walk, he decided to clean out the shed, only to discover

a thriving crop of shrooms. He weeps with joy. “The elf legions of hyperspace had ridden to my

rescue,” he writes with typical humor, though there is no mistaking the more serious tone that

follows it: “I knew that the compact was still unbroken.”399

Sadly, like many stories of scientific and technical discovery, and like many of Terence’s

tales, this story is too good to be true. In Brotherhood, Dennis sets the record straight: he made

the breakthrough in Fort Collins, and through less exalted means. Working with a fellow student,

he cultivated the mycelium in a tissue culture lab at school, but couldn’t get it to fruit until he

came across an article in the journal Mycologia that discussed using canning jars and rye. Et

voila! Though few close listeners of Terence would be surprised to learn that he could be, as

Dennis gently puts it, an “unreliable narrator,” the gap between the lightning-bolt drama of his

discovery and the more mundane laboratory procedures that Dennis employed not only

underscores Terence’s need for scientific romance, but reminds us that rivalry as much as

visionary consonance defined the brothers’ relationship.

399. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 205-7.

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That said, Dennis also saw their breakthrough as a vindication of the promises of the

Voice—a “validation of the gnosis that had been given us.”400 The much-vaunted “technology”

promised by the Teacher was, in his view, nothing less than the simple methodology that they

shortly made available through their pseudonymous text. Published by the independent Berkeley

publisher And/Or Press, which also put out books on Gurdjieff, laughing gas, and nude Tai chi,

Psilocybin was not the first printed guide to psychedelic mushroom growth—an inferior method,

designed to produce psilocybin for extraction rather than fruiting bodies, was available in The

Psychedelic Guide to Preparation of the Eucharist, first published in 1968. But the McKennas’

book was the most successful in its day, and therefore earns its place as a significant step in the

global symbiosis of psilocybin and the human nervous system. And the pseudonymous nature of

the volume also allowed Terence, in his originally anonymous foreword, to channel the mystery

of the voice with all its esoteric and cosmic overtones. “The mushroom speaks,” he tells the

reader before handing the fungus the microphone.

“I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your

history,” it begins. “Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars.” In two long,

dramatic paragraphs, the voice goes on to provide some facts about mushrooms, before

describing the galactic network it maintains through “hyperlight communication” with spore

colonies on distant worlds. Then the Voice makes a startling offer of an alliance or pact: it will

provide the plans to build “hyperlight-drive ships” in exchange “for a free ticket to new worlds

around suns less forsaken and nearer galaxy center.”

Though this Starmaker-worthy monologue seems to leave rational persuasion behind, its

epic vision is still tightly tied to technical knowledge—not the promised S-F blueprints for

hyperdrive, but the very real and reasonably effective protocols and procedures that make up the

400. McKenna, Brotherhood, 328.

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bulk of the Grower’s Guide. It is as if the practical methodology of grow-room technique allows

all the esoteric and fantastic desire that secretly fuels the sometimes pedantic speculations in

Invisible Landscape to be distilled into one pure dose of high weirdness.

Three features of the mushroom’s speech are worth pointing out here, signs that indicate

the near presence of the larger seventies zeitgeist we are tracking throughout this book. One is

the emphasis on networks, a term that is old-hat in mycology but that would, in the seventies,

take on an increasingly significant technological and social meaning. Here that pregnant

rhizomatic form is poetically indicated by the fantastic concept that earthly mycelial networks of

psilocybe, which “may have far more connections than the number in a human brain,” are

hosting a galactic hypermind.

The second feature is the extraterrestrial rhetoric of outer space itself: though the brothers

could have easily wrapped their underground methodology in a Jungian-indigenous package of

ancient earth mysteries, the McKennas instead look into the cosmos for both origins and future

fulfillment—a gnostic S-F trope that at once authenticates a profound sense of cultural alienation

and imagines a coming cosmic community, a “galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.”

Finally, the mushroom speaks of the “baroque evolutionary possibilities” of symbiosis, a

biological concept that, in the mid seventies, had hardly achieved the posthuman panache it

possesses today, when so many of the networks we cross-breed with are technological. In the

mushroom’s concluding words, we can recognize how richly the logic of species symbiosis

resonates with the premodern exchanges staged through the daimonic pact or shamanic alliance.

“A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with

manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in

good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds to
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which all citizens of our starswarm are heir.”401 Nothing is mentioned of the results of acting

without good faith, but Terence was still clearly willing to make the pact, an alliance with the

nonhuman that he honored here, through the writing of a voice in the head, an inscription of the

inside other.

401. O. T. Oss and O. N Oeric, Psilocybin, Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin
Enthusiasts (Berkeley, Calif.: And/Or Press, 1976), 14-15.
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CHAPTER FOUR. HAIL ERIS!:

ROBERT ANTON WILSON’S SKEPTICAL ILLUMINATIONS

In 1975, the paperback outfit Dell published the Illuminatus! trilogy, a bloated pinnacle

of high weirdness written by two former editors at Playboy named Robert Shea and Robert

Anton Wilson. Though intended to appear as a long single volume, which is the form in which it

is mostly read today, Illuminatus! was initially broken up by Dell into three more manageable

paperbacks: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan. The trilogy was

marketed as science fiction, and the fantastic cover art, by Carlos Victor Ochagavia, featured

dolphins, yellow submarines, half-nude hippies, and a preternatural one-eyed being looming over

a central pyramid (in the third volume, this being resembles an octopus). Perfectly keyed to a

countercultural readership both confused and transformed by sex, drugs, and the occult revival,

the novels exploited the lore of conspiracy theory and secret societies in order to juxtapose

political and esoteric themes with a satiric, experimental, and willfully low-brow sensibility.

In addition to the peculiar literary charisma of the novels—a sort of pulp postmodernism

riddled with samples and loopy mise-en-abimes—Shea and Wilson’s books were also notable for

broadcasting the existence of Discordianism, an actually existing parody religion whose

metaphysical pranks and anarchist media tactics both anticipated and influenced the freethinking
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mysticism associated with the psychedelic underground and the fringes of the cultic milieu. As

we will see, Discordianism not only definitively introduced the problem of fiction into religion,

but attempts to affirm, with humor, precisely the confusion, chaos, and epistemological

instability most religious formations are designed to combat or constrain.

The Illuminatus! trilogy (henceforth, simply Illuminatus!) also helped definitively

establish the writing career of Robert Anton Wilson, one of the most intriguing and important

esoteric thinkers and writers to emerge from the American counterculture. Like Illuminatus!,

Wilson’s later novels continued to compound fiction with history, satire with esotericism, while

his witty, iconoclastic, and digressive nonfiction texts forged an innovative vision of hedonic and

skeptical neopragmatism from a wide range of discourses, including existentialism,

phenomenology, general semantics, psychology, sociology, parapsychology, and quantum

physics.

Born to a working-class family in Brooklyn in 1932, Wilson was too old to be counted a

member of the youth culture, nor does his work carry all the entailments one might expect from a

countercultural intellectual writing about politics, philosophy, and the occult during those heady

days. Though he marched on the Pentagon in 1967 and fought in the Chicago riots in 1968, he

was in no way a man of the Left, describing himself in 1973 as “a spokesman for an extreme

right-wing libertarianism that prides itself on being more radical than left-wing anarchism.”402 In

other words, Wilson placed the freedom of the individual above the anarcho-syndicalism of some

revolutionaries on the Left.

Part of Wilson’s radicalism—which had long before left Ayn Rand in the dust—involved

his study and personal exploration of what one might call, in light of Foucault, the “limit
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experiences” of the counterculture. He experimented with psychedelics, “tantric” sexuality,

occult rituals, New Thought techniques, and altered states of consciousness; his interests in

parapsychology and “quantum weirdness” also made him a fellow traveler of the New Age

sensibility he sometimes liked to mock. That said, Wilson for the most part retained a skeptical,

freethinking, and satirical temperament and had little truck with prophetic claims, esoteric

schools, or the manipulative charisma of gurus. In this he extends, in non-collectivist mode, the

historical current articulated earlier by the “head Boo Hoo” Art Kleps, who contrasted the

incoming eastern tradition of authoritarian spirituality with a “western history of visionary and

mystical experience coupled with the vigorous advocacy of human liberty and political

radicalism of every kind.”403

Though he eventually earned a degree in psychology, Wilson remained an independent

author and freelance writer for most of his life. His blue-collar beginnings, his journalistic

disposition towards entertaining (and sometimes hasty) writing, and the wayward bouts of

poverty he experienced raising a family as an underground intellectual helped inform the down-

to-earth character of both his writing and his unusually empathic libertarian politics. And though

Wilson’s writings have not received the scholarly recognition they warrant, their mischievous

and mind-expanding ethos strongly marked a number of cultural conversations that coursed

through or emerged from the counterculture, including chaos magic, transhumanism, and the

“New Edge” cyberculture of the nineties.

More important for our purposes, however, is Wilson’s 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: Final

Secret of the Illuminati, his personal account of a long bout of synchronicities, paranoia, and

402. Robert Anton Wilson, Sex & Drugs (New York: Playboy Press, 1973), 69. For a popular historical account of
psychedelia within American libertarianism, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: a Freewheeling History of
the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).
403. Kleps, 22.
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speculative excess he experienced in the early and mid-seventies, when the political and cosmic

conspiracies mobilized in his satiric fictions, along with the more outlandish possibilities

suggested in his speculative essays, bled into the folds and passageways of his life and mind.

During these years, when he was exploring psychedelics and sexual magic along with positive

thinking exercises, Wilson entered what he called “Chapel Perilous.” From July 1973 until

October 1974, by his reckoning, Wilson came to inhabit a “reality tunnel” in which an

extraterrestrial intelligence from the star system Sirius was sending him telepathic messages.

With acrobatic acumen, Wilson managed to slip out of this particular tunnel, and Cosmic Trigger

can therefore be read productively as both a record of and creative response to the sorts of

profoundly destabilizing extraordinary experiences that shuttle high weirdness from a genre of

cultural production to an ontological slipstream alive with alien others.

Wilson’s experiences were extraordinary, but in order to appreciate them, we will need to

spend some time up front with his writing and his throughts. Given Wilson’s unusually generous

acknowledgement of the people and ideas that influenced him, Cosmic Trigger and its sequels

enable to retrace the scripts whose sometimes striking recombination shaped his experience.

Even more importantly, however, we can grapple with the “meta-programming” that illuminated

the scripting process itself, and that encouraged Wilson and his pals to construct, experiment,

and radically contest various reality tunnels through the bootstrapping possibilities of “as if” self-

programming. Ironically, however, none of Wilson’s considerable range of influences can match

the highly infectious and sometimes puerile scripting environment he and Robert Shea crafted in

Illuminatus!
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Plot, Counterplot

With Illuminatus!, Shea and Wilson spliced together a roving, baggy, brilliant and

sometimes tedious text that, though it has never gone out of print, hovers in its own peculiar

limbo of literary and cultural memory. Written roughly between 1969 and 1971, and only mildly

revised before final publication in 1975, it is an unquestionably ground-breaking novel that

sustains deep formal and thematic comparisons to a number of roughly contemporaneous

postmodern classics like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner

Darkly (1977), E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

(1973). Like Reed, Shea and Wilson channel powerful political desires into a satirical collage of

esoteric conspiracy theories, while playing with the paranoia, fugue states, and druggy dialogue

of Dick. The connections with Gravity’s Rainbow—which was resonant enough to warrant a few

allusions in the final 1975 text—are particularly tight.

Thematically, Illuminatus! engages paranoia, political conspiracy, drugs, sexual hi-jinks,

Nazis, mystical illumination, the second law of thermodynamics, anarchist pranks, weird science,

occult arcana, goofy pop music, and rumors of apocalypse. Characters appear and disappear,

occasionally change identity mid-paragraph, and possess silly names like Markoff Chaney,

Tarantella Serpentine, and the Dealy Lama. Beneath their encyclopedic range of references and

genres, both novels also seek to draw the reader to question the link between the rational and the

real, and to do so in part by playing with paranoia, conspiracy, and occulture. Listen to Pynchon

critic George Levine, writing in 1976 about the capacity that Pynchon’s novels have to disorient

the reader. “Invariably, as the surreal takes on the immediacy of experience, they make us feel
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the inadequacy of conventional modes of making sense—of analysis, causal explanation, logic.”

Pynchon’s language, he tells us, is “cruelly anchored in the banalities of the colloquial, the

obscene, the trivial, the familiar,” even as it “miraculously spins from these things into high

scientific and historical speculation, into melodrama, romance, and apocalyptic intensity.”404

Replace “romance” with “happy rutting,” and Levine could almost have been talking about

Illuminatus!

That said, Illuminatus! assiduously resists canonization as a literary work, even as a

PKD-like outlier, a condition that I suspect is exceptionally unlikely to change. There are reasons

to pause before a text described by Greil Marcus as “the longest shaggy dog joke in literary

history.” One of these challenges is the novel’s peculiar and somewhat off-putting blend of pulp

moves and ironic, avant-garde affectation. On the one hand, the novel’s prose, dialogue, and

story lines draw all-too-intimately from popular forms like weird fiction, right-wing pamphlets,

hippie porn, and the druggy slapstick of underground comics. On the other hand, the novel is

self-consciously experimental, with abrupt temporal transitions and shifts of voice, Joycean word

jazz, copious meta-fictional asides, dada-esque interjections, and an endless tango of historical

fact and fiction.

As a novel—rather than a guerrilla work of esotericism, or anarchism, or psychoactive

metaphysics—Wilson and Shea’s experiments and popular pleasures do not exactly cohere.

Despite many ludic and luminescent passages, and a particularly visionary deployment of the

irreverent satire that marks so much seventies fiction, their digressive, uncontrolled and

sometimes slapdash prose often feels more like churn than craft. “It’s a dreadfully long monster

of a book” one literary critic in Illuminatus! complains, in an obvious meta-fictional comment on

404. George Levine, “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction,” in George Levine and
David Leverenz, eds. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 113.
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a text he goes on to call a “fairy tale for paranoids.” Without Reed’s anger or Dick’s pathos or

Pynchon’s alchemy, the mix of high-brow and low-rent never quite provides enough combustion

to lift their experiment from the margins, at least for most readers. It seeks but only occasionally

finds that point where “all categories collapsed, including the all-important distinction…between

science fiction and serious literature.”405

At the same time, that very marginality helps make the trilogy a masterpiece of high

weirdness, particularly in the way that it sidesteps or warps pure fictionality. Illuminatus! is not

just a novel but also, without doubt, a guerrilla work of esotericism, anarchism, and psychoactive

metaphysics. Its very proximity to pulp genres, crank literature, libertarian zines, and the raunchy

fringes of the freak scene also lend the text a vivid subcultural and extra-literary density that is

fascinating and pleasurable in itself. Even more unusual is how the text, for all its randy satire,

both proposes and enacts a sacred irony succinctly expressed by Philip K. Dick in his novel

Valis, written later in the same decade: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially

at the trash stratum.”

This ironic and playful spirit of gnostic juxtaposition also helps stage the novel’s “second

order” intervention in the lore of conspiracy theory, or what the scholar Asbjorn Dyrendal calls

“conspiracy culture.” To clarify his term, Dyrendal makes a distinction between narrow

conspiracy theory—in which specific agents are exposed and identified with unwavering

conviction—and a broader, more “postmodern” conspiracy culture that is characterized by

uncertainty and a peculiar sense of enjoyment that navigates “between ‘passive’ entertainment

405. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (New York, N.Y.: Dell Pub., 1975), 714.
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and active play and/or serious regard, between mocking and belief.”406 It is into this latter zone

of conspiracy culture that Illuminatus! initiates the reader.

The origins of the novel underscore the importance of marginal non-fiction discourses to

the novel’s ultimate crazy quilt of views and voices. When Wilson and Shea both worked for

Hugh Heffner, one of their tasks was to edit and write replies to the Playboy Forum. Not to be

confused with the sex advice column Playboy Advisor, the Forum was introduced in the

magazine in 1963 with the express purpose of creating public discussion around “the Playboy

philosophy,” which amounted to Heffner’s strongly held positions on life, sex, politics, and the

pursuit of happiness. Heffner’s hedonistic Epicurianism made him a vocal if self-interested

advocate for strong civil liberties (including abortion rights), and the Forum consequently

attracted a wide variety of political players, including libertarian and right-wing voices who

sometimes tied the encroachment of civil liberties to larger political conspiracies. At times the

two editors received mail from cranks, wing-nuts, and paranoids, many of whom were plying the

dark waters churned up by the JFK assassination, ground zero for postwar conspiracy theory. As

a lark, the two men started bouncing around conspiratorial scenarios of their own, including one

in which all the various plots sent into Playboy were simultaneously true.407

Transforming the gag into a novel also afforded them the opportunity to participate in the

political and ontological hijinks associated with the Discordian Society, a fringe group of

anarchist satirists whose playful DIY religion Wilson had discovered after making contact with

Kerry Thornley, a libertarian zine editor then in the West Coast. Thornley had co-founded the

Society with Greg Hill in the late fifties, when, according to Discordian materials, the two young

406. Asbjorn Dyrendal “Hidden Persuaders and Invisible Wars” in Faxneld, Per., and Jesper Aagaard. Petersen, The
Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 128.
407. Tom Jackson cites Wilson’s discussion of the origins of the novel at
http://www.rawillumination.net/2014/02/illuminatus-online-reading-group-week.html
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men—humanists and enthusiasts for Mad magazine and Southern California’s fringe religions—

experienced a vision of a talking monkey in a late-night bowling alley in Downey, California.408

This radical spiritual vision did not become scripture until 1965, when the first edition of the

Principia Discordia was published in five copies. Almost entirely the work of Hill, aka

Malaclypse the Younger, the first edition rather methodically lays out the Discordian doctrine

and (dis)organizational structurea—the law of fives, the lore of the goddess Eris and her golden

apple, the variously named Discordian splinter groups—that would later appear so provocatively

in Illuminatus!

By the time that the fourth edition appeared in 1970, the Principia, now subtitled How I

Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her, had ballooned into a marvelous

assemblage of cartoons, slogans, rubber stamp impressions, fake certificates, and org charts

enlivened with chaos myths, mystic paradoxes, antinomian Zen and metaphysical one-liners like

“No two equals are the same” and “King Kong died for your sins.” The new aesthetics reflected

Hill’s transformation of the Society from a private project of religious invention into an intensely

collaborative artistic-metaphysical experiment that Hill called The Paratheo-Anametamystikhood

of Eris Esoteric (pronounced “pooey”).

Discordians were invited to elect themselves popes and to participate in the creation of

new editions of the PD through the method of “process collage,” or what the scholar Danielle

Kirby calls “occultural bricolage.”409 The fourth edition, for example, included material provided

by Thornley (aka Omar Ravenhurst), Robert Anton Wilson, Camden Benares, Thomas the

Gnostic, and a number of popes and odd-balls, many of whom were already enthusiastic

408. Downey is the same municipality that gave the world Taco Bell.
409. See Danielle Kirby, “Occultural Bricolage and Popular Culture: Remix and Art in Discordianism, the Church
of the Subgenius, and the Temple of Psychick Youth”, in Adam Possamai, ed, The Handbook of Hyperreal
Religions ed. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2011).
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participants in the exchange of zines through informal mail networks. The Discordian Society

had thus become what one might call an “open source” artistic-esoteric current, a non-zero-sum

game of remix metaphysics that invited anyone who tuned in to play. The fourth edition even

replaced the usual copyright statements with language that parodied both property and the

satanic mass: “(K) ALL RIGHTS REVERSED - Reprint what you like.” Astoundingly, the PD

managed to anticipate three features of what we could perhaps still call “net culture” today: open

source content, collaborative multimedia, and, especially, the productive power of self-

consciously deployed religious fictions that derive their charisma from a precise confusion of

faith and fabulation.

Illuminate Us!

Other than the bullhorn provided by writing bestselling paperbacks, what Shea and

especially Wilson introduced to the Discordian Society were the wild and ominous visions

bubbling out of American conspiracy culture. In particular, the Playboy editors were drawn to

one particular bete noir of fringe history that some of the Forum contributors excoriated, the

same group now help responsible for the insidious messages in some hip-hop and pop videos: the

Bavarian Illuminati.

Conventional European historians will acknowledge, without controversy, that the

Illuminati was founded in 1776 by the ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt as a freethinking secret order

within German Freemasonry. The group was banned by the Bavarian government in 1785 but

was subsequently identified by a few reactionary writers as the shadowy puppet-masters behind

the French Revolution. In the middle of the twentieth century, when a variety of mechanisms for
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global governance had been installed, Illuminati talk was revived by right-wing groups like the

John Birch Society, a rabid anti-communist organization that fomented fears of a totalitarian

international conspiracy of bankers and statesmen who wanted to install what soon became

known as the New World Order.410

The Illuminati also make a notable appearance in Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first presented the month of the Kennedy

assassination and published a year later. Hofstadter reminded Americans that the early decades

of the republic were aflame with rumors that the Illuminati were threatening to seize the

government, concerns that led to the founding of the Anti-Masonic Party in 1828. By connecting

these historical fears and fancies with the clinical language of paranoia, Hofstadter also

permanently linked the emerging discourse of “conspiracy theory” with the fantastic plots of

psychopathology.

Given the widespread use of the term today, we have become all too familiar with the

notion that conspiracy theory is a mode of discourse that focuses with a sort of feverish pedantry

on secret orders of political and sometimes metaphysical power, and whose articulation is almost

inherently fanciful, illogical, paranoid, and/or historically inaccurate. The roots of the term,

however, are highly specific. As the political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith explains, the term

“conspiracy theory” did not become culturally current until 1964, when it was used by both

intelligence agencies and media organizations as a basket term to categorize JFK assassination

scenarios that did not support the “lone gunman” theory adopted by the Warren Commission.411

As such, “conspiracy theory” became an instrument of elite discourse that deflected attention

410. For a good overview of the development of the Illuminati concept, see Michael Barkun, A Culture of
Conspiracy Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003).
45-64.
411. Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), esp. 3-21.
 323

from its own operations by conflating what deHaven-Smith holds are two very different sorts of

counter-normative discourses.

On the one hand, you have rational but nonconformist political and historical accounts

that seek to articulate and expose hidden networks of political and economic actors working

behind the scenes to achieve concrete goals. On the other hand, you have ungrounded if not

paranoid fabulations whose capacious imaginings and inherently flawed logic produce narratives

that are more or less akin to mythology, delusion, and urban folklore, and can therefore be

ignored. The latter, irrational sense of “conspiracy theory” is in large part derived from Karl

Popper, who argued in the 1945 text Open Society that authoritarian political movements, on

both the left and the right, foment “conspiracy theories of society” that really represent a

“secularization of religious superstition.” Now that we have abandoned the gods, Popper

theorized, that ontological absence is filled by “powerful men or groups…whose wickedness is

responsible for all the evils we suffer from.” Popper’s examples include both the “capitalist

class” and the Elders of Zion, whose unquestionably hoaxed Protocols remain a bestseller among

the conspiratorial right.412

For deHaven-Smith, then, “conspiracy theory” is a term whose political power derives

from disguising the difference that founds it, a difference that therefore oscillates between

secular history and covert or overt religious myth. (This sort of oscillation, moreover, is the very

substance of the weird.) Given the pervasiveness of actual political and corporate conspiracies in

contemporary times, deHaven-Smith holds that nonconformist political critics need to rigorously

separate rational accounts of conspiracies from fantasies, so as to judge the former with the

historical logic capable of revealing public truth.

412. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013),
306-307. Also DeHaven-Smith, 94-97.
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Illuminatus!, which pits the hydra-headed Illuminati against the equally multifarious

anarchist Discordians, is founded on the opposite premise: that the distinction between the

legitimate political discourse of conspiracy and the fantastic fabulations of the paranoid,

superstitious, or occult mind is not only ultimately impossible to locate, but is itself a pure form

of ideology. Moreover, as Dyrendal explains, there are significant formal and thematic points of

connection between the discourses of esotericism and conspiracy.413 Beside the use often made

of symbolic correspondences and other forms of associational thinking, both discourses

emphasize hidden orders of power, “secret chiefs,” counter-normative histories, and the notion of

a singular “diamantine self” capable of waking up to the deeper reality of things.

Conspiracy theorists, however, often invert the narratives of esotericism, which offer

initiates entrance to these secret currents of hidden knowledge. Instead, the knowledge offered

by conspiracy writers is a strangely doubled gnosis. On the one hand, it frees the individual from

the malevolent historical, ideological, and psychic spells cast by the manipulators. On the other

hand, it does so by initiating the individual into an “elite” current of conspiratorial knowledge

that is also rejected by the majority of people in the society. In this way, the same notion of

rejected knowledge that establishes the category of esotericism according to von Stuckrad and

Hanegraaff not only helps illuminate the dynamics of conspiracy theory, but explains the

inevitable commingling of these two forms of knowledge. While secret political and corporate

conspiracies exist in a conventional historical sense and can be exposed as such, the labyrinth

that researchers enter to ferret out such conspiracies inevitably includes slippery slopes that spill

into esoteric modes of thinking, though these are often laminated with secular forms like mind

413. See Asbjorn Dyrendal, “Hidden Knowledge, Hidden Powers: Esotericism and Conspiracy Culture,” in Egil
Asprem and Kennet Granholm, Contemporary Esotericism (Sheffield; Bristol, CT: Equinox Pub., 2013), 200-203,
220-225.
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control, “twilight language,” and alien pacts. The formula, at least in its postwar context, is

simple but weird: JFK ! UFO. Start with the one, the other may well swallow you up.

Plunging into this multifarious zone of uncertainty, Shea and Wilson stir up a myriad of

plots and factions by forging surreal and satirical links between actual historical actors, existing

conspiratorial scenarios, drug culture paranoia, and occult secrets. In contrast to Pynchon’s

proverbial paranoids, Illuminatus! familiarizes (infects?) the reader with a meta-fictional web of

arguments and assertions that hews much closer to already existing occult and political

conspiracy discourses. What results is a disorienting epistemological dance between fact and

fiction, prank and allegory, an instability that in turn generates an expansive rhizomatic network

of correspondences whose mounting resonances threaten to overwhelm skepticism with

synchronicity.

Early in the novel, in one of their many self-referential moves, the authors model the

seductive effects of exposure to conspiracy material. Detectives Saul Goodman and Barney

Muldoon investigate the bombing of the offices of Confrontation, a lefty magazine whose editor,

Joe Malik, has also disappeared. Uncovering a stack of memos from one of the magazine’s

reporters, Goodman (and the reader) begins piecing together elements of the Illuminati narrative.

These memos combine actual conspiracy literature—like Bircher pamphlets on the Council of

Foreign Relations and Akron Daurel’s A History of Secret Societies (1961)—with hoax sources

that Shea and Wilson had themselves pseudonymously planted in the Playboy Forum and the

rock magazine Teenset (more on these pranks in a moment).

Goodman also reads about Adam Weishaupt and his curious connections to George

Washington, both of whom, it seemed, were enthusiastic growers of hemp. To this welter of

material, Goodman applies what other detectives refer to as his “intuition,” which is defined on
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page 23 of the Dell single-volume edition as “a way of thinking beyond and between the facts, a

way of sensing wholes, of seeing that there must be a relationship between fact number one and

fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet.”414 This is resonant thinking, a

reminder that such associational pathways, though characteristic of the endless interconnections

of both occultists and the clinical paranoid, are also intimately bound up with the operations of

reason instantiated by the genre figure of the detective. Later, Goodman revisits the memos

“using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding back the intuitive

functions.”415 This process of “expansion-and-contraction,” which recalls the dialectic between

resonance and reason in Veit Erlmann’s account of modernity, is offered almost as a training

exercise for the reader only just girding her loins for seven hundred more exposition-stuffed

pages. In Goodman’s case, the exercise in uncanny criticism leads to the conclusion that the

clues before him are, like the book we hold, indeterminate networks of fact and fiction.

Of course, these memos are only the opening move in the endless and contradictory

proliferation of Illuminati plots and Discordian counter-plots that Illuminatus! teasingly and only

partly unpacks. The profligacy of these scenarios and expositions, and the authors’ willingness to

put compelling historical and political sense in the mouths of all manner of characters, makes the

ideological and occult networks of Illuminatus! all but impossible to diagram. This political and

metaphysical confusion is, of course, part of the point: not only does it draw the probing reader

into a state of ideological and historical uncertainty, but it reflects the fact that even the most

sober investigators of secret societies and esoteric undercurrents must enter a psychologically

trying and intellectually taxing labyrinth of myth, rumor, and ambiguity.

414. Shea and Wilson, 23.

415. Ibid, 50.
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Even the notion of “Illuminism” that gives the historical Illuminati its name possesses a

curious polyvalence, at once suggesting the Enlightenment of the Age of Reason and the sorts of

gnostic revelations described in, say, the medieval Islamic Neoplatonic philosophy of

Illuminationism. As Christopher McIntosh explains in his (sober) history of Rosicrucian

movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European tradition of “Illuminism”

is generally associated with theosophical and occult formulations of higher-degree Freemasonry,

much of which was anti-Aufklärung, mystical and traditionalist. But the Bavarian Illuminati was

formed around Weishaupt’s radical and freethinking conviction that “through education, the

progress of science, the pursuit of reason and the rejection of superstition and obscurantism, it

would be possible to erect a truly free, happy, and egalitarian society.”416 The important

symbolic role played by electricity at this same time—of which Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite

flight is only the most celebrated scenario—points to this strange symbolic overcoding, where

the potential “illumination” of the soul or inner spirit is redoubled onto the physical manipulation

of a largely unseen reality.417

Marking this oscillation between secular rationalism and gnostic experience, one

character in the novel describes the Illuminati as what happens “when the Enlightenment of the

eighteenth century collided with German mysticism.”418 On the one hand, the Illuminati that

Goodman starts tracking resemble the freethinking tradition-smashing philosophes of progress

and scientific exploit. In keeping with many modern conspiracy theories, some of the

Confrontation memos describe a shadowy cabal of transnational elites who maintain global

power through Machiavellian manipulation, who mastermind and infiltrate all manner of

political and ideological movements, and who deploy hidden technologies of control and

416. McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason, 103.
417. For more on the dialectic of the electro-magnetic imaginary, see Davis, Techgnosis, 39-75.
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obfuscation in order to disguise the emerging New World Order that they almost entirely control

behind the scenes.

At the same, however, the memos also begin to warp into more occult if not mythological

dimensions. One memo tracks Weishaupt’s Order back to the medieval hash-smoking Ishmaelian

sect the Order of the Assassins, whose leader, Hasan i Sabah, provided the ominous anarchist

clarion call that William S. Burroughs launched into the counterculture (and the text of

Illuminatus!): “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”419 Applying his expansion-and-

contraction method to this more esoteric material, Goodman derives a first shot at his own pet

theory:

The theory, in essence, was that the Illuminati recruited people through various “fronts,”
turned them on to some sort of illuminizing experience through marijuana (or some
special extract of marijuana) and converted them into fanatics willing to use any means
necessary to “illuminize” the rest of the world. Their aim, obviously, is nothing less than
the total transformation of humanity itself, along the lines suggested by the film 2001, or
by Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman. In the course of this conspiracy the
Illuminati…were systematically assassinating every popular political figure who might
interfere with their program.420

What is important to note here is that, from the get-go, the Illuminati, who are revealed to be the

dark plotters behind the assassinations that so devastated America in the sixties, are also tightly

linked to the sorts of extraordinary experiences associated with the counterculture’s use of drugs

and mysticism (and, predictably, sex as well). The novel’s black hats are not reactionaries,

royalists, Straussian statists, or law-and-order cops—many of whom are actually portrayed by

418. Shea and Wilson, 199.

419. The phrase actually originates with Nietzsche in the third essay of On The Genealogy of Morals.
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the authors in a reasonably positive, almost Phildickean light. Like the anarchist Discordians that

make up their supposed foes, the Illuminati are composed of what the novel characterizes as

homo neophilus—neophiles who shun traditionalism and exuberantly intensify the

deterritorializing energies associated with modernity. The end result of their science, then, is not

simply control but a sort of diabolical transhumanism.

Later, much later, we learn that four of the five Illuminati Primi are in a German rock

band named the American Medical Association, whose headlining appearance at a huge free

festival in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, forms one of the climaxes of the novel. The ultimate goal of the

AMA is to “immanentize the eschaton,” a phrase popularized by William F. Buckley and drawn

from the conservative historian Eric Voegelin. In The New Science of Politics from 1952,

Voegelin warned against what he identified as a totalitarian utopian drive to forcibly realize the

eschaton—the Christian millennial kingdom—on earth. Voegelin placed the origin of this

heretical usurpation of God’s plan with the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore, whose

revolutionary “age of the spirit” he then traced to Marxism and other modern utopian movements

that he helped no-one by labeling “gnostic.”421

Like the term “Illuminism” discussed above, the notion of immanentizing the eschaton

fuses and confuses secular and mystical registers, only now on a massive if not quite totalitarian

scale. The phrase simultaneously speaks to something desirable and terribly destructive in

modernity, that zone where immanence is not circumscribed by natural law or rationality but

manifests as a dynamic plenum that overturns the abstract hierarchies, which are also traditional

foundations, of transcendence. Despite the mystical anarchism that motivates the white hats in

420. Shea and Wilson, 51.

421. The historian Norman Cohn shored up this thesis in his influential text The Pursuit of the Millennium:
Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970).
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Illuminatus!, such immanence is profoundly ambivalent, especially when it is collectivized. In

Leviathan, the final volume of the book, such immanence takes a turn towards B-movie horror,

when we learn that the AMA plan to achieve their operation and become immortal by harvesting

the life-energy of the Ingolstadt festival fans after slaughtering them with battalions of, yes, Nazi

zombies hibernating at the bottom of a nearby lake. Here, and not for the last time in our study,

political forces sometimes must take the form of supernatural pulp.

Hodge-Podge

In the pulp cosmos of Illuminatus!, the Illuminati and their evil plans are not the only

game in town. Their nefarious hijinks are continually thwarted by the Discordians, aka the

Legion of Dynamic Discord, who are actually only one faction of a broad anti-Illuminati

underground that includes the Erisian Liberation Front, the Eristics, and the JAMs, or Justified

Ancients of MuMu. Despite the injunction that “We Discordians must stick apart,” something

does unite these groups beyond their resistance to their shared foe: an irreverent worship of

chaos as both a metaphysical principal and a literal goddess. This deity is Eris, the Greek

goddess of discord whose powers and appearance are elaborated in the Discordian materials that

predate Illuminatus!, and that we will discuss more in the following section.

As Goodman explains to his partner, Eris is best known for her role in starting the Trojan

war. Snubbed by the Olympians, who did not invite her to a wedding, Eris tosses a golden apple

into the gathering, inscribed with the phrase Kallisti, which means “for the prettiest one.” The

goddesses immediately began vying for the prize until Zeus commands poor Paris to make the

call; in choosing Aphrodite, the goddess rewards Paris with the opportunity to kidnap Helen,
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thereby triggering the Trojan War. Here, in a lesson not lost on Shea and Wilson, an object of

desire (the apple) combines with the ambiguities of written reference in order to sow dissension

among competing elites. As we will see in the next section, Eris became a fit symbol for the sort

of symbolic monkey-wrenching tactics preferred by the “real” Discordians and other media

pranksters of the sixties—one thinks of the famous ruckus Abbie Hoffman stirred up when he

and his cronies tossed fistfuls of dollar bills into the pits of Wall Street in 1967.

Though a goddess of dissension and discord, Eris also rests on more positive foundations,

foundations that suggest both a metaphysical origin to anarchism and a spiritual or mystic

ontology of chaos. The Babylonian origin story of the JAMs, one of the Discordian factions, is a

case in point. The story appears, we are told by the hippie occultist Simon Moon, in Von Junzt’s

Unausprechlichen Kulten, an invented title sometimes mentioned in Weird Tales stories and one

of Illuminatus!’s many metafictional forays into Lovecraftiania.422 The JAMs got their start at

the time of the composition of the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, which directly

influenced the opening lines of Genesis. The Babylonian myth begins with the chaos that pre-

exists the formation of the heaven and earth, a chaos inhabited by the primeval deities Apsu, the

god of fresh water and fertility, and Tiamat, dragon goddess of the sea and chaos. Against the

wishes of Apsu and their vizier Mummu, Tiamet gives birth to a host of younger gods, who

eventually rise and defeat the old ones. Marduk himself slays Tiamat, forming the heavens and

earth from her divided body. He then founds and rules Babylon, one of the earliest city-states to

appear on our planet, a rulership that is maintained, Moon says, through monopolies, land

422. The fictional tome first appears in two Robert E. Howard “Cthulhu mythos” tales from 1931, “The Children of
the Night” and “The Black Stone”, and only later included by Lovecraft in a number of stories.
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ownership, and usury. “It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has

always rested on rent and interest,” explains Moon. “The old Babylonian con.”423

In the name of the old monster chaos, the Justified Ancients of Mummu rose up as the

“first anarchist group” to pit themselves against the new monstrosity of the Babylonian state,

which was of course an early Illuminati plot.424 In their calls to return to a natural order, we are

told, the JAMs resembles the Taoists in China and the Cynics in Greece. Eventually the group

joins the Illuminati as a separate unit within the order until they get booted out by Cecil Rhodes,

an event mockingly memorialized in the pro-Illuminati tune by the Detroit rock band MC5 that

forms the corny punch-line of this shaggy joke: “Kick Out the Jams.”

More substantial is the link that the history of the JAMs makes between religion and the

state, and the even more crucial tie between anarchism and a magical metaphysics of chaos. The

Babylonian state dominates people through economic mechanisms, but also through the beliefs,

gods, and laws that naturalize an apparatus of domination. The state crafts discursive and

conceptual abstractions that, like “God” and “debt,” begin to seem more real than the embodied,

empirical self.425 Resistance to the state is therefore, in part, an antinomian act of consciousness,

as well as an abrogation of “God” and “law.”

But for metaphysical radicals like Wilson and Shea, law does not only consist of the

ideological ghosts that disguise and organize social domination. Within the immensity of cosmic

history, even the laws of physics can only be called habits, or, as the philosopher Quentin

Meillassoux insists, contingencies. As Meillassoux muses, “eternal chaos is capable, without

423. Shea and Wilson, 127.

424. Contemporary conspiracy theorists from David Icke to Jim Marrs continue to connect Babylon with the
Illuminati. See Dyrendal, “Hidden Knowledge, Hidden Powers,” 213-217.
425. This is why the anthropologist David Graeber begins his book Debt: the First Five Thousand Years with
personal anecdotes about the moral and almost metaphysical reality that the abstract concept of “debt” holds in
many minds. See Graeber, David., Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), chapter
one.
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reason, of the emergence and the abolition of the world, of destroying the laws present in nature

so as to bring others into being.”426 The Discordians offer a positive metaphysical account of

such chaos, the very confusion that the Babylonian state pretends to have vanquished in its rise

to (simulated) glory.

Adapting a term drawn from Peter Lamborn Wilson under his nome de plume Hakim

Bey, we will call this current ontological anarchism.427 This vision, at once political,

mythological and metaphysical, recognizes aboriginal chaos as a bounteous and spontaneous

giver of life that precedes all law, rather than a cosmic mess that needs to be mastered and

organized. Chaos, in this sense, is not simply disorder. The Principia Discordia instead suggests

that both order and disorder are illusions, mental constructs that disguise the more enigmatic

reality of chaos. In one of the appendices of Illuminatus!, Wilson and Shea explain that human

society begins in a state of chaos, an anarchic social order they characterize in the postwar

language of first-order cybernetics. “There is no stasis,” Wilson and Shea write. “The balance is

always shifting and homeostatic, in the manner of the ideal ‘self-organizing system’ of General

Systems Theory or Cybernetics.”428

Wilson and Shea’s vision of generative chaos echoes the New Age embrace of systems

theory that would emerge in the seventies. Though taking many forms, seventies systems theory

is often offered as an alternative to the Cartesian command-and-control metaphysics of the West,

which installs human individuals—themselves split between a controlling consciousness and a

426. Quentin Meillassoux, “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” in Conor Cunningham and Peter M. Candler,
eds., The Grandeur of Reason (Norwich, UK: SCM Press, 2010), 446.
427. See Hakim Bey, “Ontological Anarchy in a Nutshell” in Bey, Immediatism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994). For
an excellent account of Wilson’s concept and its relationship to Discordian and other underground currents, see
Christian Greer, “Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism,” in Anarchist Developments in
Cultural Studies. 2013: Issue 2, 166-187. For more on ontological anarchism, also see Moore, John, “Lived Poetry:
Stirner, Anarchy, Subjectivity and the Art of Living,” in Jonathan Purkis, and James Bowen, eds. Changing
Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 55–
72.
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controlled body—as manipulators of a passive material world. The vision of generative chaos, on

the contrary, reminds us of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek’s influential notion of

“spontaneous order,” which has become, at least for many anarcho-capitalists, a more technically

sophisticated formulation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

The anarchist gambit of the Discordians is that one can align with and activate such

generative chaos through the imaginative amplification of desire and the satori-like rupture of

ideological specters and other abstractions—a stance that moves politics into the field of magic.

As Christian Greer explains, “by shifting the ontological foundations of anarchism to an esoteric

reading of Chaos,…liberation could no longer be conceived of in terms of material gains won

from the oppressor class, but in the freedom to (re)create reality.”429 Because ontological

anarchism posits an aboriginal source of spontaneous and multitudinous variation that prevails

over all instances of law, it requires a revelation of or initiation into the essentially magical

nature of reality. As Greer puts it, “the widening of perception necessary for harmonizing with

Chaos will inherently lead the individual to understand the ways in which consciousness and the

will represent real forces and how the products of the imagination can be made tangible when

one understand how they function.”430 As such, what in Illuminatus! can look like mere drop-out

escapism—or merely nihilistic satire—should also be seen as a dangerously playful ontological

politics that refuses a purely materialist or economic index of liberation. In this sense at least,

Shea and Wilson are party to Raul Vaneigem, who wrote in 1967 that “Daydreaming subverts

the world.”431

428. Shea and Wilson, 747.

429. Greer, “Occult Origins”, 183.
430. Ibid, 180.
431. Vaneigem, Raoul, and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2006),
264.
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In both Illuminatus! and the Discordian materials that precede it, this chaos current takes

both theistic and impersonal metaphysical forms. These more specific forms also help establish

the cultural context of this parody religion. Theistically, the deity is the already mentioned Eris,

Goddess of Chaos, Discord and Confusion, who first comes to Malaclypse the Younger and

Omar Ravenhurst in a dream vision following the encounter with the monkey in a bowling alley.

To the young men, Eris proclaims

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am
the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am
alive, and I tell you that you are free.432

Even if we believe—for good reason—that both men were concocting this dream, the generous,

hieratic language here suggests a numinous poetic vision only lightly dusted with irony. In other

words, for all the laffs and yucks that surround her, Eris appears as a deity worthy of praise, if

not worship.

It is also crucial to note that Eris is a goddess; though feminism was by no means a

dominant discourse in either the various Principia Discordia or the gleefully raunchy

Illuminatus!, the early Discordians recognized that a critique of Babylon was inextricable from a

critique of patriarchy. As such, the Discordian Society should be classed as an “authentic”

Goddess revival religion, one that draws from the same sorts of cultural impulses that informed

the rise of Wicca and other neo-Pagan paths in the postwar period. In fact, neo-Pagan historian

Margot Adler traces the first use of the term “Pagan” to describe the new religious current to

Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley. In an article written about Kerista, a polyamorous

432. Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, 5th edition (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics, 1979), 3.
 336

commune he joined in 1966, Thornley argues that religions that want to be credible in an age of

science should look, not to monotheist traditions, but to the “far more constructively functional

religions of old.” Like these “so-called pagan religions,” Kerista was a “life-affirming” path

whose “fount of being is the religious experience”—an “ecstasy” we should interpret both

sexually and pharmacologically as well as metaphysically.433 While Discordianism represents a

more tricksy path, whose core gnosis is more paradoxical than sexy, it shares with Kerista a life-

affirming erotics of ecstasy.

The impersonal current of chaos found in the Principia Discordia and Illuminatus! finds

its richest expression in the concept of Tao, understood through a selective reading of—and

riffing on—the I Ching, the early Chinese philosophers Lao-tse and Zhuangzi, and the earthy

puzzles of Zen. In the Principia Discordia (first edition) the sacred Tao becomes the “Sacred

Chao,” with the famous “yin-yang” (t’ai chi) symbol of Taoist polarity morphing into the

almighty “hodge-podge.”434 Illuminatus! attributes to Chuang Chu (Zhuangzi) the notion that

“there is no governor anywhere,” a non-controversial translation from the inner chapters of the

Zhuangzi.435 The charismatic Discordian honcho Hagbard Celine, who pilots a yellow submarine

beneath the waves, explains along these lines that “we have acted chiefly by not-acting, by what

the Taoists call wu-wei.”

Though Wilson, Shea, and the Discordians were not the first to link anarchism to Taoist

literature—Kropotkin already makes the connection in a 1910 entry to the Encyclopedia

Britannica436—this association underscores the men’s ontological affirmation of the self-

433. Cited in Adler, Drawing down the Moon, 294.

434. Principia Discordia, 5th edition, 49.
435. In the second chapter, Zhuangzi investigates the multiplicity of moods and the human body: “It would seem as
though they have some True Master, and yet I find no trace of him.” See Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson, trans, The
Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 38.
436. “Anarchism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html
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organizing potentials of the cosmos. In addition, it acknowledges Discordianism’s participation

in the “Asian turn” that marked so much Beat and hippie thought and praxis. For the sociologist

Carole Cusack, this connection to American Zen is key to understanding the Discordian current,

which draws directly from “the Zen understanding of enlightenment or satori as a moment of

total awareness, and the Zen assertion that there is nothing to say, that intellectual efforts must

give way to ‘non-symbolic actions and words.’”437 Equally important, however, is the element of

absurdism and profane illumination in some Zen stories, such as Yun-men’s well-known

declaration that the Buddha “is a dried shit-stick.”438 Through their American interpretation of

Zen, Discordians emphasized illumination as an event that, whether through juxtaposition or

paradox, goes against the grain, at once a realization of coincidentia oppositorum and the

enjoyment, or sufferance, of a painful punch line.

Fnord

Both the theistic and impersonal sides of Discordianism’s chaos ontology help clarify the

crucial role that extraordinary experiences—whether understood as satori, gnosis, or

“mindfucks”—play in the intertwingled narratives of Illuminatus! These experiences are often

erotic and ecstatic, fueled by a hedonistic drive to reach beyond the bounded limits of quotidian

consciousness. Yet for all their countercultural ecstasies, Wilson and Shea are also concerned

with well-established esoteric interpretations of initiation rites in fraternal orders like

Freemasonry or the Order Templi Orientis, in which a sacred drama (or psychodrama) strikes

spiritual resonances within the aspirant.

437. Cusack, Invented Religions, 27. The quotation itself is from Alan Watts.
438. Mumonkan, case 21.
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Here one thinks, for example, of George Dorn, a staff writer for Confrontation who is

sprung out of Texas jail in Mad Dog Texas by a crew of Discordians and brought onto Celine’s

submarine. After much discourse, he is initiated into the Legion of Dynamic Discord with a

stoned sex magical ritual that he initially mocks as an “Elks Club ceremony.” It begins with his

making love with the beautiful Stella Maris and culminates with him on top of a pyramid,

thrusting through the glory hole of a giant golden apple made of steel and inscribed with Kallisti.

As the orgasm of his invisible partner echoes within the apple, the sound seems to contain “all

the agony, spasm, itch, twitch, moon madness, horror, and ecstasy of life from the ocean’s birth

to now.” When Dorn finally orgasms, a hanged man drops down toward him from a trapdoor in

the ceiling, ejaculating one last time in a scene that, as Celine later notes, is drawn equally from

William S. Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade. What disturbs Dorn most is the face of the

hanged man, which he recognizes as his own at the very moment that the projected illusion

disappears. “Thou art that,” laughs Celine when Dorn complains about the ceremony’s sadistic

pornography. “Death is the price of orgasm.”439

Extraordinary experience in Illuminatus! is rarely simply erotic and ecstatic; as an

existential event, it also unfolds into a delirious and sometimes terrifying intensification of

cognitive dissonance that heightens paradox and destroys self-knowledge and certainty.

“Illumination is on the other side of absolute terror,” Dr. Ignotius tells Joe Malik early on. “And

the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can’t believe anything

you’ve ever been told.”440 Illuminatus! does not hold out the hope, dear to the heart of much of

the New Age and other forms of “self spirituality,” that individual mystical experience provides

439. Shea and Wilson, 211.

440. Ibid, 278.
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a solid metaphysical or psychological ground. After all, the Illuminati also have their forms of

extraordinary experience; it is not for nothing that both sides refer to “illumination.”

Revelation in Illuminatus! is principally a centrifugal force, which removes the perceiver

from known frames of reference and plunges her into a vertiginous limit experience whose

existential force—and potential for humor and eros—we mar by assimilating too quickly to the

register of the “postmodern.” As an ambivalently chaotic reformulation of “classic” religious

experience, the anarchist illuminations in Illuminatus! threaten to unleash precisely those

problems that conservative upholders of religious tradition often identify with wayward mystics.

Seers lose the plot, they become paranoid, they go crazy, they start seeing things, they inspire

violence. Early in the novel, Saul Goodman and his partner visits Father James Augustine

Muldoon, a conservative Catholic theologian who gives them a decent potted historical account

of “gnosis”—which he defines as the “direct experience of God”—among the Cainites, the

Manichaens, and modern Satanists. “Rationalists are always attacking dogma for causing

fanaticism, but the worst fanatics start from gnosis,” he says.441

Muldoon is no fool, nor is he represented as one, a fact that only further destabilizes the

political and metaphysical template of the novel. His conviction that gnostic experience is a tool

of the devil is given an even more totalizing and paranoid twist later in the novel by a psychic

named Mama Sutra, who, like many walk-on characters in the novel, tells a story that echoes but

reframes the Big Picture readers are inevitably trying to piece together. Mama Sutra’s bleak

vision is that all the religious leaders of the world are members of the Cult of the Yellow Sign, an

ancient sect that hoaxes and ensorcels the rest of us on behalf of Lovecraftian entities known as

441. Ibid, 170.

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the lloigor.442 One vector of this insidious consciousness control is through religious experience.

“All such experiences come from the lloigor, to enslave us,” she tells a detective. “Revelations,

visions, trances, miracles, all of it is a trap.” The only force that works for the liberation of

humanity is, for Mama Sutra, the Illuminati, whose pursuit of reason and science is the only path

that can resist the lloigor. The Illuminati, she says, “are those who have seen the light of

reason—which is quite distinct from the stupefying and mind-destroying light in which the

lloigor sometimes appear to overwhelm and mystify their servants in the Cult of the Yellow

Sign.”443 Again, by providing an authoritative narrative that resonates with the others in the

novel, but twists it in an unsuspected direction, accounts like Mama Sutra’s work to further

disorient the reader, and to pull the rug out from under any easy “radical” notions of gnostic

liberation.

At the same time, the novel directs the critical capacities of gnosis towards a less fantastic

but no less paranoid target than the lloigor. Here what becomes illuminated is the dreadful and

disguised apparatus of social and ideological control, which is figured in the novel largely as

Illuminati plots. This sort of insight is associated with the ability to “see the fnords,” a direct

revelatory perception of the usually invisible mechanisms of control that speak to what one

ancient Gnostic-Sethian text called “the reality of the archons.” “Fnords” are trigger words

planted by the Illuminati in ordinary media like television and newspapers in order to control

unenlightened humans, and they operate through exploiting two moments of previous

conditioning. The first conditioned response to seeing the fnords produces anxiety, while the

second moment blanks out this seeing, leaving us “to feel a general low-grade emergency

442. The Cult of the Yellow Sign is drawn from Robert Chambers, a writer of supernatural horror who influenced
Lovecraft. Chamber’s 1895 short story collection The King in Yellow features an ominous book of the same name
that, like the Necronomicon, appears in a number of the tales; the Yellow Sign is an eerie glyph that opens the minds
of its possessors to control by baleful beings.
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without knowing why.”444 (Advertisements never feature fnords, thereby encouraging a

consumer society.) “Seeing the fnords” thus amounts to what one might call a gnostic (or

paranoid) media critique that, following the esoteric dialectic of conspiracy theory,

simultaneously exposes a hidden order of control while initiating the seer into an elect of

ostracized knowers. The fnords point to that threshold where the arts of persuasion and even

propaganda, which are still addressed to a conscious knowing subject, cross over into a technical

order of subliminal instrumental control—control that is to some degree returned to those who

can see the fnords and learn not to react.

While concerns with propagandist manipulation, social conditioning, and “brainwashing”

became a pervasive feature of the postwar world, the early seventies proved a particularly ripe

environment for such fears and concerns, both in the avant-garde and popular culture. A number

of essays written by William S. Burroughs in the period elaborated his theories of control, which

were influenced in part by his ten-year immersion in Scientology. Particularly important to

Burroughs was the concept of the “reactive mind,” which he defines as an “ancient instrument of

control” that responds to commands designed “to stultify and limit the potential for action.”445 In

“Playback from Eden to Watergate,” Burroughs linked this concept to his theory of language as a

virus, positing “a very small unit of word and image” that can be “biologically activated” as part

of a “control system.”446 In the popular domain, one need only point to the bestselling 1973 text

Subliminal Seduction, in which Wilson Bryan Key claimed that the media universe was saturated

with what he called “embeds”—words, images, and symbols, usually focussed on sexuality, that

443. Shea and Wilson, 526-27.

444. Ibid, 439.
445. William S. Burroughs, Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg
(New York: Grove Press, 1998), 314. Also see “The Limits of Control” in that same volume.
446. Burroughs, William S., The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, ed. Daniel Odier (New York: Grove
Press : Distributed by Random House, 1974), 14.
 342

were ever-so-faintly layered into both audio and visual advertisements. Though some of Key’s

examples were convincing, his vision was was so totalizing and pervasive that it should be

counted as conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, the resulting outcry led to an official Federal

Communications Commission statement in 1974 condemning the practice.

This discussion reminds us of Timothy Melley’s important argument that modern

conspiracy theory hinges on the experience of “agency panic,” as the individual’s enjoyment of

autonomy gives way to a fearful suspicion that actions and beliefs are being controlled by

external forces. Melley argues that conspiracy theory, defined as “the apprehension of conspiracy

by those not involved in it,” therefore begins with “an attempt to defend the integrity of the self

against the social order.”447 This defense, which attempts to protect and preserve autonomy, also

depends on a specific—and arguably perverse—attribution of agency to the social order. In other

words, the causality of what sociologists call “structural forces” are recognized but combined—

incoherently in Melley’s opinion—with older notions “of a malevolent, centralized, and

intentional program of mass control.”448

As such, conspiracy theory is a crude form of ideology critique that projects agency onto

the same sort of institutional and discursive power formations analyzed by social scientists and

Foucauldian historians. While acknowledging that something like this “paranoid style” has

existed for centuries, Melley also argues, rightly to my mind, that it undergoes a significant shift

in the postwar era. The shift, crucially, is towards something like semiotic power, where “the real

threat is not so much a specific agent or group as a system of communications, an organized array

of ideas, discourses, and techniques.”449 In other words, while the evil boardroom cabal remains

447. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2000), 10.
448. Ibid, 5.
449. Ibid, 2.
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at the core of the imagined spider-web, the action takes place within the universe of mediation,

where the apparatus of control operates on the threshold between the pop culture arts of

persuasion and the dark science of conditioning and other subliminal techniques.

Melley’s analysis helps us understand two aspects of the absurd and sometimes paranoid

gnosis offered in Illuminatus! On the one hand, the postwar shift to the system of

communication as the site of control opens up the possibility of a reverse action within the same

space, a mode of resistance that does not depend on the paranoid defense of individual autonomy

and its boundary conditions, but rather through the destabilization of the very system of

communication through tactics of chaos and confusion.

Again, Burroughs is central here. The famous system of the cut-up explored by

Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, and their crony film-maker Anthony Balch, as well as the spliced tape

recorder tactics outlined in Burroughs’ early seventies essays on the control society, suggest the

possibility of interrupting or “jamming” the signals of culture and the structures of social control

through strategies of nonsense, noise, and juxtaposition that themselves derive from earlier

moments of the avant-garde. While these strategies can be seen simply as a media praxis of

pranks and detournement, they are, for Burroughs, also an eminently esoteric form of occult

resistance: a magical practice of desire and delire that eludes and resists the dominant sorcery of

the state and social control.450

Illuminatus! must also be seen as operating within this current. The book is, first of all,

saturated with media, with newspaper clippings and book citations and TV broadcasts and

advanced screen technologies and computers programmed to throw the I Ching. This material at

once models a system of communication, at least as it took historical form in the late sixties and

450. Perhaps the best term for this practice is Genesis P. Orridge’s “esoterrorism.” See Christopher Partridge,
“Occulture is Ordinary,” in Asprem, Contemporary Esotericism, especially 124-133.
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early seventies, and detunes that systemicity through a variety of means: humor, frank sexuality,

paradox, nonsense, and the serpentine intertwining of fact and rant, fiction and metafiction. Its

characters practice scores of media pranks—a few of which, as we will see, took place in the real

world. Despite its pulp readability, Illuminatus! is also infused with the logic of Burroughs’ cut-

up, particularly in its abrupt transitions, promiscuous (and not always acknowledged)

appropriations, and relentless juxtapositions of materials and perspectives, philosophy and sex.

And beneath or alongside its zany goofs, all its psychedelic shuck and jive, the book establishes a

similar aim: to expose and undercut the specters—ideological, psychological, linguistic—that

constrain and shape our experience of reality, even if that means initiating the reader into an

abyss of freedom that is at once erotic, absurd, and terrifying.

While we could certainly argue that this abyss is “postmodern,” it also arguably re-

situates a much older logic of illumination and mystical deconstruction. Here, for example, is a

nineteenth-century Freemason’s account of the logic of initiatory ascent: “he is learning only to

unlearn; he makes, and he treads on the ruins of his former belief: slowly, painfully, dizzily, he

mounts each successive degree of initiation..and—as if to mock the hope of all return—at each

stride he hears the step on which he last trod crumble and crash into the measureless abyss that

rolls below him.”451 Illuminatus! wants to effect a similarly mocking, and similarly esoteric,

deconstruction of beliefs. Only now the steps are no longer slow, linear, and hierarchically

organized. Instead, like the freak-out dances of the Sunset Strip, they are quick-cut, horizontally

networked, and transcendentally erotic: an ontological anarchism indistinguishable from what, in

the following section, we must call a mindfuck.

451. Cited in Gerard Russell, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle
East, (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 136-7.
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Guerrilla Ontologist

Though Illuminatus! was not published until 1975, the bulk of the text was concluded in

Chicago in 1971. That was the year that Robert Anton Wilson quit his job at Playboy and made

his way to San Miguel de Alennde in Mexico, where he lived for a spell before moving to the

Bay Area, where the bulk of the incidents related in Cosmic Trigger take place. After quitting the

magazine, Wilson stuck to freelance writing for the rest of his life; as a family man from humble

origins, this meant that poverty, welfare, and pulp modes of over-production and market

pandering were sometimes part of the mix.

In 1973, in response to the growing market for countercultural pornography, a paperback

outfit published Wilson’s The Sex Magicians, whose goofy romps drew more from Playboy’s

happy hedonism than the depraved scenarios featured in many underground comix of the day.

Re-mixing a number of characters and themes from Illuminatus!, The Sex Magicians also offers

a clear portrait of Wilson’s evolving ideas about sexual ritual and altered states of consciousness,

notions that we will deal with in the following sections. Wilson also wrote two hard-cover

nonfiction books for Playboy Press during this period, Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits

(1973) and The Book of the Breast(1974). Both of these books were later republished under

different titles that in turn reflect Wilson’s increasingly direct engagement with the occultural

marketplace in the late seventies and eighties: Sex, Drugs & Magick and Ishtar Rising,

respectively.

Appearing two years after the successful debut of the Illuminatus! trilogy on a

mainstream paperback press, 1977’s Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)

marked a significant departure for Wilson. Though the book’s title was obviously designed to
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exploit the popularity of the trilogy, the book also represents a turn in Wilson’s career toward

countercultural publishing and the strange and satirical writing it could allow. Berkeley’s And/Or

Press was essentially an underground publisher, one that had only recently released the

McKennas’ pseudonymous handbook of magic mushroom cultivation. After Cosmic Trigger, all

of Wilson’s nonfiction would be published through such independent publishers, especially New

Falcon Press, a vital provider of radical occulture founded by Alan R. Miller, a clinical

psychologist and Thelemite who published under the name Christopher Hyatt. In the seventies,

the audience for psychedelia and occultural fair was sizable enough to sustain a fringe career.

And since the “public space” for these relatively marginal communities was in many ways

sustained through books and periodicals, Wilson was able to craft himself a persona of lasting

influence on the underground: avuncular cult intellectual providing canny crazy wisdom to an

audience of “skeptical seekers” drawn to conspiracy theories and occult possibilities.

Cosmic Trigger was both the first and most definite act of Wilson’s self-personification

as a hands-on occult philosopher. The book is a combination of autobiography and philosophical

essay that, in addition to telling a hair-raising tale of synchronicities and ominous hermetic

illuminations, presents a quintessential download from the conceptual universe he would

continue to tap, often with a good deal of redundancy, for the rest of his life. “This time the mask

comes off,” writes his admirer, the journalist of the weird Richard Metzger. “In this book,

Wilson came clean, in the most intellectually honest way anyone ever has, on the subject of

‘What happens when you start fooling around with occult things? What happens when you do

psychedelic drugs and try to contact higher dimensional entities through ritual magick?’”452

These are highly weird questions, of course, and we will have to build a scaffold of

understanding before hazarding answers of a sort in a later section. Here I first want to offer up a
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slice of Wilson’s conceptual universe, before we turn to some of the crucial encounters that

shaped Wilson’s philosophical and political thought in the fifties and sixties. This brief

intellectual biography, some of which is drawn from Cosmic Trigger, will help illuminate the

origins of Wilson’s ontological anarchism and his uniquely “weird” take on extraordinary

experience. At the same time, it will also provide an etiology for a visionary countercultural

radicalism that differs in some significant ways from the canonical stories associated with Beats,

hippies, and the New Left.

Wilson’s writing is too discursive and inexact to count as “philosophy.” As an

independent polymath and working writer with a popular audience, he did not overly fret about

technical discourse, and for all his erudition, he could be sloppy with references and historical

facts. He often relied on (and reused) conceptual snapshots to stand-in for complex problems.

For better or worse, this telescoping allowed him to range farther than most critical thinkers,

something that becomes particularly apparent, even uncomfortable, in his discourse on

overdetermined topics like quantum theory and parapsychology. However, Wilson’s looseness

was part of his philosophical style, a style that, like Nietzsche’s, was inextricable from his own

metaphysical sensibility. The dry humor, rapid-fire cultural allusions, and garrulous

argumentation of Illuminatus!, as well as the novel’s relentless frog-leaps between different

discourses and points of view, also informs Wilson’s “serious” (if always chatty) investigations

of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology.

At the same time, though paradox and evasion perform central roles in his thought and

writing, Wilson held little truck with the nihilism of the avant-garde or the obscurantism of the

mystic. He was no Romantic: he loved empiricism and the skeptical edge of science, and knew

enough about political history to understand how easily and cruelly it could be rewritten through

452. Richard Metzger, Disinformation: the Interviews (New York: Disinformation, 2002), 15.
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myth (including the myth of “history”). In technical terms, we might say that Wilson put forward

a skeptical empiricism that framed both ontological and epistemological questions in pragmatic,

pluralist, and radically constructionist terms. Riffing loosely on Heisenberg’s Copenhagen

interpretation of quantum physics, Wilson sometimes characterized his view of reality as a

“neurological model agnosticism.” In the preface to the 1986 edition of Cosmic Trigger, Wilson

explains:

the only ‘realities’ (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about
are perceived realities—realities involving ourselves as editors—and they are all relative
to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving
from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one
single Reality with a capital R.453

Here we can identify a few key elements. One is a fallibilist sort of “meta-programming” that

keeps moving forward by remaining open to personal experience, including extraordinary and

paranormal experience. This empiricism, riding the line between inner and outer worlds, then

becomes an operational vehicle of insight, revision, invention, and play. Another element is

Wilson’s profound pluralism, one that takes it as given that the social and psychological fields

are made up of multiplicities of what he famously calls “reality tunnels”454. Finally, Wilson puts

the nervous system in the driver’s seat, setting up a radical constructionism that brings a

cybernetic language of information processing and feedback to the necessarily hand’s-on task of

programming—“editing”—one’s realities through the experimental adaptation of different

models and practices.

453. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (Phoeniz, AZ: Falcon Press, 1986), iv.
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Though in some ways echoing emerging New Age discourses, Wilson’s theory is bound

up with a praxis that is both libertarian and, in an ethical, almost utilitarian sense, hedonistic. So

on the one hand, Wilson called for a “guerrilla ontology” that critiqued, rejected, and made fun

of the normative discourses or reality tunnels that dominate and constrict modern society,

cultural behavior, and individual psychology. On the flip side, he trumpeted the creative,

expansive, and ultimately mystical possibilities of self-reflexive reality-construction and the

openness to a universe whose chaotic potentials, paranormal and otherwise, are not compassed

by the normally rote human mind. What results from all this is an observer-driven perspectivism

whose vertiginous relativism Wilson felt no compulsion to paper over with moral or ontological

guarantees. As such, Wilson’s thought can also be considered as part of the general

“postmodern” turn that took place across diverse fields of thought in the seventies, as well as a

more constructivist and self-reflexive articulation of the “epistemological individualism” of the

New Age movement that his work both paralleled and mocked.455

Null-A

One of the charming things about Wilson as a thinker is his balance of singular

independence with an enthusiastic willingness to offer credit to the texts and thinkers that shaped

him over time. Wilson knew how much his worldview resulted from such encounters, which is

why cognitive autobiography is such an important strain in Cosmic Trigger. There he tells us

454. Wilson credits the phrase to Leary. For one of his exercises, Wilson suggested subscribing to magazines with
radically different political perspectives for a few months at a time as a way to test the malleable boundaries of one’s
own reality tunnel.
455. For an important account of “epistemological individualism” in the New Age, and its relationship to both
modernist and postmodern paradigms, see Christopher Partridge, “Truth, Authority and Epistemological Relativism
in New Age Thought”, Journal of Contemporary Religion 14, no. 1 (January 1999), 77-95.
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that, after abandoning Catholicism as a teenager, he became a committed philosophical

materialist, dabbling in Marxism while studying engineering and mathematics at New York

University. In his twenties, he treated his sometimes intense anxiety with various courses of

psychotherapy, including work with a Reichean. He also restlessly explored the full range of

fifties fads and philosophies: existentialism, Objectivism, general semantics, phenomenology,

quantum mechanics, Buddhism. Everything influenced him, but maybe not as much as the

cannabis he also tells us he started smoking during the decade. He married the poet and feminist

Arlen Riley in 1958, embarking on a happy marriage that lasted until Arlen’s death in 1999.

Around the same time he started writing for The Realist, a New York rag devoted to “freethought

criticism and satire” edited by Paul Krassner, who would later become both a Merry Prankster

and a Yippie.

Though mostly political, the Realist articles also give us insight into Wilson’s evolving

metaphysical ideas. His 1959 article “The Semantics of God” attacked the language of theism

and suggested a more impersonal semantics in its place—an “it” rather than a “he.” Following

the lead of Alan Watts, a crucial influence on Wilson throughout his life, he sought an empirical

metaphysics that aligned with both Eastern mysticism and the process orientation of Western

science, which Wilson understood through Whitehead, Bohr, and cybernetic thinkers. But the

experiential key for us here lies in his response to an unhappy theist who commented on the

piece in the letters column of the following issue. Here Wilson describes himself as, “strangely

enough,” religious, at least in an aesthetic or “mystical” sense. “But my religion begins and ends
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with a deeply felt, and oddly joyous, experience of what Joyce named, in Ulysses, ‘the apathy of

the stars.’”456

The article also casts light on one of Wilson’s most important influences in the fifties:

Alfred Korzybski. Indeed, in The Realist response, Wilson offers Korzybski’s Institute for

General Semantics for his institutional affiliation. Like William Burroughs, L. Ron Hubbard, and

many science-fiction writers, Wilson was deeply swayed by Korzybsky’s argument that human

beings possess a powerful and deeply unfortunate tendency to tightly identify language and other

abstract codes with the domains revealed through sensory experience. Korzybsky’s famous

slogan, “the map is not the territory,” directly critiques this habit of overwriting experience with

reified abstractions and forgetting the difference. The identification of map and territory—or

what Illuminatus! calls the “logogram” and the “biogram”—allows semantics to shape people’s

experience, inviting all manner of symbolic and ideological control over the body and behavior.

As such, political liberation requires a shift in our relationship to language and expression, one

that takes form precisely through the recovery of the experiential and perceiving body and what

Korzybsky’s general semantics called the “consciousness of abstraction.”

However, though Wilson aimed to root his thought and politics in what we might call a

deterritorialized and erotic body, he did not simply reject or even steadfastly critique the striating

claims of maps and abstractions. Instead, as a constructivist thinker, Wilson came to freely

embrace and deploy the maps and models he thought were liberating or entertaining or

empirically sound without worrying about how they all fit together. As a practice of perception

tuned to the dangerous but necessary dynamics of abstraction, general semantics would give

Wilson permission to suspend the authority of any single map. As such, thinking for Wilson

456. Robert Anton Wilson, “Negative Thinking” column, The Realist, no 9, June-July 1959, 2. Accessed:
http://www.ep.tc/realist/09/02.html. “The Semantics of God” is in no 8, May 1959, 1.
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became a movement between scientific psychology and esoteric cosmologies, logical positivism

and positive thinking, all the while remaining tuned to the phenomenological stream at his

fingertips. Korzybsky’s critique of Aristotelian logic also inspired Wilson’s later advocation of a

“maybe logic” that would resist or outflank the tendency of modern thinkers, and especially

scientists, to promiscuously force the axioms of identity and non-contradiction onto the dynamic

and multi-dimensional world we actually inhabit, a world in which objects and the environment

to which they are inextricably bound change every moment.457

Wilson had other reasons to reject the classical “laws of thought” beyond their mismatch

to a world of dynamic ambiguity and the weirdness of quantum mechanics. “A is not A,”

Hagbard Celine explains in Illuminatus!, referring to Aristotle’s axiom of identity. “Once you

accept A is A, you’re hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System.” Here Celine

understands the law of identity as part of a system of capture and restraint, an enslavement to

rules that any ontological anarchist should reject. But at the very same time, Celine—and Wilson

behind him—is also outflanking rival political claimants to radical liberty. After all, “A is A” is

also a rallying cry of the Objectivists, those sometimes cult-like followers of the philosophical

system developed by Ayn Rand in the forties and fifties as a foundation for her radical call for

selfish individualism and lassez-faire capitalism. Rand believed that objective existence took

primacy over consciousness, which was nonetheless able to rationally overleap the

epistemological chasms described by philosophical skeptics and to recognize reality through

empirical perception and the laws of logic.

http://www.ep.tc/realist/08/index.html
457. In the 1980s, Wilson constructed an alternative system of logical values, but though he did not have the
capacity or likely the interest in developing it formally, it is worth recognizing that scores of significantly more
hard-headed thinkers, including the founders of intuitionism in mathematicians and philosophers like Gotthard
Günther and Stéphane Lupasco, have developed transclassical logics that also attempt to step beyond, or around,
Aristotle.
 353

In Illuminatus!, whose maybe logic makes hash of such views, Wilson and Shea

specifically satirize Rand and her book Atlas Shrugged through the anti-communist crusader

Atlanta Hope and her novel Telemachus Sneezed. They also attack Rand’s theories of property

(and those of her “followers(!)”) in an appendix to the novel devoted to Proudhon. Indeed, one of

the tertiary pleasures of Illuminatus! is that it provides a rival contender to Rand’s rather dreadful

doorstep for the distinction of being the greatest American libertarian novel.

Wilson’s metaphysics is inextricable from his politics, but it is not easy to locate either on

the usual maps. In a Realist column from 1960, Wilson responds to the question of his political

affiliation with evasion, admitting his support of only two political theories: “Don’t be a victim”

(Rimbaud) and “Avoid the authorities” (Lao-tse, by way of Kerouac).458 More substantively,

Wilson’s political writing for Krassner’s journal combined a lacerating critique of power and

economic domination with an intense if non-dogmatic pacifism. Culturally, this was wrapped up

in a hip and hedonistic rejection of an American culture that tattooed its lies and repressions

directly onto people’s nervous systems.

As a more or less historical materialist, Wilson was sympathetic to Marx and the plights

of “wage-slavery,” but his distrust of government brought him increasingly in line with

Proudhon and nineteenth-century American radicals like Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner and

Benjamin Tucker. These classic anarchist thinkers offered principled attacks on the illegitimacy

and necessary violence of the state and, though critical of the capitalist system and what Tucker

called “misusury,” rejected the collective or state ownership called for by communist socialism.

(Obviously the exact positions of these thinkers are more complex). Warren’s defense of what he

called the “sovereignty of the individual” not only aligned with Wilson’s nonconformist rejection

458. Robert Anton Wilson, “Negative Thinking” column, The Realist, no 15, Feb. 1960, 21.
http://www.ep.tc/realist/15/21.html
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of politics as a system of social control, but also resonated with his Reichean insistence that a

healthier and more sensible world would emerge when individuals would break through their

armor of programmed symbolic abstractions and return to their senses.

One nineteenth-century debate that proved key to Wilson’s thought was the conflict

around natural law, the notion that human rights and privileges could be derived through rational

insight into the given nature of human beings. Jefferson enshrined natural law in his famous

preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and early American anarchists believed that the

concept provided all the basis necessary to found their radical individualism. But in the 1880s,

Benjamin Tucker rejected the very idea of natural law after encountering the proto-Nietzschean

subjectivism of the German “egoist” Max Stirner, whom he had translated in his periodical

Liberty. For Stirner, the very concept of natural or property rights, along with abstractions like

“society” and essences like God, were metaphysical illusions—“spooks” that any properly self-

serving egoist would banish from her mind as she stepped into the dangerous and vertiginous

breach that constituted the core of reality: the “creative nothing” that lies at the heart of the

individual psyche.459

With this ontological turn away from natural law, Stirner initiates what John Carroll

identifies as an “anarcho-psychological critique” of both power and the apparatus of ideology, an

anti-authoritarian current that would play a crucial if under appreciated role in modern

psychology, right-wing anarchism, and bohemian culture. And one of the results of this critique

was the principled evasion of politics, at least as it is normally—ie, collectively—conceived, an

avoidance waged both through personal psychological liberation and insurrectionary acts of

language. Like Nietzsche, Stirner can read like a selfish monster from some angles. But Wilson’s

459. John Carrol, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 48.
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embrace of the anarcho-psychological critique was rather charmingly combined with a convivial,

collaborative, and even family-oriented sensibility, one that was arguably as rooted in his

temperament as his philosophy (if there is ultimately any difference).

In the early sixties, for example, Wilson moved with his wife and daughters to the

School of Living in Brookville, Ohio, a back-to-the-land intentional community run by Mildred

Loomis along decentralized and proto-hippie lines influenced by Josiah Warren. Here Wilson

edited the community’s journal Balanced Living, which he renamed A Way Out, and stuffed with

characteristic obsessions like Reich, sexual liberty, and modernist poetry (Wilson knew his

Pound). As libertarian historian Brian Doherty points out, the older anarchist legacy that shaped

Wilson’s thought set his life’s work apart from many of the hard-edged “radicals for capitalism”

that Doherty chronicles.460 “He loved liberty but held fast to Tuckerite ideas that modern

corporate capitalism and banking just wasn’t any kind of liberty he valued.”461

Indeed, Wilson often mocked the modern libertarian obsession with Austrian economics

and the evils of the welfare state, arguments he believed barely concealed a basic hostility

towards the poor. Instead, Wilson’s central anarchist practice lay in the phenomenological

recognition and expiation of the spooks in the mind that constrain and shape our experience of

reality. The pursuit of liberty therefore meant an integrated life of critique and experimentation, a

mobile practice of constructive freethinking and hedonic exploration of body, mind, and personal

experience. The sovereign in Wilson’s anarchism was not the selfish “I” of the Objectivists, a

rationalist monad in a laissez-faire utopia that depended utterly on fixed ideas of natural law. The

singularity that Wilson tried to embrace was, instead, the aboriginal precursor of conceptual and

460. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 43.

461. Doherty, Brian, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian
Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 521.
 356

linguistic identity, that kernel, at once abyssal and down to earth, that is discovered within the

experiential flux of life: sex, children, marriage, work, humor, poetry.

Wilson soon added psychedelics to the list. After reading a review of Huxley’s Doors of

Perception in The National Review, Wilson scored some peyote from a jazz musician and

eventually got his hands on LSD. That Wilson would have read a positive article about

psychedelics in America’s leading right wing organ, a watering hole of anti-Communism and

conservative Christian intellectuals, should not be a surprise. As Marcus Boon reminds us, from

the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-sixties, and setting aside psychotherapeutic researchers, the

bulk of the interest in psychedelic compounds was found in conservative and right-wing circles,

of whom Albert Hoffman’s great friend Ernst Jünger is only the most storied example.462

In 1964, as a journalist for The Realist, Wilson traveled to Millbrook, New York, to meet

Timothy Leary, who would become a life-long friend and collaborator. Wilson owes much of his

skeptical and experimental mysticism to Leary, whose own radical empiricism enabled him to

embrace ecstatic, transcendental states while remaining largely rooted in social science and a

somewhat withering take on human personality. In the popular mind, Leary’s naturalist

orientation is somewhat obscured by the mystic turn that the “acid prophet” took in the sixties

following his ejection from Harvard, when he adopted a guru persona and produced popular

writings that remixed Eastern wisdom texts.

To understand Leary’s influence on Wilson, it might be helpful to provide a contrasting

snapshot of Leary’s thought midway through this transition, one handily provided by a talk he

462. See Boon, 258-259. Among a few American libertarians, many of whom were put off by the conservative
rhetoric of God and country, psychedelics fed into a “spiritual but not religious” yearning for expanded
consciousness. As Doherty narrates, one of the most important currents of libertarian thought in the late nineteen-
fifties, the Foundation for Economic Education, became psychedelicized through the ministrations of Gerald Heard,
Aldous Huxley’s friend and fellow SoCal mystic traveler. See Eckard V. Toy, “The Conservative Connection: the
Chairman of the Board took LSD before Timothy Leary,” American Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (fall 1980), pp. 65-77.
 357

delivered to the International Congress of Applied Psychology in August 1961. Like other

psychologists of the era, Leary saw social life as a kind of “game,” by which he meant, not an

opportunity for free play, but a rule-based set of learned sequences and culture behaviors with

established roles, semantic operators, and associated values. “All behavior involves learned

games” he insisted, noting that the institutions and social regulatory functions he referred to as

“power” are generally not interested in individuals recognizing these games.463 But in his 1961

talk, Leary also pushed the concept of game far beyond ordinary social interactions: the “subject-

object game” structured ordinary perception and science alike, while the “most treacherous and

tragic game of all” was the ego game. Defining the “mystic” as the one who “sees clearly the

game structure of behavior,” Leary outlined a pragmatic and liberationist program of “applied

mysticism,” one that suggested that “great trauma” can “shatter[ ] the gamesmanship out of you”

and thereby free you up to choose better games.464

Leary provided Wilson with a social-psychological model of gnosis, conceived as a

negative rupture of predetermined scripts and socially sanctioned roles. At the same time, Leary

was also developing his notion of “hedonic engineering,” an active and technical pursuit of

happiness and pleasure whose notion of hedonism very much included the higher raptures

associated with psychedelic mysticism. Later, Wilson would come to believe that “mystical”

states of unification and other visionary experiences—including encounters with seemingly

preternatural intelligences—were more-or-less programmable forms of ecstasy that derive from

the constructivist potentials of the nervous system. This is the reason that Leary placed DNA in

the divine driver seat rather than God: not so much to exploit the religious overtones that DNA’s

“code of life” struck in the mid-century mind, but more substantially to embed mystical ecstasy

463. Timothy Leary, “How to Change Behavior,” in Clinical Psychology, ed. G.S. Nelson, Vol 4., Proceedings,
(Copenhagen Munksgaard, 1962), 53.
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in evolutionary scripts that by their nature remained open to design and future transformation.

Leary’s use of religious or esoteric discourse emerged directly from his earlier

institutional practice as a secular social psychologist with a strong commitment to Darwin and to

emerging models of socio-biology. Unlike Jung, and despite his mystical moments in the sixties,

Leary never sought to sneak traditionalist religious or absolutist esoteric currents through the

backdoor of psychological science. As Wilson himself perceptively noted, Leary’s first book,

1957’s The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, followed Skinner in rejecting the “poetry” of

Freud and Jung. At the same time, Leary also took a step beyond Skinner’s mechanistic

“Newtonian physics” by embracing a relativistic notion of social interaction that characterized

“differing reality-coordinates experienced by different bodies as they exchanged signals in

space-time.”465 As a social critic in the mid sixties, Wilson found this “this Einsteinian and

anarchistic variation on Skinner’s 1984-ish Behavior Mod” both exciting and hopeful.466

Moving to Chicago to edit for Playboy, Wilson continued to read and sometimes write

for the growing numbers of periodicals and zines devoted to libertarian thought, pacifism, and

the New Left. These informal networks, in many ways modeled on the S-F fanzine world,

eventually led him to Kerry Thornley. Thornley was then the editor of the Innovator, a

libertarian zine from Southern California that included lively discussions of science fiction,

private fire departments, and the possibility of establishing libertarian countries on floating

platforms at sea.467 Having recently shifted from Objectivism to right-wing anarchism, Thornley

was one of many sixties libertarians who rejected American conservatives for a tentative alliance

464. Ibid, 53.

465. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 37
466. Ibid, 40.
467. Later, as the Innovator’s founder grew increasingly convinced that freedom could only be had by withdrawing
from society and the state, the zine would help birth modern survivalism, a weird right-wing parallel of the Whole
Earth Catalog’s similarly-timed turn towards rural self-sufficiency.
 359

with New Left activists, particularly regarding the war in Vietnam.468 Around this time, Thornley

had also joined the free-love community Kerista in Southern California and had started taking

acid. There are different versions of how Thornley met Wilson, who was mapping a similar path

in Chicago, where he wrote for pacifist zines and participated in the antiwar movement. In the

more Pynchonesque version, Thornley submitted an Innovator article about non-governmental

postal systems into the Forum, which regularly featured gripes about mail tampering by the

postal service. In any case, Thornley turned Wilson on to the great game of Discordianism, and a

few years later, gave Wilson the opportunity to make his first move.

Operation Mindfuck

There are a number of rather Discordian peculiarities about Thornley’s fascinating and

ultimately rather sad life, which has received fit treatment at the hands of biographer Adam

Gorightly.469 After palling around with fellow Erisian Greg Hill in Orange County, Thornley

entered the Marine Corps in 1959, where he served alongside none other than Lee Harvey

Oswald. Thornley was fascinated by the Pravda-reading Oswald, whom he characterized as “the

outfit eight ball,” and began to write a novel based on the soldier’s life a few years before the

assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1961, Thornley moved with Hill to New Orleans, where

Oswald moved briefly in 1963, a circumstance that later took on some importance.

In 1964, while living in Arlington and developing Discordian lore with Hill through the

mail, Thornley testified before the Warren Commission about his friendship with Oswald. In

1966, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the subject of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, began

468. This story is well-told by Doherty, 336-387.

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to suspect that the many holes in the so-called lone gunman theory fomented by the Warren

Commission were portals into a wide and nefarious conspiracy directed by elements of the CIA.

Garrison’s zealous investigation, which even many anti-Warren Commission historians consider

reckless, focussed on a network of New Orleans characters that eventually included Thornley.

Given the loose physical resemblance between the two men, Garrison’s office came to suspect

that the Discordian Society was a CIA front, and that Thornley was a “Second Oswald” who

impersonated the real Lee around town in order to generate the impression of an unstable and

suspicious character. In 1968, Garrison indicted Thornley.470

It was time for what Thornley and Wilson came to call Operation Mindfuck. Thornley

discovered that one of Garrison’s aides, Allan Chapman, believed that the JFK assassination had

been masterminded by the Bavarian Illuminati, the same group that obsessed so many right-wing

Playboy Forum contributors. Working with Wilson and Shea, Thornley decided to prank

Chapman by planting articles in actual publications that connected the Illuminati to the wave of

political assassinations of the decade and other more fantastic forms of malfeasance. The main

prank took the form of a letter to the Playboy Forum in April of 1969, though similar stories

appeared in a Chicago anarchist periodical and Teenset, a popular music magazine. The author of

the Teenset article—none other than “Simon Moon”—asserted that the motto of Adam

Weishaupt’s original order was Ewige Blumenkraft—“Flower Power Forever”—an assertion that

can still be found on sincere Illuminati conspiracy websites today.

469. See Adam Gorightly, The Prankster & the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald
and Inspired the Counterculture (New York: Paraview Press, 2003).
470. One of the additional “synchronicities” mentioned by Wilson and others regarding this series of events is the
assertion that the first edition of the Principia Discordia was clandestinely reproduced on a mimeograph machine
located in Garrison’s offices. This is not the case. That said, it appears that some early Discordian materials were
copied in the office by friends of Thornley and Hill who worked there. For an explanation, see Adam Gorightly’s
youtube lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUqVrH4luXc; accessed June 2015.
 361

The Playboy letter also mentioned an Illuminati group in Berkeley, which was an actually

existing outfit run by Discordians, including Louise Lacey, the most prominent female Erisian

activist. As part of the Operation, Thornley also invented a Do-It-Yourself-Conspiracy Kit,

which included stationary with Bavarian Illuminati and other bizarre letterheads that Thornley,

Wilson and others would use for over-the-top letters to the John Birch Society and other

prankable individuals and organizations. Much of this material made its way into Illuminatus!,

where the Teenset and Playboy Forum pranks are included as part of the Confrontation memos

that turn Goodman on to the conspiracy. All of which reminds us that Illuminatus! itself is part of

Operation Mindfuck, a massive pop culture mushroom emerging from this intertextual mycelial

network of collaborative hoaxing. The authors themselves admit as much in the important

Appendix Lamed, the “Tactics of Magick,” which proclaims that Illuminatus! is an initiation into

Discordian thinking that “has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand

for a period of months (or perhaps years).”471

Here is it crucial to emphasize that, while Operation Mindfuck took place in multiple

arenas, one of those dimensions was deeply political, at least in a special sense of the term

developed by the social historian Julie Stephens. In her book Anti-Disciplinary Protest, Stephens

argues that the dominant view of sixties activism, as well as the usual distinction made between

the New Left and the hippies, ignores the crucial presence of what she calls “anti-disciplinary

politics.” Fomenting a style of protest that rejected hierarchy and leadership, the anti-

disciplinarians offered an often psychedelic politics of satire, ambiguity, and play that was

“distinguished from the New Left by its ridiculing of political commitment, sacrifice, seriousness

471. Shea and Wilson, 774.

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and coherence.”472 Such protestors included the Diggers, the Yippies (including Wilson’s editor

Paul Krassner), and the folks Jerry Rubin dubbed “Marxist acidheads.”473

Classic anti-disiplinary protest spectacles included the attempted levitation of the

Pentagon (which Wilson attended), the Yippie campaign to elect a pig for president, and Abbie

Hoffman’s release of cash at the New York Stock Exchange. Stephens acutely rejects the usual

historical vision of these events as mere psychedelic froth atop a serious core of organized and

ideological movement politics. Though Stephens herself ignores the (admittedly somewhat

marginal) influence of anarchism on anti-disiplinary protest, the Discordians can certainly be

recognized in her portrait of

a countercultural sixties which was highly self-conscious and media-wise, full of self-
parodic gestures, drawing extensively on motifs from popular culture for its language of
protest and distinguished by its spectacular refusals of so-called Enlightenment
rationality, none perhaps more enduring than the conviction that reality amounted to
nothing more and nothing less than a series of mediated images.474

The only non-Discordian note here is this final ontology of images. As noted in earlier

chapters, McLuhan’s foregrounding of mediation had a pervasive influence on the sixties, both

in mainstream media circles and the bohemian fringe, and in some popular forms it contributed

to a sort of hyper-mediated nihilism where the only game in town was, as Ken Kesey said, to

“get them into your movie before they get you into theirs.” For Stephens, this sort of media

politics directly links anti-disciplinary protest to the subsequent emergence of postmodernism

and its supposed vitiation of the realist politics of solidarity into self-conscious mediation and

472. Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, 4.

473. Ibid, 3.
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ironic bricolage. There is much to Stephens’ argument, but I don’t believe that the Discordians

and the other metaphysical radicals of the day were simply handing reality over to media

technique. The levitation of the Pentagon was not just theater; for some participants at least, it

was also ritual, however carnivalesque. For at least some anti-disciplinarians, the rejection of

rationalism or the secular materialism of the left did not signal nihilism but rather the rejection of

the nihilism perceived within secular rationality.

This classic Frankfurt School attack on instrumental reason and the barbarism of the

Enlightenment—eluded to but not developed by Stephens—was read by many young people as

an invitation to place their bets on a different ontology entirely475. Wilson and Shea capture this

sentiment in the extended scene set at the Chicago Democratic Convention in the first novel of

the trilogy, where the secular and rather Wilsonish character Joe Malik—“ex-Trotskyist, ex-

engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic”—overcomes his skepticism and embraces the

esoteric radicalism represented by Simon Moon. “He was game—for astrology, for I Ching, for

LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and

rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the

annihilation of the planet.”476 Though Stephens is right that paradox and incoherence were

specifically political tactics, her focus on the mediated aesthetics of the playful misses the

ontological and esoteric sources that some activists could glimpse through their satiric

epiphanies.

All of which demands that we round up this section with a consideration of the classic

sixties term mindfuck, whose polyvalence is neatly captured in the OED definition: “A disturbing

or revelatory experience, esp. one which is drug-induced or is caused by deliberate psychological

474. Ibid, 22.

475. See Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969).
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manipulation.” In the sixties, variations of the term might describe a piece of guerrilla theater, a

bizarre synchronicity, a Lovecraft story read while stoned, or the psychological sabotage

wrought by a self-styled guru, sexual predator, or bad-vibes flatmate. For the Discordians,

mindfuck was a crucial term of art, at once a practice and an experience that juxtaposed pleasure

and deception, absurdity and illumination, politics and chaos.

On the one hand, Operation Mindfuck was an anti-disciplinary weapon against the

foolish or the powerful, a form of symbolic detournement that incarnates what Mark Dery would

later define as “culture jamming.”477 Considered as a specifically political tactic, the mindfuck

found support in von Neumann and Morgenstern’s game theory, which suggested to the

Discordians that the only strategy an opponent cannot predict is a random strategy. This is the

“random factor” embodied by the surly Illuminatus! character Markoff Chaney, a gruff midget

who directs Dada-esque pranks against various authorities, and whose Pynchonesque name refers

to the Markov Chain, a mathematical way of modeling stochastic processes whose behavior is

not based on the long-term memory of the system but only on its current state. This debt to game

theory and probability is not accidental (or random); though Wilson mocked philosophical

rationalism, his understanding and appreciation for engineering, physics, and cybernetics always

fed into his anti-authoritarian ontology.478

At the same time, the Discordian mindfuck was not just a prank directed outwards, but a

type of personal experience that, following the model of orgasm or the psychedelic “grok,”

abruptly catalyzed a different order of reality and possibility. Gorightly defines this sort of

476. Shea and Wilson, 114-115.

477. See Mark Dery, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs (New Jersey: Open
Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993).
478. As such, Wilson is a fellow traveller in what Bruce Clarke dubs the “systems counterculture.” See Bruce
Clarke, “From Information to Cognition: The Systems Counterculture, Heinz von Foerster’s Pedagogy, and Second-
Order Cybernetics,” Constructivist Foundations 7(3), 2012: 196-207.
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mindfuck as “sowing the seeds of chaos as a means of achieving a higher state of awareness.”479

In this light, the Discordian prank was an instrument of expanded consciousness, the sometimes

stinging stick wielded by American Zen scalawags who wanted to expose what Simon Moon

called the “thermoplastic” nature of reality. As such, mindfucks were not just produced; they

were also received from the world outside. When Lousie Lacey lent the first Carlos Castaneda

book to Thornley, he responded that “Don Juan was quite a head fucker—just what I needed: one

more good lay.”480 Thornley then passed the book on to Hill and Wilson, knowing that they too

would enjoy Castaneda’s metaphysical romp—a mindfuck that takes on even more Discordian

overtones in light of the later scholarly consensus that Castaneda’s books were essentially

hoaxes. So too did Discordian pranks suggest that a “separate reality” lay just next door, a plane

of ontological anarchy whose existence depended at least in part on the intertextual collaborative

game of fabricating it in the first place. As such, the mindfuck was not just an epiphany, but an

invitation. One discrete example that Gorightly cites are the business cards that Hill printed up,

with the slogan “There is no enemy anywhere” on one side, and “There is no friend anywhere”

on the other. Like a stage magician’s tricks, this simple device of cognitive dissonance was

inextricable from social performance—as well as the tentative possibility of friendship.

Without question, the mindfuck is an ambivalent and even dangerous amplification of the

ambiguities already carried by the term fuck, which takes in pleasure, transgression, anger,

degradation, and manipulation. This danger is particularly apparent in the era of the term’s

emergence, when psychoactive drugs and social instability lent themselves to all manner of

suggestions, coercion, and fabulous deceptions. The destructive deployment of hard-edged

psychological games became a central feature of the discourse surrounding new religious

479. Adam Gorightly, Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society: Featuring Robert Anton Wilson,
Kerry Thornley, and Gregory Hill, (New York: RVP Press, 2014), 61.
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movements in the late sixties and early seventies, especially those that emerged from or took

advantage of the psychological stresses of encounter groups or the malleability of consciousness

afforded by psychedelics.

In 1972, Rolling Stone journalist David Felton captured this discourse in his book

Mindfuckers, which excoriated the rise of “acid fascism” among bad-news “cult” leaders like

Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, and Victor Baranco of the Lafayette Morehouse sex commune in

California. All of these leaders, according to Felton, did not just rule over their followers, but

violated them through a kind of psychological (and sometimes literal) rape. Indeed, the perceived

excesses of many new religious movements at the time had a lot to do with what the philosopher

of mind Colin McGinn argues is the dominant contemporary sense of the term mindfuck: the

manipulative use of dishonest means to mess with people’s psyches in an aggressive, even

violent fashion. In his curious little 2008 book Mindfucking, McGinn focuses his moral critique

on the element of dishonesty in the practice. Comparing mindfucking to bullshit and lies,

McGinn argues that mindfucking is, in addition to these, “an illegitimate exercise of power” that

aims to enforce emotional as well as cognitive effects.481 Strangely, though McGinn

acknowledges that mindfucking can lead to pleasure or even insight, he does not develop this

dimension philosophically, which hamstrings his critique and makes it ill-suited to understand

Operation Mindfuck or Illuminatus!.

That said, McGinn’s critique does demand that we place the the Discordian mindfuck

against the backdrop of paranoia. As one of the more disturbing psychological effects exploited

by the mindfucker, paranoia is a unique mental orientation that combines intense emotional

states with significant and often highly articulated shifts in cognition. Paranoia, of course, has

480. Gorightly, The Prankster, 154.

481. Colin McGinn, Mindfucking (Stocksfield [U.K.]: Acumen, 2008), 38.
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served as a major topos throughout twentieth-century culture, a nexus point of psychopathology

and cultural narrative, of phantasms and reason run amok. But in the American counterculture of

the sixties and early seventies, paranoia struck particularly deep.

The traumatic effects of the JFK assassination, combined with the widespread

dissatisfaction with the Warren Commission and their fishy lone-gunman theory, drew many

young people into an alienated and conspiratorial mindset that was only amplified by later

assassinations and the massive and insidious counter-intelligence operations aimed at the protest

movement. The discursive links between conspiracy and paranoia had, again, been forged in

Hofstader’s famous 1964 essay, and though Hofstader insisted his use of the clinical term was

metaphoric, the sixties was not an era to recognize the crisp distinction between metaphor and

the real. Part of the function of the FBI’s widespread Cointelpro program, which loosed a myriad

of snitches and agent provocateurs into student groups and cells of radical activists, was to

destroy social cohesion by sowing suspicion and paranoia.

Wilson, who actively participated in the anti-war movement in late sixties Chicago,

wrote that “In any given week I would be warned perhaps three times that somebody I trusted

was really a government agent, and, of course, somebody who was accused one day might very

well be around to accuse somebody else the next day.”482 Such suspicions were of course

intensified by the widespread use of drugs like cannabis, amphetamine and LSD, all of which

can amplify paranoia, intensify the perception of meaningful coincidences, and breed what

psychiatrists call “delusions of reference.” As noted, these resonating and synchronistic networks

of signs and events not only become the cognitive platform for baroque political conspiracies,

482. Robert Anton Wilson, foreword, in Holmes, Donald, The Sapiens System: The Illuminati Conspiracy (Phoenix,
Ariz., U.S.A.: Falcon Press, 1987), 8.
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but help fuel the elaboration of more cosmic plots whose mythological power are in many ways

indistinguishable from the productions of the religious imagination.

Operation Mindfuck toyed with paranoia by parodying conspiracy culture in a manner

designed to exploit other people’s susceptibility to believe in conspiracy. Paranoia was, in other

words, a kind of sand trap in a game that required constant cognitive movement and the courage

to embrace profound instability. In McGinn’s terms, this makes it unethical, if not dangerous.

Such a critique was also levied against Wilson directly by the science fiction writer Thomas

Disch, who saw his ironic promulgation of conspiracy and esoterica to gullible and possibly

paranoid readers just another example of the “right to lie” enshrined in American popular

culture.483

However, the Discordian game can also be understood as an inoculation against paranoia,

which could be seen as an almost inevitable byproduct of both psychedelic exploration and the

critical analysis of power in the sixties and seventies, which from the JFK shenanigans to

Cointelpro to Watergate took the explicit form of conspiracy. Discordian consciousness can

therefore be seen as another kind of high-wire act, one where paranoia provides part of the

tension of the line while also threatening to destroy the acrobat if she loses the balance of her

maybe logic.

This ironic tension lies at the heart of Illuminatus! On the one hand, the book’s relentless

series of plots and counter-plots, rumors and delirious switcheroos document the oppressive

atmosphere of conspiracy—psychic or otherwise—that shadowed the sixties promise of

transformative epiphany, and that definitively eclipsed that promise in the early seventies. At the

same time, Illuminatus! grabs the bull by the horns by embracing the possibility of paranoia as a

483. Thomas Disch, The Dreams are Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, (New York:
Touchstone, 1988), 29.
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form of enjoyment, a kind of freak jouissance that subverts the heaviness of conspiratorial

conviction through the play of uncertainty. The gags and slapstick of the book can thus be read

not only as an expression of satire and strategic nonsense, but as an apotropaic, even magical

antidote to the gravity of the situation. In this light, the irrationality of anti-disciplinary politics

can also be seen as an antidote to paranoia, an absurdist evasion of the sorts of causal chains that,

however accurate their initial basis, so often imprisoned activists and psychonauts alike in mind-

forged manacles of suspicion and distrust. Writing about the atmosphere of suspicion stirred up

by all the snitches in the antiwar movement, Wilson gives voice to this logic by claiming that “I

enjoyed it all rather than being terrified only because I basically agree with Helen Keller that

‘Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing.’” 484 Wilson’s dash may have comes naturally to

him, but it is perhaps more fruitful to understand this Discordian attitude as a practice of high

weirdness—and, as we will see, a rather fragile one at that.

Religio Discordia

For scholars of religion, who like most academics love to wrangle with categories and

terminology, the Discordian Society offers some particularly entertaining volleyballs to toss back

and forth. The first question is whether it counts as a “real” religion at all. What to do with a

fiercely individualistic game of misdirection and nonsense that admits to its artificial origins,

seemingly takes nothing seriously, and rejects most institutional markers of religion?

Understandably, some scholars had decided to avoid the religion tag altogether. Hugh Urban

emphasizes Discordianism’s connections to postmodern philosophy, while Christopher Partridge

assimilates the Erisian sensibility into the current of “esoterrorism” articulated in the eighties by

484. Wilson, foreword, 8.

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the Temple of Psychick Youth founder Genesis P. Orridge, for whom “the cut-up and the

cultivation of occult culture are central to the subversion of social control.”485

At the same time, Discordianism has also been recognized as a progenitor of “hyper-real

religion,” which largely focuses on Internet-driven niche scenes that fuse pop culture and

patterns of religion. Unfortunately, Adam Possamai’s characterization of hyper-real religion as a

“simulacrum of religion” that draws from “commodified popular culture” fails to account for

Discordianism’s sideways critique of the spectacle and its attendant resistance to

commodification.486 Others have approached the question from a more functional angle,

analyzing how Discordianism fits into the lives of individuals; however as Carol Cusack notes in

her book Invented Religion, the Erisian sensibility is so iconoclastic and recombinant that

agnostics and atheists have embraced it alongside seekers, mystics, and Pagans. Cusack’s

emphasis on the invented nature of the religion—by which she means its explicit celebration of

its own character as a fictional construction—is an important step forward, but does not help

clarify the difference between exclusively satirical “religions”—like the contemporary Church of

the Spaghetti Monster, which is an atheist project designed solely to mock theism—and religious

approaches that heavily rely on satire to achieve effects that exceed or even subvert mere

parody.487

The tricky question of sincerity is not really helpful either, though here we can certainly

find a good deal of evidence that at some level the architects of Discordianism took their material

“seriously.” For example, Hill’s hopes for Discordianism are made abundantly clear in a 1969

485. Urban, Hugh B, Magia Sexualis Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 2006), 234-5; also Partridge, “Occulture is Ordinary”, 129.
486. For general overview of the discourse, see Adam Possamai, ed, Handbook of Hyper-Real Religion, (Leiden,
ND: Brill, 2012). Note, however, that the relationships to commodification and consumerism in the Principia
Discordia is worlds away from those found in, say, Jediism or Matrix spirituality.
487. For more on the Spaghetti Monster, see Cusack, Invented Religions, 134-140.
 371

letter he wrote to the Reverend Kirby Hensley, an illiterate pastor from Modesto, California who

founded the Universal Life Church in 1958. Hensley offered ordinations through the mail, no

questions asked, a process that brought upon him accusations of fraud and apostasy but that also

enabled millions of Americans in the sixties and beyond to legally perform marriages and other

services (the tax exemptions some hoped for did not work out as well). The ULC has no

doctrine, and accepts all faiths. Hill thought Hensley was “an authentic living Erisian Avatar

(Class 1-A)” and encouraged Discordians to become legal ministers through the Church if they

so choose, since POEE refused to deal with the state. In a fannish letter to Hensley, Hill

explained that

We say that we worship the Goddess Eris…We then organize into a super confusing
funny crazy church that a) points out how silly organized churches are and b) just
“happens” to have a lot of good religious philosophy in it. The result is both entertaining
and instructive, and we are proud of it and plan to promote our message as much as we
can.488

Unsurprisingly, Discordianism is also constructed in such a way that even the “evidence”

of sincerity is no evidence. As Hill wrote in a personal note to the first edition of the PD, the

question of whether its authors “really believe” its contents is rejected as incoherent.

“Discordianism absolutely destroys the distinction between ‘being serious’ and ‘not being

serious.’”489 Though we may raise our eyebrows at this “absolutely,” it remains the case that

Discordianism cannot simply be classed as an example of what Danielle Kirby calls “religions or

488. Gorightly, Historia Discordia, 121.

489. Ibid, 76
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spiritualities masquerading as a joke rather than the other way around.”490 Such a definition

remains too dependent on an ontology of true depths and surface feints, where what is called for

is something closer to the sagacious superficiality Nietzsche celebrated in his claim that

everything profound loves masks.

Kirby is right that there is something profound, sincere, and authentically religious in

Discordianism, admitting the tricksyness of all these terms. But the joke on the surface is more

than a mask—or rather, it is a profound mask, a mask whose unmasking reveals only the

oscillation between religious philosophy and satire. Perhaps the journalist and witch Margot

Adler had it right back in the seventies, when she classed Discordianism as a “religion of

paradox and play” in her great 1979 history of American Paganism, Drawing Down the Moon.

Adler’s account also has the benefit of nesting Discordianism—at least from the mid-sixties

forward—within the larger social context of emerging Paganism, which underwent a period of

great creative ferment and expansive self-definition in the sixties and seventies, especially in

California, where many Discordians spent serious time. We have already noted Adler’s

recognition of Thornley as the originator of the contemporary use of the term “pagan,” and later

we will see how Robert Anton Wilson became involved with Pagan occultists and “bootstrap

witches” in the Bay Area. Here however, I want to focus on Adler’s (rather Pagan) emphasis on

practice rather than position, and particularly on the practice of paradox.

We have already seen a few examples of these paradoxes: the “no friend”/“no enemy”

business card, the absolute coincidence of being serious and not being serious. These are both

examples of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites that features so heavily

in traditional mystical discourse. The concept, for example, plays a central role for the fifteenth-

century mystic Nicolas of Cusa, for whom God is beyond opposites and contradictions, and can

490. Danielle Kirby, “Occultural Bricolage”, 43.

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therefore be said to be the site of their coincidence, a coincidence that, Cusa is keen to point out,

should not be confused with identity. The Principia Discordia presents many similar paradoxes,

a number of which feature a coincidence or superimposition of contraries or contradictions. For

example, “Starbuck’s Pebbles” features five pebbles arrayed like this:

“Do these 5 pebble really form a pentagon?” asks the PD. Those who favor the “Aneristic

Illusion”—that the apparent order truly exists—will say yes, while those who favor the opposite

Eristic Illusion—that such apparent order does not in fact exist—will say no. But there is another

level as well (one with multiple esoteric overtones): “Criss-cross them and it is a star.” In any

case, “An Illuminated Mind can see all of these, yet he does not insist that any one is really true,

or that none at all is true.”491 Instead, the Illuminated Mind recognizes the truth of a

constructivism that combines Kant with Nietzsche: “The real reality is there, but everything you

KNOW about ‘it’ is in your mind and yours to do with as you like.” Rather than make an
 374

argument, this whole exercise instead enjoins a practice and a possible state of expanded

consciousness. In other words, paradox too is a mode of anthropotechnics.

To help understand the role that paradox plays in Discordianism, it may be helpful to

invoke a distinction made by the philosopher of religion Matthew Bagger. Bagger’s book The

Uses of Paradox attempts to analyze, on naturalistic and functionalist grounds, the immense

appeal that paradox has held for mystics and religious thinkers throughout the ages. Baggert

isolates two dominant modes of what one might call “paradoxical practice”: the ascetic and the

mystical. Using Leon Festinger’s famous notion of cognitive dissonance, Bagger argues that

some religious practitioners use paradoxes to perform a cognitive analog of the sort of self-

abnegating ascetic ordeals typified by fasting. “In the same way that some ascetics resist the

motivation to avoid or reduce hunger…, some ascetics resist the motivation to avoid or reduce

cognitive dissonance and, in fact, cultivate dissonance and seek to increase its magnitude.”492

Bagger gives the example of Zen monks, especially in the Rinzai tradition, who in the course of

their koan study cultivate a ferocious “Great Doubt”; a modern exemplar for him is Kierkegaard,

who, we are led to understand, deployed paradox to effect what the Danish philosopher himself

called the “crucifixion of the understanding.”

In contrast to such ascetics, however, mystics like Cusa celebrate the paradox as a benign

revelatory gateway into what Bagger calls “paranormal cognitive states”, which seem to resolve

the delicious tensions that in some sense produce them in the first place. For Cusa, such states

were associated with a unity that could only be grasped through “learned ignorance,” a

paradoxical state that “resolves contradictions without violating the integrity of the contrary

491. Principia Discordia, 5th edition, 54.

492. Bagger, Matthew C., The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation, and the Absurd (Columbia
University Press, 2007), 18.
 375

elements and without diminishing the reality or the force of their contradiction.”493 This sort of

active polarity also recalls the enantiodromia of Jung, but in either its ascetic or mystic

approaches, the intense engagement with paradox can certainly trigger an altered state,

something that some might call “Illuminated Mind.”

As a somewhat cramped reductionist, however, Bagger wants to suggest that such mystic

resolutions are simply a cognitive set-up lying poised within the philosophical and discursive

framework of the mystic’s given tradition. In an appropriately recursive phrase, Bagger writes

that “mysticism exploits the awe produced by paradox to render compelling the ontological

doctrine that produces paradox.”494 Bagger, of curse, means this to be an ontologically

deflationary move, one that takes the wind from the sails of Zen monks and Christian mystics

alike. But his naturalistic approach could just as easily be read as the pro-active description of a

successful bootstrap operation, which is the mode of producing paradox closest to Discordian

sources.

The sort of social science approach adopted by Bagger is also helpful for understanding

the relations between Discordianism and anarchic counterculture. Applying Mary Douglas’ work

on the functional role that categorical anomalies serve in different societies, Bagger argues that

an individual or culture’s attitude toward paradox “functions to exemplify or intimate the

dangers or rewards of boundary crossing.”495 Cognitive asceticism emerges when outsiders are

viewed as threatening to group identity; Kierkegaard, a group of one, crucified himself on

paradox in order to protect the internal life of faith against bourgeois Christianity and a corrosive

“present age.” Cusa’s mysticism, on the other hand, derives from his integrative affirmation of

493. H. Lawrence Bond, “Introduction”, Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, ed. Bond (Paulist Press,
1997), 22.
494. Bagger, 92.
495. Ibid, 46.
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the unity and harmony of a Church strong enough to include a degree of contradiction. Early in

his career, Cusa was also an advocate of a movement that attempted to integrate schismatic

tendencies within the church, and later served in the controversial cause of union with the

Eastern church. For Bagger, Cusa’s view that the mind can transcend the limits of reason reflects

his efforts to bring outsiders across the external boundary of the Church’s communion.496

What is interesting about Bagger’s distinction between ascetic and mystic modes of

paradox, as well as their different social conditions, is that both apply equally to Discordianism.

On the one hand, Discordianism is ascetic in that it strips away conventional wisdom and tests

itself on its capacity to endure contradiction and the suspension of the clear distinction between

irony and sincerity, fiction and truth. The Principia Discordia does not, for example, announce

that “there are no absolute truths,” a metaphysical principle that, of course, destroys itself on the

shoals of self-contradiction. Instead, by sustaining a tone of mockery and silliness, the texts enact

this ironic truth rather than merely state it, and thereby continue to resist reification and the

comforts of ontological essences. Following Bagger, all of this can be seen as a mechanism of

defining and establishing a boundary between the hip and the square, between the in-joke and the

war machine of rationality.

But at the same time, the humor and tone of the PD is largely playful and joyous, which

marks a more “mystical” orientation to paradox that sees contradiction and confusion as

expressions of an erotic cosmos of Whitmanesque proportions, and thereby able to contain

contradictions. This bonhomie, at least as a performance, expresses the Discordian desire to

transgress boundaries, a desire reflected in both their incestuous interpersonal exchanges and in

496. Some delightful if anecdotal support for this argument is provided by the fact that Cusa wrote that he received
his great “celestial gift” of learned ignorance, an ineffable experience through which he was led to “embrace
incomprehensibles incomprehensibly,” when he was on a boat sailing from Greece to Italy with a party of
representatives of the Eastern church.
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the larger erotic, psychedelic, and magical counterculture of which they were a part, all of which

derived enormous energy from the relentless crossing of boundaries.

In her analysis of Discordianism, Cusack rightly describes it as a “religion of liberation.”

As mentioned earlier, Cusack underscores the links to American Zen, which already by the late

fifties, at least in its “Beat” forms, had reached a high degree of sometimes joking informality.

But what she seems most interested in is the role of fiction in the Erisian stream. Bringing

Discordianism into dialogue with other modern invented religions like the Church of All Worlds

and the Church of the Subgenius (the latter with direct ties to Discordianism), Cusack argues

that, like new religions in general, what is important about these groups is not so much their

claims about reality as the stories they tell about reality. What makes invented religions stand out

is that, employing varying degrees of irony, those spiritualities loudly announce their own status

as fictions—as constructive and intentional acts of the imagination—rather than new revelations

or transformations of authentic traditions. By hanging the appeal of these invented creeds on

narrative needs, Cusack can invoke both sociological and cognitivist accounts to support her

claim that invented religions are at least functionally equivalent to well-established institutional

religions. “In cognitivist terms, there is no reason to prefer a factual to a fictional story in a

religious context.”497

But while Cusack definitely “groks” Discordianism—to use a science fiction term

popular in the Church of All Worlds—her emphasis on the role of narrative distorts

Discordianism’s aggressively parodic and self-deconstructing performance of its own sacred

talk, particularly in the Principia. As Christian Greer argues, Cusack’s emphasis on “fictionality”

reflects today’s critical needs more than it illuminates Discordianism, whose tango with

fabulation rested on, if one can say it, a more foundational antifoundationalism. In Greer’s words
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now, “the scholarly preoccupation with the integration of fiction into the Discordian mythos fails

to appreciate how Discordians, as well as other ontological anarchists, treat all ideas as socially

constructed ‘convenient fictions’ that are equally true, false, and meaningless.”498 While the

foundational fourth edition of the PD includes a number of myths, for example, these stories are

also consistently undermined, mocked, and punctured. Eris is a Goddess, but she is also the

object of schoolboy humor. Rather than fulfill what Cusack calls our “evolutionary biological

bias towards…a certain kind of explanatory narrative,” Discordianism—especially in

Illuminatus!—seeks rather to expose this bias and to rupture those explanatory narratives that

obscure the nonlinear and paradoxical “guerrilla enlightenment” of chaos.499 What

Discordianism values is the satori, not the story.

That said, fictions, and especially the strange and hazardous loops that stitch together

fictions and the real, are of central concern to Illuminatus! Even more importantly, these loops

are, like paradox, a form of praxis that use the dynamic irritation between fact and fiction to

deform consciousness and culture. For Wilson, this praxis took on a more explicitly occult

character in the early seventies, when Wilson’s increasingly esoteric investigations in reality

tunneling set up the nexus of self-confirming fabulations that invaded his life during the years

described in Cosmic Trigger. One feature of these investigations was his participation, along

with Arlen, in Northern California’s pagan demimonde, where the two socialized with members

of the Ordo Templi Orientis and joined two small witchcraft groups, the Stone Moon coven and

the Moebius Circle.500

497. Cusack, 22.

498. Christian Greer, review, Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith,
Correspondences 2.1, 2014, 111.
499. Cusack, 52.
500. Aidan Kelly, A Tapestry of Witches (Tacoma, WA: Hierophant Wordsmith Press, 2014), 64
 379

Both of these small groups were spin-offs of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the

Golden Dawn, a vital Northern California tradition whose followers described themselves in one

1972 publication as “an assemblage of natural anarchists, bootstrap witches and alienated

intelligentsia.”501 The phrase “bootstrap witches” here referred to the fact that, unlike the

Gardnerian and related Wiccan traditions that were imported from the United Kingdom, the

group openly acknowledged that their practice began, not with an authentic transmission or

hidden ancestral tradition, but rather with art, fiction and play. The origins of the order lay in a

class taught at San Francisco State by the poet and film-maker James Broughton, whose

assignment to create a ritual inspired Aidan Kelly, Glenn Turner, and others to begin a collective

process of creative invention. Sampling different literary and mythological traditions, and pulling

themselves up by their own “bootstraps,” the crew transformed themselves in short order into a

living occult current whose practitioners took the results of their magical performances seriously

as well as playfully.502 After one particularly powerful early ritual, Kelly realized “that the Craft

could be a religion for us skeptical middle-class intellectuals.” And it could do so, he saw, for

three reasons: it did not require anyone to violate their intellectual integrity; it “operated

nonintellectually”; and it could alter people’s state of consciousness.503

Wilson’s participation in NROOGD spin-off groups reflected an important shift in his

ontological anarchism that seemed to begin in the very early seventies, following his move from

Chicago. Riding the waves of the occult revival, Wilson increasingly came to play with

Discordian paradox—including the coincidence of fiction and reality—in a more than

intellectual or literary manner, and to exploit the tension of such contradictions into an occult

501. Adler, Drawing Down the Moon,162

502. Kelly, a PhD, would also go on to produce scholarly research that effectively destroyed Gardner’s claim that
his texts were products of a living but hidden witchcraft tradition. Kelly’s social history of the NROOGD is
contained in Aidan Kelly, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches (Tacoma, WA: Hierophant Wordsmith Press, 2011).
 380

engine for his increasingly intense and vivid hands-on experiments in epistemology and

ontology. It is these practices that stage the ontological funhouse of Cosmic Trigger. In the

following section, however, we need to pull back and first understand how Wilson tugs on the

boundaries of fiction, reality, and the occult in his writing, and particularly how Illuminatus!

weaves in the literary legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, whose infectious tales of extraterrestrial pseudo-

gods, forbidden grimoires, and cosmic “outsideness” have come to define the very substance of

the weird as genre. More importantly, however, Lovecraft’s invented mythology is also one of

the more significant sites in twentieth-century literature where the ontological warp introduced

by “as if” fictional entities becomes part of the fictional universe itself, as imagined entities take

on a second-order or bootstrapped life of their own in a manner that, like the events in Cosmic

Trigger, is simultaneously disturbing and absurd.

Eldritch Palmer…

Though he hasn’t been recognized as such, Robert Anton Wilson stands as one of the

more perspicacious and inventive writers to critically engage the matter of Lovecraft in the

sixties and early seventies, when Lovecraft criticism was in its infancy. Admittedly, Wilson

mostly corralled his critical appreciation for Lovecraft in works of fiction, and patchwork

fictions at that, in which the genre of horror only plays a minor role. In fact, Wilson claims that

he never considered Lovecraft’s writings “horror fiction” because “they never scared me; I

regarded them as a special kind of prose-poetry that lifts the reader into a perspective far, far

beyond human prejudice, a perspective in which Earth and its denizens are very unimportant,

503. Kelly, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, 23.

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virtually accidental parts of the cosmic drama.”504 That said, when Wilson personifies cosmic

and inhuman forces in Illuminatus! or 1973’s The Sex Magicians, he turns as often as not to the

horrible monsters like Yog-Sothoth that Lovecraft invented as part of the artificial mythology of

cosmic outsiders sometimes called the “Cthulhu mythos.”

Wilson did so partly to continue the intertextual game started by Lovecraft and his Weird

Tales cronies, in which a shared network of references to gods and grimoires subtly thickened

the ontology of the tales. Wilson wanted to exploit the very same quality of quasi-reality

constructed through these referential strategies to amplify the occult and sometimes foreboding

political possibilities he was sketching with Shea. Indeed, Wilson was not just a good reader of

Lovecraft, but an insightful student of the whole tradition of weird and gothic fiction that

Lovecraft helped focus and cohere in his own 1927 critical account of the supernatural tale. In

fact, though Illuminatus! is usually classed (poorly) as “science fiction,” it is better seen as a

conspiratorial reformulation of the weird tale, a pulp form that derives some of its peculiar

frisson by, as we will see, making the reader ever so slightly paranoid. Secret societies are, in the

light of Illuminatus!, weird societies. In Illuminatus! we are even told that Bavarian Illuminati

head Adam Weishaupt performed rites so bizarre that the resulting “psychic vibrations” had

bounced off every sensitive mind in Europe, generating such literary productions as Lewis’s The

Monk, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein, and DeSade’s One

Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom.

But it is Lovecraft that deserves pride of place here. Blending elements of classic fantasy,

pulp horror, and the emerging logic of science fiction, the central bulk of Lovecraft’s tales are

characterized by a fascination with the dialectics of madness and knowledge; a pantheon of

bizarre extraterrestrial pseudo-gods who are essentially inimical to human life; and an anxious

504. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (Tempe, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications., 1991), 172.
 382

concern with human degeneration and the corrosive call of the primitive. In Lovecraft’s mature

work, magic, whether learned or atavistic, unleashes prehistoric and cosmic powers rather than

supernatural hierarchies of angels or devils. Lovecraft first makes this move in his 1928 story

“The Call of Cthulhu,” wherein he reframes the archaic gods worshipped by voodou initiates and

remote “Eskimo wizards” as extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional beings. Paralleling Theosophy’s

mythological histories of earth, and later entering popular culture as Erich von Daniken’s

“ancient astronaut” theory, Lovecraft’s science-fictional ancient history suggested that the

savage mysteries that animate the most primitive human cults encode actual truths about the

cosmos, including dimensions of reality—like Einsteinean space-time and the non-Euclidean

geometry used to describe it—that early twentieth century astrophysics was only beginning to

understand.

In contrast to the supernaturalism of ghost stories or the gothic tales he began his fiction

career with, the metaphysical background of Lovecraft’s mature horror is thus a kind of science

fiction whose “cosmic indifferentism” reflects the atheistic materialism that Lovecraft professed

at great and sometimes hectoring length in his letters and popular press articles. But even as

Lovecraft embraced the disillusioning powers of science, he also pessimistically anticipated

science’s ultimate evisceration of human cultural norms. His weird tales were imaginative

diversions from this nihilism, but the amorality of their cosmic monsters reflected it as well, as

did the qualified realism that Lovecraft brought to his greatest works.

Lovecraft was no Romantic, in other words, and the dialectic that his work and thought

stage between realism and metaphysical wonder helps explain why he was so important to

Wilson, the McKennas, Philip K. Dick, and other voyagers into psychedelia and high weirdness.

One of the best ways into this dialectic is through the literary historian Michael Saler’s key
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notion of “disenchanted enchantment.” In his book As If, Saler describes how Anglo-American

readers and writers in the late nineteenth century began turning to works of fiction that combined

the pleasures of the marvelous, already found in the Aesthetic and decadent writers of the time,

with the rhetoric of reason and objectivity that such writers rejected. H. Rider Haggard’s

enormously popular She, which came equipped with maps, chronologies, and doctored

photographs, is the classic example of how writers were learning to combine imaginary exotica

with the armature of reason (a process that, as we will see in the next section, also characterizes

important aspects of the modern occult revival).

According to Saler, this self-reflexive form of enchantment “delights without deluding,”

as readers come to enjoy their fictions “as if” they were real, but only in so far as this conditional

state is bounded by what Saler calls the “ironic imagination.” Confident with the apotropaic

powers of such ironic distance, adults could “reside safely within carefully mapped geographies

of the imagination without compromising their reason—going native, as it were—because the

necessary distinction between fantasy and reality was securely reinforced through the distancing

power of irony.”505

Another ways of approaching this is that the texts of “disenchanted enchantment” reframe

the imagination as a pleasure, at once a wonder and an entertainment, but without relying on the

metaphysical substance the animates the central current of Romanticism. In contrast to the

latter’s hieratic and earnest sensibility, Saler’s “as if” texts instead emphasize “the provisional,

the contingent, and the artificial.”506 One of the more remarkable statements of disenchanted

enchantment found in Saler’s book comes from a celebrated 1930 letter by Lovecraft to his

friend, the California weird fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith:

505. Michael T. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Pre-History of Virtual Reality (Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29.
 384

[I get a] big kick . . . from taking reality just as it is—accepting all the limitations of the
most orthodox science—and then permitting my symbolizing faculty to build outward
from the existing facts; rearing a structure of indefinite promise and possibility . . . But
the whole secret of the kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so. I’m probably trying to
have my cake and eat it at the same time—to get the intoxication of a sense of cosmic
contact and significance as the theists do, and yet to avoid the ignorant ostrich-act
whereby they cripple their vision and secure the desiderate results.507

Note that here the ironic imagination takes its pleasures, its intoxication, in part through

an proximity to religion. In the classic terms of the history of religion, we might say that the

ironic imagination enjoys the sacred but only at the cost of its profanation. Cosmic promise and

possibility are, in the end, nothing but a tease that produces an ultimately demotic pleasure, a big

kick, a cheap thrill—and a sober and rational morning-after. Indeed, it is no accident that

Lovecraft uses the term “intoxication,” since from one angle, nothing ironizes the metaphysical

imagination of the Romantics or the religious so much as appreciating how much mere

pharmacology mimics or models such sublimities. Intoxication, in its response to Sloterdijk’s

vertical tension, also builds outward.

For Walter Benjamin, the energies released from such profane illuminations contained

the seeds of real historical possibility; for a lot of heads and freaks in the counterculture, profane

illuminations were also big kicks. As such, it is not surprising to find an important vein of

disenchanted enchantment within the occultural milieu of the sixties and the seventies. Both the

authors and many of the fans of Illuminatus! wanted to have their conspiratorial cake and eat it

506. Ibid, 33.

507. H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-31, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House, 1976), 193; cited in Saler, 31.
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too. Some readers of Von Daniken took it all seriously, but many others read his books as they

would read Lovecraft—for an imaginative or rhetorical rush made more delicious or perverse by

its proximity to a “structure of indefinite promise” in part provided by the author’s own (perhaps

dissimulated) stance of sincerity. Whatever “secrets” are revealed through such esoteric reading

are, in this modern context, inextricably bound up with the other secret Lovecraft mentions: the

secret that the reader knows damn well it isn’t true, a secret that itself must itself be temporarily

secreted for kicks to be had.

This is why Lovecraft, when discussing the methodology he brought to bear on his

fiction, often invoked the language of the hoax. In the same letter to Smith above, in which he

described his attitude as that of the “hoax-weaver,” Lovecraft described his method: “One part of

my mind tries to concoct something realistic and coherent enough to fool the rest of my mind &

make me swallow the marvel.”508 Lovecraft developed this dialectical hoaxing, which served as

an important literary model for Wilson, through a variety of tactics. One was the language of

realism Lovecraft developed in his mature writing, which restrains the feverish tropes of macabre

for a more transparent language that, while not without its purple blooms, often lies closer to

reportage and nonfiction essay. More notably, Lovecraft’s fictions developed a collective

“virtual” consistency through a webwork of invented place-names, creatures, and book titles that

would recur across many stories, although some of these appearances are themselves notably

inconsistent.

But even more importantly was that Lovecraft turned this world-building into a shared

collective practice. Lovecraft encouraged his fellow Weird Tales writers to drop the names of

his grimoires and beasties into their fictions, something Lovecraft himself also did when he

508. Ibid.
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edited and ghostwrote stories for clients. “I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial

mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation,” he noted in one letter.509 Lovecraft

would also return the favor, as writers like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith made their

own contributions that what later writers called the “Cthulhu Mythos” but that Lovecraft referred

to more lightly as his “cycle of synthetic folklore” (SL 5.16) or simply “Yog-Sothery.”510 Like

the transformation of the Discordian Society into the collaborate game of POEE, Yog-Sothery

was a collective insider game of invention and self-reference that played with the form of the

literary hoax.

One important example of Lovecraft’s interweaving of social and invented worlds is his

1936 tale “The Haunter of the Dark,” the last independent story he wrote. The hero of the tale is

a young writer of fantastic fiction named Robert Blake, who is a stand-in for Robert Bloch, a

young Weird Tales contributor who had placed a Lovecraft-like figure in a story published the

previous year. In “Haunter,” we read of Blake’s exploration of an abandoned Providence Free-

Will church once occupied by the Church of Starry Wisdom, who used a Shining Trapezohedron

to communicate with extraterrestrial beings, one of whom, we are led to infer, spells the end of

poor Blake. In his first visit to the Church, Blake discovers a copy of Lovecraft’s most famous

invented book, Abdul Alhazred’s dread Necronomicon, along with an encrypted record book and

other hoary tomes, including texts—like von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten—that were

invented by his pals (in this case, Conan creator Robert E. Howard). Blake later figures out that

the record book is written in Aklo, an obscure language first mentioned in an 1899 story by the

British supernatural horror writer Arthur Machen. In other words, in this and other stories,

509. Ibid, 166.

510. Following Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth, who founded Arkham Horror largely to publish the work of his
friend and mentor, coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe this shared fictional universe, which Derleth and
 387

Lovecraft casts his referential back in time, taking in early writers of supernatural horror and

thereby charging the genre itself with an intertextual “virtual” reality, a sort of secret tradition

constructed backwards through time.

Perhaps the most surprising title included in the list of Blake’s finds is the Book of Dzyan,

which is an actual book—sort of. One of the most influential texts of Theosophy, Madame

Blavatsky’s monumental The Secret Doctrine, is an elaborate commentary on the Book of Dzyan,

whose stanzas she claimed to have stumbled across while studying in Tibet. Though some

passages may have been cribbed from the Rig Veda, the book is largely believed by scholars to

be the product of Blavatsky’s considerable imagination. That said, it is a different kind of

invented book than the Necronomicon, not simply because we are given a good deal of its

contents, but because the speech act that frames it does not depend on fictionality. Indeed, like so

many important esoteric texts, the Book stands somewhere between (or beyond) the polarities of

fact and fiction, and derives its authority from neither. As Dan Clore notes, Aleister Crowley

recognized this paradox in his review of another fabricated Blavatsky text, The Voice of the

Silence, which he determined to be “better than ‘genuine,’ being, like The Chymical Marriage of

Christian Rosencreutz, the forgery of a great adept.”511

Crowley’s reference here is to one of the early Rosicrucian texts whose appearance in the

seventeenth century inspired the creation of actual Rosicrucian orders, but which was admitted

by its author to be a ludibrium, or “trivial game.” Similarly, the Book Dzyan can be seen as a

ludibrium, or, perhaps, a Tibetan terma text—in other words, a text that derives its authority

from both the visionary imagination and its framing within a spiritual discourse or tradition. And

others in the Circle continued to elaborate and extend, often by forcing the Lovecraft Circle’s enigmatic cluster of
possibilities into a polished and, in Derleth’s case, explicitly moralistic system.
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like The Chymical Marriage, The Secret Doctrine proved enormously influential. Blavatsky’s

text, and particularly its antediluvian history of the earth’s fabulous races and civilizations,

provided the basic motifs and themse for copious New Age cosmologies and UFO revelations

(including von Daniken’s astronaut archaeology). Moreover, Blavatsky’s wild and rather

science-fictional lore, with its tales of Atlantean sex magicians, giant Lemurian apes, and

liberating rebel angels, also influenced both weird fiction writers and the tangled Atlantean

backstory of Illuminatus!

In other words, the Lovecraftian line between the substance of fictions and the forgeries

of adepts had already grown rather hazy by the time Wilson, along with Shea, started to play the

game. Adding a cosmic dimension to conspiracy culture, the two authors cast the extraterrestrial

entities of the Cthulhu mythos—which they call the lloigor, a term not used by Lovecraft himself

but invented by two of his followers—as the ancient inhuman intelligences that guide and

interact with the Illuminati. As such, Shea and Wilson round out or even counter the political

networks of conspiracy theory with a fictional if conspiratorial “game” of Yog-Sothery, a now

thoroughly collective body of metafictional lore they also intelligently extend. For most of the

novel, Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in a Pentagon-shaped building, but late in the text he

temporarily takes over the body of one of the Illuminati leaders and speaks words not leavened,

for once in the novel, with humor. “The voice was like crude petroleum seeping through gravel,

and, like petroleum, it was a fossil thing, the voice of a creature that had arisen on the planet

when the South Pole was in the Sahara and the great cephalopods were the highest form of

511. Cited in Dan Clore, “The Lurker at the Threshold of Interpretation: Hoax Necronomicons and Paratextual
Noise,” in Joshi, S. T, Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos (Lakeland, FL: Miskatonic River Pres,
LLC., 2011), 105.
 389

life.”512 The simile here is rich and timely, both for the seventies and today: modern petroleum-

based civilization is in essence a Lovecraftian pact with the dead monsters of the past.513

For the most part, the authors make their Lovecraftian moves in the more metafictional

mode of the ironic imagination. In a few flashback sequences, we meet Lovecraft himself in the

nineteen-twenties, and the episodes suitably mix fact and fiction.514 This Lovecraft is a strict

materialist, but he is being threatened by mysterious cultists who object to him revealing their

secrets—secrets that the author claims he simply cribbed from books written by “mental cases”

and stored in the library of Miskatonic University, a faux institution that itself appears as part of

the Cthulhu Mythos. “Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce,” threatens one anonymous

letter, referring to the mysterious 1913 disappearance of the California fabulist Ambrose Bierce,

who also invented terms—like Carcosa and Hali—that were reused by the fantasist Robert

Chambers, who was, as noted, an important influence on Lovecraft.515 Another one of the cultists

warns Lovecraft that the powerful occult societies of the day have for the most part left him

alone because the readership of pulp magazines is so small, but that this situation is not likely to

last once the genres of fantasy and science-fiction themselves finally take off.

…and his Holy Hoax

Along with thickening the implications of the Cthulhu Mythos lore, Wilson and Shea also

put their own kind of pressure on Lovecraft’s famous claim that the weird tale should be crafted

512. Shea and Wilson, 648.

513. For a theoretically sophisticated contemporary spin on petroleum necromancy, see Negarestani, Reza,
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008).
514. Including H.P. Lovecraft as a character or direct reference within Cthulhu Mythos stories is a time-honored
tradition. See “Lovecraft as a Character in Lovecraftian Fiction”, in Robert M. Price, H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu
Mythos, (Mercer Island, WA: Starmount Press, 1990), 32-36.
 390

with “the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” For this statement is more curious than it at

first appears. As Clore explains, hoaxes cannot be presented as hoaxes and remain hoaxes. But

neither can fictions be presented as hoaxes and remain mere fictions. Instead, the rhetoric of

objectivity that provides fictions with such verisimilitude creates, instead, the impression of a

deeper veil, a second-order or “inverse” hoax, that masks truth as fiction. “The usual hoax:

fiction presented as fact,” says Illuminatus!, which derives far more power from the opposite

conspiratorial possibility: “ fact presented as fiction.” The pretense of such a presentation must

at once be veiled and clever enough to stir deep reason, so that a “structure of indefinite promise

and possibility” looms between and the lines and stories. Here is where so many of the later

Cthulhu Mythos writers, notably August Derleth, go wrong: they define and systematize the

mythology, whereas it is precisely the contradictions and enigmas of the Lovecraft Circle’s

referential game that keeps the structure indefinite, but still shaped as structure, and therefore

still “building outward” rather than simply evocative or poetic.

An even more infernal elicitation of pattern recognition undergirds the dialectics of

knowledge and insanity that characterize so many Lovecraft stories, and that also serve to draw

the reader into the plot. As readers, we follow bookish and blinkered protagonists as they piece

together alien and bizarre implications from quotidian fragments of evidence and experience,

usually drawn from texts and dreams. As they proceed, they form incomplete patterns of

possibility whose more ominous import we readers invariably recognize before the doomed

characters do. David E. Schultz explains the resulting reader response: “The reader of

Lovecraft’s stories realizes that horror lies beneath the revelation. But as one closes the pages of

the story just read, one realizes that a greater horror has not been stated…In our enlightenment,

515. Shea and Wilson, 181. “Carcosa” also made an appearance in the first season of the HBO series True Detective
(2014).
 391

we have been drawn into and forced to become part of the horror and we are helpless to

retreat.”516 At times in his letters, Lovecraft claimed that he was “of course” not interested in

actually fooling his readers with his invented mythology, but critics rightly contest this claim.517

To use the term anachronistically, Lovecraft was something of a mindfucker.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothery was how a game of hoaxing and

esoteric referentiality designed by an arch skeptic came to be appropriated by practicing

occultists in the latter third of the twentieth century. The first signs of the emergence of

Lovecraftian ritual magic occurred while Shea and Wilson were first writing Illuminatus! and

can be traced to the British magician Kenneth Grant. One of the most controversial figures to

emerge from the Thelemic magical current begun by Aleister Crowley, Grant was the renegade

head of the New Isis Lodge and the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis. Writing for Man, Myth

and Magic in 1970, and two years later in his 1972 book The Magical Revival, Grant argued that

Lovecraft was linked to actual traditions of ancient and contemporary magic through, of all

things, his sleeping mind. In actuality, Lovecraft was an extraordinary dreamer, whose unusually

vivid, often nightmarish, and intensely detailed dreamlife directly influenced his fiction (the

name Necronomicon, for example, came from a dream). For Grant, Lovecraft’s dreams were

esoterically objective; as such, The Necronomicon is a “real” book tucked away in the

Dreamlands that Lovecraft’s waking mind was too hidebound and timid to accept.

Continuing to play the cross-referential game, Grant was particularly keen on lining up

curious similarities between names, like Yog-Sothoth and Crowley’s Sut-Thoth. The year 1972

also saw the publication of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals, a companion text to the Church

516. David E. Schultz,, “From Microcosm to Macrocosm: The Growth of Lovecraft’s Cosmic Vision”, in Lovecraft,
H. P, David E Schultz, and S. T Joshi, An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of
H.P. Lovecraft (Rutherford [N.J.]; London; Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Associated
University Presses, 1991), 214.
 392

of Satan leader’s popular The Satanic Bible. The book includes two Lovecraftian rites written by

LaVey’s deputy Michael Aquino, the “Ceremony of the Angles” and “The Call to Cthulhu.” In

his introduction, Aquino legitimizes the occult appropriation of Lovecraft along much less

supernaturalist lines than Grant, emphasizing instead Lovecraft’s amoral philosophy and the

subjective, archetypal, and possibly prophetic power of fantasy. This argument accorded with the

language of “psychodrama” that LaVey himself offered as a non-supernatural explanation for the

transformative power of blasphemous ritual. Within the Church of Satan, LaVey also founded an

informal “Order of the Trapezoid” whose name was inspired in part by the “shining

trapezohedron” in “The Haunter of the Dark.”

These and other Lovecraftian currents within magic may stray into realms at once silly

and overly serious, but as Tim Moroney put it, in appropriating the skeptic’s work, “they have

committed no category error.”518 In other words, the legitimacy of the occult appropriation of

Lovecraft can be said to lie in the intertextual and metafictional dynamics of the texts

themselves. The central Lovecraftian theme that critic Donald Burleson identifies as “oneiric

objectivism”—that the dreamworld is real—becomes the central vehicle for occultist

legitimization; from this perspective, occultists impose a second-order level of objectivity onto

the textual circuit that Lovecraft himself established between his actual dreams and his

(meta)fictional worlds. Lovecraft himself noted this very logic in a letter pointed out by Robert

M. Price: “Who can disprove any…concoction [of the imagination], or say that it is not

‘esoterically true’ even if its creator did think he invented it in jest or fiction?”519

517. See Clore, op cit.

518. Tim Maroney, “Introduction” in Tim Moroney, ed;, The Book of Dzyan (Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 2000), 56.
519. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, 326. Cited in Robert M. Price, ”Demythologizing Cthulhu,” in Joshi, S. T,
Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos (Lakeland, FL: Miskatonic River Pres, LLC., 2011), 123.
 393

However, what is more interesting for our purposes than oneiric objectivism is the

LaVeyan line that requires no essentialist substantiation for the game beyond the

psychodynamics of the play itself. From this perspective, Lovecraftian occultists are simply

culture makers who have accepted the invitation to enter and extend the intertextual network of

the Mythos and its flirtation with another order of veiling and representing reality. In the

occultist version of the game, however, players place their bets on the element of verisimilitude

within the framework of the “hoax.” Within the circle of the ritual, or the referential network of

texts, a different mode of ontology is allowed to take shape, one that “has a life of its own.”

But what exactly is this life of fictions? Playfully making a move himself, Michael Saler

notes that, in his brief “History of the Necronomicon,” Lovecraft tells us that the dreaded tome

was a translation of an earlier Arabic text called Al Azif. While noting that Lovecraft derived the

Arabic title from Samuel Henley’s notes to William Beckford’s weird masterpiece Vathek, Saler

jokes that he might also have been alluding to Hans Vaihinger’s text The Philosophy of “As If,”

first translated into English in 1924. A post-Kantian philosopher, Vaihinger argued that a great

many concepts in science and rationalist philosophy—the atom, say, or the infinitesimal, or even

Kant’s Ding-an-such—are simply fictions that we treat “as if” they were true in order for us to

get on with our practical business in the world of sensation and movement. Vaihinger was no

irrationalist; as a pragmatist he rejected the great doubts of philosophical skepticism, and

maintained that there was a crucial difference between such useful fictions and true hypotheses

in that the latter can be rigorously tested experimentally. However, Vaihinger’s notion of fiction

as a “a more conscious, more practical and more fruitful error” has applications beyond the

philosophy of science, particularly in psychology and literature, where it helped concretize

 394

Nietzsche’s idea of necessary fictions.520 Vaihinger also introduced the important idea that “as

if” fictions, like unproven hypotheses, create an irritable tension in the mind, a disturbance that

naturally seeks the equilibrium of settled reality provided by the interconnection of facts. When

this “as if” tension collapses, in a mind or a society, fictions become dogmas, as if becomes

because. Much of Wilson’s thought and attitude toward the occult real also approached

conceptual models as “as if” fictions running on a “maybe logic” that must ultimately judged by

their pragmatic or experiential effects.

All this still begs the ontological question, which is precisely the question raised by

Lovecraftian occults, who “raise the stakes,” as it were, on the quasi-reality of fictions. Said

another way, Lovecraftian magic—which is only one example of the active role that fictions play

in various invented religions, including Discordianism and various Pagan constructions—adds

another twist to Saler’s “disenchanted enchantment,” a twist that suspends, in practice, the

difference between the two. For Saler, disenchanted enchantment is an attitude modern readers

learn to bring to their fictions so that they can enjoy the fantastic satisfactions of the imagination

while refusing the credulity associated with religion and superstition.

But what happens when this same attitude of disenchanted enchantment is brought to

bear on religious or esoteric practice itself? As we will see in the next section, a version of such

“disenchanted enchantment” has been a feature of modern occult practice since at least since the

era of Aleister Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn. This current of skeptical magical

pragmatism, with its multiplication of “as if” fictions that gain ontological density, characterizes

the “bootstrap magic” of figures like Wilson, NROOGD, and Lovecraftian sorcerers. In contrast

to Saler, we might call this practice enchanted disenchantment. Put into practice, in other words,

520. The quotation is from Vaihinger, Hans, trans. C. K Ogden, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, a System of the
Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, (London; New York: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,
 395

a de-ontological and constructivist attitude paradoxically “boots up” room for new kinds of

entities to arise, beings that demand what Bruno Latour calls their own sort of ontological

pasture.

Here we should recall Latour’s notion of instauration, by which he means the act

whereby a constructionist process exceeds the deflationary limitations of “mere” social

constructionism to produce something that can now makes its own claims on us. “The act of

instauration has to provide the opportunity to encounter beings capable of worrying you,” he

writes. These are “beings whose ontological status is still open but that are nevertheless capable

of making you do something, of unsettling you, insisting, obliging you to speak well of them…”

Crucially, Latour introduces his notion of instauration with the example of fictions. When

Balzac writes that he has been “carried away by his characters,” Latour thinks we need to pause

and seriously consider the status of this enigmatic work of fabulation, through which one’s

actions make “others” get moving. When an author’s characters take on a life of their own, we

have the doubling that Latour calls faire faire: “but now the arrow can go in either direction:

from the constructor to the constructed or vice versa, from the product to the producer, from the

creation to the creator.” Latour insists that this oscillation is part of the phenomena itself, even if

authors like Balzac are misspeaking, or succumbing to Romantic cliché. But despite, something

escapes, and flickers beyond the circle of the subject it nonetheless depends upon. This is the

flickering expression of what Guattari calls those “incorporeal domains of entities we detect at

the same time that we produce them, and which appear to have been always there, from the

moment we engender them.” 521

Ltd.; Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., 1924), 94. For Nietzsche’s concepts, see Beyond Good and Evil, 4.
521. Guattari, 17.
 396

Latour further develops his notion when he comes to analyze the particular ontological

mode he calls beings of fiction. Latour wants to remind us that, though the world is saturated

with fictions, our usual modern story divests them of any ontological claims. However, this

ignores what Latour calls the exteriority among beings of fiction, or what Lovecraft readers

might call outsideness. However enigmatic the causal act of instauration or bootstrapping is, it

remains for Latour a two-way street. Such beings arrive in the imagination, or even further, offer

us an imagination we would not have without them. As listeners we not only receive Bach’s

music but also the capacity to appreciate Bach’s music itself; we are subject to fictions in that we

win our subjectivity from them.522

However, even as these beings of fiction impose themselves on creators as well as fans,

they remain delicate constructions, “composites,” as Delezue and Guattari would say, that

depend on our own practice and attention. “They have this peculiarity, then: their objectivity

depends on their being reprised, taken up again by subjectivities that would not exist themselves

if these beings had not given them to us.”523 Appropriately, Latour acknowledges just how

peculiar this line of thinking is. “It’s weird, yes,” he writes, using bizarre in French, but this

weirdness lies “in the art and manner of what exists.” To the objection that all this weirdness

simply proves that we only “imagine” these beings, Latour asks us instead to reframe the act of

imagining as a relational ontology. It is simply part of the nature of fictional beings—

Castaneda’s Don Juan, Madame Bovary, Conan the Barbarian—that they need us to keep them

going even though we cannot invent them. “We are part of their trajectory, but their continuous

creation is distributed all along their path of life, so much so that we can never really tell whether

522. Latour, 241.

523. Latour, 242.
 397

it is the artist or the audience that is creating the work. In other words, they too make

networks.”524

Needless to say, Latour’s weird ideas are particularly appropriate to the matter of

Lovecraft’s artificial mythology. Instauration, however ill-formed a term, helps us understand

both the constructive contributions of fans and readers, and the networks that form both the

content and the context of the game of Yog-Sothery. But Latour’s notions are also extremely

helpful in lending substance to the bootstrap witchery of NROOGD, the Discordians, and left-

hand occultists working in a Lovecraftian vein. Like fictions, religion is constructed, but it is no

mere construction. The “as if” is a springboard for real encounter. As Jose Ferrer notes in his call

for a participatory approach to the understanding and practice of religion, “Spiritual knowing is

not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the

‘bringing forth’ of a world or domain of distinctions cocreated by the different elements involved

in the participatory event.”525 These “different elements” are material as well as psychological,

and form what Latour would call the network. As such, than religious experience is, to some

degree, inextricable from Latour’s beings of fiction. Indeed, one of the reasons that Lovecraftian

magic has come to play such an important role in the development of “hyper-real” religion today

is precisely because the beasties are so nasty that their capacity to unsettle us is simply easier to

notice.

As the witches in NROOGD discovered, however, bountiful and kind entities also play

this game, and as Wilson came to find, so too do cosmic tricksters. For though the Cthulhu

mythos itself was not central to Wilson’s imaginal encounters in the seventies, the Lovecraftian

524. Latour, 242-3.

525. Ferrer bases his claim on enactionist modes of cognition developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and
Eleanor Rosch. These in turn draw heavily from the autopoetic systems theory described in an earlier chapter. See
 398

game of intertextual invocation that he played in Illuminatus! remained a crucial model for

understanding the role that fictions—and their weird ontological dynamics—play in occult

explorations and the extraordinary experiences that emerge from them. The important lesson is

that ontology is variegated, situational, emergent, and relational. As Hagbard Celine explains in

Illuminatus!, “When you’re dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific

way, contemplating them from an armchair, [the] rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite

profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind

or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time,

and that’s a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you’re actually dealing with these figures, the

only safe, pragmatic, and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a

purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer’s Apprentice had

understood that, he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.”526 But though Wilson

presumably understood this lesson, having allowed Celine to speak these words through his

hand, he still found himself in some interesting forms of trouble.

The Method of Science

Aleister Crowley casts such an enormous shadow over contemporary occulture that it is

easy to forget that even in the late sixties, when the notorious writer appeared among the gallery

of heroes and rogues that decorated the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Loney Hearts Club Band,

Crowley was a relatively unknown quantity. In 1967, the year the Beatles record was released,

the vast majority of Crowley’s books were out of print, and his fraternal order, the Ordo Templi

Jorge Ferrer, “Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction,” in Jorge N. Ferrer, and Jacob H Sherman, The
Participatory Turn Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 137.
 399

Orientis, was in dusty disarray. Robert Anton Wilson did not start reading Crowley until 1970 or

1971, when he got turned on to the writer by none other than Alan Watts.527

Wilson’s timing was perfect, since the early seventies proved to be the Great Beast’s big

come-back. In 1970, major fanboy Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s Boleskine House, while David

Bowie sang of “Crowley’s uniform of imagery” and California experimental cineaste Kenneth

Anger completed filming his visionary Thelemite film Lucifer Rising. Publishers like Samuel

Weiser, Lancer, and the Sangreal Foundation flooded the market with Crowleyania, including

the first edition of Crowley’s remarkable Thoth Tarot deck, designed with Lady Frieda Harris.

And in California, Grady McMurtry spearheaded the revival of the O.T.O., registering the

association as a legal entity in 1971.

Bob Wilson was entertained by Crowley’s outrageous character, and he thoroughly

enjoyed the impish spirit of wordplay and misdirection that Crowley brought to many of his

texts, and especially the crafty Book of Lies (1912/13), which Weiser had reissued in 1970. In

that sense, it is unsurprising that some of the Crowleyania that appears in the novels Illuminatus!

and The Sex Magicians is also interwoven with Lovecraftian lore, as Wilson merrily assimilates

the already tricksy Crowley to the para-fictional conspiratorial game described above.528 Though

Wilson did not love Crowley’s politics, which he discounted as “a blend of Nietzschean

Supermanism and anarcho-fascist Darwinism,” there are important resonances between both

526. Shea and Wilson, 599-600.

527. That a pacific proponent of Eastern wisdom would recommend Crowley should not surprise us, since Watts
himself had, in the thirties, spent time studying with a charismatic “rascal-guru” with a reputation as a black
magician, a teacher Watts compared to Crowley and Gurdjieff. See Watts’ account in Watts, Alan, In My Own Way:
An Autobiography, 1915-1965 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 109-114.
528. Feverish speculative links between Crowley and Lovecraft were also being forged in the early seventies by
Kenneth Grant, who may have influenced Wilson’s literary play in The Magical Revival (1972), a text Wilson
discusses in Cosmic Trigger. Because Illuminatus! was mostly written between 1969-1971, but not published until
1975, it is difficult to pin down the chronology of its elements and their lines of influence. However, Grant would
not have been able to pull of the impish economy of the Illuminatus! equation: “Abdul Alhazred = A.: A.: ??!”
 400

men’s notions of freedom.529 When the priest of the black mass early in Illuminatus! intones the

famous motto of Crowley’s Thelema—“Do what though wilt shall be the whole of the law”—the

command sounds, at least in the libertarian context of that book, more like Max Stirner than

Hassan I-Sabbah. Elsewhere in the novel, Shea and Wilson also include Crowley’s brief and

militantly libertarian “Liber OZ,” an enumeration of Thelemic prerogatives that begins with the

Feuerbachian declaration that “there is no god but man.”

Perhaps what most intrigued Wilson about the Great Beast, however, was his

“methodology.” In Cosmic Trigger, where Wilson describes his intellectual encounter with

Crowley, he describes the Crowleyian system as an unprecedented synthesis of three elements:

1) an illuminist thread of Western occultism that utilizes “dangerous ‘physiological

experiments’” involving drugs and sexual ritual; 2) Eastern yoga, and 3) “modern scientific

method,” which for Wilson included “total skepticism about all results obtained, the keeping of

careful objective records of each ‘experiment,’ and detached philosophical analysis after each

stage of increased awareness.”530

Here I want to look a little more closely at this third plank, which helps set up Wilson’s

own pragmatic reframing of extraordinary visionary experience. Crowley was no hater of the

concept of science. He described his esoteric system as “Scientific Illuminism,” while the motto

of the A.’.A.’. was “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion.” As Olav Hammer argues,

such invocations of “science” were also a standard practice for esotericists in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. In his book Claiming Knowledge, Hammer offers an extensive

critique of this esoteric “parasitism” on scientific discourse, particularly as practiced by the

Abdul Alhazred, of course, is the author of the Necronomicon, while the A.:A.: is the name of a magical order
Crowley founded in 1907.
529. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 71.
530. Ibid, 70.
 401

Theosophists. Most esotericists of the day, he writes, understood “science” to mean “the body of

statements, the terminology and/or the technical applications of science.”531 But this notion of

science ignores what Hammer and many others argue is the most essential characteristic of

scientific practice: its method of inquiry. This method does not consist in a body of knowledge

but rather an intersubjective and repeatable process designed, at least in part, to expose and

correct all manner of errors. Although studies of science in the wake of Thomas Kuhn have

significantly qualified Hammer’s idealized Popperian view of scientific progress (especially in

regard to the concrete practice of falsification), the scientific method nonetheless remains open,

self-correcting, and ultimately provisional.532 And it is this method, Hammer states, that one

“rarely if ever finds in Esoteric movement texts.”533

Unfortunately, Hammer does not look closely at Crowley, whose interest in the “method

of science” seems to offer a crucial and terribly influential counter-example. On the surface, of

course, Crowley’s A.:A.: motto may not seem terribly far from William Q. Judge’s roughly

contemporaneous claim that Theosophy was a “scientific religion and a religious science.”534 But

there is an important difference between these assertions. Unlike Judge, Crowley took the stance

that it was possible to base an experiential spiritual school on “practice and methods” rather then

theory or belief.535 This pragmatic methodology was, he claimed, sufficient to achieve

Illumination, or “Spiritual Experience.” At the same time, of course, Crowley’s protocols do not

resemble normative conceptions of scientific method, since any “results” imply an ineradicable

531. Hammer, 204.

532. Also see the brief but insightful discussion in Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual
Magic in Contemporary England (Harvard University Press, 1991), 123-125; also Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja,
Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 140-154.
533. Hammer, 204.
534. Cited in Hammer, 222.
535. Aleister Crowley, ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an
Autohagiography (London: Arkana, 1989), 296.
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subjectivity that severely hamstrings conventional interpretations of repeatability and

falsification.

As Marco Pasi argues, Crowley’s method of science reflected a Jamesian pragmatism

that Crowley had imbibed, like so many, from The Varieties of Religious Experience, which

appeared in 1902.536 Pasi also cautions that Crowley was quite willing to leaven his pragmatic

empiricism with supernatural or even messianic convictions, especially after he received the

Book of the Law, began fashioning himself as a prophet, and plunged deeper into sexual magic.

That said, Crowley was capable of waxing quite skeptically about the ontological status

of magical phenomena. The most deflated views of occult experience were expressed early in his

magical career, especially in the “Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic” that served as the

introduction to the version of the Goetia he published in 1904. Here the demonic spirits conjured

in the Triangle of Art are considered to be nothing more than “portions of the human brain,”

different from ordinary sensory neural events only in that they are willed by the magician and

“caused” by the operations of ceremonial magic. As such, Crowley’s focus on “practice and

methods,” as well as his sometimes reductionist language, represent one of the earliest and most

pivotal articulations of the sort of “skeptical Theurgy” that Wilson himself would carry forward.

Egil Asprem identifies three central elements of Crowley’s method that in many ways

support Wilson’s notions from Cosmic Trigger. Crowley demanded “the careful use of a magical

record to stress the externalization of personal experience which makes inter-subjectivity

possible.” In addition, he conceived of “rituals as scientific experiments, with the idea of testing

536. See Marco Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views
on Occult Practice”, in Bogdan, Henrik, and Martin P Starr, Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 53-88.
 403

obtained results through inter-subjectively verifiable methods.”537 However one might judge the

rigor of this method, Asprem argues conclusively that we should recognize his empirical

pragmatism as sincere and based on his own philosophical and esoteric influences. These

influences include Crowley’s early exposure to Theravada Buddhism, whose dry and

disenchanting operations of self-analysis were typically interpreted in his era as signs of a

“rational religion.” But the origins of Crowley’s “Scientific Illunism” lie equally in the practical

and psychological orientation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the ground-breaking

British occult society where the young Crowley cut his magical teeth.

On the one hand, the Golden Dawn’s interest in initiatory rituals, ancient gods, and

recondite angelic tongues certainly reflects a Romantic and traditionalist reaction to the positivist

intellectual orientation of industrialist fin-de-siecle Britain. On the other hand, the Order’s

pursuit of the mysteries was, as Alex Owen insists, “entirely regulated by reason.”538 Rejecting

the passive reception of exterior occult forces typifiied by the Spiritualist seance, the Golden

Dawn magicians stressed the control of the mind and the active cultivation of will even as they

explored the intuitive, hallucinatory, or twilight dimensions of human consciousness (or, as some

were learning to call it, the subconscious). If they were not practicing the same kind of

disenchanted enchantment that Saler describes emerging in literature at the time, it was

something close, perhaps more of an enchanted disenchantment. In one crucial passage, Owen

clarifies the Golden Dawn’s precise partnership of intuition and reason:

If we assume the mythopoeic capabilities of the hidden regions of the mind, then
advanced occult practice can be understood as an extraordinary and controlled

537. Egil Asprem, “Magic Naturalized? Negotiating Science and Occult Experience in Aleister Crowley’s Scientific
Illuminism,” Aries 8 (2008), 151.
 404

performance of the conscious “I” in a mythos of mutual unconscious creation. By this

reckoning, it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently
irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience
of the occult “real.”539

While such experiences served in part to confirm the reality of occult theories, a certain

instrumental skepticism—a key element of science—played an important role in the alignment

that Owen describes. One of the strongest examples that Owen gives is from—surprise,

surprise—Aleister Crowley, who cautions astral travelers about the need to distinguish between

“authentic astral phenomena and figments of personal imagination.” Leaving aside the

ontological problems raised by this distinction, what is important to note here are the terms that

Crowley uses to make it: “We must not assert the ‘reality’ or ‘objectivity’ of an Astral being on

no better evidence than the subjective sensation of its independent existence. We must insist on

proof.”540 As Asprem points out, Crowley’s assessments not only invoke scientific values of

objectivity and demonstration, but they occur after the fact, breaking down the immediacy of the

raw visionary material into a data set for later analysis.541 In this way, and in the name of a

skeptical pragmatism that was nonetheless open to preternatural possibility, Crowley attempted

to undermine the “subjective sensation” of experiential authenticity that underlies so many

esoteric claims. This move displaces the immediacy of extraordinary experience into an temporal

protocol involving future critical assessment, and it would prove influential for later

psychonauts, who themselves also wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

538. Alex Owen, The place of enchantment: British occultism and the culture of the modern (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 239.
539. Ibid, 182.
540. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1976), 256.
541. While the tradition of testing and identifying spirits is fundamental to the rites of exorcism and medieval and
Renaissance ceremonial magic, Crowley is not demanding proof of divine origin but of independent origin. For a
 405

Tantric Thelema

Less than a decade into Crowley’s countercultural revival, Wilson’s fiction and essays

helped propagate a particular version of the Beast, one that was ironic, hedonic and pragmatist

rather than prophetic—a metaphysical libertarian or ontological anarchist. In Cosmic Trigger and

later writings, Wilson was particularly fond of citing the following passage in “Liber O vel

Manus et Sagittae,” an instruction manual for the A.:A.: that, again, seems to both prophesy and

shape Wilson’s own model agnosticism:

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth, 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 reality or philosophical validity to
any of them.542

To speak anachronistically, here Crowley specifically calls for a very Wilsonian resistance

against reifying abstractions, suggesting in its place a sort of empirical negative capability that

holds reality claims lightly. At the same time, Crowley also gestures a certain kind of self-

conscious constructionism, whereby practice correlates with extraordinary phenomena without

providing them a metaphysical foundation. This is why I am not sure we can fully accept Owen’s

claim that the modern occult self “did not recognize the relativism of its own self-reflexivity.” Or

rather, even if such relativism remained only vestigial in Crowley—though his intense irony

discussion of testing spirits, see Nancy Caciola, Discerning spirits: divine and demonic possession in the Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 274-98.
542. Crowley, Aleister, Mary Desti, Leila Waddell, and Hymenaeus Beta, ed. Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts
I-IV (San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books,1997), 613.
 406

would suggest otherwise, at least at points—it was brought forth fully by Wilson, who tried to

suspend ontological claims while pursuing novel intensities and the creative possibility of things,

and entities, that flicker on the border between existence and symbolic activity.

Both men embraced the self-authenticating power of spiritual experience—as Crowley

wrote in a founding statement of the A.’.A.’. “There is only one Rock which Skepticism cannot

shake; the Rock of Experience.” At the same time, both Crowley and Wilson were committed—

inconsistently, and in very different ways—to the analysis and further staging of these individual

“facts” of esoteric experience in a critical process of assemblage that unfolded over time. Using

John Lilly’s language, one Illuminatus! appendix defines “the magician” as a “self-programmer.”

Comparing the practices of invocation and evocation to auto-suggestion and hypnosis, the

appendix author (principally if not solely Wilson) further clarifies that the self-programming

magician “edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.” Elsewhere in the same appendix we

find another assertion that simultaneously celebrates and undermines the autonomy of the liberal

subject as both a subject and object of reality programming: “There is no essential difference

between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be

condensed into Abra-Melin’s simple ‘Invoke often.’”543 Here, the distinctions between religion

and secular psychology break down into a technical approach to ontological fabrication that

similarly (and more deviously) erodes the difference between self-transformation and the

manipulation of others.

Wilson’s encounter with Crowley’s writing was crucial to his development of an esoteric

libertarianism. Indeed, if there is a discrete trigger for the events described in Cosmic Trigger, it

could be said to be Wilson’s discovery of Crowley’s 1912 (or 1913) text The Book of Lies. Here

Crowley, writing at the height of his considerable powers, offers a brilliant and occasionally
 407

puerile series of short, cryptic, and clever verses shot through with kabbalistic symbolism,

numerology, and sexual double-entendre; Weiser’s 1972 edition, presumably Wilson’s source,

also included commentary later provided by Crowley himself. Wilson, applying a cognitive

connection-machine already tuned to a delirious excess by writing Illlumintus!, came to suspect

that the sexual mysticism evidently encoded in the Book of Lies was the core “Tantric” secret

encrypted within the rites of Freemasonry and the Illuminist tradition. He was particularly

intrigued by chapter 69, whose number and title, “How to Succeed and How to Suck Eggs,”

gives the reader a sense of Crowley’s punning mix of esotericism and sex manual, as does the

verse enjoining the aspirants to exchange “the Double Gift of Tongues.”

Without going into much kama sutric detail, Wilson gives his nuts-and-bolts description

of this carnal gnosis in Cosmic Trigger: “The idea behind Tantric sacramental sex (or sex-

magick, as it is also called) is that postponing normal orgasm by various postures, meditations,

incantations, and especially prayers, enables one to produce eventually a new kind of orgasm—

the polyphase orgasm, Leary has called it.” Wilson in turn links the resulting “neurological

explosion” to then-popular Hindu notions about the ascent of kundalini, which Wilson, like a

good countercultural pragmatist, also explicitly ties to the action of psychoactive drugs. “The

experience is much like nitrous oxide in that it seems to condense an LSD trip into a few

minutes, and like prolonged hatha yoga in that it seems to produce a permanent change in neuro-

physiology.”544

For a juicier account of such ecstasies, we might turn to Wilson’s early seventies fictions,

though of course we cannot know how much these accounts articulate Wilson’s own

experiences. The Sex Magicians is, as one might expect, saturated with occult eroticism:

543. Shea and Wilson, 769.

544. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 68.
 408

pornographic Tarot cards, swingers practicing Pranayama at sex parties, and dumb, ill-informed

quips about sex as a “voodoo possession ritual.” At one point, we have a weird tales flashback to

a goddess-worshipping rite in old Atlantis, the Epiphany of Mum-Mum. Serviced by the high

priests Lhuv-Kerapht and Klarkash-Ton, the nude priestess Salome evokes the sacred energy of

T’angpoon in her loins. The crowd, having smoked “the magic herb, Ak-opoko-gol,” become

increasingly frenzied as the tension of coitus reservatus mounts. In the end, the whole crowd

becomes possessed by the T’angpoon, and begin babbling in tongues and beating their chests.

Though this ecstasy offers a parody of freak Dionysian primitivism, or one of Lovecraft’s

archaic witch-cults, Wilson’s tone also grows strangely serious, almost technical. “There was not

a single person in the church aware of the bodies and other so-called ‘tangible objects’ which

compromise ordinary perception,” Wilson writes in a deeply lysergic mode. “Turned on to the

subatomic Direct Perception which is the intercommunication of the universe itself, they saw and

felt only the energetic level which is aware of its own immortality. People had come to the

temple, but only gods were in attendance now.”545 In Illuminatus!, Stella Maris’s experience of

female sexual bliss features a similar theurgic transformation. After weeks training in behavioral

reconditioning, Pranayama, and occult ritual, all designed to allow her to channel the goddess

Eris, Stella has an extraordinary experience in the midst of a chaotic rite: “…the White Light

came as a series of orgasms and stars going nova, she half felt the body of light coming forth

from the body of fire…” Her first words, though, express a curious deflation, one that

underscores the psychedelic conundrum of the come-down and lends the whole scene a demotic

believability. “Shit. Is it always going to be like that—a white epileptic spasm and a hole in

time? Won’t I ever be able to remember it?”546

545. Robert Anton Wilson, The Sex Magicians (Sheffield House, 1973), 143-44.
546. Shea and Wilson, 713.
 409

When introducing the T’angpoon in The Sex Magicians, Wilson notes parenthetically that

the energy is identical what “later civilizations were to call kundalini, mana, Animal Magnetism

or just ‘the vibes.’”547 Once again, the discourse of religious comparativism serves not so much

to essentialize archetypal meanings as to reframe the human body as a prima materia of

energetic transformation. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson links these embodied possibilities to

Reich’s “orgone” and the “hedonic circuit” of the nervous system described by Leary, but he also

regularly refers to this current as “Tantric.” In this, Wilson was offering his own take on the

Orientalized (and sometimes psychedelicized) sexual mysticism that Vedantic scholar Georg

Feuerstein would come to critique as “California Tantra.” And though Wilson’s personal reserve

prevented him from going into much personal detail, he explored various “neuro-psychological

experiments” involving “Tantric” sex, LSD, cannabis, and occult ritual.

In the hands of Wilson and others, California Tantra represents a quintessentially modern

blend of Eastern tantra and Western sex, ripe with misprision, projection, experience, and desire.

But its American origins lie as far back as the turn of the twentieth century, although California

arguably remains its origin.548 Some Beats tuned into tantra in the fifties—the Gary Synder

figure practices yab-yum in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958)—and the current became an

established aspect of sixties discourse through texts like Omar Garrison’s widely-read 1964 book

Tantra: the Yoga of Sex.549 Representatives of Eastern Tantric traditions and Western scholars

alike, then and now, have deplored this novel invention of the religious imagination, with

547. Wilson, The Sex Magicians, 142.

548. See Robert Love’s biography of Pierre Bernard, an American sex and neo-Hinduism teacher who founded his
Tantrik Order of America in 1905 somewhere on the West Coast. Love, Robert, The Great Oom: The Improbable
Birth of Yoga in America (New York: Viking, 2010).
549. For an excellent if ungenerous account of the development of Western Tantra, see Feuerstein, Georg, Tantra:
The Path of Ecstasy (Boston: Shambhala , 1998), esp. 203-263.
 410

Feuerstein insisting that California Tantrics make the fundamental error of confusing higher bliss

with the physical orgasm.550

However, as Jeffrey Kripal argues in Esalen, Western psychedelic mystics were not just

projecting their own altered states onto the mythologies and esoteric systems of Asia, but were

also accurately (if naively) recognizing Asia’s own “countercultures”—left-hand or “crazy

wisdom” paths that would sprout new and peculiar blooms in sixties and seventies America,

where they eclipsed an earlier generation’s obsession with the clean modernist lines of

Vedanta.551 The “authenticity” of this “Tantric transmission,” as Kripal calls it, should not

concern us here—what is important is how perceptions of and contacts with Asian Tantric

traditions allowed Western discourses and practices to shape and transform the psycho-

physiological platform of extraordinary experience. Through renegades like Reich, an important

influence on Esalen and Wilson alike, psychoanalysis itself began to morph into a neo-Tantric

science focused on what Kripal calls “the enlightenment of the body.”

Hugh Urban also reminds us that today’s sexual Tantrics draw heavily from already

existing currents of Western sexual magic, with Crowley himself playing a prime role in the

fabrication of a yoga of erotic ecstasy and illumination. For Urban, one of the paradoxes of

California Tantra is that it transforms the “dangerous power and secrecy” that surround

traditional Asian Tantric practices into the “healthy pleasure and liberated openness” of the

sexual revolution.552 Along those lines, we should meditate on the paradoxical title of a book like

1979’s Sexual Secrets: The Alchemy of Ecstasy, written by Western Tantric initiate Nik Douglas

and Penny Slinger. These are not secrets requiring initiation or apprenticeship, but commodified

550. Feuerstein, xvi.

551. See Kripal, Esalen, esp. 16-20, 125-131.
552. Urban, Hugh B, Tantra Sex, Secrecy Politics, and Power in the Study of Religions (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 205.
 411

“techniques” requiring purchase and practice in a marketplace of exotic gratification. As such,

Urban considers California Tantra’s occult articulation of techniques of pleasure and ecstasy to

be “the quintessential religion for consumerist capitalist society.”553 At the same time, however,

this consumerist matrix, and its resistance, remains the context for innumerable extraordinary

experiences that exceed the boundaries of commodity exchange.

On the one hand, Wilson’s own encounter with sexual magic is very much a part of this

renegotiation, as can be seen in the hedonic instrumentalism that dominates his first nonfiction

book, Sex & Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, which was published in 1973 through Playboy

Press. Unlike Cosmic Trigger, this book was a strictly commercial affair—the paperback edition,

with a blurb from no less than Alan Watts, features a kaleidoscopic image of a woman in ecstasy

alongside an equally alluring question: “Are drugs the answer to better sex?” Wilson’s answer,

intriguingly, has as much to do with esoteric ritual and occult experience as it does with erotic

techniques or psychoactive substances. Again pushing a sort of hedonic comparativism, Wilson

presents both Asian Tantric traditions and Western magic as collections of instrumental

anthropotechnics that anticipate or even transcend the altered states available through

psychoactive drugs. “There is no area of new perception and expanded awareness discoverable

through peyote (or LSD or similar drugs) that cannot also be reached by techniques well known

to Oriental yogis and Western occultists.”554

Wilson does not slather these techniques with New Age spirituality or the groovy lingo of

enlightenment, satori, or union with Godhead. Instead he uses Leary’s hedonic language of the

nervous system, one that offers a more “scientific” and skeptical approach to the matter of

extraordinary experience. As Wilson explains, when Leary, John Lilly, and others “saw gods and

553. Ibid, 207.

554. Wilson, Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits (New York: Playboy Press, 1973), 16-17.
 412

heavens and experienced ‘occult’ energies, they did not take these dramatic events at face

value.”555 Instead, they dug down to discover the truth of Lilly’s meta-programming mantra

about beliefs becoming true within the province and limits of the mind.

Wilson characterized Lilly’s famous assertion as an “operational” statement: “a

generalization useful to the troubleshooter dealing with actual events in the laboratory. (In this

case, of course, the laboratory is the human head.)”556 Even the rare and glorious experience of

“unification”—the ecstatic collapse of subject and object described by heavy acid-heads and

Eastern nondualist traditions alike—is here described in cybernetic terms rather than “spooky or

metaphysical” ones. To explain this particular peak experience, Wilson brings up the example of

the cybernetic psychiatrist Ross Ashby’s homeostat, one of the first devices designed to learn

from and adapt to its surroundings. As Wilson explains (with Alan Watts in the background), the

homeostat does not model the existence of an isolated animal, but rather an “animal-in-an-

environment.” For Wilson, the experiences of fusion with God or the universe described by

mystics and heads alike represents “precisely the shift of attention from the conscious ego to the

previously unconscious organism-environment feedback network.”557 Though cybernetics had

been an important influence on Wilson since the fifties, he did follow some sixties and especially

seventies intellectuals in attempting to mystify the idea of “systems” into a new ideology of

holism and collective consciousness. Instead, he was interested in redescribing mystical

experience without reducing it, finding in its ecstasies a cognitive truth about the co-created

construction of self and world.

It is important to emphasize here how much Wilson’s secular approach to the ecstatic

mysticism sidesteps the spiritualized notions of psychedelic ecstasy found within much

555. Ibid, 246.

556. Ibid, 57-58.
 413

countercultural discourse. In fact, Wilson’s approach in many ways supports the conservative

scholar R.C. Zaehner’s famous criticism of Aldous Huxley in his 1957 book Mysticism: Sacred

and Profane. In this text, Zaehner argues that Huxley’s influential account of mescaline

mysticism in The Doors of Perception represents an essentially naturalist phenomena unmarked

by any sacred order of being. However, even as he distanced himself from more idealistic

accounts of extraordinary experience, Wilson did more than simply graft an ecstatic

instrumentalism to a consumer capitalism that, in the seventies, was heavily engaged in

absorbing countercultural mores. Though Wilson accepted a liberatory model of sexuality

inherited from Reich and easily aligned with the liberal subject, he also retained the sense of

Tantra’s “dangerous power and secrecy” as he moved beyond the Playboy Press.

Cosmic Trigger, after all, is a rather cautionary tale, and moreover one that contains its

own veiled secrets. Early in the volume, for example, Wilson offers a reasonably clear top-level

description of the various “neuro-psychological experiments” that he undertook after cracking

the carnal code of the Book of Lies. But then Wilson makes a surprising and uncharacteristic

rhetorical move: he refuses to detail some practices “because they are too dangerous for ordinary

or casual experimenters.” Without the proper physical and philosophical preparation, he warns,

“magick investigation will merely blow your mind,” and possibly land you in a lunatic

asylum.558 This is, of course, almost the opposite of the take-away from Sex and Drugs, which is

that sex, drugs, and magic can, well, really blow your mind. What has changed? Why the note of

caution here?

Certainly, Wilson’s elision has important rhetorical effects. For one thing, Wilson’s

explicit invocation of what he refuses to say intensifies the desirability of these exotic and

557. Ibid, 253.

558. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 72.
 414

mysterious techniques, not unlike Lovecraft’s “forbidden” books and “unspeakable” dimensions.

By staying mum, Wilson grants himself the authority of one who knows how to use such

techniques, when to reveal them, and when to keep silent. But though Cosmic Trigger does in

some ways serves as a platform for Wilson’s self-construction as a rascal guru—albeit a rather

down-to-earth and garrulous sort—this sort of master discourse runs contrary to his demotic and

Discordian sensibility. I think two conclusions are warranted.

One is that Wilson, though a hedonist and “enchanted disenchanter” of the sacred, was

not a nihilist or a party animal. His quest was not simply for pleasure or even bliss, in other

words, but also for the critical insights derived along with and through such profane

illuminations. Alongside the earthly delights offered by California Tantrics, we must recognize

with Kripal a current of Western sexual mysticism that, however psychological its vocabulary,

simply has more at stake that healthy liberated kicks. In this Crowleyian current, pleasure is

Promethean, an engine not for satisfaction alone but also insight and encounter, and therefore a

“practice of truth” as well as intensity.

Here we might recall Foucault’s late discussion of the ars erotica, an art whose discourse

he argues has long laid dormant in the modern West. In such a practice, which usually plays

second fiddle to the psychological “science” of sexuality, “truth is extracted from pleasure itself,

gathered as experience, analyzed according to its quality, followed along its reverberations in the

body and the soul.” Like many traditional arts, this ars requires apprenticeship as well as deep

discretion, as its “quintessential knowledge is transmitted by magisterial initiation, with the

stamp of secrecy, to those who have shown themselves to be worthy of it.”559 Here Foucault is

quite consciously describing a praxis of pleasure rather than the usual psychoanalytic science of

559. See Michel Foucault, “The West and the Truth of Sex,” in Tim Dean, Christopher Lane, eds, Homosexuality
and Psychoanalysis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 53.
 415

desire. Similarly, Wilson’s ontologically deflated but operational account of mystical experience

offers a hedonic and psychedelic alternative to the endless drive of spiritual “seeking.”

The other reason for Wilson’s reticence is that he knows whereof he speaks. The years

covered by Cosmic Trigger were peak years of the countercultural occult revival, a time of

transition between the wreckage of sixties dreams and the emergence of a New Age ready to

make its more overt compromises with consumerist self-realization. During this period, Wilson

became deeply involved in the occult demimonde of the Bay Area, and his encounters with

Thelemites, psychedelic magicians and bootstrap witch covens gave him plenty of first-hand

experience of the traps on the path. More centrally, Cosmic Trigger narrates the years that

Wilson found himself in what he calls “Chapel Perilous,” a sort of ontological weigh-station of

high weirdness, replete with ominous paranormal events, overwhelming synchronicities, and

personal tragedy. The cognitive and emotional pressures of Chapel Perilous are such, he says,

that “you come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way.”560

Though he clearly enjoyed some of the ride, and implies that such a crossroads might be

inevitable along the occult Promethean path, Wilson nonetheless holds a great deal of respect for

the traumatic potential of high weirdness. His own return to agnosticism—a stance that is as

performed in and through this very text—was in no ways guaranteed. Indeed, not unlike Lilly’s

biographies or Dick’s writings in the last years of his life, Cosmic Trigger is an attempt both to

narratively expose the pathological dimensions of extraordinary experience and to rescue the

author from the paranoid envelopment in mysteries whose enigmatic charisma is nonetheless

sustained, and even broadcast, through the very act of writing.

 416

Chapel Perilous

In The Making of the Counterculture, Theodor Roszak recognized that the

counterculture’s seemingly “irrational” embrace of occultism and drugs represented more than

simply escapism or hedonistic kicks. These practices and pleasures also emerged from a distrust

and rejection of rationality itself, whose Enlightenment shine had become darkened through the

soulless and violent instrumentalism of the military-industrial order and the “control society”

refining its manipulative technieques through the space of the spectacle. In this light, Zen

meditation, Dionysian partying, and high-dose psychedelia all reflected a revolutionary politics

of the possible, whereby a more original, authentic, or simply liberating source might be

discovered behind or beyond bankrupt rationality and the repressive behavioral norms disguised

as ordinary “common sense.” This rejection of rationality helps explain why Camille Paglia

describes the counterculture as a religious revival of Romanticism, where the search for what she

calls “cosmic consciousness” mixed together radical politics with “ecstatic nature-worship and

sex-charged self-transformation.”561

Wilson’s psychonautical practice both parallels and checks this Romantic religiosity. On

the one hand, it shares the exuberant embrace of transrational hedonistic practices presumed to

shatter mainstream American norms “programmed” into the nervous system. At the same time,

however, Wilson attempted to sustain an agnostic and even skeptical orientation towards his

encounters with cosmic consciousness, a position that gives off little aroma of Romanticism in

any but the most ironic sense. Plunging into the transrational intensities of extraordinary

experience, he attempted to maintain, at least in the long run, an individualistic sense of critical

560. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 6.

561. Paglia, op cit, 58.
 417

agency associated with skeptical reason and located in the empirical body. However, in some

important ways, Wilson remained party to the countercultural attack on rationality.

Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist have pointed to this critical difference between

reason as an empirical activity and rationality as an abstract and totalizing system. “Reason is

based on the body while rationality lacks a foundation outside its own tautological loops,” they

declare. Here the empirical phenomenal unfolding of embodiment provides an perspectival

organization to reason as well as a sense of agency. “Reason is represented by a highly real,

active actor, while rationality is only represented by a highly illusory, passive observer.”562

It is important to emphasize that this situational agent or actor is not the same thing as the

rational liberal subject whose singular and autonomous self-presence sustains a capitalist

political order dependent on the ideology of choice and calculated self-interest. Confronted with

evidence of his own constructed character, this liberal subject is wont to experience “agency

panic,” which as we have seen can grow into paranoid fears of hidden orders of coercion and

mind control. Despite Wilson’s libertarian investment in autonomy, however, his writings and

adventures reflect very little panic when agency is challenged, whether from the deconstructive

labor of psychoanalysis, the critique of social and linguistic imprints, or the self-dissolving seas

of high-dose LSD. In concert with some post-structuralist accounts of identity, many of which

were also emerging in the seventies, Wilson was happy to accept a self that is internally divided,

and whose independence is paradoxically dependent on an agonistic internal society of roles,

scripts, and partial subjects. Notably, Wilson tells his story in Cosmic Trigger from the shifting

perspective of these internal characters. At various points, we hear from the Shaman, the Poet,

562. Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Syntheism - Creating God in the Internet Age (New York: Stockholm
Text, 2014), 64.
 418

the Oracle, the Struggling Writer, and the Skeptic—the only one, Wilson suggestively notes,

“who usually possesses veto power over all the others.”563

Wilson’s psychonautical praxis, as described in Cosmic Trigger, radicalizes the

difference between reason and rationality. Actively cultivating extraordinary experiences that by

definition challenge the rational order of the world, Wilson nonetheless deploys reason to

skeptically undermine ontological convictions and other over-beliefs arising from encounters

with cosmic consciousness. An appendix to Illuminatus! gives us a portrait of this secular or

critical gnosis. In a brief and concocted account, Wilson and Shea outline the Ishmaelian esoteric

religious training that the legendary Hassan I Sabbah received before founding the Order of the

Assassins. In the highest grade of this training, the seeker learns that even personal mystical

encounters with the Absolute or God should be subjected “to the most merciless analysis and

criticism.” A fully realized adept was therefore “one who had achieved supreme mystical

awareness but refused to make even that into an idol; he was a total atheist-anarchist subject to

no authority but his own independent mind.”564

Even as he resorted to many of the strategies of skepticism, Wilson also resisted the

certainties that can and do arise for many skeptics following the reduction of experiential

anomalies to manageable categories of knowledge based on psychology, sociology, or

neuroscience. For Wilson, the independent mind of reason is checked by its own reflexive

critique of certainty, as well as the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that enjoys ontological

ambiguity and the marvels that result from an unleashed nervous system. We might think of this

enjoyment as a sort of antifoundationalist but naturalist aesthetics of the sublime, or at least the

weird, one whose blend of irony and wonder recalls John Keats’ famous account of negative

563. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 3.

564. Shea and Wilson, 757.
 419

capability. In a letter to his brother, Keats praises those who are “capable of being in

uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats

criticizes Coleridge, who, he writes, lacked such capacity, and would refuse “a fine isolated

verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery” if he could not crystalize such a glimpse

into knowledge.

And yet it is precisely such isolated verisimilitudes—singular appearances of truth

flickering from the heart of existential mystery—that beckoned Wilson. His practice is therefore

another sort of high-wire act, one that maintains its precarious enjoyment of sublimity precisely

by affirming the tension that results from the refusal to resolve the ultimate meaning of such

experiences into orders of faith or knowledge. In this way, Wilson’s “anti-belief system” should

be seen as an occult extension of the same ironic imagination described by Saler, which enabled

readers to enjoy the fruits of enchantment without falling into the clutches of credulity. But as

Saler points out, this stance is not a one-shot deal: “the double consciousness of the ironic

imagination requires ongoing practice to maintain.”565

Wilson provides relatively light details on his specific occult and sex magickal practices

and experiences in Cosmic Trigger. Many of the protocols centered on Crowleyian magic,

including rituals designed to establish contact with the Holy Guardian Angel, a daimonic guide

that Crowley alternately described—to Wilson’s great delight—as a superhuman intelligence or

a feature of the personal unconscious. For some trips, Wilson played a “hypno-tape with positive

suggestions on it,” tapes that drew from mainline New Thought sources within the American

565. Saler, 50.

 420

metaphysical tradition: Christian Science, self-help literature, and, eventually, A Course in

Miracles.566

In one LSD experiment, he spent the first few hours in the dark, lying on the bed with

eyes closed, repeatedly listening to a tape of John Lilly’s “Beliefs Unlimited,” a meta-

programming thought experiment Lilly included in The Center of the Cyclone. “Beliefs

Unlimited” begins with Lilly’s famous claim that “what one believes to be true either is true or

becomes true within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally”—and then

proceeds to hammer away at the very concept of such limits. For Wilson, the tape proved to be

valuable in breaking down “conditioned expectations about the boundary between the possible

and the impossible,” even as it encouraged a gullible faith in the mind’s secret powers. At the

same time, Wilson does not worry much of temporary states of gullibility. He reports that it is

easy “to re-establish scientific skepticism” about such results once the experiment is over, though

he also insists that “skepticism during the experiment prevents any interesting results.”567 Here

we have a perfect expression of Saler’s disenchanted enchantment, though now deployed as a

probe of experience rather than literary or media fictions.

However, in the second volume of Cosmic Trigger, Wilson offers another account of

ritual experience that suggests a use of the ironic imagination in situ. In 1972, in a farmhouse in

Mendocino, Wilson decided to preform Crowley’s Mass of the Phoenix, a solo ritual first

described in The Book of Lies. After dropping 250 micrograms of LSD and putting on some

Beethoven, Wilson performed the invocation. Soon he found himself surrounded by a ring of

slavering dog-faced demons who stood out solidly against the room’s actual furniture.

566. “In general, I am much happier than before starting these experiments.” See Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Volume
II, 55.
 421

On one level, I was seriously frightened; but on another level, I felt confident of my hard-
learned ability to navigate in the Infernal regions of psychedelic space—or in the
qliphotic astral realm, or whatever you want to call this particularly unlovely reality-
tunnel. I recalled something from H.P. Lovecraft: “Do not call up any that you cannot put
down.” This was not helpful. But then I remembered from some book on shamanism: “If
you feed Them, they will become Allies instead of Foes.”568

While we of course cannot take this as an accurate account of Wilson’s real-time thought

processes, we should nonetheless notice some characteristic features of Wilson’s

anthropotechnics: the indeterminate flicker between different ontologies (psychedelic space vs.

the qliphotic “astral realm” of modern esotericism; pulp fiction vs. anthropology), the recall and

citation of texts, and the “hard-learned ability” that comes with practice. Armed with all this, and

recalling the line from the book on shamanism, Wilson then directed his psychedelicized

imagination to conjure up something tasty—shrimp cocktails, he decided—and proceeded to

feed the demons. At this point the entities transformed into dwarf-sized replicas of the nuns he

recalled from grammar school. Laughing, he then closed the circle, writing, in an echo of

Crowley’s Goetic skepticism, that he was “totally convinced that all the ‘entities’ invoked in

Magick are parts of our own minds.” But the evening was not yet through with him. Suddenly,

his bed started shaking “like a scene from the Exorcist.” It was a mild earthquake. With a further

dose of apotropaic irony, Wilson writes, “It would be best to not even think of it as a

synchronicity.”569

This last line is worth pondering in light of the long bout of high weirdness that first

descended upon Wilson a few months after performing this ritual. A jaw-dropping series of

567. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 83.

568. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, 159.
 422

meaningful coincidences sent Wilson headfirst into “the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal

parameters of synchronicity.”570 Linking between texts and dreams and waking encounters, these

events unleashed an elaborate parade of “beings” into Wilson’s life, including Horus, ETs, the

number 23, and the Dog Star Sirius. Wilson’s comment about the earthquake reminds us that he

recognized the interpretive choices involved in the “perception” of a synchronicity, as well as the

possible dangers of such hermeneutics. As such, it reminds us again of the role that reason and

reframing played in some psychonautical operations. And yet, as Wilson would himself discover,

the existential logic of synchronicity turns on the impossible necessity that announces its arrival

as an unquestionable event. Or, in other words, the synchronistic event presents itself as already

inextricable from narrative implications that provide a half-veiled but suggestive wink in the

immanent guise of a fait accompli.

In simpler terms that draw from our earlier discussion of resonance, “synchronicity”

might be said to refer to the striking experience or perception of a resonating correlation between

causally unrelated and chance elements. However it arises, the operation of correlating these

elements thickens them into almost oracular signs that demand to be read—or that, perhaps more

accurately, read themselves as if already inscribed onto the fabric of existence. Such signs often

take the form of discrete words, objects, actions or images that cross between different

ontological domains, especially between the external object-world, the linguistic scene of

dialogue, or the internal theater of thoughts, memories, and stories. In addition to the force of any

particular correlations, these moments suggest a second-order network of meaningful “acausal

connections” memorably described in the Alex Cox film Repo Man as “a lattice of coincidence

that lays on top o’ everything.”

569. Ibid, 160.

570. Shea and Wilson, 541.
 423

It is the veiled suggestion of such a lattice that lends the particular correlation its eerie,

weird, and absurd character, something that Freud also noted in his celebrated 1919 essay on

psychopathology and the uncanny. Here he described the superstitious desire to recognize fate or

a “secret meaning” in the uncanny recurrence of a certain number, which for Freud is 62, and for

Wilson was 23. Significantly, Freud links this temptation to a new concept in his

metapsychology: the unconscious compulsion to repeat, associated with the death drive that

works against Eros. Rather than infusing the future with desire, the death drive stitched into our

beings seeks extinction and stasis through repetition. As such, recurrent numbers seem uncanny

to us because they remind us of this “daemonic” repetition within.

The concept of synchronicity itself was famously developed and named by Carl Jung and

the physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1950s. Jung used the concept to explain both the oracular

mechanism of the I Ching as well as Jung’s then-emerging belief in the enigmatic “psychoid”

intertwining of the unconscious archetypes and physical matter. As a concept, and even a term,

synchronicity inherits something from both Jung’s psychoanalytic esotericism and Pauli’s

physics-inflected interest in paranormal phenomena. With its links to the oracular mechanisms of

forced correlation, synchronicity keys into one of the most venerable human modes of pattern

recognition, and refashions the esoteric logic of correspondences into a more transitive and open-

ended series of signs, a series that founds comparison itself.

At the same time, synchronicity is a naturalistic concept, one that carries forward

modernity’s disenchanted refashioning of meaningful coincidence into the plotted “chance

encounters” of Victorian novels, or Horace Walpole’s concept of serendipity, those “fortunate

happenstances” whose real effects are as strong in scientific history as anything. For Jung,

synchronicity was an actual feature of reality. Along with many of his followers, especially
 424

Maria Von Franz, Jung attempted to scientifically or formally establish the principle, though as

Arthur Koestler points out, these efforts founder precisely in their inability to present an

“acausal” principle in anything other than causal terms.571 Nonetheless, it is important to

recognize that, despite its linkages to the archaic logic of oracular semiosis, the concept of

synchronicity embraced by Wilson represents a prime postwar example of how the quasi-

scientific terminology of the paranormal reframes previously esoteric or occult phenomena,

creating what Egil Asprem calls “a uniquely naturalistic mode of enchantment.”572

Jung began noting the phenomenon as early as the 1920s. The most classic example

occurred during an analytic session in which a female patient, who defended herself with a

“highly polished Cartesian rationalism,” tells Jung about a dream in which she received a golden

scarab jewel. At that moment, Jung hears an insect slamming against the outside of the nearby

window-pane, and discovers a common rose-chafer beetle with a gold-green carapace. Jung then

opens up the window and tells the patient, “Here is your scarab”—an action that, he claims,

broke down her intellectual resistance to the analysis. Jung’s decision to put the coincidence into

social play is crucial, one that recalls Stephen Paul Miller’s definition of “uncanny criticism” as a

critical reading that is not driven by “cause and effect” but “by noting relationships between

phenomena.” Rather than respect modernity’s Great Divide between nature and human culture,

which would a priori reject any meaningful correlation between a narration and an

entomological tropism, Jung acted instead as an uncanny critic. He pointed out two event-signs

that resonated across and between different ontological domains, conjoined in that moment by a

571. See Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence; (New York: Random House, 1972). For more on these
theoretical accounts, see Roderick Main, The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern
Western Culture (Psychology Press, 2004).
572. See Egil Asprem, “Psychic Enchantments of the Educated Classes,” in Asprem, Contemporary Esotericism, op.
cit., 348.
 425

transversal sounding.573 At the same time, Jung did so without implying or establishing a linear

or causal relationship between these events or even defining the nature or “meaning” of the

connection at all. Nonetheless, by merely pointing out the uncanny resonance, he produced

effects in the analytic situation by introducing an extra dimension to the analysis, one that might

be described as a kind of juxtaposition or superposition that simultaneously demands sense (the

coincidence must be meaningful) and forecloses it (no reasonable cause of the meaningful

coincidence is imaginable).

This dimension opens up the distinction between statistically anomalous events and

meaningful statistically anomalous events, with only the latter generating or containing an

overtone of personal significance that rides or parasites unlikely clusters of phenomena.

Synchronicities, it might be said, forge signs and references out of events. At such moments, as

Jeff Kripal explains, “space-time looks very much like a text and physical objects begin to

function more like words or symbols than like the lifeless objects we assume them to be.”574 In

other words, these object messages in turn remind us of the interlocking correspondences of

reference and citation discovered through writing and research, with all its notorious serendipity.

Indeed, Wilson uses “synchronicity” to refer both to startling experiential coincidences and

surprising connections between texts and talk.

The link between coincidence, esoteric possibility, and the textual operations of reference

is well-represented by a tale that Wilson includes in both Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger. In her

book, This Timeless Moment, Laura Huxley, Aldous’s second wife, describes her attempt to

573. This should remind us again of Erlmann’s distinction between reason and resonance. “While reason implies the
disjunction of subject and object, resonance involves their conjunction,” writes Erlmann. “Where reason requires
separation and autonomy, resonance entails adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the boundary between
perceiver and perceived.” While this invocation of “sympathy” does strike the overtones on the old occult
monochord of correspondences, Erlmann is equally adamant that resonance is stitched into modernity. Erlmann, 9-
10.
574. Kripal, Esalen, 15.
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contact the spirit of her deceased husband through the medium Keith Milton Rhinehart. The

medium informed her that Aldous wanted to transmit “classical evidence of survival”—that is, a

message that could not be explained “merely” as telepathy, as something Rinehart picked out

of her mind (which is wild enough, admittedly).

Later that evening, Rhinehart produced the evidence: passing on a message supposedly

from Aldous, he instructed Laura to go to another room in the house, a room the medium had

visited only briefly in the company of others, and find a particular book by its location on the

shelf. She was to look on a certain page and a certain line. The book she found in the spot was a

Spanish anthology of literary criticism that Aldous may have glanced at before his death but that

Laura had never seen. Translated, here is the sentence Laura found: “Aldous Huxley does not

surprise us in this admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sense

and the sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form.” When telling the story a the

close of The Eye in the Pyramid, Wilson adds the fact that “the line was, of course, line 23.”575

This story of course recalls familiar mentalist tricks, and it should also be noted that,

though Rhinehardt did ask for line 23, the line only encompasses the very end of the sentence

that Laura Huxley discovered.576 This still reminds us that the repetition of the number 23

throughout Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger is more than a pure, if uncanny recurrence. The

number also ties into larger referential networks that involve the Discordian law of 5s, the 23rd

chapter of The Book of Lies, the American slang term 23 Skidoo, and William S. Burroughs, who

Wilson claims told him about the mysterious number in the first place. In other words,

synchronicities seem intimately bound up with the peculiar slipperiness of inter-textual

references and the endless labyrinths of cognitive correspondences, which alone were enough to

575. Shea and Wilson, 304.

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drive Wilson to the threshold of Chapel Perilous. But what drove him inside, and what gives

synchronicities their existential bite, is the capacity of their textual play to arrive with the force

of an event, like a bell ringing in time.

Dog Star Days

During the summer of 1973, when Wilson received what he called the “Sirius

transmissions,” he decided to redo one of his hypno-tape experiments. Instead of taking LSD, he

would enter a “Tantric sex trance” with the help of his wife, charmingly referred to as “the Most

Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy.” The following morning, on July 23, Wilson awoke from a

dream and scribbled: “Sirius is important.” This dream fragment in turn spawned an

associational network of paranormal experiences and textual discoveries that linked the dog star

to ancient Egypt, the “dog days” of late summer, Crowley (by way of Kenneth Grant’s recently

published books), and, eventually, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, a popular “ancient alien”

book that appeared in 1976.

As the synchronistic text proliferated, it seemed to engender its own incorporeal author.

Wilson’s Shaman came to believe that he was in communication with a “Higher Intelligence”

that he saw or heard in dreams, intuitions, and waking visions. Such intermediary beings saturate

modern occultism, of course, from the Enochian angels of John Dee through the Secret Chiefs of

Theosophy and the ancient Atlanteans channeled by New Agers. Reinscribing the occult tension

between esoteric and naturalistic explanations for extraordinary experience, not to mention the

cultural continuity between angels and aliens, Wilson vacillated between identifying this

576. See Laura Huxley, This Timeless Moment (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1968), 324-326.
 428

Intelligence as Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel or an extraterrestrial being using a cosmic “ESP

channel” that Wilson had “tuned into” by metaprogramming his nervous system.577

He compares the entity to a being of light, and puts particular emphasis on its discourse,

including melodious and edifying statements (“They live happiest who have forgiven most”),

successful predictions (the arrival of a desperately needed check from a publisher), and a lot of

“gibberish” about time, infinity, and the future. For those conversant with the discourses of

Spiritualists and New Age prophets, this latter admission paradoxically strikes the bell of

authenticity. As Wouter Hanegraaff remarked regarding Terence McKenna’s mushroom Voice,

who was also obsessed with time, we seem to be in the presence of that poorly understood but

sometimes unquestionably unfaked phenomenon of channeling.

Needless to say, the particular period of Wilson’s “Sirius Transmissions”—roughly July

of 1973 through October 1974—did not occur in a social (or cosmic) vacuum. These were the

dog days in many ways, the time of Watergate, recession, and energy crisis. These all-too-

worldly concerns were mirrored by a good deal of cosmic activity as well. The space station

Skylab was launched in May, 1973, while Pioneer 10 began transmitting images of Jupiter—the

location of the “Star Gate” in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in November of that year, the

same month that Mariner 10 was launched toward Mercury. Late 1973 also saw the naked-eye

appearance of the Comet Kohoutek, whose identification earlier that year had inspired quasi-

apocalyptic speculations by the Children of God’s David Berg and other wild minds. That

October, as the Yom Kippur War unfolded in the holy land, the United States also hosted an

extraordinary wave of UFO sightings centered in Ohio. Closer to home, Wilson’s experiences

577. Historians of religion have long recognized that contemporary extraterrestrial lore heavily draws from earlier
Theosophical and other esoteric lore. See J. Gordon Melton, “The Contactees: A Survey” and John A. Saliba
“Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena” in Lewis, James R, The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other
Worlds (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 1-14, 15-64.
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were also paralleled by a bout of cosmic communications reported by his old friend Timothy

Leary. Though the high weirdness of Leary’s life in the early seventies deserves a more extended

investigation in this book, we will have to content ourselves here with a brief summary.

Following his Weather Underground-assisted escape from a low-security Californian

prison in 1970, Timothy Leary lived on the lam in Africa, Europe and Asia, consorting with

Black Panthers, kosmiche Krautrock musicians, and psychedelic high society. By early 1973, he

had been recaptured and was back in prison. Facing decades of time, locked in solitary

confinement alongside fellow Folsom inmate Charles Manson, Leary began writing a series of

fascinating texts that his partner Joanna Harcourt-Smith independently published in the

following months. Neurologic outlined a social-cybernetic and ultimately mystical model of the

human nervous system, later to become the “eight-circuit model” that Robert Anton Wilson

helped propagate in Cosmic Trigger and later texts. Leary described his new thinking as “PSY

PHI,” for scientific philosophy. In the late summer, Leary and Harcourt-Smith published a more

apocalyptic essay called Starseed, a Kahoutek-inspired text that speculates that “life is an

interstellar communications network” and that the contact with extraterrestrial intelligence

possibly signaled by the comet’s presence was most likely to occur through a properly tuned

nervous system.

Finally, as if to prove the point, Terra II…A Way Out presents itself as a channeled text

consisting of the “English translations” Leary made of telepathic transmissions from Higher

Intelligences supposedly received by a fellow prisoner in the late summer. Published in 1974

following Leary’s transfer to Vacaville, Terra II proclaimed that the time for earthlings to mutate

had arrived, and it outlined, in great science-fictional detail, the steps necessary for us to return

to the stars that seeded us and to claim our groovy post-terrestrial existence.
 430

Of course, assessing the earnestness of any of Leary’s statements is a fool’s game, and

some have pointed to details about prison life included in the text as evidence that it was

designed to seed and assist in another prison break. Nonetheless, these texts represent a decided

shift in Leary’s outlook from the “soft, sweet custard mush” of Hindu spirituality, which he

proffered in the sixties, and towards a more cosmic and furture-oriented transhumanism.

Moreover, with its explicit mention of John Dee, Terra II also reflects Leary’s recent interest of

occult practice, and hints as well at an obsession with Crowley that had begun a few years before

in North Africa.578 In any case, Leary’s transhumanist turn proved particularly important to

Wilson, whose own self narration in Cosmic Trigger is not always easy to disentangle from

Leary’s considerable influence. Nonetheless, it bears mentioning that Wilson did not begin

corresponding with Leary until the fall of 1973, a few months following the onset of their mutual

impression of incoming cosmic communication.

Throughout July of 1973, Wilson attempted to maintain the tight-rope dance of “maybe

logic” regarding the ontology of this Higher Intelligence, but he gradually lost the balance. Even

enthusiastic and sympathetic readers of Wilson, when retracing his growing network of

coincidences, can note many instances of flabby associational thinking that should not have

gotten past the Skeptic, who Wilson admits was, at he time, “whacked out of his skull.” More

critical readers, drawing from the considerable sociobiological literature on our hard-wired

predisposition for superstitious or “magical” thinking, would find plenty of evidence for arbitrary

pattern recognition, delusions of reference, and off-the-hook agency detection.579

578. For a marvelous account of these deeper connections, see Matt Cardin, “In Search of Higher Intelligence: The
Daimonic Muse(s) of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson,” in Voss, Angela, and William
Rowlandson, Daimonic Imagination Uncanny Intelligence. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2013), 266-281.
579. The best one-stop shops for these arguments remains Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary
Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
 431

For his part, Wilson—or rather, the fruitful alliance of the Shaman and Skeptic—

seriously consider but then reject the possibility of madness, even as Wilson’s

“neurometaprogrammer”—the Lillyian cognitive operator who sets the limits on belief—decides

that a real contact with Higher Intelligence had begun. “Was this at last the illumination of the

Illuminati—the experience of skepticism carried to the point where it abolishes itself and, since

you can't believe anything fully, you are as free of skepticism as of any other philosophy and

finally open to thinking the unthinkable?”580 Wilson’s disenchanted enchantment had become re-

enchanted. His apotropaic skepticism was outpaced by delire, as paranoid semiology and

synchronistic resonance led him decisively away from“consensus reality,” that handy

sociological term of art that itself became popular in the seventies.581

In terms of social psychology, we might say that Wilson scripted his own extraordinary

experience, but unlike the copious naive examples of such self-scripting we might find in the

history of the New Age and popular occulture, Wilson ironically recognized the fictions and

absurdities that infused and shaped the emerging “four-dimensional coincidence-hologram.” This

should at once remind us of the strange ontology of fictions discussed above, whose modes of

being remain distinct from material objects and dependent on our own interest in them, and yet

are powerful enough to trouble us with their networked exteriority. And indeed, one way of

characterizing the uncanny story of Cosmic Trigger is that the paratextual mindfucks of

conspiracy and magic that Wilson helped unleash in Illuminatus! came home to roost.

This destabilizing nexus of authorship, trickery, and higher intelligence is gestured

towards at the close of Illuminatus! Joe Malik, aboard Celine’s submarine and facing a giant sea

monster, realizes that he is just a character in a book. Celine then admits to both the other

580. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 89.

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characters and the reader that his computer FUCKUP actually wrote the novel, having been

programmed to “correlat[e] all the data on this caper” and put it into the form of a fiction. At this

moment, so reminiscent of the close of Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death (1970), the book’s

authorial voice offers its own paranthetical note: “(So, at last, I learn my identity, in

parentheses…).” This is a less surreal aside to the reader than it may appear, given that Celine’s

admission in some sense describes Wilson and Shea’s own method of fictionally elaborating

historical conspiracy theories.

But Celine is not through with the beings of fiction: “FUCKUP may be writing all this, in

one sense, but in a higher sense there’s a being, or beings, outside our entire universe, writing

this. Our universe is inside their book, whoever they are. They’re the Secret Chiefs.”582 Here the

writing of paranormal (or paratextual) fictions stages the second-order recognition that higher

intelligences are writing the book of the world, including those apparent fictions that swallow us

up as fate. This recalls the stage of Realization that Jeffrey Kripal describes in Mutants and

Mystics, which tracks the strange loops that tie together creative writing and the paranormal

through twentieth century popular culture. “Through the uncanny practices of writing, reading,

and artistic production,” individuals encounter paranormal events that “reveal a dimension of the

world that works remarkably like a text or a story.” The realization that comes from this

encounter is that we are being written: “we are caught in a story (or stories) that we did not write

and that we may not even like.”583

For his part, Wilson was never altogether happy with the story that extraterrestrial adepts

from Sirius were beaming him intelligent signals. He attributes his exit from that particular

581. The term comes from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York:
Anchor Books, 1966); see especially p. 3.
582. Shea and Wilson, 722.
583. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 28.
 433

reality tunnel to, of all things, a “Crowleymass” held in Berkeley in October 1974, celebrating

the 99th birthday of the beast. As described in Wilson’s text, many notables from California’s

occult scene were in attendance, including Grady McMurtry, Caliph of the re-established O.T.O,

and Dr. Jacques Vallee, astronomer, computer network researcher, and independent UFO

investigator. Vallee shared with Wilson his growing conviction that UFOs were not a “nuts and

bolts” or even extraterrestrial phenomenon, but only the latest bizarre formation of a long-

standing zone of terrestrial weirdness. Based in part on his own comparativist research into the

history of occultism and secret societies, Vallee argued that absurd encounters with preternatural

alien intelligences were perhaps better seen as part of a terrestrial “control system” designed to

tweak human culture and consciousness for purposes he did not claim to understand. Vallee’s

arguments, informed by deep research and a nimble mind, may have cracked Wilson’s ET

convictions, but it hardly returned him to a sober rationalism, since Vallee’s control system

theory still depends on the existence of a continuum of weirdness inhabited by ontological agents

lurking well beyond the reductive psychological discourse of projection, hallucination, and

fabricated memory.

In his various accounts of this peculiar period of his life, Wilson himself wavers on this

point. On the one hand, he writes that the “objective and documented evidence” gathered in

Cosmic Trigger is designed to show that “something is going on—something more physical and

palpable than hallucination.”584 On the one hand, his later writings tend to suggest a more

skeptical resolution. In the early nineties, he wrote that he escaped “Chapel Perilous” back in the

day through a pragmatic decision rather than through a specific lens of truth. “I…decided to

safeguard my sanity by choosing the subjective theory (It’s all in my head) and ruthlessly

584. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 11.

 434

repressed any tendency to speculate further about possible objective theories (There are super-

human forces at work here…).”

Though we might doubt the simple voluntarism this account implies, Wilson’s

psychonautical tactics do imply an instrumental capacity to pragmatically navigate diverging

paradigms whose very articulation returns agency to the navigator. In his 1991 account, he

admits that he took particular solace at the time in the popular seventies discourse of brain

lateralization, from which he concluded that his experience amounted to “my over-developed left

brain learning to receive signals from the usually ‘silent’ right brain.”585 As we will see in the

following chapter, Philip K. Dick would turn to this same model for very similar purposes. From

the perspective of 1991, however, Wilson recognizes the deep insufficiency of this model—an

admission that underscores both his acceptance of the error-correction involved in scientific

falsification and of the pragmatic value and even necessity of fungible models.

Ontologically, Wilson’s tricksy vacillation allows him to play both ends against the

middle while having his cake and eating it too—a characteristic that, depending on one’s

temperament, might appear as alternately charming or sloppy. What makes it important,

however, is that it represents a novel and, within occult circles, influential example of how

naturalistic and reductive explanations about extraordinary experience “re-enter” the meaningful

negotiation and production of such experiences. If we understand both the nineteenth-century

occult revival and the New Age of the seventies as products of an ongoing negotiation between

older esoteric currents and disenchanted modernity, than Wilson represents a striking example of

a “second order” disenchantment that uses the very force of ironic imagination as a

psychonautical tool. In the jargon of anthropology, he confounds the distinction between etic and

585. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Volume II, 56-57.

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emic discourse—that is, the difference between discourse used by people studying a cultural

phenomenon and those in the scene itself.

On the one hand, Wilson was a critical and generally skeptical thinker who embraced

many reductive socio-cognitive accounts of “religious” phenomenology, whether these derive

from linguistics, sociology, neuroscience, or other secular discourses often devoted to smoking

out “religion” from one of its last redoubts: personal experience. At the same time, Wilson’s

project—which in many ways begins with Cosmic Trigger, and carried forward in texts like

Prometheus Rising (1983) and Quantum Psychology (1990)—is not concerned with deflationary

explanations or naturalism per se. Inspired by parapsychology, Leary’s 8-circuit model, and the

possible entanglement of consciousness with quantum effects, Wilson hewed to an optimistic

and ultimately transhumanist account of the brain and nervous system that significantly exceeded

the boundaries of conventional neuroscience or our era’s militant “skepticism.”

In this, Wilson can be seen as an outlier of the New Age, whose platitudes he often

mocked but whose concerns he overlapped. For one thing, Wilson needs to be considered in light

of quantum weirdness. Along with a number of pioneering New Age thinkers in the 1970s,

Wilson believed that quantum mechanics offers fundamental insight into the peculiar imbrication

of consciousness and physical reality, notions he derived not simply from pop science texts but

from ongoing relationships with the wilder Bay Area physicists chronicled in the physicist David

Kaiser’s great seventies history How the Hippies Saved Physics. (One of the members of this

Fundamental Fysiks Group, Saul-Paul Sirag, provides the afterword for Cosmic Trigger.)

Unlike most New Age physics promoters, however, Wilson was not parasitizing the

authority of science or stumping for the “Eastern Wisdom”-inflected holism argued for in books

like Fritjof Capra’s 1975 The Tao of Physics. Instead, Wilson turned to physics to argue that
 436

reality was weirder than we generally suppose, that the weirdness involved consciousness, and

that it placed paradoxical limitations on our own capacity to know even as it authorized far-out

speculations. In this, as in other ways, Wilson’s philosophical effort may be understood as a

skeptical, socio-cognitive corrective to the essential New Age gambit that we “create our own

reality.” In other words, for all his neurological constructionism and libertarian love of

autonomy, Wilson always recognized the capacity of reality to surprise, confuse, and wound well

beyond the individual will.

Indeed, Cosmic Trigger concludes with an all-too-actual tragedy: the murder of Wilson’s

daughter Luna. Wilson’s decision to conclude his text with this story simultaneously indicates

his resistance to cheap New Age idealism and his conviction that writing itself is a working

through, a rendering and extension of the connections—the “network”— that sustain. The book’s

final synchronicity begins with a telegram of condolences to Wilson from Leary: “YOU ARE

SURROUNDED BY A NETWORK OF LOVE AND GRATITUDE.” Flipping through Luna’s

notebook shortly thereafter, Wilson discovers a poem she wrote called “The Network.”

In Kripal’s terms, Wilson passed from the stage of Realization—in which the paranormal

is recognized as a force of inscription—to the stage of Authorization, in which we in turn author

that inscription. “If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us,

Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us.”586 For Wilson, this

authorization ultimately manifests as a radical transhumanist constructionism that necessitates

the creative and courageous deployments of “technologies of the self.” For though Wilson’s

rather anarchistic protocols of truth, rule, and relation do not resemble the more sober procedures

that Foucault associates with Stoic or Christian anthropotechnics—Wilson’s skepticism, in fact,

brings him more closely to classic Pyrronhism—his procedures were far more than techniques of
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pleasure or even intensity. They were also games of truth that played with the very distinction

between truth and false, fiction and phenomena. Weaving a spiral dance of “maybe logic”

between materialism and mysticism, Wilson helped articulate and model a “double game” of

skeptical esotericism as an “as if” anthropotechnics capable of extending thought through the

very limit experiences that confront and confound it as radical non-thought. And why play such a

double game? In his introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel

Foucault speaks for his curiosity in these matters, which doubles for Wilson as well: “There are

times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and

perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and

reflecting at all.”587

586. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 254.

587. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 8.
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CHAPTER FIVE. VALIS CALLING:

PHILIP K. DICK’S TRASH TRANSMISSION

Since the death of Philip K. Dick in 1982, the literary and popular appeal of the

Californian science fiction writer has grown exponentially. Indeed, it is now fair to say that Dick

has posthumously achieved the dream that remained unfulfilled in his life: to step beyond the

ghetto of genre fiction into the ranks of the most important American novelists of the postwar

period. Dick’s funny, absurd, nightmarish and self-consciously quotidian fictions—sometimes

hastily written, and sometimes crushingly bleak—have now spawned a dozen or so films, a

vibrant critical discourse, and a global cult following not unmarked with the cryptic mania

conjured, in the history of religions anyway, by the term cult.

This fascination does not entirely rest with his work, though, since the writer’s complex

personality and colorful biography—or psycho-biography—also mark and magnetize his oeuvre

in intimate and peculiar ways. It is no accident that the paperback covers of many of his novels,

especially those republished in the eighties and nineties, weave in images of Dick’s bearded,

avuncular, and bemused visage. Popular accounts of his work routinely trot out his political

paranoia, his LSD use and amphetamine abuse, and his scandalous number of increasingly

younger wives. But his greatest scandal is arguably a sacred one: the series of extraordinary
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visionary experiences he underwent that began in 1974, experiences he often described as

“religious” or “mystical” and that, for the observer, lend themselves equally to the languages of

revelation, psychosis, and speculative fiction.

Both Dick’s visionary experiences and his written accounts of those experiences were

strikingly varied, a complexity that derives in part from the fact that the distinction between

those two rather handy categories is, in Dick’s case, rather difficult to maintain. In some

accounts, Dick’s language resembles that of a classic mystic, as he describes how, in a dark time

of his life, a benign transcendent power “intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and

give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world.”588 This intervening force took

many forms, some considerably less benign: an alien satellite; the Gnostic-Jewish wisdom figure

Sophia; Russian psychotronic devices; aliens (“ETIs”); and the cosmic matrix he sometimes

called VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. He also felt that a secondary entity

had possessed him, an entity he identified variously with California’s controversial Episcopal

Bishop Jim Pike (who died in 1969); the prophet Elijah; a form of plasmatic information called

Firebright; and a second-century Christian named Thomas. Dick received what he believed were

prophetic transmissions in dreams, witnessed eight nighttime hours of rapid-fire “colored

graphics” that resembled Kandinsky and Klee, and, on more than one occasion, saw the

lineaments of ancient Rome pop through the ticky-tacky landscape of Orange County in a

cinematic act of temporal “superimposition.”

The overriding message of all of this seemed to be that, at the very least, our world—or

rather Dick’s early seventies California world—was a colossal illusion. He came to believe, at

least some of the time, that he was still living in apostolic times, that the intervening centuries of

588. Charles Platt, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction : Interviews (New York:
Berkley Books, 1980), 155.
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history were a manufactured fabulation, and that he and everybody else were trapped in a frozen

block of causal determinism and political oppression he called the Black Iron Prison, whose

paradigm was Rome but whose contemporary expression was the Nixon administration. Amidst

all this phenomenological exotica, Dick also heard voices issue from unplugged radios, became

convinced of a Communist plot to control or even kill him, and, while listening to the Beatles

song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” saw a miraculous blast of pink light that informed him that his

son Christopher was suffering from a potentially fatal inguinal hernia.

Dick’s visionary run of pathos, trauma, radiance, esoterica, and paranoia stands as one of

the towering peaks of high weirdness in the countercultural seventies. Dick’s bizarre

experiences—which persisted steadily for a few years, and then appeared off and on until he

died—also challenge our categories of understanding. Even the question of how to conveniently

refer to this series in some short-hand manner is a conundrum, since most such terms—

revelations, religious experiences, anomalies, hallucinations, symptoms—already carry their own

ontology with them, pre-determining the meaning and etiology of the events in question.

Luckily, Dick did us the great service of referring to the experiences as “2/3/74”—a neutral term

that, first and foremost, establishes the series as space-time events that fundamentally eluded

Dick’s obsessive attempts to categorize or craft into an overarching meaning.

It is precisely for this reason that Dick’s biographer Lawrence Sutin declared

indeterminacy to be the essential message of 2/3/74. This deep semantic instability also lent

Dick’s experiences a boundless speculative potential, as well as a traumatic irony that sets them

apart from more stabilized examples of revelation or visionary experience, in which the intensity

of the experience authenticates a relatively fixed message. Dick never knew what hit him, and

the restless hermeneutical derive this indeterminacy provoked infused nearly all the writing Dick
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produced before his death in 1982. These texts include A Scanner Darkly (1977), the VALIS

trilogy (VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

(1982)), a number of short stories and essays, the posthumously published novel Radio Free

Albemuth, and—most unusually—the Exegesis, an enormous speculative diary the author kept

until his death, and that ultimately comprised over 8000 mostly hand-written pages.589

The fact that 2/3/74 is so deeply embedded in Dick’s late works means that literary critics

have been, with some important exceptions, the only scholars so far to wrestle with the religious

and phenomenological problems raised by the VALIS events.590 For Dick’s earliest critics, who

were writing in the seventies and eighties and often deeply indebted to historical materialism,

Dick’s later “theological” works were considered significantly inferior to his best sixties novels;

with the release of VALIS, Eric Rabkin worried explicitly that Dick had simply gone insane.591

As Umberto Rossi explains in his essential study of Dick’s fiction, the second wave of Dick

criticism—beginning in the early 1990s—was saturated with postmodern concerns, and Dick’s

engagement with simulation, androids, and cybernetics were privileged over the humanist,

589. There have been two published versions of the Exegesis: a selection of undated fragments by Lawrence
Sutin— In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller, 1991)—and a more
substantial abridgment published in 2012: Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson
and Jonathan Lethem (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). For clarity’s sake, I will refer to the text that
Dick wrote as the Exegesis, while I will refer to the HMH edition as the Exegesis.
590. There are a few important exceptions here, notably Gabriel Mckee’s explicitly theological monograph Pink
Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: the Science Fictional Religion of Philip K, Dick (University Press of
America, 2004). Also see Michael Desjardins, “Retrofitting Gnosticism: Philip K. Dick and Christian Origins” in
George Aichele and Tina Pippin, eds, Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of God: Fantasy and Ideology in the
Bible(London: Routledge, 1998). In his chapter on Dick in Mutants and Mystics, op. cit, Jeffrey Kripal presents the
views of a historian of religion. A number of the literary essays on Dick, of course, offer significant insights into his
religious and philosophical concerns. See, just for a few examples, Samuel J. Umland’s excellent “To Flee from
Dionysus: Enthousiasmos from ‘Upon the Dull Earth’ to Valis” in Umland, Samuel J, Philip K. Dick: Contemporary
Critical Interpretations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 81-99; also Georg Schmid, "The Apocryphal
Judaic Traditions as Historical Repetoire: An Analysis of The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick,” Degres 51
(Autumn 1987): fl-fll.
591. Eric Rabkin, “Irrational Expectations: or, How Economics and the Post-Industrial World Failed Philip K.
Dick,” in Mullen, Richard D., ed., On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies (SF-TH Inc., 1992),
178-187.
 442

ethical, and mystical strains of his work592. Today, Dick’s work continues to inspire scholars

working with broadly posthumanist concerns, though his subtler critics more productively locate

him at the crossroads between modernism and postmodernism, humanism and posthumanism. At

the same time, and to some degree in concert with the general “religious turn” in critical studies

over the last few decades, there has been a rich recuperation and engagement with Dick’s

theological and metaphysical texts, including some from posthumanist angles.593 That said,

Dick’s life and fiction have rarely been treated as a chapter in the history of religions, with its

tool kit of relevant methodologies.594

In addressing his late works, Dick’s literary critics often feel the need to clearly establish

that they are addressing his fiction and not the author’s psychology or the biographical reality of

his unusual experiences. I want to establish the same boundary from the other side. While I will

be alluding to and sometimes analyzing Dick’s fiction, I will so only as it informs the question of

how the man Philip K. Dick conceived, constructed, and reflected on the high weirdness that

erupted into his life. More centrally, I am concerned with placing the enigma of 2/3/74 within the

freaky Zeitgeist we have already established, an early seventies matrix that weaves together

California counterculture, the occult revival, weird fiction, media systems, and the “spiritual but

not religious” tensions between neuroscience, psychology, and mysticism.

Like Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, and other psychonauts of the era,

including John Lilly and Timothy Leary, Dick navigated the oceans of extraordinary experience

by threading his singular way between the Scylla of skeptical naturalism and the Charabdis of

592. Umberto Rossi, The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels
(McFarland, 2011).
593. See, for example, Anthony Enns, “Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick,” Science
Fiction Studies, 33 (2006), 68-88.
594. These include an anthropological and cognitive understanding of altered states of consciousness; the historical
study of gnosis and esotericism as modern cultural currents; the hermeneutic investigation of religious reading; and
the history of countercultural spirituality in postwar America.
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religious faith. Like these men, he also availed himself to the postwar nonconformist’s

intellectual bag of tricks: existentialism, psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, and

comparative religion. And finally, he worked out the consequences of his experiences in

reflexive and abidingly interesting texts, novels and essays that themselves helped constitute the

pulp canons of weirdo culture, even as they seeded that trash stratum with clandestine symbols of

the divine.

On the other hand, there are two significant ways that Dick differs from our other avatars

of high weirdness. One is that, though he tried LSD and other hallucinogens and was for good

reasons considered a “druggy” writer, Dick did not associate much mystical significance to

psychedelic drugs, and personally preferred all manner of amphetamines and attendant

pharmaceuticals. In other words, while Dick’s life and texts are deeply embedded in the

psychological and metaphysical conundrum of drugs, his story forces us to look outside the

relatively neat metabolic arcs of an eight-hour acid trip or a fifteen-minute blast of DMT.

One danger in discussing the negotiation of extraordinary experience in the

counterculture is that the taboo around psychedelic drugs can swamp other sources of

extraordinary experience, including, in Dick’s case, all manner of unusual and occasionally

psychotic symptoms. Moreover, Dick’s wariness about the mystical potential of psychedelics

points to a deeper if subtler distinction from our other avatars, who were all in their own ways

psychedelic Prometheans storming the gates of heaven. With a few important exceptions, Dick’s

texts, both fiction and nonfiction, do not extol or romanticize techniques of ecstasy, and certainly

not the countercultural rhetoric of chemical nirvana, which he dabbled with in the sixties but had

come to vociferously reject by the time of 2/3/74.

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As such, the experiences of high weirdness that defined the last eight years of his life

were, in a formal sense, not consciously intended but passively undergone. While Dick was

certainly looking for a miracle of sorts, the events were not experienced or narrated as intentional

acts, almost as if they escaped design by design. In VALIS, this crucial distinction is underscored:

“A theophany consists of self-disclosure by the divine. It does not consist of something the

percipient does; it consists of something the divine—the God or gods, the high power—does.”595

This distinction leads to our second major difference. While all of our avatars brush up

against “religion,” Dick both desired and directly grappled with the possibilities of faith and

redemption. In terms of extraordinary experience, this meant that aspects of 2/3/74 and their

narration lend themselves to more traditionally mystical and theological discourse.596 So while

Dick should be read, with qualifications, as a countercultural intellectual seeker, dabbling in

psychedelics and aspects of the occult revival, we also need to take seriously—though by no

means exclusively—his regular self-description as a Christian and an Episcopalian. Like Walter

Percy or Flannery O’Conner, Dick drew something both formative and fundamental from

Christianity—from Acts, from Paul, from metanoia and the Holy Spirit.

This doesn’t mean that Dick wasn’t also a “syncretistic thinker,” as Umberto Rossi dubs

him, someone who naturally fell into a mode of religious comparativism that actively engaged

Taoism, Vedanta, hermeticism, Kabbalah, idealist philosophy, Plato and the pre-Socratics, Greek

polytheism, alchemy, Jung, the I Ching, and a number of proto-New Age texts of the

seventies.597 Moreover, Dick’s Christianity cannot be disentangled from his Gnosticism. Though

some contemporary scholars of early Christianity argue that the descriptor Gnosticism is too

595. Dick, VALIS, 3.37.

596. McKenna’s apocalypticism, of course, is deeply dependent on Christian eschatology; however, unlike Dick,
neither Jesus Christ nor questions of sin, Satan, or salvation play a role in McKenna’s revelations.
597. See Umberto Rossi, “Radio PKD,” Foundation 106, Summer 2009, 27, n. 39.
 445

vague and polemical to be of use in the study of religion, Dick took this difference very

seriously, and wrestles with both “Christian” and “Gnostic” identities throughout the Exegesis.

So while he remains very much an esoteric thinker in both style and substance, his esotericism is

more thoroughly metaphysical and theological. Which in some ways just makes it all even

weirder.

West Marin Blues

In a late essay on the late Dick, the critic Darko Suvin—the Marxist doyen of science

fiction studies—addressed what he considered the strengths and weaknesses of Dick’s post-

2/3/74 fiction. While finding much to disappoint in Dick’s apparent religious turn, Suvin praised

what he saw as Dick’s unwavering argument with the world, a struggle that refused to

countenance the suffering of “Joe Everyman” or to cease the search for this-worldly salvation

amidst his ontological questions. In this, Suvin saw Dick as a “quintessential countercultural

figure” of the California of the fifties and sixties, one who declared “NO in thunder and if need

be galactic godheads.”598 Writing in 1988, the critic Carl Freedman also continued to see Dick as

a writer of the sixties, arguing that the defining characteristics of Dick’s worlds—commodities

and conspiracies—were intrinsic to the socio-cultural period, which he stretches to the downbeat

early seventies of Watergate.599 Both critics therefore locate 2/3/74 and the texts that follow

within a diminished phase of Dick’s career, as a kind of hazy mystical supplement to Dick’s

period of primary political vibrancy. As such, Dick’s career could be said to function as an

allegory or synecdoche for the fate of the freaks in the seventies, when the counterculture lost its

598. Darko Suvin, “Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating Within the Later P.K. Dick,” Extrapolation, 43 (4), 2002,
394.
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radical way into something like “religion.” After all, Dick was hardly immune to the undertow of

the times, and in the seventies was forced, like so many, to both continue his “mental fight” with

reality and to shift away from identification with the counterculture. And in one crucial aspect of

his life, a domain that must be addressed in any discussion of 2/3/74, this stereotypical arc proves

true. And that domain is drugs.

In this section, I want to present a highly condensed psycho-biographical account of

Dick’s life in the sixties, concentrating on those aspects of his life that most directly set up the

phantasmagoria of 2/3/74: drugs, hallucinations, and religion. In 1960, in his early thirties, Dick

was living in Point Reyes in west Marin County, a bucolic rural area where he had moved with

his first wife Kleo once they decided to leave Berkeley after years of poverty, progressive

cultural life, and occasional visits from the FBI. Dick then met and married Anne Rubenstein,

and moved in with her family. By this point, Dick was an inveterate and knowledgeable pillhead

who took the amphetamine Semoxydrine twice a day, along with the antiarrhythmic drug

quinidine and a raft of prescription meds for any number of ailments. “Adults are sick all the

time,” he told Anne.600 When they met, Dick still identified as a “Berkeley beatnik,” combining

voracious intellectual interests with the sartorial style and attitude of a member of the “working

proletariat.”601 He wasn’t exactly a hipster—he claimed to hate the Alan Watts lectures broadcast

on KPFA—but he was a liberal-left Berkeleyite. In terms of religion, Dick, who was raised

largely outside of a faith structure, still considered himself a freethinker and atheist.

That said, Dick had been writing and thinking about religious and mythic material almost

from his start as a writer. One of his earliest manuscripts that survives is a partially completed

novel called The Earthshaker, which his biographer Gregg Rickman dates to 1948 or 49. The

599. Carl Freedman, “Editorial Introduction: Dick and Criticism,” in On Philip K. Dick, op cit, 145-152.
600. Anne R. Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick (San Francisco: Tachyon, 2010), 38.
 447

novel features two characters named John and Paul searching through a ruined world for the

“JWH serpent”; according to the outline, in one chapter the protagonists pursue their quest

“through Books. Faust. the gnosis. Cabala.”602 This somewhat precocious interest in esoterica

may well be linked to some of the gay writers and poets who inhabited a rooming house where

the teenage Dick lived for a few months in 1947 and 48. These writers included Robert Duncan,

Philip Lamantia, and Jack Spicer, all future stars of the San Francisco Renaissance poetry scene.

All of them were fascinated with the imbrication of modernist literature with mystical and

surrealist practice. Duncan, who was raised by Bay Area Theosophists, used a Japanese-English

dictionary as an oracle, while Spicer was already cultivating his practice of “out-of-space

spectral dictation,” an alien poetics that conceived of the writer as a kind of Orphic radio set. The

rooming house featured experiments with automatic writing and exquisite corpse narratives,

along with some bohemian drug use.

Rickman believes that Spicer and Duncan profoundly influenced Dick in both his

mystical and literary leanings, and speculates that he may have imbibed the Gnostic current in

particular from Lamantia, who was delving into alchemy and hermeticism at the time.603 But

Dick contributed to the scene as well. One time he returned home from the record store where he

worked with a Wilcox-Gay Recordio—the first home recording machine. Poetic hijinks ensued,

while the device helped hard-wire the conceptual circuit between recording technology and

voices from the Outside, a motif shared by both Dick and Spicer.

Though Point Reyes was the sticks compared to Berkeley, there was an apocalyptic UFO

cult there, which appears in Dick’s West Marin “mainstream” novel Confessions of a Crap

601. Anne Dick, 31.

602. Gregg Rickman, To the High Castle: Philip K. Dick, a Life, 1928-1962 (Long Beach, Calif.: Fragments
West/The Valentine Press, 1989), 216-17.
603. Rickman, High Castle, 173.
 448

Artist, written in 1959 but not published until 1975. Dick shared a great deal with Anne

intellectually; they talked Schopenhauer and game theory, existential psychology and Proust.

Anne described “synchronistically” reading the Tao Te Ching along with a book on cybernetics

that compared Taoism to the influential science of communication and control.604 And while Phil

had been on the Jung tip since he was a young man, the couple followed up the Swiss wizard’s

comparativist threads to bohemian seeker classics like The Book of the Golden Flower, Evans-

Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead, and most likely his book on UFOs. But the most important

text they discovered through Jung was the I Ching.

The Chinese oracle proved enormously important to Dick, providing him the prototype

and real-life equivalent of the oracular books scattered throughout his fictions. Already a fixture

among bohemian poets and the avant-garde by 1960, the I Ching uses chance operations (tossing

coins or drawing stalks of yarrow) and a binary code to generate abstract figures linked to

ancient poetic fragments and layers of dense commentary. Too often considered to be a “Taoist”

text, which is how Emmanuel Carrère describes it in his otherwise inspiring chapter on the oracle

in his Dick biography, the I Ching nonetheless presents itself as a book of wisdom as well as

divinatory advice.

Dick explored the book with a Black friend from Berkeley named Maury Guy, who

changed his name to Iskander once he got into a new religious movement called Subud. Guy

reports that Dick was more interested in the book intellectually than spiritually. Nonetheless,

Dick started to use it regularly, even dreaming one night of an old Chinese man that he later

interpreted as a representative of the book. Anne wrote that “he thought the I Ching was

604. Anne Dick, 67. Anne misidentifies the author as Norbert Wiener. The book’s “eight different orders” comes
instead from Pierre de Latil, Thinking by Machine: A Study of Cybernetics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
Comparing yin and yang to the balance of equilibrium and force, Latil notes “if we find ourselves agreeing with the
 449

alive,…and that the I Ching had sent the dream to him.”605 Here we find an earlier indication of a

link that would become very important in 2/3/74: the link between dreams and books, and

especially those lively dreams and books that shape the world through their recombinant power

to provide enigmatic messages. In his bio, Rickman cannily if not entirely accurately called I

Ching “the literary equivalent of voices in the head.”606

Dick began to use the I Ching compulsively, like a machine. He also famously used it to

navigate plot points in one of the most important books he wrote while living with Anne, The

Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternative history novel that wonderfully combined science

fiction elements (“What if the Axis powers won World War II?”) with Dick’s more literary

concerns. In addition to cementing Dick’s technique of multifocal narrative, the novel’s mixture

of Japanese aesthetic concepts, the I Ching, Wagner, and Jung also reflected the increasing

comparativist reach of Dick’s thinking.607 The novel was a great success for the author. With a

wife and family, a sports car and a growing number of readers, Dick found himself making the

closest pass to a conventional mainstream life he would ever manage.

But things were not altogether stable. On Good Friday, in 1961, Phil was outside working

in the garden when he suddenly came running in, telling Anne in terrified tones that he had seen

a great streak of black sweeping across the sky. “For a moment there was utter nothingness

dividing the sky in half.”608 The couple also began to fight dramatically; Phil would occasionally

hit Anne, and more than a few plates were thrown. Anne was also shocked at Dick’s use of

oriental mystics, it is not because of any nebulous views on spiritual existence; we started off solely on the
fundamental concepts of the machine” (345).
605. Anne Dick, 66.
606. Rickman, High Castle, 377.
607. According to a 1974 interview, Dick claims to have thrown the coins himself at every point in the novel where
his characters employ the oracle, and to have altered the plot accordingly—an important instance of esoteric practice
informing his fiction. “Interview with Philip K. Dick,” Vertex, 1, no. 6 (1974);
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/vertex-interview-with-philip-k-dick/
(Accessed July 2015).
 450

pills—Serpasil for heart murmur, Semosydrine for agoraphobia, Stelazine for anxiety, Preludin

and other amphetamines to lift mood and to fuel an incredible run of mostly pretty incredible

books.

The ferocity of Dick’s consumption of amphetamine before moving in with Anne is

unclear. He had first been given aphedrine for asthma as a child, and had been getting

Semoxydrine scripts for mood regulation while living in Berkeley. By the early sixties, his

consumption of amphetamines and other pharmaceutical pills was prodigious, a pattern that

would last until he crashed and burned in the early seventies. It is important to emphasize the

pragmatism of Dick’s use of speed. As the literature on drugs makes clear, speed is in many

ways a proletarian drug of production, of intensifying and maximizing time, and it does so with

measurable improvement to certain cognitive tasks, while also producing reliably devastating

crashes.

Given the pittance paid for science fiction, speed helped Dick write nearly a dozen novels

in the years 1963 and 1964.609 But more than that, speed shaped and supported the rapid-fire,

immersive, and deeply personal way that Dick wrote his books. Though he researched and

contemplated his novels in advance, the manuscripts themselves emerged with visionary

intensity, their multiple threads, plot turns, and narrative foci fashioned on the fly. Indeed, before

1970, Dick didn’t even do multiple drafts.610 As Jonathan Lethem puts it, “Dick was a writer

who in his process was impulsive, he was explosive, he was prolific and he was not utterly in

control.”611 This lack of control explains the unevenness and awkward transitions found in much

608. Anne Dick, 67.

609. Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Da Capo Press, 2005), 27.
610. Lord RC, Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion (Ward, CO; [United States]: Ganymedean Slime Mold
Pubs , 2006), 180.
611. “Library of America Interviews Jonathan Lethem about Philip k. Dick”,
http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/lethem_interview.pdf
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of his writing, but it also helps explain the uncanny and charismatic immediacy of his fictions

and their deep imbrication with Dick’s emotional and psychic life. “I am merely an intermediary

between my unconscious and my typewriter,” Dick once claimed, technologizing the mysterious

dynamic of spontaneous invention known by most writers.612 Speed—both the substance, and the

headlong flight through narrative time—removed resistance from this circuit, at once liberating

and liquifying writing. As Marcus Boon notes in his study of literature and drugs, amphetamine-

fueled writing rarely has spiritual content, but “Dick makes this absence the basis of his own

intense desire for transcendence.”613

Sometimes, though, transcendence is the last thing you need, even when ordinary life is

going poorly. By the fall of 1963, Dick’s marriage had devolved along with the emotional

stability of both parties; Dick even managed to have the psychiatrist he shared with his wife

briefly commit Anne to a mental hospital. Sometime during the fall, perhaps following the

assassination of JFK, Dick was walking to the isolated shack he rented as a writing office. He

looked up at the sky and saw a face, a “vast visage of perfect evil” that had empty slots for eyes.

“It was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God.”614 The face haunted him for days, possibly

weeks. He told his shrink, and he told the Episcopal priest at St. Columba’s Church in nearby

Inverness, who identified the figure as Satan and gave Dick holy unction.

Though the exact relationship between the vision and Dick’s turn to Christianity is

murky—it some accounts it was the cause, in others he explained it as Anne’s last-ditch attempt

to save the marriage—the family began attending St. Columbo’s by the end of the year, and were

baptized in early 1964. Though Dick wouldn’t attend services for long, he more or less self-

612. Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick, the Last Testament (Long Beach, Calif.: Fragments West/Valentine Press,
1985), 47.
613. Boon, The Road of Excess, 208.
614. Philip K. Dick, Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (Citadel Press, 2002), 377.
 452

identified as a Christian and Episcopalian for the rest of his life. In his catechism class, Dick

became particularly fascinated with the Eucharist, which in the high church tradition represented

by St. Columba’s remains haunted by the mysterious logic of transubstantiation found in the

Catholic rite. According to Sutin, Dick’s fascination with the almost alchemical transformation

of God into matter also led him to Jung’s “Transformation Symbols in the Mass,” where Dick

may have encountered the explicitly Gnostic notions of the fallen and ignorant world-crafter for

the first time.615

In a 1969 letter, Dick describes his 1963 vision as an “actual mystical experience” in

which “I saw the face of evil.” In a foreword written a decade later, he back-peddles in a slight

way that, paradoxically, speaks to the flickering substance of such spectral encounters: “I didn't

really see it, but the face was there.” In that afterword, written when he was already deep into the

Exegesis, Dick himself was perfectly willing to reduce his mystical experience to the

psychological causes of extended isolation and “sensory deprivation.” Though Dick had linked

the vision to “certain chemicals” in the sixties, by 1979 Dick does not mention amphetamines,

which in large quantities are perfectly capable of producing dark and paranoid hallucinations and

other symptoms of psychosis.616 Switching to a more psychoanalytic register in the same

afterword, Dick explains that, subsequent to his hallucinatory vision, he came across a war

photograph in Life magazine that reminded him of the terrifying World War I gas-mask that his

father—who would abandon the family when Dick was four—would sometimes don when Dick

was a child. Yet even when Dick was willing to reduce the visionary mask to a screen memory

of his own “atavistic” encounter with the absent and terrifying father, Dick allowed the

615. Sutin, 128.

616. The phrase is from the fanzine article “Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Happens to
Robert Heinlein?”, in Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical
Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin (Vintage Books, 1996), 58-59.
 453

archetypal hijacking of such ciphers by “transcendent and vast” forces. Regardless of origins and

ontology, the imaginal encounter still had teeth. “Anyhow the visage could not be denied.”617

Dick eventually translated this dark vision into the titular character of 1965’s nightmarish

novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose “three stigmata” include artificial eyes, a

metallic hand, and steel teeth that, for Marcus Boon anyway, suggest the motor-mouth jaws of

speed freaks. The novel, written when Dick felt himself a born-again new man, is nonetheless

full of dark and debased parodies of Christian communion, as the evil Eldritch wrests demiurgic

control over the subjective realities of the poor folks who consume his new-fangled drug, Chew-

Z. Instead of the I Ching, Dick fleshed out the novel’s metaphysics with another bohemian best-

seller, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , along with his studies of the Eucharist and interest in

popular reports about LSD. Dick was a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan, and the classic Lovecraftian

adjective “eldritch” is unquestionably an allusion to the Weird Tales master, whom Dick admired

in part for creating the sense that his outlandish stories were somehow true. Indeed, despite its

mutant offworld trappings, Three Stigmata is as much an example of supernatural horror as of

science fiction, and it leaves some readers with that special Lovecraftian suspicion that the very

same evil that prevents Chew-Z users from ever coming off the drug also leaks into the readers

of the novel.

In any case, The Three Stigmata was weird, and recognized as such by many budding

freaks and heads, with their growing literary taste for pocket worlds and pulp metaphysics. Such

readers were ready for novels that not only included drugs as major devices but formally and

mischievously played with the malleability of reality and perception. With novels like Now Wait

for Last Year and Three Stigmata, which one review dubbed a “Satanic bible,” Dick gained a

reputation not only as a druggy author, but as the author of books that functioned as drugs.

617. Dick, Minority Report, 377.

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As Carrère notes, “The adjective Phildickean—a term used to describe strange situations

or a twisted yet accurate perspective on the world—was becoming a countercultural shibboleth,

at least in some circles, as his reputation spread beyond the small world of science fiction

devotees.”618 Indeed, one of the secret histories of the whose sixties era was the migration of

bohemian DIY enthusiasts from the tiny world of S-F fanzines into rock fandom and other

emerging countercultures of consciousness. Paul Williams, the most important of those sixties S-

F geeks to shape rock sensibility (and later the executor of Dick’s estate), passed on a copy of

Three Stigmata to Timothy Leary, who in turn gave it to John Lennon, who briefly considered

turning it into a film. And in 1967, in the Introduction to his seminal Dangerous Visions

anthology, Harlan Ellison notoriously claimed that Dick had written his contribution, as well as

books like Palmer Eldritch, on LSD. At the time at least, this was a myth that Dick, having

found a new identity in a counterculture that was not entirely his own, was happy to nurture

himself.

Fabulous Freak

In 1964, Dick left Anne and Marin County and returned to Berkeley, where, as

Emmanuel Carrère puts it, he “discovered to his absolute delight that he was completely in synch

with the Zeitgeist.”619 Though Dick’s growing paranoia and agoraphobia kept him home, he

cultivated a crew of long-haired, dope-smoking science fiction writers as pals and conversational

sparring partners. It was also the year that LSD began seeping into Bay Area bohemia, well

before Ken Kesey began throwing his famous Acid Tests. Dick’s pal and hipster mentor Ray

618. Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (Macmillan,
2005), 142.
 455

Nelson got his hands on some Sandoz capsules and Dick ate his first psychedelic. Rarely for the

era, Dick experienced a terror trip that, significantly, found Dick transported to ancient Rome.

Lanced with a spear, quavering before an angry God, Dick was reduced to barking prayers in

Latin, a language he had not studied since the forties but that saturated the classic Western

church music he loved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dick never cared much for LSD, though he took

it a few more times and—common accounts to the contrary—sometimes enjoyed himself.620

Dick hated to be alone, and he relentlessly and gushily pursued women. Through Maren

Hackett, an old Marin County friend who attended St. Columba’s, Dick met Nancy Hackett, her

daughter, a young dark-haired girl that he successfully wooed and who soon became his fourth

wife. In 1965, they moved back across the Bay to San Rafael. Maren was also the lover of a man

who exercised a decisive spiritual influence on Dick: James Pike, the hard-drinking and highly

progressive Episcopal Bishop of northern California whose radical views on the trinity and the

virgin Mary repeatedly sparked formal heresy procedures from the Church.

Pike and Dick, both motor-mouthed book-mad conversationalists, hit it off, and their

wide-ranging discussions—which surely touched on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and, most likely, John

Allegro’s theories of the mushroom trance at the basis of Christianity—encouraged the

heterodox bent in Dick’s theological thought. Following the suicide of his son in 1966, Pike

began attending Spiritualist seances, occasionally with a skeptical Dick and Nancy in tow; later,

he formally renounced his office and formed the ambiguously named Foundation for Religious

Transition. In 1969, Pike died rather foolishly in the wadis near the Dead Sea hunting for the

619. Carrère, 120.

620. In a 1967 letter, he describes splitting a 150 microgram tab with Nancy. “I saw all manner of joyous coloration,
especially pinks and reds, very luminous and exciting, and I had several great insights about myself…Frankly, I’d
like to get hold of some more; it was an altogether pleasant trip…” Dick, Selected Letters 1938-1971, 192.
 456

(possibly fungal) origins of Christianity. Joan Didion compared him to the Great Gatsby, a man

lost in the loosening afforded by the possibilities of endless Californian reinvention.

Pike would later become the model for Timothy Archer in Dick’s last published book,

which allowed Dick to portray the human cost of the sort of madcap religious speculations

favored by both the Bishop and himself. Dick also cites his conversations with Pike as an

important influence on the theological system that Dick and his friend William Sarill devised—

“based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists”—for his harrowing 1970 novel, A Maze of

Death, a crucial unconscious staging ground for 2/3/74.621 The bulk of the story takes place on

the planet Delmak-O, where, following the framework of Agatha Christie’s And Then There

Were None, a crew of colonists get mysteriously picked off one by one. As the characters sink

into their own subjective world-views, about the only thing the fractious crew can agree on is a

cybernetic theology featuring four deities: the Mentufacturer (the demiurge), the Form-Destroyer

(death, entropy), the Walker-on-Earth (an Elijah-like prophet), and the Intercessor (the

Redeemer). The ontological coherence of their shared world begins to break down, and they

begin to suspect they are actually amnesiac inmates of an insane asylum on earth. But the

colonists still can't explain why each one of them is tattooed with the phrase “Persus 9.” To find

out they ask the tench, an oracular creature that inhabits the planet, but instead of giving them his

usual I Ching-like answers, the beast explodes in a mass of gelatin and computer circuitry, and

Delmak-O itself is annihilated.

We then learn that Persus 9 is the name of a disabled spaceship circling a dead star, and it

is within this bleak diagetic world where Dick scatters seeds for 2/3/74. To stave off despair, the

captain-less crew had taken to programming their T.E.N.C.H. 889B computer to generate virtual

621. My account here draws from the earlier discussion of A Maze of Death in my book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic,
and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2015) , 299-302.
 457

worlds they would then enter through “polyencephalic fusion.” The parameters for Delmak-O

included the same arbitrary postulate that Dick claims he and Sarill used to create the theology in

the first place: that God exists. As the crew prepare to enter another simulation, one character,

Seth Morley, can’t take it anymore. He wanders off alone, and prepares to kill himself and the

whole crew by venting all the oxygen. But his hand freezes on the release lock. “What he

intended to do had made him frozen, as if time had stopped.” The causality here is confused—

was it the act itself that prevented the act? But even that’s not as confusing as the appearance in

the spaceship corridor of a hieratic figure who declares himself to be the Intercessor. “But we

invented you!,” cries Morley. “We and T.E.N.C.H. 889B.” The Intercessor does not explain

himself, and simply leads Morley “into the stars,” while the rest of the crew submit themselves to

the death drive of pure repetition, finding themselves once again on Delmak-O.

Here an arbitrary fabulation, programmed to run on the inside of a fictional world,

achieves an invasive exteriority. The ontological Mobius strip that results recalls Ian Watson’s

comment that “one rule of Dick’s false realities is the paradox that once in, there’s no way out,

yet for this very reason transcendence of a sort can be achieved.”622 But what sort of

transcendence is this? Dick’s and Morley’s constructed metafictional redeemer hardly represents

a traditional mode of salvation, but nor is it simple human wish fulfillment. Within the novel, the

Intercessor is not solely a human (or humanist) construction: this almost literal deus ex machina

is the hybrid production of the human imagination and the T.E.N.C.H. 889B.

As Bruno Latour suggested in his expanded notion of the word construction, “every use

of the word…opens up an enigma as to the author of the construction: when someone acts,

622. Ian Watson, "The False Reality as Mediator," in Mullen, On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science Fiction
Studies, 67.
 458

others get moving, pass into action.”623 Creation is always mediated and collaborative, but this

reality in turn obscures seemingly easy questions about origins and authorship, even to the point

of realizing an uncanny encounter, with Balzac being carried away by his characters, or a

marionette controlling the hand that operates it. For Dick, this enigma of the tench is,

appropriately, doubled. Not only does the tench operate both inside and outside the fabricated

world, as both beast and device, but it figures two different but deeply related writing machines.

One is the computer as a sort of cybernetic inscription machine capable of simulating existence

(significantly, when the tench explodes, it first splits into two and four pieces, as if following a

binary sequence). The other machine is what Dick himself later called in the Exegesis his own

“wordsmith unconscious,” a site not only of archaic Jungian archetypes but the recombinant

smithery of language continuously forging new scraps (and scripts) beneath the surface of

consciousness.

In terms of his productive output, Dick kept up nearly the same pace in the late sixties as

he had earlier in the decade. But his focus shifted. As Patricia Warrick points out, during the

second half of the sixties, Dick turns from “political fiction exploring capitalist-fascist-

bureaucratic structures to epistemological and ontological questions”—in other words, from

outer to inner space.624 Along with their somewhat diminished quality, these novels also

arguably show increasing signs of exhaustion, despair, and what Dick himself recognized as

psychological disfunction. Indeed, Dick sometimes named the Jung-soaked The Galactic Pot-

Healer (1969) his one unquestionably psychotic work. It is hard not to agree with Lawrence

Sutin, who wrote that in these years, “Phil longed for a revelation.”625 Nancy’s mother Maren

623. Latour, 158.

624. Patricia S. Warrick, Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987),
118.
625. Sutin, 155.
 459

had killed herself in 1967, and a year later, after moving into the predominantly Black

neighborhood of Santa Venetia, Dick was audited by the IRS. This was stressful not only due to

his ongoing money woes and failure to pay back taxes, but to his fears that the audit was

motivated by his decision to sign a “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” petition sponsored

earlier that year by the leftist magazine Ramparts.

Dick’s intensified consumption of amphetamines, tranquilizers, and other drugs was also

a constant source of tension with Nancy. Though he mostly sourced his pills through a rotating

cast of doctors and pharmacies, he sometimes bought street speed, and in 1969, he wound up in

the hospital with acute pancreatitis and kidney failure after scoring a bad batch. Whatever else

drugs did for him—a matter we will touch on in the next section—their constant modulations

hardly stabilized the cognitive and affective roller-coaster he rode. But psychoactive chemicals

had become so integral to Dick’s life and psyche that he had became a kind of pharmaceutical

cyborg.

Dick had also come to place his own extreme psychological symptoms on a continuum

with drug experiences, especially psychedelics. In the summer of 1967, Dick underwent a

dramatic “psychotic episode” that lasted eight hours, an event he compared in a subsequent letter

to the “severe distortions in perception” associated with LSD. As in the classic Romantic drug

writing of De Quincey and Baudelaire, Dick’s brief break was, according to a letter written at the

time, both terrifying and sublime. He had “bees in head,” saw his new baby daughter transform

into a disgusting pulpy vegetable, and became convinced that an “alien outside force was

controlling my mind and directing me to commit suicide.” And yet there was joy and energy too,

as he happily performed household tasks and ate a dish of ice cream that “became a

transcendental experience.”
 460

Drawing from Jung and the popular theories of John Weir Perry mentioned in an earlier

section, Dick tried to frame his rather nasty experience as a “redemptive psychosis” that

overwhelmed his stultified and neurotic ego with the enlivening forces of the unconscious. As

such, he concludes that his episode was very much like LSD, with the “same possibilities for

insight and growth.”626 Here LSD, which was first studied as a psychotomimetic, provides in

turn a new narrative for psychosis itself, one that Dick in turn amplifies at the end of his letter

through the bardo lore of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Such links were au current of course,

and even a little dated by 1969. But what’s important here his how Dick intertwines visionary

experience and psychosis through a comparative act of religious reading rooted in the episodic

metabolism of a trip. In other words, both psychoactive substances and psychotic symptoms

similarly warped Dick’s experiences into phenomenological material out of which he read and

wrote his way towards both healing and hell.

Flow My Tears

In May 1970, Dick’s hopes for an overwhelming and redemptive experience were

revitalized by a powerful mescaline trip in which he felt “an overpowering love of other

people.”627 This love trip, whose transformative force he mentions in numerous letters, was

well-timed. Dick’s marriage to Nancy was falling apart, and she was having an affair with a

nearby neighbor, a Black fellow named Honor Jackson. After Nancy left Dick in September,

taking their daughter Isa with her, Dick wrote a rare letter to his ex-wife Anne. He does not

mention the mescaline trip here (Anne was not a drug user), but does write as if his blast of

626. Dick, Selected Letters 1938-1971, 212-214.

627. Ibid, 295.
 461

beatific empathy had become a more sustained state. “It is all new to me, this divine love;” he

writes in the present tense. “It fills me up and I hate no one, even Mr. Jackson, Nancy’s

paramour.” In addition, Dick claims that his behavior has changed. “I like to hug people and be

hugged them all the time, now…My shell is broken…For the first time I’m really alive.”

Crucially, Dick ties this conversion topos to the breakthrough in his fiction represented

by Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, a novel that was started and largely completed in 1970.

The book is a darkly prescient fable on false memories and the paranoid horrors of a total

surveillance state, but for Dick and many readers, the familiar Phildickean bummer world is

enlivened with an extended meditation on different kinds of love, particularly St. Paul’s notion of

caritas. Dick tells Anne that his book sales had fallen off over the previous few years, a situation

he attributed to the obsessive concern in his sixties novels with the unstable nature of reality. His

editor, he says, wanted him he had to take a more positive stance; “I had to say what is real.”628

Hence, Flow My Tears. Though readers of this sometimes nightmarish book should be forgiven

for not seeing the “complete reversal”629 Dick claimed, Dick describes what he had written as a

great “hymn of affirmation.” What is real, and what therefore grounds the fragile ontology of the

universe, is love.

Following Nancy’s departure, Dick’s need for love and companionship led him to

literally open the doors of his house to local young druggies riding the backwash of the

counterculture. While maintaining his agoraphobic ways—the kids called him the Hermit—Dick

played den mother to a rotating cast of dropouts, runaways, drifters, partiers, dealers, and addicts.

Though now in his forties, Dick identified with many of these kids. “He felt he was on the right

628. Ibid, 297.

629. Ibid, 281.
 462

side of the barricades, a freak among other freaks, and it didn’t take that long for them to adopt

this strange roly-poly guy, who was both sad and funny at the same time.”630

When he had money, Dick was generous with it, and there were always drugs around—

most notably, the jars of white crosses and other ups that he kept in the fridge next to his protein-

fortified milkshakes. Continuously smitten, Dick hit on many of the young women, some of

whom were from the same high school then attended by his former step-daughters with Anne.

But Dick’s invariably painful and unrealistic love affairs were secondary to his desire to create

and enjoy what Dick himself called a “family.” It was his own informal crash-pad version of the

many underground tribes that emerged in the era, an emergence that can be tracked in part to the

playful intimacy and loopy conversations facilitated through the collective effervescence of

drugs. Needless to say, such families were frequently dysfunctional—with the terrifying example

of Manson’s devilish “family” now hovering in the smoggy California ether. Paul Williams,

visiting the house, called it a “weird scene” in which Dick played a “kind of guru role.” But as

Sutin persuasively argues, Dick was far too needy and broken himself to incarnate the

charismatic authoritarian.631

Dick hardly wrote anything from late 1970 through 1972, though he was absorbing

material he would deploy with great humor and feeling in A Scanner Darkly (1977). Begun in

1973, that book’s portrait of low-rent California drug culture reflects both the cracked bonhomie

and the mental, emotional and physical degradation of Dick’s Santa Venetia years. But though he

wasn’t producing, Dick did keep taking drugs; when he was briefly hospitalized at the Stanford

University psych ward in May of 1971, the doctor cataloged his intake at a thousand Benzedrine

tablets a week, along with forty mgs of the tranquilizer Stelazine a day.

630. Carrère, 175.

631. Sutin, 177.
 463

Unsurprisingly, Dick’s bouts of paranoia, tolerated and sometimes intensified by his

household, had grown ferocious, and he increasingly expected a hit on his house. In November,

we might say that Dick got his wish when he came home to discover doors broken, windows

smashed, and his stereo and many possessions gone. Most ominous was the damage to the

massive fire-proof file cabinet that contained Dick’s manuscripts, business documents, pulp SF

magazines, and rare LPs, all of which were now missing. Though the details are typically murky,

Dick always claimed that explosives had been used to open the cabinet. The burglary was

officially investigated but never solved, which for Dick was a sort of gift in itself, since it left

him with a traumatic enigma that simultaneously confirmed his paranoia and inspired a

motherload of complicated and dramatic possibilities, creating a sort of speculative run-through

for 2/3/74. Dickblamed the Black Panthers, military intelligence, the local cops, the FBI, drug-

crazed rip-off artists, and right-wing groups; very occasionally he even speculated that he

himself had been the perpetrator (a theme also suggested in A Scanner Darkly, where the

undercover narc must surveil himself). In any case, the burglary left Dick a wreck. When he

received an invitation to attend the Vancouver SF Con in February of 1972 as guest of honor, the

agoraphobe, for once, accepted the invitation. Leaving his house to sink into foreclosure, Dick

flew up to British Columbia with a battered suitcase, an old trenchcoat, and a Bible.

In Vancouver, Dick delivered a speech that addressed one of the key dialectics in his

work, “The Android and the Human.” Dick began the talk by blurring the line between the two

categories into a sort of posthumanist animism. As technologies and electronic systems grow

more animated, he argued, they restore the anthropologically “primitive” sense that our

environment is alive. At the same time, humans come to recognize how much we are and have

been directed by “built-in tropisms,” a condition that for Dick raises the paranoid specter of
 464

behavioral control. As is clear from his fiction, Dick frees his two categories from essentialism,

such that people and machines are now both capable of behaving as either “androids” or

“humans.” The android is both psychologically and socially determined: it is obedient from

within and predictable from without. In an eerie presentiment of our current era of consumer

surveillance and behavioral economics, Dick stresses predictability over direct control; “It is

precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific

accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form.”632

As such, the contrasting survival of the “true, human individual” requires the

unpredictability and even lawlessness of the the rebel, the joker, the thief. Dick’s famous rallying

cry here, dismissed by a number of commentators as naive, is “Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be

elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the

gadgets used by the authorities.”633 With this countercultural rallying cry, Dick seems to be

attempting to both integrate and sentimentally affirm the outlaw values of his now lost family of

miscreants.

The mention of technologies in this call to arms is not incidental, given the central role

that technological and media control plays in the sorts of authoritarian societies Dick observed in

the Soviet bloc and had fabulated in Flow My Tears. However, despite their imbrication with the

apparatus of power, technologies could never be totally controlled in Dick’s decidedly non-

Luddite view. He praised the example of “phone freaks” like Captain Crunch, aka John Draper,

who discovered that the 2600 Hz tone of a plastic toy whistle prize found in Cap’n Crunch cereal

could be used to control AT&T trunk lines and therefore place free calls. Draper went on to build

632. Dick, Shifting, 191.

633. Ibid, 194-5. Similar ideas were put forward at roughly the same time by William S. Burroughs in Electronic
Revolution, first published in 1970 and later revised to reflect Watergate. See William S. Burroughs, Electronic
Revolution/Die Elektronische Revolution (Pociao’s Books, 1998).
 465

blue boxes, tone controllers that streamlined the unauthorized use and exploration of the phone

system and inspired a whole miscreant subculture of phone phreaks (their preferred spelling) that

included the young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In other words, however naive Dick’s praise

of outlaw youth culture might seem then and now, he had zeroed in on the old school ethos of the

hacker, drawing from it not only a monkey-wrenching ethos but an almost Discordian ontology,

one in which reality “is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make.”634

In this way, Dick held out hope that the very disaffection of the post-hippie youth culture

staged a politics of refusal and subversion, an early form of what we might call “culture

jamming.” At the same, Dick also applied the same sort of “phreak” logic to the metaphysical

and psychological plane. Here the System to be hacked was, significantly, the totalizing systems

of the paranoid, whose refusal of randomness and unpredictability Dick linked the intellectual

process of systematizing as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic,

semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis

of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.” As an “antidote” to such

systematizing, Dick called for an injection of sudden surprises into life, a cultivation, as it were,

of organic noise on the digital line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless,

the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.”635

Here Dick may be read as talking to himself, or at least the paranoid part of himself that

was addicted to the explanatory system-building that dominated his ceaseless analysis of the

break-in as it would later dominate the relentless and often conspiratorial hunts for meaning in

the Exegesis. For Dick, the negative capability that allows us to stay content with the mysterious

and meaningless was easier said then done. Certainly Dick wasn’t very content in Vancouver,

634. Dick, Shifting, 205.

635. Dick, Shifting, 208.
 466

where his desperately needy infatuations and crazy mood swings put tremendous pressures on

the people who put him up following the delivery of his speech. Psychosis, it seemed to some,

was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s LP The Medium is

the Message, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan

dubbed “acoustic space.” When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and

screamed, “Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have

to go the hospital.”636 After leaving one host, Dick drifted through the city, increasingly isolated,

and spent two weeks that neither his memory nor anyone else can account for, though he later

told his fifth wife Tessa that he may spent some of it driving around limousines with men in

black. Finally finding himself alone in a newly-rented apartment, Dick decided to kill himself.

He swallowed 700 mg of potassium bromide before he reconsidered and called the suicide

hotline whose number he had scrawled on a piece of cardboard.

At the end of his rope, and with few options, Dick entered a drug treatment center called

X-Kalay, which mostly accepted heroin addicts. But though Dick was in another country, he still

could not escape weird California, because X-Kalay was directly inspired by Synanon, the

notorious tough-love drug rehab institution and alternative community founded in Santa Monica

in the late fifties. By the early seventies, Synanon, perhaps stealing a page from the earlier

transformation of Dianetics into the Church of Scientology, had mutated into the Church of

Synanon, and had also become what many observers at the time considered an authoritarian cult.

As at Synanon, residents of X-Kalay played “the Game,” a no-holds-barred practice of

“attack therapy” between and among residents and staff. Outside these sessions, residents were

disciplined to adopt a bland and neutral demeanor that, from Dick’s perspective, disguised

passive-aggressive feelings and led to paranoia. In a letter written that April, Dick perceptively

636. Anne Dick, 159.

 467

noted that the ideology of such encounter groups was prefaced on the “metaphysical” assumption

that there is “a ‘real’, hidden, authentic personality” that appears once all the false layers are

violently unmasked. In contrast, Dick argued that a person’s authentic nature is constructed by,

and only appears within, the shifting frameworks of interpersonal relationships. As such, the

authentic personality that appears in the encounter session “is not revealed during the game; it is

created during the game: the group manufactures it as they teach the person new, ‘productive’

habits and attitudes.” That was the problem that Dick saw with the method: the framework of

relationships at X-Kalay were so hostile and impoverished that the newly adjusted personality

was reduced to a “conditioned-reflex machine”—in other words, a paradoxically deprogrammed

android. 637

X-Kalay still proved transformative for Dick. It not only furnished the author with

material later used to great effect in A Scanner Darkly, but it helped him break his amphetamine

habit. More significantly for his worldview, the experience also turned Dick against the romantic

rhetoric of countercultural intoxication, “the rock, drug, hippy, kid, California culture I’ve got to

cut loose from and let die and leave me.” 638That said, Dick by no means went straight edge after

leaving X-Kalay. His hypochondria did not abate, and he continued to enjoy snuff, alcohol,

cannabis, and the occasional stimulant; he also experienced one of his most important 1975

visions after taking the long-acting psychedelic phenethylamine DOM, a compound invented by

Alexander Shulgin and sold on the street as STP.639 Nonetheless, Dick was riding the very same

early-seventies cultural wave that the sociologist Steven Tipton chronicled in Getting Saved from

the Sixties: a wave of personal and ideological change that, while retaining countercultural

notions of transformation and transcendence, attempted to reconstruct a more grounded

637. Dick, Selected Letters 1972-1973, 24-26.

638. Letter cited in Anne Dick, 160.
 468

behavioral center beyond the deterritorializing confusions of drugs. Though Dick had not had his

revelation, he had taken one step towards being saved.

Dick’s return to California was motivated by an invitation from a professor of science

fiction at Cal State Fullerton, who responded to one of Dick’s rather desperate letters with the

news that some of his students were willing to put the author up until he got on his feet. But Dick

returned to a very different California: Orange County, the most conservative county in coastal

California, the home of Disneyland and an influential center for the countercultural Jesus

Movement that Tipton in part chronicles.

Here, though, Dick found a kinder and gentler version of the youth community he had

conjured in Santa Venetia. As Carrère has it, “Everyone was broke, but their poverty had nothing

in common with the sordid, squalid impoverishment of his old doper friends. They lived the

friendly, trusting bohemian life of students and aspiring artists who held part-time jobs to get

by.” Grinding through his usual round of intense and sometimes pathetic infatuations, Dick

eventually settled on another “dark-haired girl,” the young Tessa Busby. Though Dick was

occasionally abusive with her, she would marry him and bear him his last child, Christopher.

And while Dick missed Northern California and disliked the tacky communities surrounding

Fullerton—“this is a brutal, plastic area”—he would spend the rest of his life in Orange County,

whose strip malls and theme parks became for him, at least at times, a visionary landscape.

Dia-Gnosis

Despite Dick’s drug abuse, exaggerations, and endless fictionalizing, we can be confident

about the objectively anomalous force of Dick’s visions for the simple reason that bizarre and

639. Dick, Exegesis, 106; 681.

 469

extraordinary experiences had been happening to him well before street drugs or metaphysics or

pulp fiction entered the picture. In the neutral jargon of the contemporary neurodiversity

movement, Dick was at no point neurotypical. From an early age, Dick’s nervous system

regularly played host to a variety of debilitating and traumatic psychological symptoms:

paralyzing anxiety, clinical depression, agoraphobia, paranoia, vertigo, and a globus hysteria that

made it impossible for him to swallow food in public. Some peculiar early experiences directly

foreshadowed the more mystical registers of 2/3/74, such as a couple “out of body experiences”

and a voice in his head that helped him complete a high school physics exam.640 These

experiences do not just remind us that Dick had an unusual brain as well as an unusual mind;

they also remind us that some of his later philosophical and literary concerns were seeded by

pathological symptoms that existentially undermined the ontological consistency of the everyday

world. To Gregg Rickman, Dick described one particular kind of recurrent panic attack:

What happens is the category of space, the Kantian ordering ontological category of
space collapses and space closes in around you like it’s suffocating you, you know? The
walls seem to crush you and then all of a sudden the walls open out like a bellow and
suddenly you have nothing to stand up against and support yourself and hold onto. It’s
like it oscillates like it breathes, it’s incredible. There’s no name for that. It’s a
combination of agoraphobia, which is fear of open spaces, and claustrophobia, fear of
closed spaces. And I would oscillate between them.641

The first of these attacks occurred three months into Dick’s first semester at high school, when

Dick was probably not yet reading Kant. Dick’s language shows that he subsequently learned to

address or frame these phobic crises in philosophical terms, perhaps as a way to make them

640. Rickman, High Castle, 140.

 470

existentially meaningful. Such pathologized philosophy, here and throughout the Exegesis, must

be seen in part as a metaphysical drive emerging directly out of a quite terrifying

phenomenological encounter with unravelled cognition. There was nothing inherently “mystical”

about these phobic experiences—“It’s hell” he told Rickman—and yet Dick would come to see

them as, at least some of the time, spiritually illuminating. In a 1978 entry to the Exegesis, Dick

wrote, for example, that he “first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school.”642

We must step carefully here, because the language we use to categorize these

experiences—rather than their etiology—stacks the deck in advance. We might dub Dick’s

ontological vertigo as an early index of mystical predispositions, or, more conventionally, as

recognizable signs of mental disorder. In his formidable text on Dick, which leans heavily on a

psychoanalytic discourse of psychosis, Laurence Rickels sometimes offers a compromise label of

“psychotic/mythic” experiences, which holds a certain appeal. With Dick I prefer visionary

experiences, since the register visionary places the beat on the phenomenological unfolding of

non-ordinary, affect-charged, immersive and often image-driven scenarios without necessarily

sneaking in etiology through the backdoor. Drugs, psychosis, hypnagogia, esoteric ritual, mere

(and sheer) sensation—all may occasion visionary experience. But most of all, the “visionary” is

already a fundamental figure of both writers and writing, a Romantic and avant-garde

secularization of prophetic modes that stretch at least back to the Jewish Bible. And with Dick,

the imbrication of visionary experience and writing, as both processes and products, is key.

Here however I want to indulge a bit in the understandable impulse to attempt a diagnosis

of Dick and his visionary experiences. Simply put, psycho-physiological conditions are the

obvious first place to turn in confronting his myriad of symptoms. With Dick, however, nothing

641. Ibid, 129.

642. Ibid, 130.
 471

is obvious, and certainly not the question of diagnoses, as much of the literary scholarship

surrounding Dick makes evident. Given how intensely Dick’s fictions were shaped by his

personal life—including his mental problems, his lifelong engagement with psychotherapy and

diagnostic tests, and his voracious capacity for and knowledge of pharmaceutical drugs—it is

very tempting for critics to read his work as what Damien Broderick calls a “coded case

history.”643

A number of critics, particularly Rickels, also interpret Dick in light of Daniel Paul

Schreber, the subject of Freud’s most important essay on paranoia, and whose Memoirs of My

Nervous Illness features sometimes startlingly resonances with the Exegesis. Others have

focused on the trauma caused by the loss of Dick’s baby twin sister, a haunting absence, often

named by Dick, that left the writer—in this view—saddled with guilt, irresolvable melancholy,

and the compulsion to produce fictions featuring twins, fragmented subjectivity, and alternative

worlds. Other diagnoses turn toward psycho-physiological explanations, especially regarding

2/3/74. Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin, Alice Flaherty, and others seem satisfied with

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, a condition that has been associated with intense religious ideation,

time-slips, and the kind of graphomania required to bring something as monstrous as the

Exegesis into the world. Perhaps the most notorious diagnosis, though, belongs to Dick

biographer and critic Gregg Rickman, who argued strenuously that Dick’s dissociative

tendencies not only were the result of child sexual abuse, but resulted in Dick having multiple

personalities.

There is a rather PhilDickean trap in all of this, however. The trap does not consist in

offering “reductive” psychophysiological explanations for his multidimensional experiences, nor

643. Damien Broderick, Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science, (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2000), 146.
 472

even in biologizing Dick’s texts in light of those conditions. Rather, the trap lies in ignoring the

intense reflexivity involved in the task of psychologizing Dick in the first place. As Luckhurst

points out, the various diagnoses offered by critics and shrinks just don’t add up, and they don’t

add up in part because both psychiatric discourse and its object (Dick, in this case) are moving

targets. As Luckhurst points out, “Dick’s thirty-year career was undertaken whilst psychiatric

discourse was undergoing almost continual revolution, not just in nomenclature or classification,

but also in foundational methodological terms.”644

More importantly—and in another example of Latourian constructionism—these

categories and methodologies were themselves changing the subjects they were designed to

diagnose and treat. To make this crucial point, Luckhurst turns to Ian Hacking, who argues that

the construction of novel psychiatric categories “creates new ways for people to be.”645 Particular

diagnoses (and their attendant protocols) are operators in a network that interactively shapes the

people who fit into it. Hacking calls this process “dynamic nominimalism”—dynamic because

these categories are dialogic and inherently unstable, as is perhaps most visible today in the

rapidly shifting character, symptomology, and cultural reception of autism.

Hacking’s arguments apply to all subjects of psychiatric diagnoses, but they particularly

apply to Dick, who himself was intensely self-conscious about psychological discourse and

practice. Along with Luckhurst and Rickels, Chris Rudge draws our attention to Dick’s

“singularly prodigious interlocution with psychiatry.”646 Dick was not only treated by a wide

variety of psychotherapists from an early age, but was subjected to scores of profile tests and

prescribed a wide range of drugs that kept pace with the increasingly dominant role of

644. Roger Luckhurst, “Diagnosing Dick,” in Alexander Dunst and Stefan Schlensag, eds, The World According to
Philip K. Dick (Palgrave, 2015), 18.
645. Ibid, 19.
 473

pharmaceuticals in psychiatry. All of these things fascinated Dick, and he studied them deeply.

As Rickels points out in I Think I Am Philip K. Dick, the most psychoanalytically sophisticated

study of Dick to date, Dick’s knowledge of psychiatry, especially in the fifties and sixties, was

much more thorough and specialized than his knowledge of religion and philosophy, which

leaned heavily on encyclopedias.647

In both cases, however, Dick’s knowledge fueled a relentless production of personal

hypotheses, such that, in Luckhurst’s words now, “his texts, both fictional and non-fictional, run

constantly through a bewildering array of diagnostic labels for various symptomatic

behaviors.”648 While Dick’s own multifarious symptoms elicited scores of outside diagnoses

over the decades, nobody racked up as many as Dick himself did. As Rickels points out, Dick’s

relentless practice of well-informed self-diagnosis gives his work a particularly affinity with both

psychoanalytic texts and the curious genre of psychotic memoirs, of which Schreber’s justly

remains the most celebrated. The sheer variety of Dick’s diagnoses however, rather than

providing a basis for personal cure, wound up magnifying the cracks and conflicts in the field

and the multiple models of human experience they presume. Here we will distinguish three,

highly generalized orientations.

On the one hand, Dick needs to be seen as a cybernetic transformer of the current of

depth psychology that begins decisively with Freud. For Rickels, Freud’s work on mourning and

melancholy provides the key to unlock Dick’s abiding obsession with the dead and where and

how, technologically and otherwise, they linger in our world. Such specters also stir up the

646. Chris Rudge, “‘The Shock of Dysrecognition’: Biopolitical Subjects and Drugs in Dick’s Fiction,” in The
World According to Philip K. Dick, 31.
647. See Laurence A. Rickels, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (U of Minnesota Press, 2010), 5. For an overview of
Dick’s debt to European psychiatry, also see Anthony Wolk, “The Swiss Connection” in Umland, Samuel J, Philip
K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 101-126.
648. Luckhurst, 20.
 474

question of religious experience, of course. Reading Dick with and through Freud, Schreber, and

Walter Benjamin, Rickels discovers a shared concern with a modern process of secularization

that retains religious frames of reference, but only as “abandoned ruins, lexicons still deposited

in our range of reference, but deposits without redemption value.” Like Schreber, and despite his

personal embrace of Christian salvation, Dick experienced this haunting and ruination from the

psychological inside. “Dick’s footing with psychosis allowed him to immerse himself in the

legacy of melancholia or narcissism, the deep end of mankind’s traditions/transmissions in all

talk of life (and death).”649 But though Rickels admires Dick’s “revalorization of psychosis in

terms of alternate present realities,” the ontological questions of extraordinary experience are, in

his study, foreclosed.650

Dick himself resisted the blanket Freudian reduction of uncanny or enchanted experience

to endopsychic projection. Even before identifying himself as a religious person, Dick’s thinking

and writing are more visibly indebted to Carl Jung, whom Dick started reading when he was a

young man. As with Terence McKenna and many other Americans in the fifties, Dick discovered

in Jung not only a storehouse of Eastern mysticism and Western esotericism but intellectual

permission to widen the portals of the unconscious to include more alien or chthonic forces,

thereby creating a secular bridge towards more numinous possibilities. The notion of the

collective unconscious encouraged Dick to imagine forms of transpersonal cognition that

flickered in his fiction and bloomed into the prophetic network metaphysics of the Exegesis.

Jung’s archetypal theory, which scholars now rightly see as a strain of modern

esotericism in itself, also influenced Dick’s capacious attitude towards his own unconscious, and

especially to his own dream life. However Jung may have explained their etiology, the

649. Rickels, 10.

650. Ibid, 58.
 475

archetypes were also, for all pragmatic purposes, independent and exterior agents. Jung also

offered dire warnings about their invasive power, of course, concerns that fleshed out Dick’s

long-standing concerns—expressed in both his fiction and the Exegesis—with being consumed

or dominated by daemonic outside agencies.651 As Samuel J. Umland puts it, in terms highly

relevant to 2/3/74, “For Dick, the Dionysian loss of Self entails not simply a confusion in the

subject as to his identity, but the experience of an infusion of a transmigrating or invading agent

or agency that corresponds to what has been known since the Greeks as possession.”652

In the fifties and early sixties, when Dick was refining his psychological knowledge,

Jung’s influence was matched by a current of psychoanalytic thought that, while more obscure,

may in many ways have made a more profound mark on his texts. The current is the existential

psychology of Ludwig Bingswanger, which Dick encountered in Rollo May’s 1958 edited

collection Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. As a number of critics

have noted, Dick drew his important concept of the “tomb world” from Binswanger’s study of

the schizophrenic patient Ellen West, one of the principal studies Dick in which Binswanger

demonstrated his concern to what Foucault called, in his early essay on the analyst, “the

modalities of existence.”653 For Binswanger and his fellow existential psychologists, patients did

not just live with their symptoms—they lived in a total world, a world of “existential structures”

that lay, as it were, beyond the veil of their immediate symptoms or the symbols in their dreams.

For Bingswanger, psychosis was not an aberration so much as a new form of “being-in-the-

world.” This notion of a pathological but very concrete, world-building gestalt deeply marked

Dick’s construction of the various idios kosmoi in his works.

651. Perhaps the most satisfying investigation of the theme of consumption in Dick is Christopher Palmer, Philip K.
Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool University Press, 2003) esp. 133-145.
652. Umland, 90.
653. Foucault and Binswanger, 33.
 476

On a more personal level, Binswanger’s phenomenological debt to Heidegger confirmed

in Dick a deep sobriety about death, personal authenticity, and what Heidegger famously called

the “thrownness” of our being in the world. These attitudes later contributed to Dick’s

incorporation of Hans Jonas’s influential interpretation of Gnostic existentialism, which guides

some of the core themes in the Exegesis. Indeed, as with far more countercultural subjects than is

usually acknowledged, Dick’s singular and often heretical religiosity can only be understood

against the overwhelming background of mid-century existentialism, which in Dick’s case is

noticeable in his harrowing appreciation for the alien facticity of things and the entropic shadows

of human finitude.

At the same time, while Dick continued to draw from and interpret himself through the

perspectives of depth psychology, he also kept pace with the growing reductionist orientation of

psychiatry. In “The Android and the Human,” Dick announces, for example, that “Mental illness

is a biochemical phenomenon,” one that “may have to do with faulty brain metabolism, the

failure of certain brain catalysts such as serotonin and noradrenaline to act properly.” In light of

the significance that Rickels finds in the work of mourning that dominates Dick’s psychological

fictions, it is notable that in this speech Dick specifically addresses the shock of loss and grief as

physiological triggers, shocking events that cause “an overproduction of noradrenaline flowing

down generally unused neural pathways, overloading brain circuits and producing behavior that

we call psychotic.”654

In a sense, however, this model of causation recalls the predictable and determined logic

that Dick associates with “the android.” Indeed, Dick’s very quest to reframe the dialectic

between androids and humans derives in part from his reductive hunch that human beings “are

becoming, and may to a great extent always have been, inanimate in the sense that we are led,
 477

directed by built-in tropisms.”655 In terms that would make the hearts of both Richard Dawkins

and Timothy Leary proud, Dick will declare, years later in the Exegesis, that human beings are

just “DNA robots.”656 In a sense, the tension between humanism and posthumanism that critics

find in Dick’s fiction reflects a similarly contradictory tension between depth psychology and

physiological behaviorism, which over-writes the hermeneutical operations of psychoanalysis

with technical models and chemical solutions.

Indeed, Dick’s sympathy for the “android” was not just theoretical. As a knowledgable

and compulsive pillhead, Dick was perfectly at home in materialist psychiatry’s world of endless

chemical modulation and the posthuman subject such modulation constructs. By the late sixties,

Dick was taking pills to wake up, to go to sleep, to work, to shift moods, to relax, to focus, to

experiment, to blaze. As Nancy put it, “Phil took Stelazine, muscle relaxants, stomach relaxants,

Valium, tranquilizers, and stimulants. …He took seventy pills a day.”657 Though Dick no doubt

gobbled pills for a variety of reasons, his pharmaceutical use certainly reflected his obsession

with diagnostic frameworks and his hard-wired approach to his own extreme experiences.

Dick was not just taking drugs, he was hacking himself with drugs, a psychonaut not only

in vision but in pharmaceutical geekery. As Carrère has it, “he preferred prescription drugs,

admiring their precision and the relative predictability of their effects, and he enjoyed all the

possible combinations they afforded the connoisseur.”658 This “neuro-hacking” attitude is very

evident in his great 1968 story “The Electric Ant,” in which Garrison Poole, having discovered

that he is an android or “electric ant,” begins to manually cut and splice the tapes that construct

654. Dick, Shifting, 200.

655. Ibid, 187.
656. Dick, Exegesis, 576. In Folder 50 in the unpublished Exegesis, Dick also mentions “Leary’s robots.”
657. Anne Dick, 174.
658. Carrère, 156.
 478

his reality, achieving mystical as well as pathological results. Similarly, Pete Sands, the Christian

mystic in Deus Irae (1976), heretically seeks God through experimental drugs.

This discourse of technical auto-manipulation also reflects the peculiar twist that popular

psychology took in the early seventies, when social scientific language and psychophysical

models helped construct the new category of “altered states of consciousness,” a category that

itself had been forcibly opened up through the spread of LSD among users and researchers alike.

Dick was an enthusiastic reader of Psychology Today, which in the seventies was a sort of Time

magazine for the consciousness culture. One article in the April 1973 issue, which described the

treatment of schizophrenia with vitamins, almost certainly inspired Dick to start taking a mega-

vitamin formula that involved massive doses of niacin and vitamins C, and that Dick frequently

invoked to explain his initial 2/3/74 experiences.659

Dick in turn interpreted the action of this regimen through the discourse of brain

lateralization that also entered popular consciousness in the early seventies through the

psychologist Robert Ornstein’s bestselling work. As we have already seen with Robert Anton

Wilson, this discourse linked the “left brain” with language and reason and the non-dominant

“right brain” with intuition, imagery, and the creative unconscious. In one enthusiastic letter

from July, Dick connected the vitamin formula with the improved “neural firing in my right

hemisphere” that he first experienced in March. “I’ve had over four months of enormously

heightened neural efficiency and firing, producing a total change in personality and abilities and

habits,” he writes, though at the same time “my experiences involve the mystic and even the

sacred.”660 However we might fault Dick’s neurological enthusiasms here, the point is that Dick

paralleled his religious accounts with naturalistic models and an operationalist attitude.

659. Sutin, 212.

660. Dick, Selected Letters: 1974, 224.
 479

Navigating between the Scylla of depth psychology and the Charybdis of medical

psychiatry, Dick increasingly found himself following a third way that, in the seventies anyway,

split the difference between psychoanalysis and biology. The historian and psychotherapist

Adam Crabtree calls this stream the “alternate-consciousness paradigm,” a current that Crabtree

traces to an origin point long before psychology as such emerged as a human science,

psychoanalytic or not.661 Beginning with the popular “magnetic” therapies of Anton Mesmer,

and carrying forth through Spiritualism and the abiding strangeness of hypnotism, the nineteenth

century was awash with unusual or altered states of consciousness whose explorations and

explanations laid the groundwork for the development of the modern “unconscious.” As such,

the alternate-consciousness paradigm itself mediates between occult and naturalistic

explanations. The historian of religion Anne Taves explains that the institutional and discursive

construction of “hypnotism” precisely involved peeling away the weirder dimensions of

magnetized states in order to create an object that was more amenable to neurologists.662 As

Taves explains, this operation left weird stuff like clairvoyance and “trance” floating free,

leaving them to be taken up by the emerging world of “the occult.”

According to Taves, the alternate-consciousness paradigm reaches its American

culmination with William James, and is then doubly repressed by both psychoanalysis and the

new academic psychology, thereafter to meander through variously disreputable streams of New

Thought, esotericism, and alternative healing modalities. The paradigm made a major come-back

in the nineteen-sixties, however, and Dick himself contributed some canny thoughts on the

matter in his 1964 essay “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality.” In the essay, which

661. Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), vii.
662. Taves tells this story in Fits, Trances & Visions, op cit.
 480

was clearly written in the shadow of his metallic face vision, Dick explores the nature of

hallucination and their relationship to hypnotic suggestion.

Dick knows something of the history that Crabtree and Taves would later tell, and argues

that, given the extraordinary feats performed by some hypnotized subjects, “there simply can be

no psychogenic explanation as to such a phenomenon, unless we wish to posit yoga or Psionic

or—let's face it—magical powers.”663 In the essay, Dick also reminds us that even

psychoanalysis remains haunted by the apparent telepathic feats performed by mentally disturbed

patients and reported by Jan Ehrenwald and other clinicians.664 Thinking comparatively, Dick

argues that hallucinations, whether caused by hypnosis, psychosis, drugs, or even the mystical

event of religious “conversion,” may represent realities the rest of us cannot perceive. As such,

they should be considered to be quantitatively rather than qualitatively different than ordinary

perception—paranormal intensities rather that thoroughly pathological symptoms.

The point is not to argue for or against Dick’s position, which recalls Huxley’s “reducing

valve” theory of consciousness. Here I simply want to note that Dick was deeply conversant with

the “altered states paradigm” and rightly saw it emerging on the horizon of historical possibility.

“Entirely new terms such as ‘expanded consciousness’ are heard, terms indicating that research,

especially with hallucinatory drugs, points to the probability, whether we like it or not, that, as in

the case of Jan Ehrenwald's paranoids, the percept system of the organism is overperceiving…

but the overperception emanates from outside the organism.”665

Dick also makes an important point in this essay about the coincidence of psychosis and

the paranormal, a connection that helps us approach 2/3/74 with more subtlety. For the moment,

663. Dick, Shifting, 170.

664. For a contemporary account of this marvelous current of weirdness inside the analytic chamber, see Mikita
Brottman, Phantoms of the Clinic from Thought-Transference to Projective Identification (London: Karnac Books,
2011).
 481

let’s accept the diagnosis—which Dick himself embraced on more than one occasion—that with

2/3/74, Dick had suffered what he himself called “total psychosis.”666 However, the pathological

character of 2/3/74 does not automatically close the doors on the possibility that Dick

encountered an ontological Beyond. Nor does the presence of pathology dissipate the irreducible

otherness lurking in anomalies, whatever their purported origin.

As Jeff Kripal argues the point, “psychopathology and the paranormal go just fine

together, as do mushrooms and religious revelation, or madness and holiness, or car wrecks and

near-death experiences, or mystics and sexual trauma; once the ego is dissolved, however it is

dissolved, the imaginal, the supernormal, and the spiritual can come rushing in.”667 I am not sure

that the sixties language of “ego dissolution” is necessarily helpful here, when something more

fractured is often involved, but the point is clear: just as traumas like accidents or the deaths of

family members are anecdotally and statistically associated with paranormal phenomena, so

might the eruption of pathological symptoms clear the space for divine invasions, or at least for a

collapse of the binary distinction into what Dick impishly called his “supernatural psychotic

experience.”668

Even if we want to keep that transcendental door slammed shut, however, we should still

be wary of the misdirection that lies within psychological diagnoses, at least when they come to

Dick. The explanatory power of most psychological models not only requires a devalorization of

experiential phenomena, but often ignores the fact that, one way or the other, these experiences

demand a creative and constructive existential response. Here we should recall William James’

lasting argument about the distinction between origin and function in psychology. In other

665. Dick, Shifting, 172.

666. Of course, Dick would also argue at times that 2-3-74 saved him from psychosis.
667. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 100-101.
 482

words, the origin of Dick’s shattering experiences is of secondary importance to the often

ingenious strategies whereby Dick and his “wordsmith unconscious” put the pieces together into

complex but functional worlds of meaning. I am not just saying that we should admire the

lemon-aide Dick made from the psychological lemons that were his lot. Recalling our earlier

discussion of Latour’s ontologically robust version of constructionism, I am saying that the texts

that Dick used to clamber out of his own “tomb world” and towards philosophical vision

possessed, in some enigmatic but more-than-metaphoric sense, a life of their own.

It is no accident therefore that Dick’s accounts of 2/3/74 read like episodes from Dick’s

earlier novels, which abound with time-slips, schizophrenic visions, dualist metaphysics,

conspiracies, and spookily animated everyday objects. But this resemblance derives from

something deeper—and weirder—than his own imagination run riot. As we will see in a

moment, the links between Dick’s experiences, his “exegesis” of those experiences, and his own

fictions offer us a remarkable portrait of the “self-scripting” feedback loops that engender worlds

as they circulate between the subject—conscious or otherwise—and cultural artifacts, very much

the typewriter. This doesn’t at all mean that 2/3/74 was merely scripted, in the sense in which

Steven Katz and other Kantian critics of “religious experience” insist. Instead, I would like to

suggest that the “meta-programming” play of textuality is part of the fabric of Dick’s experiences

themselves, just as his subsequent written work, and especially his Exegesis, bodies itself forth

as a visionary and sometimes daemonic experience in its own right. All the words that Dick

threw at 2/3/74 merely unrolled, through time, the impossible text that was always already

inscribed within and as the raptures of 2/3/74, a palimpsest of writings marked up at once by the

Logos, by Dick’s wordsmith unconscious, and, perhaps most of all, by that “goddam typewriter.”

668. Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick, the Last Testament (Long Beach, Calif.: Fragments West/Valentine Press,
1985), 42.
 483

Bullshit Artist

In his novelistic account of Dick’s life, Emmanuel Carrère sees the author calming down

both emotionally and spiritually in 1973. Gaining distance on his own compulsive speculations,

Dick even talks about starting a group of recovered meaning-seekers along the lines of

Alcoholics Anonymous. Though Dick continued to experience intense mood swings and

paranoid episodes that year, his published letters basically support Carrère’s portrait. Besides

science fiction, Dick writes about the energy crisis, the latest Kris Kristofferson record, and a lot

about Watergate, which he and others saw as confirmation of some of his theories about the 1971

burglary. There is very little about metaphysics or God, even in his letters to Nancy, whom he

had consistently hectored in the past about Christian virtue.

One visionary episode during this period, highlighted by Sutin in his biography, was a

strange encounter with a personified Death that Dick describes in a letter to Patrice Duvic on

February 14, 1973. Terribly sick with pneumonia, Dick encountered Death wearing a single-

breasted “plastic” suit and sporting a “samplecase” the figure then opened to reveal some

psychological tests. Death determines that Dick is insane and tries to lure him up a winding road

towards a mental institution where, Death promises, he can finally relax. Only Tessa’s sudden

appearance in the room breaks the spell, at which point Dick realizes that Death had been

bullshitting him to make his own job easier.

Dick would repeat this story a number of times over the year, including an essentially

similar account to Anne ten months later, in late December. But there is reason to distrust this

rather Phildickean “experience,” or at least to recognize that what is cast as a fever vision is
 484

perhaps better seen as the product of a feverish mode of writing experience—and experiencing

writing—in which stories are rehearsed and developed through ping-pong signifiers and multiple

drafts. Five days before writing to Duvic, Dick first mentioned the vision in another letter. He

prefaces this much briefer account by invoking Carlos Castaneda’s notion that Death is always

hovering on your left side, and that when you see him you should ask him a question. In the next

sentence, he mentions being terribly sick and seeing Death, who sports the single-breasted plastic

suit and a “briefcase.” Dick asks Death what the point of “this whole dreary procession” is, and

Death replies, “Look, I got my own troubles.”669

Two days before typing up this delightful routine, however, Dick wrote to another

correspondent about another encounter he had while lying sick and “dying in bed.” This time,

however, the encounter was with Tessa’s cat Pinky, who jumped up on him after being smuggled

into the apartment in a “suitcase” of Tessa’s. Dick reports, “I assumed he was Death, having read

Carlos Castaneda, and when you see Death you are to ask him a question.”670 So Dick then asks

the cat about the meaning of life.

In these early versions of the story, Castaneda helps stage Dick’s visionary encounter

with Death, though the then-popular author is erased in the story’s final form as Dick carries it

forward throughout 1973. In his letters, Dick first mentions Castaneda after reading a Sam Keen

interview with the author in the December 1972 issue of Psychology Today, an article that “made

a big impression on me.”671 There Castaneda presents Don Juan’s teaching that, in Yaqui

sorcery, death is a physical presence hovering over your left shoulder. Castaneda says nothing

about asking Death a question, either here or in Journey to Ixtlan (1972), where that teaching

first appears (and which, for all we know, Dick may never have read). That said, Castaneda does

669. Dick, Selected Letters 1972-1973, 145.

670. Ibid, 139.
 485

describe Death as “an impartial judge who will speak truth to you and give you accurate

advice.”672 From all this we might tentatively conclude that Dick’s initial “encounter” is actually

with Castaneda’s neoshamanic personification of Death, an encounter that takes place in the

pages of a popular psychology magazine saturated with seventies consciousness culture. This

conceptual impression then collides with the Dick’s surprise, sick-bed interaction with Pinky,

recently emerged from a “suitcase.” This quotidian scene feverishly evolves into a Woody Allen-

worthy routine with a wise-guy grim reaper, now featuring a “briefcase.” By the time the full

vision is articulated, dense with Phildickean fictional elements like psychological tests and

plastic suits, the Castaneda trigger has been erased, tucked away in the “case” that this vision has

become.

Dick’s iterations of his Death vision encapsulate some of the problems that arise in our

attempts to reconstruct the visionary phenomena behind 2/3/74. Dick may certainly be accused

of making all this stuff up as he goes along, of fooling his correspondents, of goofing around. In

his own words, Dick was an ardent practitioner of “shuckin’ and jivin’,” a mode of conversation

that Tim Powers—a younger science fiction writer who Dick befriended in Southern California,

and who was often hoodwinked by these tall tales—somewhat generously defines as “telling the

other person whatever it might be most effective for that person to hear.”673 A less favorable

account is provided by Thomas Disch in his tart book on S-F, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of,

where he explains Dick’s claims for 2/3/74 as symptoms of the grand American “right to lie,” a

national predilection for enthusiastic and guiltless mendacity that marks American religion as

much as American fiction.

671. Ibid, 131.

672. Sam Keen, “Seeing Castaneda,” Psychology Today, December 1972, http://www.nagualism.com/carlos-
castaneda-interview-psychology-today.html (Accessed June 2015).
673. Tim Powers, “Introduction”, in Dick, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1975-76, vii.
 486

Perhaps the best term for Dick’s practice, however, is bullshitting. In his popular book on

the subject, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes that, in contrast with lying, the “mode of

creativity” associated with bullshitting is more art than craft, “more expansive and independent,

with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play.”674 That’s why

Frankfurt approves of the phrase bullshit artist, which also illuminates something essential about

Dick’s styles of conversation and correspondence, not to mention the sort of narrative games

Dick plays with his readers (and his characters). Trickster fiction writers like Dick are

preeminent bullshit artists, as are proto-New Age metaphysical hoaxsters like Carlos Castaneda.

Indeed, even in the private Exegesis, where Dick was presumably capturing his personal

thoughts and opinions, the more fabulous networks of fictionalizing are never very far from the

“theory,” as the Exegesis is stuffed with scores of plot outlines for both possible novels and the

conspiracies that Dick believed surrounded him. A similar mix is found in his correspondence,

where Dick exploited the iterative nature of writing letters to multiple correspondents in order to

work out more-or-less well-crafted versions of 2/3/74 events, some of which he then placed in

his later novels.

The error here, however, would be to relax into the conclusion that Dick was simply

bullshitting. With Dick, nothing is simple, since Dick’s imbricated life and work and psyche

impossibly complicate the conventional distinctions between fact and fiction, let alone between

reading, writing, and experience itself. After all, Don Juan’s Death is not just any old concept or

signifier. Castaneda’s neo-shamanic Death is a visionary fiction designed to functionally stage

the reader’s metaphysically transformative encounter with her own mortal condition, an

encounter that in itself is impossible to symbolize and for that reason always lurks over the

674. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

 487

shoulder of our discourse. For Dick, sick to death in bed, Castaneda’s imaginative invitation

mobilized this sort of encounter, however feline the initial trigger.

Who is to say, in other words, that in Dick’s mind this event did not, in the end and

retrospectively, “take place”? After all, Dick was writing from his own altered consciousness,

that strange hypnogogic liminal zone of fever and scrambled memory, where interactive fictions

and tricksy signifiers have easy purchase on the mind. Taking this scene forward into the matter

of 2/3/74, the hermeneutic task appears to be something more evocative than reductive detective

work, something more like an archaeology of esoteric hieroglyphs and sometimes unconscious

signifiers that float like specters through Dick’s discourse, and that, like those technological

artifacts in “Android and the Human,” grow animated through the very course of analysis.

Rending Accounts

Dick’s earliest accounts of 2/3/74 are contained in letters he wrote over many months

later that same year. These letters, most of which were included in the early folders of the

Exegesis, suggest a long period of gestation during which Dick organized, selected and

tentatively constructed various versions of the extraordinary events, which he would in turn

revise in light of shifting interpretive needs, creative possibilities, and the perceived differences

of individual readers. For example, the letters Dick writes to the graduate student Claudia Bush

in the summer of 1974—a handful of the dozens of lengthly missives he wrote Bush over the

years—are intense, goofy, and unreservedly weird. He describes getting messages from an

ancient Cumaean sibyl, picking up words in ancient languages from dreams, and feeling like he

is hosting a secondary personality, possibly a highly educated Greek-speaking scholar of the

 488

third century, living in the Mediterranean. These letters are packed with gods and sacred texts,

and he speaks intimately of Brahman, Ahura-Mazda, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

At the same time, Dick’s letter to the SF critic Peter Fitting on June 28 that summer—

which became one of the first entries in the Exegesis—adopts a far more reserved and secular

tone. He describes many of the core phenomena to Fitting: the hypnogogic slide show of modern

abstract paintings; days filled with distinctly new thoughts and unusual personal behaviors;

information pouring in from books in dreams, from animals, from space. However, while

religious language is present in the letter, it is always corralled within Dick’s “objective” self-

reporting of his impressions. In the place of supernatural explanations, Dick presents naturalistic

(thought still weird) accounts like “tachyon” theory—picked up from Arthur Koestler—and the

“disinhibition” of GABA fluid in his brain, caused, he suspects, by the orthomolecular

megadoses of vitamin C mentioned above.675 Whatever we think of the science here, the point is

that these explanations allow Dick to cordon off religious or supernatural language, with its aura

of psychosis. “Without the tachyon theory,” he tells Fitting, “I would lack any kind of scientific

formulation, and would have to declare that ‘God has shown me the sacred tablets in which the

future is written’ and so forth.”676 While similar tensions between religious, paranormal, and

more-or-less naturalistic explanations run throughout the Exegesis, the particular take he

provides to Fitting cannot be separated from Fitting’s status as an important (and unquestionably

materialist) critic of Dick’s work.

Readers of Dick’s letters are familiar with the sometimes shocking degree to which the

author dons different masks for different correspondents, in tone as well as content, and often on

the very same day. Sometimes, these variations appear to be manipulative attempts to elicit

675. See Dick, Exegesis, 6-10.

676. Dick, Exegesis, 8.
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sympathy or respect, and other times just as more shuckin and jivin’. However, Dick also seems

to have used his correspondence as a way to stabilize himself, to temporarily ground the

constantly shifting frameworks of his own ongoing and unstable self-narration. This makes

isolating something like a “standard account” of 2/374 events difficult enough, let alone

establishing a relationship between that account and Dick’s experiences.677

Alas, things become no clearer when we leave the letters aside and focus on the accounts

of 2/3/74 that Dick included in the Exegesis and did not share with correspondents. During the

summer of 1974, he began to type up undated personal philosophical pieces that he combined

with the carbons for his early 2/3/74 letters, like the ones to Bush and Fitting. By 1975, he had

largely ceased including letters into the emerging document, though his correspondence

continues to be saturated with his religious and philosophical concerns. By 1976, in a sign of the

increasingly personal and intrapsychic nature of his philosophical diary, Dick gave up his trusty

typewriter and wrote his notes in ball-point pen, sometimes cranking out as much as 150 pages in

a single night. Dick continued this prodigious output until his death in March of 1982, when he

left behind over eight thousand pages of Exegesis.

Unfortunately, with some important exceptions—particularly Dick’s dreams and

hypnogogic voices—this purely “Exegetical” Dick is less interested in narrating or even

schematically rendering his experiences than in riffing off of them. Rather than rendering a full

account, in other words, Dick is usually happy to refer to events in a personal short-hand—some

of which remain hopelessly obscure—and then spring-board from these references into his

evolving speculative matrix. For all these reasons, no “standard” narrative sequence of 2/3/74

and its attendant visions, voices, dreams and synchronicities can ever be reconstructed with

677. For the difficulties and possibilities of such interpretive labor see Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History,
Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993), esp.3-49.
 490

much satisfaction, at least from these sources.678 Of course, given the sort of reconstruction work

that all humans perform as part of their ongoing self-narration, this is arguably always the case.

But in contrast to more definitive self-narrations, in which fabulation must be teased from

authoritative renderings, Dick’s ceaseless interpretive assemblages throws the reader into

ambiguity from the get-go. In other words, even on the surface level, the Exegesis underscores a

core argument made by many scholars of religion addressing the problem of religious

experience: interpretation cannot be separated from experience, nor can previously established

scripts be unpeeled from phenomenological reporting.

There are, nonetheless, a number of relatively clear experiential topoi that Dick returns to

frequently and more-or-less consistently throughout his letters, personal writings, and fiction.

These provide the best access to the phenomenological “building blocks” of Dick’s extraordinary

experiences, recognizing that the particular arrangement of these blocks is always already

variable. Perhaps the most memorable of these primal scenes, and certainly one of the most

significant, is the “fish sign” encounter, which took place in February, possibly on the twentieth,

and that came to be seen as the trigger or initiating event of the entire series, whose central

emergence Dick generally locates in March (or “3-74”). Dick returned to the fish sign throughout

his later writings, including VALIS, and it, along with the pink light, remains firmly wedded to

popular accounts of 2/3/74.

Dick first told the tale in a letter to Ursula K. Le Guin on 23 September, five months after

his initial mention of a recent “religious experience” in his correspondence. To Le Guin, Dick

wrote that, after undergoing oral surgery to remove two impacted wisdom teeth, the Sodium

678. Perhaps the most extensive if naive attempt to organize a narrative of Dick’s 2/3/74 experiences is Anthony
Peake’s A Life of Philip K Dick; though it contains some new biographical material, the text has been criticized by
Dick fans and scholars. See Anthony Peake, A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future.
(Arcturus publishing ltd, 2013).
 491

Pentothal started wearing off. A call to a local pharmacy brought a delivery woman to the door

bearing painkillers; she had “black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense.” In the

letter, Dick admits to being mesmerized with this woman and trying to think of what to say to

her; noticing her gold necklace, he asks her what it is, “just to find something to say to hold her

there.” The woman points out that the “major figure” in the necklace was a fish, “a sign used by

the early Christians.” In the Le Guin letter, nothing strange occurs until later, when the “dazzling

shower of colored graphics” came over him at night. Dick had already offered extensive

descriptions of this hypnogogic display of abstract images in earlier letters which did not

mention the necklace. To Le Guin, Dick theorized that the “fish sign” was a trigger or

“disinhibiting stimuli” that caused “a vast drop in GABA fluid in the brain,” releasing “major

engramming” and initiating his ongoing relationship with what he here simply calls “the

spirit.”679

In her 2009 memoir, Dick’s wife Tessa confirms the essential outlines of the necklace

story, though she quibbles with details. 680What really changed over time is the significance that

Dick accorded the story. As late as March 1975, when he—unusually—takes the time to

enumerate and date the major events of the previous spring, he doesn’t even mention the fish

sign. In contrast, a similar list in the summer of 1978 includes the necklace.681 It is also in the

late seventies that Dick starts to refer to “2-3-74” rather than his earlier location of his first

experiences in March 1975 (“3-74”). In other words, it seems as if the intensity and condensed

679. Dick, Exegesis, 48-9.

680. For example, Tessa writes that Dick had had two abscessed molars removed, not wisdom teeth. Dick’s revision
makes writerly sense, since the term “wisdom” foreshadows the Gnostic figure Sophia who would come to play
such an important role in Dick’s speculations. See Tessa B. Dick, Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright
(CreateSpace, 2009), 75-83.
681. Dick, Exegesis, 133; 345.
 492

significance of the fish sign encounter was retrospectively re-inscribed with much greater depth

as the years went along.

In his accounts, Dick drops his “low” motivation to chat up the attractive girl (a motive

that was seconded by his wife Tessa), and intensifies both the visual and cognitive effects of the

pendant and its identification. One example is his essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn't

Fall Apart Two Days Later,” written for a speech in 1978 but never delivered. Here Dick

describes a “shining” gold necklace with a “gleaming gold fish” that “hypnotized” him. Once the

woman touches the “glimmering” fish and identifies it as a Christian sign, Dick describes his

reaction with mystical and biblical language:

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly
experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally,
"loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the
twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could
see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the
Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs…
But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us,
and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy.
We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long.682

There are a number of things to note in this fascinating passage, whose immediacy—“in

that instant”—is the paradoxical result of careful construction, as Dick compresses a looser,

more associational engagement into what he sometimes called an augenblick. Alongside this

immediacy, however, Dick reaches for mediating scripts. With “anamnesis,” Dick identifies his

extraordinary experience of alternative identity using a piece of metaphysical jargon he only

 493

learned after the fact, just as the astronaut Edgar Mitchell only later came to identify his own

extraterrestrial epiphany in 1971 as savikalpa samadhi. However, this bit of apparatus arguably

allows the motivating force of the encounter to transform and grow in articulation—as if Dick’s

jogged memory needed to encounter further knowledge in order to return to the original site of

recollection and re-member it (and himself).

Dick’s allusion to Paul’s words in Corinthians—the last trumpet will sound “in the

twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:52)—lends his experience an eschatological dimension. And yet

the punctuated transformation of this revelatory instant is mingled, not with the direct experience

of Christ’s return, but with the peculiar waiting associated with the time lodged between the

resurrection and the parousia. As Giorgio Agamben explains in The Time that Remains, his

illuminating treatment of Paul’s letters, parousia does not mean “second coming,” as in a second

historical event, but instead denotes presence. For Agamben, Paul uses this term to highlight the

notion that messianic time is made of up two heterogenous times, the chronos of everyday,

represented time, like February 20, 1974, and the eruptive, immanent Now of kairos. “The

Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains

within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the

contrary, to make it graspable.”683

Messianic time is out of joint; it is dislodged from chronological time but is not, yet, the

end of time. Messianic time “is not another day, homogenous to others; rather, it is that

innermost disjointedness within time through which one may—by a hairs-breadth—grasp time

and accomplish it.”684 We might say that, as such, messianic time is superimposed on

682. Dick, Shifting, 271.

683. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans (Stanford
University Press, 2005), 71.
684. Ibid, 72.
 494

chronological time, but what Dick would call orthogonally, the way that iron Rome, with its

secret Christian remnant, superimposes itself on Orange County. The cryptic fish sign, as it were,

does not just awaken Dick; it dislodges him, both temporally and ontologically, producing what

Dick sometimes called a “meta-abstraction.” This disturbance allowed Dick to grasp the fullness

of presence only for so long, and to do so arguably through the very medium that displaces and

defers by its very nature: writing.

Even as this 1978 account is full of literary echoes, Dick underscores the visuality of the

scene. He describes the shimmering, gleaming, glittering fish, and announces that “not only

could I remember [Rome] but I could see it.” Though Dick does not often stress this particular

visual flashback—his main visions of Orange County as Rome come later in the spring—it is

important that the early Christian underground hits him as a vision and not just as a memory.

Even leaving aside the question of what it means to “see” Rome—a seeing that Dick

acknowledges was very brief—Dick consistently emphasizes the golden light shining off the

fish, an energetic sensation that is sometimes confused and conflated—occasionally by Dick

himself—with the famous “pink light” (of which more in a moment).

Despite Dick’s emphasis on the phenomenology of the experience, however, the photon

stream still serves as a literary trace or semantic trigger. Later, when Dick encounter the ideas of

Jacob Boehme in the Exegesis—an encounter that helped inspire the increasingly dialectical

dynamics of Dick’s text—Dick linked his visual encounter with the necklace to the sunlit

reflection from a pewter dish that, according to tradition, occasioned the young cobbler’s first

great mystical vision in 1600. In the fish sign’s glints and glitters, however, we should also sense

the refraction of a visionary script much closer to home: one of the key moments in The Man in
 495

the High Castle, when the character Tagomi briefly enters a parallel universe (ours, as it

happens) while contemplating a piece of silver jewelry:

in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It reflected light. Fire, Mr. Tagomi thought.
Not dank or dark object at all. Not heavy, weary, but pulsing with life…In his palm, the
silver squiggle danced and blinded him; he squinted, seeing now only the play of
fire…What is the space which this speaks of? Vertical ascent. To heaven. Of time? Into
the light-world of the mutable. Yes, this thing has disgorged its spirit: light. And my
attention is fixed; I can't look away. Spellbound by mesmerizing shimmering surface
which I can no longer control.

A number of elements important to 2/3/74 are included here: the play of reflection, the

“speaking” of transcendence, and the inability to control or refuse the experience. To his credit,

Dick himself recognizes the connection between the fish sign and Tagomi’s epiphany in the late

seventies, though, as is typical, the resonance underscored the prophetic nature of his fictions

rather than the more deflationary picture of self-scripting.

The famous pink beam in turn is associated with a second fish fish sign: a small,

rectangular silver-and-black bumper-sticker stuck on a west-facing window in Dick’s

apartment.685 Tessa told Gregg Rickman that, after the delivery woman visited, the couple

purchased a few of these fish stickers at a local Christian bookstore and put one on the window

and one on their car. While the necklace seems to have been a relatively ornate, probably

handmade item that only contained a fish as its “major figure,” this bumper-sticker is without

question an early iteration of the minimalist Christian ΙΧΘΥΣ symbols now swimming their way

685. Tessa Dick, 78-79.

 496

across the rear ends of automobiles everywhere.686 Shortly after purchasing the sticker, it blazed

in the sunlight, producing in Dick an experience of pink or “strawberry ice-cream” light. Later

that summer, this same sticker fired the “pink beam of info-rich light” at Dick, supposedly

informing him of his son Christopher’s life-threatening health condition.687

In one of the final entries in the Exegesis, Dick returns to the multidimensional

glimmerings of this shiny doubled fish sign. Uncharacteristically, he offers a sober and

phenomenologically bare account that deflates as much as it magnifies the continued significance

of these encounters.

2-74: light (sunlight reflected off the golden fish sign).

3-74: (Valis) light (“beam of pink light” is what I always say, but it was sunlight, as in 2-
74, only this time it was the sticker of the fish sign in the living room window. The
upsilon became a palm tree. The pink part was the phosphene after-image of the fish
sticker.)
So fish sign both times: in 2-74 (the meta-abstraction); and 3-74, Valis, the info about
Chrissy.
It’s Christ. In 2-74 there was no pink light as such. But sunlight. Fish sign and light.
Like Boehme. And Mr. Tagomi.

Given its placement toward the close of the Exegesis, we cannot help but read this poetic

condensation of Dick’s initial visionary experiences as a sort of green flash on the horizon just

before the sun sinks down. Shorn of metaphysics, of the need for elaborate speculation, his

words are reduced to the frog-plop haikus of barest memory, to “fish sign and light.” These

phenomenological glints also return with an admission: Dick was not blasted with a sci-fi laser

686. We know that the bumper-sticker contained the Greek acrostic because Dick elsewhere describes the
transformation of the Υ into the palm tree of his “Palm Tree Garden” vision.
 497

after all, but simply a sunbeam that left a pinkish phosphene glow in his eyes. And yet, the

referential force of the experiential text remains energized, even alive: a Greek letter grows into a

tree, while historical mystics and fictional characters reflect and refract one another through

Dick’s experience. It’s Christ, Dick decides, but there is also the sense that the medium is the

message. Since Dick got so much out of looking very closely at the ΙΧΘΥΣ, it behooves us to do

the same.

ΙΧΘΥΣ

What is the ἰχθύς, and how and why does it come to manifest as a bumper-sticker in a

Christian bookstore in mid-seventies coastal California? In the ancient Mediterranean, the fish

became a popular symbol among Christians between the second and fourth centuries, after which

its use somewhat mysteriously disappeared. The glyph largely remained out of living use until it

was picked up again by the countercultural Jesus Movement in the late sixties and early

seventies.

Popularly known—significantly for us—as “Jesus freaks,” these followers of “the One

Way” emerged on the West Coast in the late sixties, hit the cover of Time magazine in 1971, and

by 1974, had waned in ferocity but consolidated in ways that would significantly influence

American evangelism for decades to come.688 In its early years, and in consort with the

counterculture it both paralleled and eluded, the movement used a variety of media to construct a

687. In one entry from 1978 (or later), Dick describes “the way it [VALIS] fired the pink beam of info-rich light
from the fish sign on the window at me.” Dick, Exegesis, 379.
688. For a thorough history of the Jesus movement, see Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People
Movement in America, (new York: Oxford, 2013). For a particular insightful account of the Movement’s influence
on later evangelical subjectivity, see T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), especially 13-38.
 498

radical, visionary, and collectivist alternative to mainline Christianity and the hedonistic spiritual

confusions of the drug culture. These strategies not only included the selective appropriation of

hippie fashions, but the whole-hearted embrace of pop media, like underground newspapers, t-

shirts, LP album covers, posters, buttons, and, yes, bumper-stickers. Rather than reproduce mid-

century Christian iconography, they invented new gestures—the “one way” raised forefinger—

and revived ancient symbols, like the dove and the fish.

While these images made for groovy and more up-beat pop symbolism, Kevin John

Smith also argues that these symbols remained radical, “the fish being reintroduced as a sign of

the marginalization of the faithful in the catacombs, in defiance and rebellion against the pagan

power of Rome.” Elsewhere Smith also links the symbol to “a sense of social rejection and

resistance to materialism.”689 In other words, for the modern Jesus Movement, the fish sign was

not just a kinder, gentler alternative to the cross, but also an intentional signifier of

countercultural values associated with the early church and its covert resistance to pagan

“Rome.”

Dick’s new home of Orange County was a hotbed of the Jesus Movement. Twenty miles

from Dick’s apartment in Fullerton, Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel became the first and most

important mainline congregation to recognize and incorporate the underground movement into a

more accessible, popular, and institutional revival. (Calvary’s Maranatha! Music record label,

founded in 1971, was an important purveyor of the sort of Christian folk-rock that would quickly

(d)evolve into Contemporary Christian Music).

Dick was certainly aware of the Jesus Movement, and critical of it as well. When Nancy

wrote him in early 1974 about possibly entering a Christian community house, he warned her

689. Smith, Kevin John, The Origins, Nature, and Significance of the Jesus Movement as a Revitalization Movement
(Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2011), 310, 334.
 499

against the coercive tactics and physical force used at some “Jesus communes,” which he

compared to X-Kalay.690 Perhaps Dick’s biggest gripe with the movement was its excessive

emotionality. “I cannot see the sacrifice of the mind in the name of religion, which is why the

Jesus Freaks turn me off.” 691 At the same time, Dick was certainly perceived as following a

parallel track; even his editor at Bantam, looking at a draft of VALIS in 1976, accused him of

writing like a Jesus freak.692

The comment is not misplaced. In his insightful monograph Pink Beams of Light from the

God in the Gutter, Gabriel Mckee makes an extended case for Dick’s Christianity as against his

supposed Gnosticism, arguing that “Much of what has been identified as gnostic in Dick’s work

is just as easily—and often more convincingly—identifiable as Christian.”693 Mckee insists that,

despite his many heterodox views, Dick “truly believed in the salvific power of Christ,” and that

the author treats Christianity in the Exegesis not as just another theory but as a working

assumption.694 I am not convinced that Dick’s texts and biography allow us to cordon off his

“truly” Christian beliefs from all the other hypotheses, and prefer to see Dick as a broader, more

syncretic, and comparativist thinker. But Mckee is correct to insist that Dick’s religious identity

be seen, at least in part, as an idiosyncratic and speculative expression of a counter-cultural

Christianity that remains, nonetheless, Christianity.

In other words, Dick was a distant but fellow traveller with the Jesus Freaks. Like many

in the Jesus Movement, Dick had scraped the dregs of the drug culture, hit the suicidal bottom,

but subsequently found himself dissatisfied with the sorts of secular-psychological solutions that

690. Dick, Selected Letters 1974, 21.

691. Dick, Selected Letters 1975-76, 341.
692. Ibid. 347.
693. Mckee, 31.
694. For a strong critique of Dick’s Christianity from a Christian theological perspective, see Aron Dunlap & Joshua
Ramey, “Sophia Within, Without Sophia, Wither Sophia: the Longing of Philip K. Dick,” Glossalator 7, 187-208.
 500

rose up in the seventies to transition individuals out the psycho-spiritual chaos of the occult and

psychedelic underground. Though his life in Southern California was comparatively straight,

living with his small family and not taking speed, Dick remained spiritually and politically

aligned with the visionary, peace-loving, angry, and anti-authoritarian values of the

counterculture. This alignment played itself out in his quest throughout the Exegesis to articulate

an alternative Christianity capable of responding to the political crises of the seventies, as it was

embodied by Nixon and later by the environmental crisis. But like the Jesus Freaks, Dick was

principally motivated here, not by concepts, but by his extraordinary experience of a personal

encounter with a transhistorical spirit. The visionary intensity (and sometimes hysteria) that

arose from these encounters not only marked Dick’s whole concept of Christianity, but helps

explain his weird temporal theorizing and imaginal “return to Rome.”

In an insightful book on the Jesus Movement published in 1973, Robert Ellwood offers

some penetrating insights into the American evangelical mindspace that helped spawn the Jesus

people. Characterizing evangelism as a religion of “psychoexperiential initiation, rather than of

classical form,” Ellwood emphasizes how this experiential dimension produces a fundamental

shift in the orientation to time and history. “Bible time is special; it stands in equal relation to all

other points in time. The evangelical is always contemporaneous with it, particularly with the

time of Christ. He always wants to collapse into nothing all time between himself and the New

Testament…He wants to walk into the time capsule which is the New Testament world, with it

miracles, its expectation of an immediate end, and above all the mighty tangible presence of

Jesus Christ. He wants to be the thirteenth disciple and to write in his life the twenty-ninth

chapter of the book of Acts.”695

695. Robert S. Ellwood, One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1973), 31-32.
 501

While Ellwood is largely speaking metaphorically here, we can see quite clearly how

crucial aspects of 2/3/74 might be characterized as Dick’s literalization of these motivating

religious metaphors. Dick’s notion of archetypal or “orthogonal” time, which takes up a great

deal of speculation in the Exegesis, perfectly mirrors Ellwood’s notion of biblical time standing

“in equal relation” with other points in time. The visual “superimposition” of Rome and Orange

County topologically incarnates the New Testament time capsule. And for Dick, the Acts of the

Apostles—sometimes considered as the gospel of the Holy Spirit, which guides and protects the

apostles as they spread the kerygma following the death of Jesus—was far more central a text

than the four Gospels or Revelation.

Dick’s obsession with Acts began with Flow My Tears the Policeman, which was

published February 1974, the same month he encountered the delivery woman. Though only one

of a dozen or so earlier novels that Dick would come to obsessively re-interpret in the pink

allegorical light of 2/3/74, Tears achieves a certain prophetic pride of place for what Dick saw as

its unplanned biblical allusions and hidden codes. According to a 1978 essay, Dick talked about

the book with his priest—“I am an Episcopalian” he reminds the reader—and especially its final

scene, where Felix Buckman, following a strange dream, encounters a black man in a gas station

and feels tremendous love for him. This scene interwove his mescaline vision, his breakup with

Nancy, and his “prophetic” inclusion of actual dreams into his fiction. In turn the priest reminded

Dick of a scene in Acts when Philip the Evangelist converts an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch

(8:26– 40). This admittedly rather weak connection inspired other, even weaker ones, none of

which prevented Dick from making a lot of hay out of the mysterious “Acts material” throughout

the Exegesis.696

696. Paul’s trial before the procurator Marcus Antonius Felix (24:1–27), and the only incidence of a person named
Jason in the entire Bible (17:6-9).
 502

The weirdest prophetic payload that Dick discovered in Tears—and one that bring us

back to the fish sign—was a happenstance artifact of the printing process. In VALIS, Horselover

Fat—who stands in for the “visionary” Phil Dick—tells his pals that “the two-word cypher signal

KING FELIX” was sent out in February 1974 but remained obscure even to the Army

cryptographers who studied it.697 This “cypher signal” appears on page 218 of the Doubleday

hardcover edition of Flow My Tears, published in February 1974, where the word “king”—used

in the description of Buckman’s dream—vertically crowns the word “Felix” on the following

line. It is not clear when Dick first identified this mysterious code, but in April 1974 he is already

describing to a Reverend Siebert how he dug up the meanings of the word Felix (lucky,

felicitous). A few months later, he councils a translator of Tears to pay particular attention to

“the key logos Felix.”698 Relatively early on, in other words, Dick felt that Tears carried a

powerful code and subliminal catalyst into the world.

However, even before Dick becomes obsessed with this “Acts material,” Tears is linked

with 2/3/74 through the matrix of ancient Rome. In April, writing to Ursula K. Le Guin, Dick

first announces that he had undergone a “religious experience,” one that he additionally

characterized as a “conversion, a la William James.” Crucially, however, Dick does not mention

the delivery woman here, and won’t until five more months have passed. In the April letter, he

pairs religious with contemporary political language: the Holy Spirit had “taken him over” and

commanded him to turn against the “Communist beast Fascists who would enslave the world.”

This, Dick tells Le Guin, is the message that Tears covertly conveys, “without having my

consciously arrived at it”: the message that “we are in Rome again, with the early Christians

697. Dick, VALIS, 151.

698. Dick, Selected Letters 1974, 66, 131.
 503

persecuted and fighting for freedom.”699 Dick’s Rome, in other words, is first and foremost a sort

of visionary literalization of the metaphoric Rome of America under Nixon, with its grim

conjunction of malfeasance in high office, countercultural retreat, and surveillance paranoia.

Indeed, it is in a long document entitled “July 8, 1974: The First Day of the

Constitutional Crisis”—enclosed in a July letter to Bush and included in the Exegesis—that Dick

first mentions the ἰχθύς (though, significantly, still nothing about the delivery woman). Dick

begins the document by noting that Charles Colson—Nixon’s “dirty tricks artist”—showed up to

prison still wearing his fanboy Nixon tie clasp. Never forgetting that Nixon himself came from

the Golden State, Dick ironically invokes the Mamas and the Papas line “California dreaming is

becoming a reality,” noting, with a foreboding sense of the seventies weird, “what a dreadful

surreal reality it is: foglike and dangerous, with the subtle and terrible manifestations of evil

rising up like rocks in the gloom.”700 This imaginal dread, which we discussed in an earlier

chapter, then sets the stage for his discussion of his experiences the previous March, where Dick

writes that he was absolutely convinced that he was living in Rome sometime after the

crucifixion. “Back in the furtive Fish Sign days. Secret baptism and that stuff….I was a Christian

but I had to hide it. Or they’d get me.”701

Here Christianity is linked, not just to resistance against an oppressive state but with

secrecy, a secrecy that cloaks both ritual practices and furtive signs. Here we need to recall a

pervasive bit of modern folklore about the ἰχθύς, which Dick himself later references. This is the

notion that the fish sign was used by early Christians to clandestinely identify themselves to one

another—in some scenarios, by first drawing the initial arc of the fish shape in the sand, a

meaningless line that would only be completed by the other if they were in the know.

699. Ibid, 49-50.

700. Dick, Exegesis, 19.
 504

The fish was, without doubt, one of the most important identifying symbols for the early

Christians—Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the second century, recommends that

his readers have their seals engraved with a dove or a fish.702 Moreover, in some of its uses, the

Christian fish was indeed a kind of code—with ἰχθύς, the Greek word for fish, forming the

acrostic for the phrase Ίησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ, which translates as “Jesus Christ,

Son of God, Savior.”

That said, the use of the fish as a “secret sign” has no historical basis.703 Nonetheless,

countless contemporary books, magazines, blogs, and references allude to this clandestine code.

The origins of the lore remain obscure, but it stretches back at least to the nineteenth century,

where the fish sign was explicitly compared to the secret tokens of Freemasonry, both inside and

outside the Masonic press. As such, Dick recognized in the ἰχθύς not only an iconic resonance

between early Christians and contemporary Christian possibility, but also an operational and

esoteric token. For Dick, the ἰχθύς was an insider code, both subcultural and secret—a “furtive”

sign of clandestine recognition among spiritual and political partisans. In this sense, the fish was

less sign than signal, its value adhering less in its denotive or even connotative reference than in

its agency as a technical vector of covert communication.

In this, the sign recalls Giorgio Agamben’s development of the related notion of the

signature, the semiotic organization of resemblance that plays such a strong role in esoteric

thought. Jakob Boehme, who helped establish the notion through his De Signatura Rerum

(1621), argued that God marked objects—like plants—with a signature to indicate their purpose.

701. Ibid, 33.

702. Paedagogus, III, xi.
703. For an exhaustive archaeological and literary excavation of the ἰχθύς, see Charles R. Moray, “The Origin of
the Fish Symbol”, Princeton Theological Review, 8 (1910): 93-106, 231-46, 410-32. For a summary of the
archaeological evidence, see Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before
Constantine (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1985), 30-35.
 505

As such, the signature follows the logic of analogy rather than strict similarity. Though the term

is often associated with what Foucault would call the pre-modern “episteme,” Agamben richly

restores its meaning, using the concept to break out of an overly static semiotic understanding of

the relationship between signifier and signified, and to return the sign to expression and,

particularly, enunciation. The signature is what “displaces and moves” the relation of signifier

and signified into another domain, “positioning it in a new network of pragmatic and

hermeneutic relations.”704

Crucially, Agamben in turn links this “operative” sense of the signature to the ancient

semiosis of Iamblichan theurgy. For the late Neoplatonist Iamblichus, divine presences were

thoroughly mediated through material, linguistic, and even musical symbols called synthemata,

which “bore the impress of the god and were able to awaken souls to the divinity they

symbolized.”705 As Agamben points out, this doctrine influenced the theory of Catholic

sacraments as well as the theosophy of Boehme. But the important point here is that, in this

doctrine, “the symbols [synthemata] themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate

work.”706 Mediating between semiotics—the differential science of the sign—and hermeneutics,

the endless depths of interpretation, the signature acts, performing its own transformative

enunciation. Signatures are “marks that teach us how to recognize them.”707

In the folkloric nostalgia of the contemporary Christian imagination, the ἰχθύς allows

secret Christians to recognize on another. But in the delivery woman scene, it is the sign itself

that acts. In his initial fish sign letter to Le Guin, Dick describes the ἰχθύς as an example of those

704. Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York; Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books,
2009), 40.
705. Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1995), 50.
706. Agamben, Signature, 51.
707. Ibid, 57.
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“external signals” that act as “disinhibiting stimuli, which cause a vast drop in GABA fluid in the

brain, releasing…major engramming.”708 Like the “cypher signal” KING FELIX hidden in

Tears, the fish is not simply a secret token between partisans but an informational device in an

environment populated with human robots dominated by tropisms, a transponder condensed into

what Dick elsewhere calls a “Logos triggering agent.”709

This “pragmatic” understanding of the fish sign, as Agamben might put it, does not just

depend on Dick’s predilection for the surreal, pre-modern logic of signatures, though he will take

on Boehme and other occult theories of correspondences with great gusto in the later, more

metaphysical pages of the Exegesis. Dick’s understanding of signs as “triggers,” “signals” or

“disinhibiting stimuli” also reflects one of his long-standing concerns as a science-fiction writer,

which is to use the discourse and operations of technological media as an allegorical apparatus to

interrogate his literary and philosophical concerns with psychology, language, and human

relations. It also reflects his debt to behaviorism, and its language of tropisms and stimuli.

In contrast to the orthomolecular vitamins, the “disinhibiting stimulus” of the February

fish sign locates the inaugurating event of the visionary series of 2/3/74 in an external and

instigating trigger outside Dick’s control. As such, it effects the traumatic rupture of an

encounter with the Outside. And also unlike the vitamins, which are strictly non-semantic in their

operation, the ἰχθύς signifies, opening up a chain of meanings that might (and will) come to serve

as a lifeline out of that very rupture. Recalling Dick’s comment about his “conversion, a la

William James,” we should note that this rupture very much suggests the model of conversion

that James offers in Varieties. There James argued that the individuals most likely to undergo

conversion possess an unusually “extensive” psychological domain “in which mental work can

708. Dick, Exegesis, 49.

709. Ibid, 56.
 507

go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting the equilibrium of

the primary consciousness, may come.”710 In other words, the potential convert externalizes their

unconscious as subliminal operations, setting up apparently divine invasions that authenticate

themselves through this very displacement.

Characteristically, Dick himself acknowledged how the trigger mechanism of the fish

sign mobilized already existing scripts. Early in the Exegesis, he argues that the fish sign was not

a “magic amulet” whose power resided in its shape or properties. Instead, its triggering power

depended on a whole “life process” of semiotic association. “As an infant I was given dreams

and experiences (e.g., with fish, the ‘tunny,’ the shark dreams, later on the Tiberius fish teeth

necklace dream), without which her appearance and that fish necklace would have done

nothing.”711 At the same time, we also must remember that, for James as for Dick, the subliminal

unconscious was an ontologically open category rather than a reductive one, as much a liminal

threshold to the transpersonal as a claustrophobic underground cave of scripts and impulses.712

Indeed, one way of characterizing Dick’s specifically religious quest is his attempt to understand

and reframe his “encounter with the unconscious” as an invasive experience of an Other lurking

beyond the cybernetic loops of the Self.

The complex function of the fish sign, with combines semantic content with a trigger

event, also recalls Paul Ricoeur’s account of the symbol, which draws from both psychoanalysis

and the comparativism of Eliade. Distinguishing the symbol from the metaphor, Ricoeur argues

710. James, Varieties, 178. For more on the “gradualist” understanding of conversion, see Thomas McGowan,
"Conversion and Human Development,” in New Religions and Mental Health: Understanding the Issues, ed.
Herbert Richardson (New York: Edward Mellon, 1980), 127-73.
711. Dick, Exegesis, 116. Dick explains one of these early childhood references in a February 27, 1975, letter to
Claudia Bush: “I knew about the Fish sign, too, the Savior: I called him ‘Tunny,’ from a del Monte billboard for
some canned food. We had to travel under the Oakland Estuary in the Alameda Tube, and I saw the tube like a can;
at the end we emerged in the sunlight and I saw the billboard with ‘Tunny’ on it. I loved ol’ Tunny, the great fish. . .
.” Again, we have Dick’s understanding of pop trash as a potentially redemptive sign. Dick, Selected Letters 1975-
1976, 113.
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that while the latter makes its leaps entirely within the linguistic field, through a logic of

substitution and signification, the symbol is a hybrid of semantic and non-semantic or pre-

linguistic activity that resists transcription. While the metaphor’s tension between literal and

figurative meaning remains inscribed in the world of logos, Ricoeur’s symbol “hesitates on the

dividing line between bios and logos.” Within classic psychoanalysis, this non-semantic

dimension concerns the tension between repressed energetic impulses and the secondary

repression of cultural signs. For Freud, the dreamwork is the example par excellence of the

duplex symbol that Ricoeur identifies, since it writes the very duplicity of the metaphor’s tension

between literal and figurative while also attesting to forces that operate outside the signifying

circuit entirely. The dream work is thus simultaneously marked by a riddling or hieroglyphic

textuality and the effects of a mechanical, energetic, almost hydraulic set of operations

(substitution, condensation, displacement). Hence psychoanalysis has a “mixed language, which

connects the vocabulary of the dynamics or energetics…of impulses with that of a textual

exegesis.” This is the crossroads where Dick finds himself, speaking a language of visionary

experience that, like psychoanalysis, and like the fish sign itself, finds itself “in the intermingling

of force and meaning, impulse and discourse, energetics and semantics.”713

There is, however, another category of sign that the ἰχθύς should recall here at the close:

the icon. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s famous typology of signs, an icon strictly resembles the

thing it indicates, just as the two crossed arcs resemble a fish. The iconic character of the fish

sign, however, also points to the deeper theology of the icon as it is understood in the Christian

and particularly Eastern Orthodox tradition. As a statue or painting that transparently mediates

712. For more on the origins of the subliminal in James’ usage, see Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, esp. 58-70.
713. Paul Ricœur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press, 1976), 59; cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the
Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 175.
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divine presence, the icon nonetheless is traditionally said to be written by its artisans rather than

carved or painted. The icon is a picture that, like the fish sign (or much graffiti), is also a text.

The icon also does something particular to the viewer.

In his incisive comparison of the icon and the idol, the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc

Marion makes the point that the “icon does not result from a vision but provokes one.”714 The

idol, by contrast, is all about our gaze: in holding and fixing our gaze on the level of the visible,

the idol simply sustains our given subjectivity and its grasping, and therefore acts as a “mirror,

not a portrait.” But the I who encounters an authentic icon is no longer owner of its gaze; instead,

the icon confronts us with an “invisible gaze that subverts us in the measure of its glory.”715 We

can also understand the icon through the Eliadian figure of the hierophany, that manifestation of

the sacred—which can happen through every and any imaginable material vessel—that

nonetheless carries a peculiar self-canceling dialectic whereby the “thing becomes sacred in so

far as it embodies (that is, reveals) something other than itself.”716 Marion adds something

crucial to this picture, an element that would be born out through Dick’s elaborate development

and regular return to the fish sign throughout the Exegesis: a fluctuating dynamics of revealing

and concealing. “The gaze can never rest or settle if it looks at an icon; it always must rebound

upon the visible, in order to go back in it up the infinite stream of the invisible.” 717

This restlessness, this perpetual rebound upon the visible, may help explain why the fish

sign continues the morph and mutate as it develops through the Exegesis and Dick’s subsequent

visions and hypnogogic phosphene-shows.718 Scattered throughout the thousands of pages of the

714. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 17.
715. Ibid, 22.
716. Eliade, Patterns, 13.
717. Marion, 18.
718. A few of these transforms are, well, exegetical. In one rather ingenious allegorical reading, the two intersecting
points of the two arcs as indicating both the initial event of Christ and his eventual second coming in historical time.
Dick, Exegesis, 136.
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Exegesis are scores of small, tightly executed diagrams rendered in Dick’s ball-point pen. Some

of these are essentially doodles, but many of them are schematics that attempt to graphically

represent, sometimes to great effect, Dick’s various cosmologies and metaphysical engines.

Among these maps and figures are numerous variations on the ἰχθύς, some of which reference

Dick’s subsequent visionary experiences with the fish sign.

One undated page in the earliest folder of the Exegesis, which covers 1974 and appears

chronologically in July, features a dozen sketches in which the two arcs of the fish have evolved

into the vesica piscis, an important figure in Christian and sacred art. Many of these figures are

marked with various hashes, crosses, and zigzags, as if Dick is exploring the formal possibilities

of the figure—or, to speak more animistically, as if the figure itself were alive with its own

variations. To Tessa, Dick said that the normal fish symbol was “not quite right, and that it

wasn’t really a fish, but a symbol of something else.”719 That Dick felt there were additional

signs concealed in the fish sign is also suggested in a line he writes to Bush in 1975, where he

describes the “more elaborate ideogram beneath the fish symbol.”720 In one evolution of the

figure, reproduced in the published Exegesis, the pisces becomes the toothy mouth of a whale

that Dick apparently glimpsed in a vision and that, in anticipation of the Darwinian rejoinder to

the vehicular ἰχθύς we see today, has a smaller fish in its mouth.721 In later folders, the fish

multiplies itself as a linked daisy-chain that becomes that supreme icon of bios and logos

intertwined: the double-helix strand of DNA, a graphic elaboration that informs the extensive

biological theorizing that appears in the Exegesis and VALIS. But the eeriest and most lasting

transformation of these signs and signatures is the simple morph of the fish into an eye. From

719. Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, 72.

720. Dick, Exegesis, 92.
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Dick’s notes it stares at us like Marion’s icon, or like Robert Anton Wilson’s eye in the pyramid,

or like the third eye of the Sybil that Dick saw in a dream one night, and that he linked to

prophecy, and to the pineal gland lodged between the hemispheres of our brains.

Exegesis Unbound

Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis represents a mountain peak of high weirdness in the seventies.

On the one hand, this immense and impossible text records one decidedly weird fiction writer’s

obsessive attempt to grapple with his extraordinary experiences from his unique position within a

cultural milieu dominated by esotericism, experimental psychology, posthumanist intimations,

and the detritus of countercultural and psychedelic rebellion. On the other hand, the text is a

highly weird object itself, a profoundly anomalous manuscript that remains challenging to

characterize even in the most general terms. Is it a philosophical essay, a research project, an

encyclopedic assemblage, a novelist’s notepad, a dream diary, a paranoid rant, a crank summa?

Because it is all these and more, can it even be said to be an “it”? We can call it a “text”

at least, but only if we recall Derrida’s declaration that a text, properly understood, “is no longer

a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential

network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential

traces.”722 Even restricting ourselves to the 895 pages of the abridged 2011 edition—about a

tenth of the “manuscript” itself, and constructed through an editorial process best compared to

battlefield triage—the Exegesis remains a dizzying, impossible, exhausting, and overwhelming

721. Ibid, 37. The Whale’s Mouth vision is related to the code ALBEMUTH, and recalls as well the name of the
colonist planet in his 1964 story “The Unteleported Man.” Samuel J. Umland offers a compelling reading of the
Whale’s Mouth in Umland, 81-82, 93.
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text, a “chaos of paperwork” stuffed with oracular voices, cosmic conspiracies, and a mountain

of sometimes half-digested religious, mythological, philosophical and speculative ideas that Dick

unceasingly assembled and reassembled in his quest to interpret (and restage) his extraordinary

encounters. Paul Williams, the original executor of Dick’s estate, did Derrida one better when he

tried to capture its air of interminable sublimity: “seen from the perspective of any given page or

section it seems borderless, eternal, immeasurable, an endlessly recurring aha! followed by new

analyses, new doubts, new questions and possibilities.”723

The Exegesis also radiates a distinct aura of pathology. When Dick was in the hospital,

dying, Tim Powers came across thousands of its pages in Dick’s apartment. The writing seemed

“crazy,” or at least crazy enough that Power felt it was best concealed from sight, less Dick be

declared insane and lose control over his affairs. “Out of its proper context it really sounded

weird,” Powers later said, explaining why he proceeded to stuff a good chunk of the manuscript

into a large ashtray emblazoned with the phrase “Elvis is King.”724 Paul Williams, Dick’s

original literary executor, subsequently divided the rescued document—which had already been

reordered and sometimes bizarrely sequenced by Dick—into ninety-one haphazardly numbered

folders. These sat in Williams’ Marin County garage for many years, during which time Dick’s

posthumous fame (and the number of lucrative film options) grew significantly.

Though the Exegesis became something of a holy grail for Dick’s exploding number of

trufans, the holders of the estate were, for reasons of reputation as well as editorial challenge,

understandably loathe to deal with it. Jay Kinney, later the editor of Gnosis magazine, took an

722. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines” in Harold Bloom, ed. Deconstruction and Criticism (New York:
Seabury Press, 1979), 84.
723. Cited by Lawrence Suvin, “Introduction,” in Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (Novato,
CA: Underwood-Miller, 1991), 7.
724. Cited in Scott Timberg, “Philip K. Dick at UC Irvine,” The Misread City, May 24, 2010. http://scott-
timberg.blogspot.com/2010/05/philip-k-dick-at-uc-irvine.html (Accessed June 2015).
 513

initial look at the folders and concluded in a 1984 article that it would require a “staggering”

amount of editorial work to properly handle its over 8000 pages. Bringing up the dread name of

L. Ron Hubbard, Kinney also suggested that its publication could form the basis of a “Dickean

religion.”725 In 1991, Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin was able to publish a solid selection of

these materials as In Pursuit of Valis, and included more representative Exegesis selections in the

Dick essay collection he edited and released a few years later. In 2011, a much larger abridged

edition of Dick’s diary was issued by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as The Exegesis of Philip K.

Dick. As one of the assistant editors of that project, I can attest that Dick’s own one-time

dismissal of the Exegesis as a “hell-chore” resonates.

But if Dick’s abiding faith in coincidentia oppositorum holds any water, then the hell-

chore was also, at least sometimes, a stairway to heaven. As a learned and sometimes beautifully

written text that responds to, reframes, and restages extraordinary encounters, the Exegesis

presents a powerful, perhaps unsurpassed object for the study of the construction process that

Ann Taves outlines in her methodological reframing of the vexed question of “religious

experience.” Once again, Taves argues that “religious” or “mystical” experiences are best seen as

beginning with basic and relatively uncontroversial phenomenological building blocks she calls

“special experiences.” These experiences—which I have renamed “extraordinary experiences”—

can be singularized and set apart from the quotidian run of everyday of life for a number of

reasons, but principally through their ideal or anomalous character. To become religious or

mystical experiences, these building blocks are then reframed, reconstructed and renamed

according to cognitive templates or cultural scripts that attribute certain categories of events to

religious or esoteric forces. The end results of this construction process are not experiential

reports so much as claims and beliefs about the meaning and significance of such experiences.

725. Pamela Jackson, Introduction, in Dick, Exegesis, xv-xvi.

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But—and this is crucial—Taves does not follow other critical scholars in ignoring the building

blocks of “actual” experience. The unquestionable presence of radical phenomenological

anomaly in the fringes of human life remain very much part of the picture.

What makes Dick’s construction of 2/3/74 unusual is that he neither settled on or

stabilized any attribution or meaningful explanation of his experiences. Nor, on the other hand,

did he eventually write them off as brain glitches or self-contained oddities unassimilable to his

life narratives, as many people are wont to do with such things. Instead, he thought and wrote his

way through an interminable series of metaphysical schemas, mythic associations, and

speculative possibilities, ranging from “two-source cosmogonies” to Orphic mythology to

tachyon physics to Soviet plots to the physiological dynamics of brain hemispheres and

orthomolecular medicine.

The construction process Taves articulates is, in Dick’s case, thrown into an incessant

perpetuity, giving us a contemporary—and arguably “postmodern”—picture of how the

imbrication of texts and extraordinary experience simultaneously destabilize and renegotiate the

sacred through a process of temporal iteration. What results is a picture of modern “religious

experience” that is at once more hypothetical and hysterical than the one found in The Varieties

of Religious Experience, which, as we have argued, inaugurates the very same tradition of

pragmatic phenomenological seeking that Dick—who gave a copy of James to a girlfriend in the

late forties—found himself working within in the sixties and seventies. Rather than serving as

noetically incontrovertible building blocks that establish a stable structure of belief, Dick’s

experiences instead become the constantly-renewing fuel for the perpetual motion machine of

interpretation and textual production that “is” 2/374. The more Dick wrote about his experiences,

the more he rewrote them, and the more they seemed to have always already rewritten him.
 515

This suggests that the biographical attempt to distinguish between Dick’s raw self-reports

and the various interpretations and fictionalized spins he gives these experiences is arguably

flawed in essence. As Gabriel McKee notes, “The Exegesis contains both accounts of experience

and analyses of their possible meaning, but the line between the two is so thin as to be nearly

nonexistent.”726 I emphasize this point here not, however, to confirm the now conventional

“critical” notion that extraordinary experience is always already mediated by pre-existing scripts

and templates, and should therefore be evacuated of explanatory power. Instead, Mckee’s blurred

line should lead us deeper into the anomaly of the text itself.

As Mckee explains, writing the Exegesis was not only a way for Dick to record his

experiences, or even to interpret them, but also became an extension of the experiences

themselves. “The intellectual process of theorizing directly proceeds from the inexplicable

experience, and since it is a search for an illuminating truth, filled…with periodic, if short-lived,

epiphanies, this intellectual search is an experience in itself.”727 In other words, by writing and

constructing the Exegesis in the shadowy light of its catalytic anomalies, whose enigmatic

weirdness could always be summoned again to puncture whatever explanation was on deck, Dick

shaped the Exegesis into an ongoing site of potential encounter with the very mystical or alien

forces that remained beyond the grasp of the text’s speculative production. As such, Dick’s

writing in the Exegesis was not so much a hermeneutic means of stabilizing meaning, but rather

a textual and even technical operation that staged and manifested the continual unfoldment of the

transmission itself, invoking the invasive arborescence of VALIS through the text’s iterative

interminability and borderless potential for recombination.

726. Mckee, 46.

727. Ibid, 71.
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Indeed, by calling the work an “Exegesis” in the first place, Dick already acknowledged

how much he conceived his own “raw” experiences as texts to be interpreted, either as allegories

that needed to be metaphysically unpacked or temporal echoes of past texts, usually his own.728

In many ways, then, the Exegesis is an auto-Exegesis. Dick not only set to interpreting his

anomalous experiences ad infinitum, but to using his newfound theories to provide allegorical

interpretations of his earlier novels, novels that he recursively understood as subliminally and

prophetically encoding the truths unfurled by 2/3/74. In this way, Dick treated his own work as a

carrier of subliminal revelation, which in a basic sense it was: it is obvious to any student of the

author, and sometimes even to Dick himself, how much the figures, gestures, and themes of his

earlier fiction prefigured the figures, gestures, and themes of 2/3/74.

Finally, the Exegesis also feeds directly on itself. “The text did not merely explain; it

provided material in need of explanation, which it then recursively, cumulatively interpreted in

new and dynamic ways.”729 As such, it follows the postmodern logic of the “information

revolution” that Mark Taylor limns in his work on network culture, which “occurs when

information turns on itself and becomes self-reflexive…[in this process] information acts on

information to form feedback loops that generate increasing complexity.”730 Or as James Burton

explains in his media-ecological take on Dick’s metaphysical text, “Dick’s exegesis, though

purporting to be a hermeneutic undertaking, simultaneously consists in the production of the text

it is supposed to interpret—with ‘text’ now understood in its etymological sense as something

woven, constructed, built, but also as something always in a dynamic process of flux.”731

728. Indeed, if personal mystical experience has come to take the place of sacred script in many modern lives, that
substitution occurs in part by transforming experience into text.
729. Mckee, 6.
730. Taylor, Mark C, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001), 106.
731. James Burton, “From Exegesis to Ecology”, in Dunst, The World according to Philip K. Dick, op. cit., 213.
 517

One approach to understanding this dynamic process to see it as an iterative apparatus of

generating hypotheses about the meaning, nature, and consequences of VALIS. Much could be

said about these “what if” speculations and their relationship to the compositional strategies of

science fiction, whose speculations similarly blur the line between imaginative possibilities and

technical thought experiments that literalize metaphor. Here I am more interested in how the

essentially scientific form of the hypothesis enters into Dick’s metaphysical practice as a

particular, and particularly mutant, form of religious speculation. To do this I would like to

briefly view the Exegesis in light of another anomalous text that often comes up in Dick

criticism: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). The well-educated

judge wrote the text towards the end of his longest spell at the Sonnenstein asylum, and it earned

lasting force as the object of Freud’s most focussed writing on paranoia. Memoirs remains not

only the most eloquent, complex, and inventive book of first-person psychopathology, but one

that reflects a peculiar and significant tension between delusion and sanity, far-out

phantasmagoria and nuanced interpretation, as Schreber writes sensibly and even critically about

voices and visions redolent of madness.

As what Freud called a “gifted paranoid,” Schreber displays original and frequently

fascinating modes of interpretation and reflection throughout the Memoirs. For Freud, this

evidence of substantial sense led to a crucial insight that challenged the neurological materialism

of Schreber’s own doctors, who believed the judge’s delusions were simply an index of brain

damage. Instead, Freud saw Schreber’s “theologico-psychological system” as something far

more creative and productive. “The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological

product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.” 732 Freud also

732. Freud, Standard Edition, 12:71.

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recognized distinct connections between these formations and religious thinking, and indeed his

Schreber text in many ways inaugurates Freud’s own career as a religious critic.733

There are a number of important resonances, of both surface and depth, between Memoirs

and the Exegesis. Schreber too is primarily devoted to his “religious conceptions,” but these

conceptions, like Dick’s, owe a strong debt to both technical media and quasi-scientific forms of

esotericism alongside more traditionally theological concerns with salvation and apocalypse.

Schreber posited a binary god that he identified with the same Zoroastrian power-sharing

between Ariman and Ormuzd that Dick depicts in Cosmic Puppets (1957), one of the author’s

earliest forays into cosmic dualism. Schreber too finds divine inspiration in dreams, and attempts

to draw meanings from the voices he hears—voices whose suggestive phrases appear in the

Memoirs within the same quotation marks that Dick uses to mark off the contributions of his “AI

Voice” to the Exegesis. Schreber’s most notable conviction was that he was being transformed

into a woman so that God would impregnate him with children who would save the world; even

this notion appears, albeit briefly, in the Exegesis. 734Schreber is also unquestionably paranoid,

his imagination dominated by persecution complexes, cardboard “fleeting-improvised-men,” and

his own messianic role in the destruction and renewal of the universe.

Furthermore, though God still rules the roost, Schreber’s cosmos is a materialist universe.

The soul is contained in the nerves of the body, distant planets are inhabited by other creatures,

and God communicates through a “light-telegraphy” of rays and vibrating nerves. But this

materialism begs a crucial question, one that Alexander van der Haven articulates in his study of

Schreber and religion, and that applies to Dick’s religious fiction as well as the Exegesis: “how

733. See Galina Hristeva, “‘Homo Homini Deus’: Freud as a Religious Critic in ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an
Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’” in JEP European Journal of
Psychoanalysis, II (2010), 141-170.
734. Dick, Exegesis, 489-490.
 519

do revelations work in a religious cosmos that is not transcendental?” Once revelation is carried

through material media, whether cosmic rays or spiritual light-telegraphs, that revelation is also

subject to the noise that haunts any communications channel, not to mention the distortions

introduced by any flaws in the receiver. “Schreber’s realization that divine communication was

mechanical and imperfect prevented him from presenting himself as a prophet of a ready-made

message,” writes van der Haven. In other words, though Schreber had absolute faith in the

religious import of his experiences, he recognized that their meaning could only remain

hypothetical, and therefore perpetually open to revision. “As a result, Schreber’s religious claims

were not authoritative utterances but hypotheses that stand to be corrected by new data and new

interpretations by peer seekers.” In the Memoirs, Schreber questions many of his interpretations,

and also regularly rewrites the meaning of earlier experiences in light of later revelations.

For van der Haven, Schreber announces the emergence a new mode of religious

theorizing that, despite its visionary contents, accords more with a scientific epistemology and a

naturalized cosmos. Though the hypothesis are wild and science-fictional, they also turn away

from the self-grounding authority of dogmatic revelation. As such, and with Schreber’s debts to

Spiritualism and Theosophy in mind, Memoirs needs to be seen as part of Wouter Hanegraaff’s

story of the “occult” negotiation of esotericism in the mirror of secular thought. “The Schreber

case witnesses a new type of ‘religious,’ one that just like the scientific method it models itself

on, provides hypothetical claims rather than ready-made meaning that is based on transcendental

authority.”735 This openness represents a provisional attitude toward the cosmos imposed by the

erosion of transcendental guarantees. As if they were exemplars of William James’ religious

pragmatism, Schreber and Dick both approach their religious speculations with a creative,

735. Alexander van der Haven, “God as Hypothesis: Daniel Paul Schreber and the Study of Religion” (article under
review).
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experimental, and provisional orientation toward a future that is always capable of rewriting the

meaning, consequences, and even validity of apparently veridical experiences. Indeed, in Dick’s

case especially, the speculative engine also reliably undermined and cancelled out previous

hypotheses.

The role of hypotheses in such “speculative religion” also forces us to refine our ideas

about the pivotal role that the discourse of experience, along with the phenomenological activity

that “experience” names, play in modern currents of metaphysical, esoteric, and New Age

thought. According to a now dominant “critical” narrative within religious studies, personal

experience emerged as a new sort of foundation for religion—and particularly Protestant

religion—once science and skepticism undermined the dogmatic bases of faith. By highlighting

extraordinary, rapturous, or ineffable experiences, writers like Schleiermacher and James helped

inaugurate the shift from external religious authority onto the individual subject. This gesture

simultaneously ruptures and disguises the discursive force of “religion,” making space for more

singularized construction of identity, authenticity, and authority along the lines that we can now

identify, along with the pollsters, as “spiritual but not religious.” One reason for this shift to the

self, according to the critical narrative provided by Wayne Proudfoot and others, is that the

seemingly incontrovertible authority of much extraordinary experience—its synchronistic slam,

its realer-than-real timbre, its “I know what I saw”—serves as a much better buffer against the

force of reductionist explanations than rickety dogmatic claims. In this narrative, then, it is

precisely the non-hypothetical nature of experiential claims that explains their success as a new

source of religious authority in modernity.

In The New Metaphysicals, which takes aim at the rhetoric of individual experience

among contemporary New Age mystics in Cambridge, MA, Courtney Bender clearly allies
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herself with this critical narrative. Bender points out that one of the ironies of modern New Age

seeker culture is that its heightened emphasis on novel individual experiences has itself become a

collective tradition of its own, guided by often invisible discursive, theoretical, and institutional

norms.736 In her book, Bender analyzes the discursive devices that construct spiritual experience,

and isolates collective narrative templates that help organize the purportedly singular experiences

that found the metaphysical and esoteric views of her subjects. For Bender, rushing like so many

critical scholars to toss the baby out with the bathwater, the mere existence of such patterns

“throws into doubt” the notion that spiritual narratives reflect an “actual” experience.

At the same time, Bender discovered that, while her informants would provide crisp and

authoritative accounts of their most important mystical experiences during their formal

interviews with her, observation of their actual practice with these narratives over time revealed

something more intriguing. What Bender noticed was that the telling of these stories was always

a retelling, an evolving narrative that was in many ways motivated by an expectation of

interpretive uncertainty. Some mystics “seemed resolved to let the ‘final’ interpretation stand

somewhere in the distant future: as such, their experiences remained open for interpretation and

even for the possibility that a previous ‘experience’ might be determined in the future to be not

an experience at all.” This process, Bender discovered, was enhanced rather than squelched by

certain writing practices popular among her subjects, such as writing “morning pages.” The

written articulation of such narratives opened up as many possibilities as their inscription might

seemingly foreclose—including the possibility that earlier spiritual experiences were projections

or even spiritual traps. This very opening toward the future—a possibility of encounter

736. Bender writes that the unique self-narratives of the New Age individuals she studied in Cambridge, MA, were
actually “highly regulated and shaped by theological norms that they also reproduce. Specifically, they consistently
represent and reproduce claims to religious experience as an individual experience.” See Bender, The New
Metaphysicals, op cit., 56-89.
 522

engendered in part through the time displacement of the written form itself—became, in some

sense, the substance of the revelation itself. “Mystics sought the experience yet-to-come, which

held the possibility of resolving unsolved mysteries or creatively unsettling other previous

interpretations. Daily life was thus always possibly revelatory.”737

In other words, the very refusal of resolution stretched the living enigma of the

experiences—or, to be fair, the “experiences”—into the present and the future, rendering the

process of exegesis at once interminable and ecstatic, a pharmakon both poisonous and

intoxicating. Like Scheherazade, Dick too wrote his Exegesis into the night, night after night, in

part to stave off the “death” or permanent loss of contact with 2/3/74. Readers of the published

Exegesis can readily identify with the cry Dick appended to the end of one letter: “will the long

dances/typing/madness/enthusiasm ever end?”738

The Collage of Cosmic Consciousness

The Exegesis is not just a text: it is also a protean assemblage, a referential hypertext and

speculative machine that generates itself through protocols that are at once dialectical and

phantasmic, generative and pathological. On the one hand, Dick was driven to understand his

experiences. As such, he crafted a variety of mostly metaphysical hypotheses, feeding these

multifarious mythological, philosophical and religious constructs with his own fictions, dream

thoughts, and a wide range of sometimes half-digested texts, authors, gods, and encyclopedia

entries. On the other hand, Dick was driven to extend the experiences themselves, to use writing

to invite, or trigger, the rapturous rupture of reason and understanding that signaled the invasion

737. Ibid, 83.

738. Dick, Exegesis, 115.
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of the Outside. As such, his sometimes immensely intricate hypotheses were regularly ruptured

or abandoned according to a strategy of interpretive instability that deployed uncertainty in light

of possible future revelation. In order to keep the engine running, he needed to regularly interrupt

or cancel a given line of attack so that the ground could be cleared for another assault on the

mountain top. His “Eureka!”s were always simultaneously hand grenades.

There is a suggestive parallel between the speculative style of the Exegesis, in which

possibilities do not so much build upon themselves as regularly collapse and regenerate in

reworked forms, and the sometimes nightmarish narrative turbulence of Dick’s fictions. This

“secret love of chaos,” as Dick admitted to in a 1978 essay, finds Dick regularly forcing his

characters to confront what Dick elsewhere called “the reality that is revealed when our

ontological categories collapse.”739 A number of commentators associate this secret love with the

“trickster” side of Dick, but as the critic Anthony Enns correctly points out, this strategy also

reflects Dick’s more sustained ethical devotion to novelty and the future. As Enns explains,

Dick’s own idiosyncratic “information theory” associates entropy not so much with signal

degradation but the “tomb world” of stasis, or the locked groove of pure repetition. Even

destruction—or informational “noise”—can be liberating in such a context. Dick’s compulsively

chaotic gestures are even reflected in the curious endings to many of his books, when a final

“twist” (like fictional savior at the close of A Maze of Death) once again unsettles the fictional

world’s diagetic frame.

In a flawed but fascinating analysis of Dick’s narrative devices, John Huntington

addresses these abrupt shifts that are so familiar in Dick’s fiction. Taking a mechanistic approach

grounded in the vagaries of pulp production, Huntington casts Dick as an insincere narrative

trickster who slavishly adhered to the classic pulp S-F writer A.E. van Vogt’s “800 words rule,”
 524

which held that to keep a reader engaged you needed to introduce a new idea every 800 words.

The mindfucks that have so titillated Dick’s readers are, in Huntington’s view, “as often as not

the result of arbitrary and random reversals.” Though Huntington does not discuss the Exegesis,

he does talk about the novel VALIS and the exegetical theorizing of Horselover Fat, which also

depends in part on being regularly ruptured. “For a writer like Dick, who has a strong streak of

Horselover Fat in him and could, one imagines, happily treat us to hundreds of pages of deep,

repetitive, and vague philosophy about the nature of reality, the very arbitrariness of van Vogt’s

mechanical 800-word technique prevents the domination of a single idea.” Huntington

intriguingly compares this purported device to I Ching, which also “enforces randomness.”740

The novelty of Dick’s use of the I Ching in the plotting of The Man in the High Castle might, in

this view, simply represent the formalization of an already existing strategy of arbitrary, or

“orthogonal,” moves.

Umberto Rossi, who offers a far more nuanced account of Dick’s narrative shifts or

“shunts,” has exposed a number of methodological flaws in Huntington’s analyses of Dick’s

fiction.741 Moreover, the existence of the Exegesis, through fulfilling Huntington’s view of Dick

as a Horselover Fat in disguise, undermines the main thrust of Huntington’s accusations, which

is that Dick’s narrative finger traps are the work of a sometimes shallow game player who “must

be both the entertainer and the novelist of important themes.” 742 With the Exegesis, Dick is

entertaining no-one except himself, and a lot of time he is clearly not managing that very well

either. Though there is something to be said for the possibility that in the Exegesis, Dick is trying

to trick himself, his lack of an audience forces us to look outside the economics of commercial

739. Dick, Shifting Realities, 219.

740. John Huntington, “Philip K, Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity”, in Mullen, Richard D., On Philip K. Dick: 40
Articles from Science-Fiction Studies (SF-TH Inc., 1992), 172.
741. Rossi, Twisted Worlds, 54-55.
 525

literary production. That said, Huntington’s reductive and unsatisfying take on the pulp method

behind Dick’s madness does have the benefit of drawing our attention away from the literary

level of meaning and intention towards the technical processes that inform the rhythm and

mechanics of Dick’s unusual texts.

In other words, there is a weird construction project going on, as it were, just beneath the

metaphysical surface of Dick’s hermeneutic sleuthing through the archives of mythology and

mysticism. As Burton explains, while the Exegesis represents a spiritual attempt to extract

meaning from texts and visionary experiences alike, it also “twists the (exegetical) search for

meaning into the production of dynamic, informational forms.”743 Where we might see Dick as

an exegete, citing or interpreting texts or hypnogogic voices, Burton encourages us to recognize

something more like a collage or assemblage artist, collecting and experimentally arranging

“object-ideas” into different forms and sequences in order to see “if and how they fit, what they

can do.”744 Here Burton is inspired by the vision of the rhizomatic text described by Deleuze and

Guattari in the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus: a decentered text whose pragmatic effects

and functions operate through an immanent if disjunctive network of breaks, flows, and

perpetual bifurcations. As such, Burton links the “informational forms” of the Exegesis to the

distributed and autopoetic systems of ecological thought, to the mutant self-replication of

algorithmic codes, and to the dynamic and unexpected assemblages built by tinkerers and

bricoleurs everywhere. In a key insight, Burton argues that Dick built the God he was looking

for: an ecological-textual system whose dynamics are lively and viral enough to constitute a kind

of entity, or “eco-technological subjectivity.”

742. Huntington, 175.

743. Burton, 211.
744. Ibid, 213.
 526

For Burton, the recognition of the Exegesis as a fabricated assemblage of material media

and informational forms cuts against Dick’s relentlessly transcendentalist and frequently dualist

search for a savior, for an Outside he might call home. The seeker’s quest, in this view, is a kind

of phantasmic pursuit that inspires as its more substantial by-product “an immanent, media-

ecological construction that is only (if deceptively) ‘colored’ by a thematics of

transcendence.”745 To his credit, Burton also acknowledges that Dick himself never stops seeking

a more traditional form of salvation through the productions of the text. However, rather than see

Dick’s continued religious quest as a sort of false consciousness that tricks him into

posthumanist symbiosis with an eco-technological-textual entity, I would instead like to look a

little closer here at how Dick’s particular (and culturally bound) approach to religious

hermeneutics feeds into the “informational forms” of the Exegesis. In other words, I would like

to look at some of the concrete and procedural ways that Dick constructed his metaphyiscal

assemblage by folding or splicing transcendence into his immanent assemblage.

In “The Object of Post-Criticism,” an infectious piece of media criticism written in the

early eighties, Gregory Ulmer explores the logic of citation in literary and critical texts through

the artistic models of collage and montage. Ulmer defines the modernist practice of collage as an

initial severing of material from a pre-existing context, and then a subsequent insertion

(montage) of that material into a new and larger assemblage that retains some visible trace of

heterogeneity or juxtaposition. As a specifically avant-garde or critical strategy, collage does not

seek to reflect reality but intervene in it, to rupture, satirize, or mutate it. Within literature and

criticism, collage takes the form of citation, and citation, at least within the Derridean and

grammatological context that inspires Ulmer, becomes a general principle of written language.

Writing can be seen as an infinite field of collage, of heterogenous ruptures and new citational

745. Ibid, 215.

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juxtapositions, seamless only in fantasy. Significantly in light of the biological language that

Dick often brings to bear on VALIS, Derrida also characterizes the explicit citation of one text

by another as a kind of biological grafting, “a calculated insemination of the proliferating

allogene through which the two texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each

other’s content.”746 Here we should note the viral implications of citation, not so much as a

stable metaphor between linguistics and molecular biology, but as an allegory for the very

imbrication of these two ontological orders within postwar media texts. It is not for nothing that,

of all modern authors Dick admired, the most commonly referenced novelist in the Exegesis is

William S. Burroughs.

According to Ulmer, Derrida also describes another critical strategy that maintains

heterogeneity while disguising the overt juxtapositions of explicit citation. This is the

“superimposition” of one text upon another, a process that involves a kind of mimicry whereby

one text mimes or simulates another. One of Derrida’s own examples is the massive Glas, whose

media template, Ulmer argues, is not drawn from collage but photography, which models the

“attempt to devise a system of reference or representation which works in terms of differance,

with its reversible temporality, rather than in terms of the irreversible time of the sign.”747

Finally, Ulmer addresses the specifically parasitic dimensions of all of this, and he does so in

part through further citation, this time of J. Hillis Miller, responding to the common complaint

that deconstructionist readings are simply parasitic: “What happens when a critical essay extracts

a ‘passage’ and ‘cites’ it? Is this different from a citation, echo, or allusion within a poem? Is a

citation an alien parasite within the body of its host, the main text, or is it the other way around,

746. Cited in Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism”, in Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture (New Press, 2002), 90.
747. Ulmer, 93.
 528

the interpretive text the parasite which surrounds and strangles the citation which is its host?”748

As in classical Zen texts, the relationship of guest and host is shifty and ambivalent, as much

symbiotic as parasitic.

Ulmer’s text invokes a number of elements—assemblage, superimposition, reverse

temporality, viral citation—that resonate with Dick, reminding us how much his texts—

including the Exegesis—need to be seen in media critical terms. Superimposition, for example, is

both a metaphysical concern and a compositional strategy for the Exegetical Dick, whose

“double exposure” experience of Rome in Orange County clearly references film and

photography.749

Here however I am interested in how understanding Dick’s use of citations in the

Exegesis (and VALIS) illuminates Burton’s suggestion that we view the Exegesis not only as a

work of philosophical or religious criticism, but as a material media assemblage of “object-

ideas.” Dick himself was perfectly aware of the modernist inheritance of collage, particularly as

it manifested in a crucial strain of assemblage art that thrived in northern and southern California

in the same era when Dick himself was learning how to construct art and ideas from and through

pulp genre writing. As Ken Simpson writes in an article on Dick’s “aesthetics of garbage,” which

takes in both his fiction and religious writing, Dick’s aesthetic milieu “included the use of trash

objects in neo-Dada, Funk, or Beat assemblage art in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early

1960s.”750 As mentioned earlier, Dick roomed briefly with San Francisco Renaissance poets

Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and the networks around these men soon expanded to include

748. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1977), 439.
749. Enns also discusses this, comparing it to Dick’s assertion in his essay on schizophrenia that the schizophrenic
experiences temporality as a heightened intensification of the now because “the whole can of film has descended
upon him.” See Enns, op cit, 85.
750. Ken Simpson, “The Aesthetics of Garbage in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip,” Canadian Review of
American Studies, Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2014, 366.
 529

assemblage artists like Wallace Berman, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, and Jess. Though Dick

was not involved in this scene, he shared an approach to assemblage that includes “the selection

and arrangement of trash objects to reflect personal memories, political events, or spiritual

concerns”—features that Simpson notes distinguishes California assemblage from other

traditions of junk art.751

There is more that could be said about Dick’s aesthetics of trash. Here, I want to continue

to look at the Exegesis as a spiritual or cosmic assemblage that grafts citations in ways that

render the text viral, heterogenous, destabilized—and nonetheless deeply esoteric and mystical,

as Dick brings the tools of comparative religion to bear on his experiences through the logic of

superimposition. The Exegesis is saturated with words, phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs

inside quotation marks, all of which make the text “a mishmash of external voices.”752

Sometimes these samples are annotated or announced, but a lot of the time it is unclear whether

Dick is citing scripture, a half-remembered poem, some garbled song lyric, the Encyclopedia

Britannica, or his own Exegesis. We will deal with these explicitly textual references in a

moment; here we need to grapple with the most peculiar of these oft-cited sources: the inner

voice that Dick referred to variously as the Sibyl, the Spirit, Thomas, his unconscious, and the AI

Voice, which is how he refers to it through the bulk of the later Exegesis.

Snatching Voices

Philip K. Dick not only heard voices in his head—he actively cultivated such hearing.

This alone might strike many as a sign of mental distress. However, the condition of “hearing

751. Ibid, 368.

752. Pamela Jackson, Annotation, in Dick, Exegesis, 63.
 530

voices,” once considered a pathological point of no return, has lost some of its uncanny terror

these days, when unusual forms of cognition are increasingly being reframed if not normalized.

Psychologists have long known that, like other discrete hallucinations, hearing voices is a

relatively common experience within the population at large, and that its eruption into any given

individual’s life does not in itself indicate that psychosis is near. Moreover, seen from the

emerging political perspective of the neuro-diversity movement, voice hearers—with or without

other psychological issues—have themselves increasingly come to reframe the phenomena not as

a pathology to remove but as a condition to live with, perhaps even to benefit from. Moreover,

some anthropologists have come to see the phenomenon as an important dimension of religious

training—in this view, individuals, such as evangelical Christians, practice in order to learn to

recognize the autonomous voice of God or saving spirits within the internal chatter of the mind.

But there are even further reasons to divide Dick’s experience of his AI Voice from the

pathologized scene of “hearing voices.” While Dick sometimes did hear voices—or “receive

information”—during the day, the vast majority of these spectral communications occurred

during states of hypnogogia or dream. This is a crucial point: the dream is a primary site of

2/3/74, perhaps the primary site. Though dreams lack the exotica of pink laser beams and

glimpses of Rome, oneiromancy remains the central field of Dick’s encounters, proving

Gananath Obeyesekere’s point that, in modernity, dreams elude secularization, filling in the

space left when more explicit forms of visionary experience were eclipsed by Enlightenment

mores.753 The whole of the Exegesis is regularly interjected with dreams, whose accounts Dick

interprets as coded communications from Beyond, and whose substance and language sometimes

make their twisty way into his later fictions. Indeed, the composition of The Divine Invasion

753. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Awakened Ones Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 372.
 531

(1981), can be seen to begin with a dream that Dick reports in the late seventies, in which the

Satanic takeover of the Church is revealed, a condition that demands the Second Coming to

appear outside of worldly institutions.754

The first months of 2/3/74 exploded with “hundreds” of extraordinary dreams, many of

which flooded Dick with “information,” sometimes apparently in other languages. Much of this

lore was about religions, and particularly religions and mythology of the Antique World. While

this material often appeared in printing or script, it took a number of other materially mediated

forms. Dick reported to Bush that “as soon as I close my eyes information in the form of printed

matter, visual matter such as photographs, audio stuff in the form of phonograph records—it all

floods over me at a high rate of print-out.”755

We have to be careful here, however. If the phrase “as soon as I close my eyes” is not

simply a figure of speech, then Dick was describing experiences that likely emerged, not within

the dream states traditionally associated with rapid-eye-movement (REM), but with the

sometimes bizarre states that occur as the brain first drifts into sleep. This transition from waking

to sleep is known as hypnagogia, while the corresponding return to waking has come to be called

hypnapompia. Such “hypnoid” states are associated with napping and daydreaming as well as

falling asleep, but despite their ubiquity they are far less discussed in the psychological literature

or the popular discourse of dreams than the immersive narrative enigmas linked to REM. One

general feature of hypnoid states is that they combine the presence of uncanny, dream-like

754. This dream appears in folder 48, and appears in the published Exegesis as [48:828], p. 542. It should be noted
that every effort was taken in the editing of the published Exegesis to include all of Dick’s dream descriptions, as
well as all his descriptions of particular experiences.
755. Dick, Exegesis, 23-24.
 532

phantasmagoria with a detached awareness still more-or-less rooted in the waking, everyday

subject.756

As such, the mixture of states resembles the rare state of lucid dreaming, although in

hypnogogia, the dreamer is not immersed in the figural sensurround of the dream so much as

passively perceiving external and autonomous visual and auditory phenomenon. This perceptual

quality can lead to “the half belief that the imagery is real, and the transient conviction that one is

tuned into some mystical and otherworldly ‘reality’.”757 Andreas Mavromatis, whose

Hypnagogia: the Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep (1987), though

flawed, remains one of the most thorough treatments of the phenomenon, reports that

hypnogogic images are often made up of abstract imagery and sometimes feature printed texts

and writing.758 Dick’s early experience of witnessing eight hours of flash-cut images of

modernist art, though anomalous in length, recalls the abstract visual complexities of

hypnagogia. Such states also feature fragmentary voices, which Mavromatis reports includes

quotations, references to conversations, remarks directed to oneself, “pompous nonsense,” and

“irrelevant sentences containing unrecognizable names.”759

Let us recall some of the messages Dick received, some of which appear in his later

fictions: “Perturbations in the reality field.” “The physical universe is plastic in the face of

mind.” “You must put your slippers on / To walk toward the dawn.” “The God has granted me

756. This mixed state is also represented in simple EEG scans of the brain as it goes to sleep. As the brain moves
from the beta of waking to the lower frequencies of theta and delta associated with sleep, it passes through a
hypnogogic period characterized by notably unstable frequencies.
757. Peter McKellar, “Imagery from the Standpoint of Introspection,” Sheehan, Peter W, and John S Antrobus, The
Function and Nature of Imagery, (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 43.
758. Summarizing research into the visual modality of hypnogogia, Mavromatis writes that these displays, which
are often abstract and sometimes feature words and texts, are characterized by “externality, autonomy, clarity of
detail, brevity of duration, vividness of color, by the diffused quality and ‘internality’ of their illuminations, and the
sense of reality they impart in the subject. See Andreas Mavromatis, Hypnagogia: The Unique State of
Consciousness between Wakefulness and Sleep (London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 81.
759. Ibid.
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his voice, to hear it, to speak it.” Though it is not always clear what state Dick was in when he

overheard these statements, he does provide a nicely textured account of one experience in early

1978, though it describes a message he received years earlier:

I hear a far off quiet voice that is not a human voice; it—she—comforts me. In the dark
of the night she tells me that “St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable
before.” A voice barely audible. In my head. Later she tells me she is a “tutelary spirit,”
and I don’t know what that word means. Tutor? I look it up. It means “guardian.”760

This appears to be a hypnogogic experience, whose message is not drawn from a REM dream

but from a voice “in my head” heard while Dick was lying semi-conscious in bed. Dick, who of

course was familiar with the jargon of altered states, also uses the technical term “hypnogogia”

itself in order to categorize many messages. Late in the Exegesis, he often introduces these

messages in the following fashion:

Hypnogogic: “one of us is dead.” The two selves in me. It must be me and my sister!

Though Dick may have been using this colon formula simply as shorthand, it can be understood

to mean that it is the liminal state itself, rather than the AI Voice, that is speaking. This

ambiguity points to one of the oddities of such twilight communications: their seeming

autonomy and relative sense demands attribution, and yet any external agent so posited would

have to be understood as taking up temporary residence within states of consciousness usually

considered purely interior and psychological. The modern, secular notion of the unconscious

seems a safer bet.

 534

And indeed, throughout the Exegesis, Dick still occasionally attributes his nocturnal

audio and visual texts to the “unconscious.” That said, it bears repeating that Dick had a

capacious, very “seventies” notion of the unconscious that brought together sometimes

contradictory models: Jamesian, Jungian, behaviorist, paranormal, esoteric. Whether we see

these contradictions as a sign of incoherence or the productive use of ambiguity to resist the

premature foreclosure of the unconscious, Dick’s notion of a separate Dreamer within the self

superimposed metaphysics and neurology. For example, in “Man, Android and Machine,” a

speech written in 1976, Dick cites Finnegans Wake and “Brahmanism” to argue for the esoteric,

mytho-poetic view of the world as a dream from which we are struggling to awake. In the same

speech, he also cites Robert Ornstein’s popular work on brain lateralization to suggest that the

right brain uses dreams in order to communicate with the left brain, where the bounded

personality resides: “hence the Dreamer who communicates to us so urgently in the night is

located neurologically, evidently, in our right brain, which is the not-I.”761

Like many literary writers who identified with modernism, Dick also believed that “his”

unconscious was intimately bound up with whatever feature of his psyche enabled him to write

books. Recall Dick’s willingness to put his own dreams into his fictions, as well as his late

declaration to Gregg Rickman that he sometimes considered himself simply a conduit between

his unconscious and the typewriter. Playfully, Dick also underscored this connection between the

unconscious and the typewriter when he insisted in July 1974 that the “goddam typewriter”

wrote his books. But while the uncanny feeling of autonomous language and narrative

production is commonly reported by creative writers, Dick was willing to push the metaphysical

questions raised by the seemingly autonomous character of fictional enunciation. “Let us say that

760. Dick, Exegesis, 278.

761. Dick, Shifting Realities, 220-221.
 535

I am inspired by a creative entity outside my conscious personality to write what I write,” he

wrote to Peter Fitting. “I had imagined it to be my subconscious, but this only begs the question,

What is the subconscious?”762

This vital, Jamesian question was sharpened through Dick’s nighttime textual encounters

with what he called, in his letter to Fitting, his “wordsmith unconscious.” When describing the

elaborately annotated books he sometimes saw in his early 2/3/74 dreams, texts with “scrawly

blue pen or pencil in the margins,” Dick noted that

Someone has been copyediting it, cutting out unnecessary words. My book-writing
unconscious has a concise style. As one would expect from over 23 years of professional
work, cutting and pruning, looking up words in the dictionary. I have so to speak a real
pro for an unconscious.

Here, rather than assume the existence of an independent agent, Dick is willing to attribute the

language he encounters in his dreams to the copy-editing dispositions of his own mind’s trained

dispositions. On the other hand, Dick still personifies these quasi-automatic functions once they

take on autonomy in the dream realm. This “someone” has a recognizably different style then his

own; later he notes that it is willing to craft unliterary phrases like “she will see the sea,” along

with peculiar words like “syntonic.”763

Leaving aside the question of the identity of this “someone” for the moment, we should

emphasize that Dick, as soon as he entered his period of anomalous dreaming, began to practice

with his chatty liminal states. He did not just receive, in other words—he tuned and shaped. For

as with lucid dreams, the depth and retention of hypnogogic experience can be increased through

762. Dick, Exegesis, 13.

763. Ibid, 29.
 536

the application of will, and particularly in learning to engage the threshold of dream with alert

and probing attention. In the document enclosed to Bush in July of 1974, Dick writes

The other night when I found myself thinking, during the hypnogogic state, in Greek, I
managed to snatch a couple of words out of what I believe to be a syntactic sentence. (At
the time I wasn’t positive it was Greek; it remained a problem to check on, today. It was.)
I snatched out:
crypte (–) morphosis764

Surfing the froth of hypnogogia, Dick’s awareness is active and independent enough to perceive

the character of the dream speech (“Greek”) and to then snatch something back. Once again,

Dick wavers on attribution. Though by the time of this writing Dick was convinced that the

Greek voice of his “tutor” belonged to the ancient healer Asklepios—an identification he

jokingly imagines proclaiming to his psychotherapist—he nonetheless here describes finding

“himself” thinking Greek words, a hypnogogic stream that he then self-consciously samples—

from himself, as it were. This is an unusual attribution from Dick, however. Despite invoking the

“unconscious” or his “right brain” at times, Dick is generally prone to leap beyond “himself”

and, armed with often unpersuasive or nebulous “proof,” identify the source of the Voice with an

external, knowing agency.

The point here is not to castigate or overwrite this identification with “explanations,” as

so many critical scholars are wont to do. It is more important to point out that Dick’s

extraordinary dream experiences were the result not only of adventitious factors but also his own

practice, his own discipline of attention, or what T. M. Luhrman calls “inner sense cultivation.”

This emphasis on practice helps shift our account of Dick’s experience away from the question
 537

of truth and reception toward a more participatory and enactionist understanding of how

extraordinary experience comes to be. In When God Talks Back, her admirably balanced study of

contemporary evangelical experience, Luhrman carefully builds the case that, whatever the

ontology, the sense of God’s immediate and autonomous presence is something that is also

cultivated through a complex set of practices and disciplines that are both individual,

collaborative, and collective. Tentative beliefs—which we might assimilate to James’ “as if” or

Dick’s “what if?”—themselves inspire practices that fundamentally shift experience in far more

substantial ways than beliefs themselves. “The point of religious conviction is that the everyday

world is not all there is to reality,” Luhrman argues. “To see beyond, one must change the way

one pays attention.”765

While 2/3/74 is almost always discussed as something that happened to Dick—especially

by Dick himself—it is crucial that we recognize the ways in which Dick himself collaborated

with and cultivated that process. The most obvious example is his regime of orthomolecular

vitamins, though its unclear whether this made any appreciable difference beyond placebo effect.

Dreams, on the other hand, are quite evidently plastic and responsive to the ways we pay

attention to them over time. In this sense, they can made to provide evidence for the social

constructionist argument that it is our preexisting cultural attitudes and languages that shape our

most extraordinary experiences in advance. As we have seen, Dick in some ways brought on the

dreams that helped drive 2/3/74, and that continued to provide new “information” until the end of

his labors. But we must be careful not to miss the enigmatic function of emergence in all this. As

Elliot Wolfson notes in his great dream book, “the notion that experience is hermeneutically

shaped by a preexperiential interpretive scheme affords us the opportunity to discern the extent

764. Ibid, 35.

765. T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, op. cit., 188.
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to which the dream exemplifies the paradox of the oxymoron fictional truth, a truth whose

authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality.”766 This approach takes us

into the heart of Dick’s practice of active fabulation, a practice that takes in not only his fictions

and thoughts about his experiences, but, to a degree, his experiences themselves.

Dreambook

Dick’s dream practice did not only involve the alert sampling of hypnogogia and other

forms of what Dale Pendell calls “interdimensional smuggling.” More conventionally, Dick’s

practice involves hermeneutic operations of interpretation, although it is important to distinguish

the interpretation of individual dreams—alongside or after the dream—from the interpretive

stance that, from the outset, affirms that dreams are worth squeezing for meaning in the first

place. Given how full his nights were with anomalous tongues, Dick in a sense had no choice but

to interpret the concrete fragments of language that took up residence in his own liminal

consciousness. He listened for puns, etymological clues, and other associative resonances.

Hearing the phrase “Perturbations in the reality field” elicited an extensive cross-disciplinary

study the terms “perturbation” and “field” that goes on for pages in the Exegesis.767

Dick researched or tested unfamiliar or nonsense terms to see if they were found in

foreign languages, often with Tessa, who also had a smidgen of knowledge of ancient languages.

In the example quoted in the section above, Dick used his and Tessa’s crude Greek to gloss

“Crypte morphosis” as meaning latent or concealed shape. Recursively, the term then becomes

an analytic concept he deploys throughout the Exegesis, which is of course obsessed with hidden

766. Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, op. cit., 16.
767. Dick, Exegesis, 333-334.
 539

or camouflaged contents, like the phrase “King Felix” embedded in Flow My Tears. In the

following passage, in an even loopier example of such recursion, Dick uses the term to unpack

another dream of encrypted polysemic language:

I saw before me a few sentences from the New Testament which included the name
Jesus. Then this was shown me (I’m not kidding you): the name or word “Jesus” was
drawn open, literally reached down into and opened, to reveal that it was a crypte
morphosis, a code word, made up to conceal first the actual name of the God, which was
Zagreus, and then the word was reshuffled to show that Zeus was within it, too, so that
Zeus and Zagreus were within[…]a “mere” code cover or what they call plaintext cypher,
“Jesus.”[…] It showed me that John Allegro is right: the New Testament is a cypher.768

Here a technical term snatched from a dream helps Dick understand a separate encounter

with a text whose metamorphosis recalls the sorts of condensations, displacements, and

transformations that more frequently mark the images in dreams. The reading of this specific

dream text is also embedded in a larger and more public circuit of readings; in this case, Dick’s

understanding of the controversial Biblical scholar John Allegro’s roundly dismissed arguments

that some of the language of the New Testament is in code. In Allegro’s case, the cyphers point

towards a hidden hallucinogenic mushroom rite, a theme that Dick returns to in The

Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

However, far more important than this specific text is the referential environment of both

Dick’s dream and its interpretation: an environment we can only call comparative religion. In

discovering that the name “Jesus” disguises a name of Dionysus (Zagreus)—a name which in

turn suggests Zeus, who fathered Dionysus according to the Orphic cult—Dick, or his wordsmith

768. Ibid, 83.

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unconscious, is making an exaggerated display of the sorts of associative and historically layered

interpretive moves that came to dominate the understanding of world religion and mythology in

the twentieth century.

We will look more at Dick’s creative (mis)use of the sort of comparative methods found

in scholars of religion like Jung and Eliade in the following section. Here however it is important

to see how these methods were brought to bear on the question of dream, including Dick’s

experience of dream texts and the voices of external, seemingly autonomous agents. As with

many people drawn to comparative religion, particularly in its more popular forms, Dick turned

to the archive of the world’s faiths, magics, and mythologies in order to make sense of his own

anomalous experiences, to provide uncanny encounters a name and a lineage. Given the

universality of dreams in human populations, Dick of course discovered that for most of human

history, dreams served as the royal road, not to the unconscious, but to powerful Others.

This is particularly true of the antique Greco-Roman world that formed Dick’s most

powerful spiritual landscape. As E.R Dodds explains, for the ancient Greeks, a figure met in a

dream might be a god or messenger or ghost; “but whichever it is, it exists objectively in space is

independent of the dreamer.”769 Dick cycled through all these possibilities as well when he

considered the identity of his most persistent internal others, including, initially, the ghost of

James Pike. In the existential psychologist Rollo May’s book Love and Will, Dick also read

about the daimon of Socrates, an intimate guardian that reminded Dick of the voice that once

aided him on a high school physics test. This connection helped Dick elaborate the notion of the

AI Voice—who was usually considered as distinct from the secondary personality—as a tutor or

teacher. This identification also recursively entailed and encouraged Dick’s own continued

hermeneutic obsession with his unfolding dreamtexts.

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Dick also resurrected another dream practice that was widespread in antiquity: the

specifically allegorical reading of dreamtexts as a kind of oracle. “When we dream, there is an

oracle in each of us,” wrote the fourth-century Christian Neoplatonist bishop Synesius, a

disciple of Hypatia. Synesius suggested that one should consult one’s bed as one would the

Delphic Pythia’s tripod: “The god comes to one’s side when one is asleep—this is the whole

system of the initiation.”770 Here, then, is another example of Dick actively engaging his dreams

and hypnogogic experiences as coded communications from sacred beings whose equivocal

displays, which demand allegorical unpacking, turn on the very identity of those sources. In a

February 5 letter to Claudia, Dick writes

I was up to 5 A.M. on this last night. I did something I never did before: I commanded
the entity to show itself to me—the entity which has been guiding me internally since
March. A sort of dream-like period passed then, of hypnagogic images of underwater
cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not a still: a man lay
dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch. He wore a
fawn skin! I rose from bed at once, convinced that I had Dionysos…For hours I studied
everything about Dionysos I could find; nothing about his garb, except “he was dressed
in the Greek style.” Today I found in The Bacchae of Euripides this: “. . . I have fitted the
fawn-skin to their bodies.” It is Dionysos who speaks. He means his followers. And I
have a dim memory that in The Frogs he wears a fawn skin. It is thus shown.771

Here we see how whole-heartedly Dick embraced the allegorical mode: the associations

he builds from the traumatic kernel of his dream—the dead man with a fawn skin—are not the

769. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 104.
770. Cited in Miller, Patricia Cox, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 70-71.
771. Dick, Exegesis, 99. It is worth noting that Tim Powers has pointed to the uncanny and prophetic position of this
dead man’s body. According to Powers, who arrived at Dick’s apartment shortly before the author was taken to the
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free associations of psychoanalysis but the connections and figures unearthed through literary

and comparative research on the archive: The Bacchae and The Frogs confirm the meaning of

the fawnskin. There is something deeply classical in all of this. As Patricia Cox Miller notes,

Greco-Roman dream interpreters saw “the dream as a text in disguise,” a hermeneutical puzzle

that led to an important equation in Antiquity between the allegorical interpretation of sacred

texts and dream experience.772 As Miller explains, Augustine directly compares the dreamer to

the exegete; the former “wanders through various images” just as the latter wanders through

signs. What underlies both modes, and that applies equally to Dick, is the working assumption

that the appearance—of book or dream—possessed oracular power, which is to say that the

language it expressed was at once portentous, equivocal, and almost infinitely extensible. “As in

dream divination, so also in allegorical ‘divination’ of dream-texts, human subjectivity is shaped

by the enlargement of its sphere of reference.”773

These referential dynamics, at once hermeneutic and oneiric, are key to understanding

Dick’s practice in the Exegesis. On the one hand, it is clear from our discussion how much

Dick’s reading and expectations shaped his dream encounters, a condition that seems to

undermine his perception (and desire) that his dreams were crafted by an external agency beyond

even his own wordsmith unconscious. On the other hand, the unusual degree of textuality—

written and spoken—in Dick’s dreams also create an uncanny counter-movement. As Dick

brought his own texts into his dreams, so did his dreams leak into the way Dick practiced with

his texts. The reams of writing glimpsed in his dreams, printed and hand-written, inevitably

converge with the reams of writing Dick himself was producing in his correspondence, his

hospital for the last time in early 1982, Dick had collapsed “between the coffee table and the couch.” See Tim
Powers, “Introduction,” in Dick, The Selected Letters: 1975-1976, ix-x.
772. Miller, Dreams, 74.
773. Ibid, 98.
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fiction, and especially his Exegesis. And one of the methods of establishing this convergence

was precisely the hermeneutic operations of reference. In other words, along with the content of

interpretation, it was the apparatus of commentary that broke down the barrier between dream

and book, enlarging both the sphere of Dick’s experiences and what Burton calls the

“information forms” that emerge within the Exegesis.

One remarkable example of this referential logic occurs in folder 50, when the recursive,

self-referential quality of the Exegesis goes haywire. At the top of page 37, Dick ends a sentence

with an asterisk that refers to a small chunk of footnoted text below, which concerns the presence

of Christ. Between these chunks of text lies the brief description of a dream in which Dick opens

one of his own books and discovers a footnote that reads: “this is a gloss in the text for ‘I love

you.’” The waking Dick associates this book with Tears, and the gloss with the cryptic message

King Felix. On the right margin of this account, Dick then parenthetically defines the term

“gloss” as a difficult term needing explanation. This explanation, already doubled, nonetheless

seems to have required another explanation, since Dick added to the parenthetical statement

another footnote, now using his usual bracketed numeral (1). This footnote offers a variant

reading of the meaning of “gloss,” defining it not as the explanation of an obscure term but

instead as another term for the obscure reference itself — in this case, the cypher-text Felix. A

parenthetical amendment about the Greek variant glossa in turn spawns another reference mark,

a circled (x) that leads to yet another iterated definition. Finally, Dick reiterates that Felix,

indeed, is such a glossa: a lossy obscurity whose invisible message is, at least in its original

context, “at odds with what is apparent.”774

And what is apparent here, and odd, is the Exegesis reading and writing itself, like a book

in a dream, or like a book made of dreams. In his own remarkable book about books and dreams,
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Peter Lamborn Wilson asks us to remember why Moslem and Jewish dream interpreters

traditionally claim that the “dream follows the interpretation” (literally, “follows the mouth”).

The dream exudes a surplus of meaning, an excess of codes and puns and allusions. Once the

dream is spoken, part of this surplus is loosed into the waking world, where it inevitably begins

to congeal. The surplus becomes a text, something public and shared. And yet this is what the

dream offered all along, for the dream itself is the first teacher of the sign or script, since it

detaches images from their material basis, doubles them, recombines them, inscribes them anew.

But without some form of condensation, this phantasmagoria simply drifts: “without script, so to

speak (as a doubling of the image), the dream itself would lack resolution, completion,

fulfillment.” Thus the dream follows the mouth, “and out of this movement, the book

emerges.”775

In some of the traditions that Wilson investigates, to dream of a book is already a sign of

initiation, one of those rare initiations that are bestowed not by masters but by the oneiric or

sacred imagination itself. Dick, seeking an initiation he could never fully realize, or else had

received and forgotten long before, in some sense tried to port the initiatory book he dreamt into

the real life of typewritten pages and rants scribbled with a ball-point pen. The Exegesis that

resulted may not initiate on its own, at least for most readers, but with its vast referentiality and

recursive auto-commentary, its phantasmic marginalia and parasitic citations, the text itself

dissolves into the sort of marginal, hypnogogic space that, perhaps inevitably, becomes a space

of encounter.

774. Dick, Exegesis, 280-282.

775. Peter Lamborn Wilson, ‘Shower of Stars’ Dream & Book (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996), 86-87.
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Sacred Seeking

Between his extraordinary dreams and his even more bizarre bouts of high weirdness,

Dick found himself processing forms of experience that, whatever their origins, took the form of

narrative encounters, even “texts,” that demanded to be interpreted. However, despite the

traumatic aspect of these events, Dick did not turn towards medicalized explanations and

psychobiological accounts that might banish or at least deflate the exotic otherwordliness and

aura of significance that he felt. Instead, he sought to simultaneously corral and intensify the

arresting peculiarity of 2/3/74, which he did partly by locating the events within existing currents

of human thought. By approaching theology, myth, philosophy in a persona and esoteric mode,

Dick hoped that he might simultaneously amplify and clarify the meaning of 2/3/74 and

constrain its radical singularity. However, Dick found himself in a most unusual cultural location

from which to launch his hermeneutic engines. If Dick had lived within a time of tradition or an

orthodox community of interpretation, the available templates to organize the meaning of such

experiences—and possibly to seed them in the first place—would be relatively constrained in

number. But he did not live in such a time or in such a community.

Dick was instead a psychologically unique and independent autodidact largely making

his own way through what was, in terms of the maps for extraordinary experience, a radical and

profligate time. Like many intellectuals who found themselves in at least loose alignment with

the counterculture, Dick was an essentially secular or philosophical thinker, deeply marked by

psychological and existential discourses, who nonetheless was drawn to both the far fringes of

experience and the larger, loopier questions of metaphysics. Such individuals do belong to the

larger “society of seekers” that Campbell associates with his notion of cultic milieu, but as
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Campbell underscores, this society is marked by its informality and tolerance for individualism

and eccentricity.

Despite his brief time at St Columba’s, his peripheral relationships with priests and

churches in Southern California, and his short mail-order stint with the Rosicrucian organization

AMORC, Dick lived outside the more bounded context of a faith community. Like so many

seekers of the era, what he had instead was access to a growing mountain of texts and reproduced

images, as well as the loose-limbed communities of friendship and interpretation—stoned or

otherwise—surrounding some of these texts. In the postwar period, such seekers could not only

access the usual mainline theological sources, but also new translations of Asian classics,

reprints of occult and esoteric lore, proto-New Age novelties, paranormal literature, pulp novels,

and secondary sources on indigenous mythology and mystical practices written by public

intellectuals and scholars. In other words, where a visionary in an earlier era might find

themselves located within a specific and homogenous textual tradition of interpreting religious

experience, Dick found himself facing both a global archive of traditions and a mutant

marketplace of novelties.

The notion of textual tradition as a shaper of personal mystical experience has become a

central element in the scholarship of mysticism. In his early work on visionary Kabbalah, Elliot

Wolfson makes the point that, insofar as a given mystic or visionary is operating within a

religious tradition, the very “immediacy” that stands as such a defining characteristic of their

experiences is itself, and necessarily, mediated by previous discourse. In some sense, this stance

aligns Wolfson with Stephen Katz and other contextualists, who, as noted earlier, have been

arguing something like this point for decades in their attacks on the sort of sui generis mysticism

offered by perennialist thinkers like James, Jung, or Huxley. For these latter thinkers, of course,
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the potential for mystical experiences is a sort of organ in humanity’s universal psychological

makeup, one that is capable of being stimulated largely outside of cultural context.

But Wolfson is more sophisticated than the usual social constructionists here. Rather than

reducing religious experience to an iteration of previous scripts and effects of cultural practices,

he instead identifies “a dialectical relationship…between past visions recorded in literary texts

and the present visionary experience, making the new experience, in effect, the reenvisioning of

an original event.” Wolfson puts the phenomenological emphasis on re-visioning, a reiteration

that is paradoxically original. In this way, he shows how the effects of tradition on both the

content and dynamics of visionary experience can be acknowledged without sacrificing the

novelty or immanence of its visionary reassemblage. But, importantly, this “way of seeing is

simultaneously a way of reading”—in other words, such revisionary mysticism, however visual

its expression, is inextricable from hermeneutics. Along these lines, Wolfson invokes Michael

Lieb’s description of a “visionary hermeneutics that is both self-perpetuating and self-

authorizing.”776 These two terms are crucial for us, for Dick’s Exegesis is notable not only for its

commitment to visionary hermeneutics, but for the intensity with which Dick pursues a form of

self-authorization whose perpetual frustration is almost designed to ceaselessly perpetuate the

process.

Wolfson is speaking within the context of medieval Jewish mysticism, of course, an

immensely subtle but nonetheless highly bounded and singular tradition—one whose specific

hermeneutical strategies he believes ultimately erases the very distinction between experience

and interpretation. But what happens to the practice of visionary hermeneutics when such

traditionally circumscribed bodies of text and oral tradition dissolve into a heterogenous

776. Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism
(Princeton University Press, 1997), 53.
 548

marketplace of pulp pocketbooks and inexpensive translations, pop scholarship and psychology,

the fictions and fabulations of occult revival, and the modernist legacy of avant-garde

primitivism and surrealist delire? For modern seekers, striving to be visionary hermenauts, the

textual context is something that is built through association, assemblage and bricolage, as the

creative juxtaposition and superimposition of cross-cultural texts, past and present, became a

central and necessary practice. In other words: comparison.

This is partly why the comparative methods associated with Mircae Eliade and Carl

Jung—especially popular texts like Jung’s Man and His Symbols or Eliade’s Shamanism:

Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, both translated in 1964—and texts like Huxley’s The Perennial

Philosophy (1945) and Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man (1958), became so important to

what we might call “seeker hermeneutics” in the first decades of the postwar period. These

sources provided readers with comparativist templates for drawing a wide variety of texts,

traditions, gods and practices together, often into an archetypal and transcultural ‘spirituality’

more or less rooted in psychology and known, at least at times, as perennialism.

As a scholarly method, comparison is found at the very origins of the modern study of

religion, a study that in many ways was initiated out of Christianity’s need to understand rivals

and potential converts on an increasingly global stage. Here the great example of such rigorous

associational webs of anthropological resonance is Frazer’s massive The Golden Bough: A Study

in Comparative Religion (1890 and beyond), whose vast horde of material settles down over the

course of thousands of pages into some core motifs or patterns associated with fertility and the

recapitulation of a dying and rising god. As a tool, comparison obviously need not be attached to

the sort of metaphysical agenda later put forward by perennialists like Huxley and Huston Smith;
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brilliantly, Jonathan Z. Smith has both discussed and demonstrated the use of rigorous

comparativist rubrics in the service of strictly critical religious scholarship.777

Here however I am not interested in defending comparison as a methodology, nor in

strictly defining and differentiating forms of comparison. Far more simply, I simply want to

suggest ways that the general approach of comparison was received among postwar seekers as a

set of practices accompanied by a form of permission. One of these practices involved the

distillation of shared patterns of phenomenology out of disparate, juxtaposed, but often

peculiarly resonant materials drawn from the anthropological, aesthetic, textual, and symbolic

record of world myth and religion. The other, arguably more important procedure involved the

second-order comparison (often only implicit) between these essentially premodern patterns and

the predicament of the modern psychological or existential subject. Depending on its own

therapeutic or critical bent, this second-order comparison could stress continuity or discontinuity.

So, for example, Jung’s claims for the collective unconscious suggested that alienated moderns

already had access to the revitalizing store of archaic archetypes lurking below the surface of

consciousness. At the same time, in works like The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and

History (1954) and Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959), Eliade offered patterns

and topologies that implicitly demonstrated the bleak existential environs of “modern man,” who

discovers that a previous era’s pursuit of reason and Enlightenment had landed him inside the

iron cage of disenchanted history and materialist ontology.

Of course, the act of comparing religion itself is a product of the cage. Indeed, one of the

ironies of religious comparison as a postwar culture of meaning-making is that the very features

777. See, among a vast number of examples, Jonathan Z. Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” in Jonathan Z.
Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19-35. Also
“When the Bough Breaks,” in Jonathan Z Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden:
Brill, 1978), 208-239.
 550

that were necessary to produce the discourse in the first place—scientific psychology,

technological colonialism, the knowledge production protocols of the modern university—

needed to be repressed or camouflaged in order to generate what amounted to a therapeutic

discourse more spiritual than it was humanist. Contemporary critics of Eranos scholars like Jung,

Eliade, and Henri Corbin prefer the term “religionist” to describe this therapeutic orientation.778

Comparison also presented itself, again, as a form of permission, tactily allowing an

almost poetic practice of assembling and revisioning the global archive of myth and religion for

contemporary psychospiritual needs, a practice that, though stretched far beyond the boundaries

of academe, nonetheless depended for its legitimacy on scientific or at least scholarly and

psychological authority. For a time, the game worked, and the operations of religious comparison

extended themselves far into the seeker culture at large, where they served to both inspire and

ground the cultic milieu’s eclectic and informal assemblage of symbolic meaning systems as

well as its growing need to map the phenomenological fringes associated with “altered states of

consciousness.” In its quest to find a phenomenological essence between superficial diversity,

religious comparison also became an integral part of esoteric discourse, driven by the operating

assumption that the commonalities between traditions increased the closer you came to the

intimate sources of experience within. However, in the context of the cultic milieu, it is also

important to emphasize the presence of “secular” material, often of a paranormal, existentialist,

or more conventionally psychological nature.

778. For more on this critique, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 277-313.
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Gnostic Comparativism

Dick’s Exegesis, as well as his later essays and aspects of VALIS, represents a critical

example—sometimes brilliant, sometimes batshit—of how the resources of comparativist

thinking were brought to bear on one individual’s extraordinary experiences—experiences that

were always already marked to a certain degree by this widened postwar world of resonating

symbolic reference. Armed with a copy of the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as

well as Paul Edward’s well-respected Encyclopedia of Philosophy and occultural candy like

Chariots of the Gods?!, Dick dove through times and places and texts in order to hunt down

fragments, clues, and glimmering reflections that might help him clarify his enigmatic

experiences and construct them into a site of illumination.

A list of important proper names in the Exegesis and the related referential universe of

VALIS would include philosophers like Parmenides, Spinoza, Heidegger, Whitehead, Hegel, and

Bergson; religious thinkers or esotericists like St. Paul, Sankara, Bruno, Boehme, Calvin, Tillich,

Harthshorne, and de Chardin; psychologists like Jung, Julian Jaynes, Ludwig Binswanger, and

Robert Ornstein; writers like William Burroughs, Stanislaw Lem, George Herbert, and Joyce;

and historians of religion like Mircae Eliade, Hans Jonas, and Frances Yates. Throughout his

engagement with these and other thinkers, Dick reveals himself to be an autodidact in both the

creative and problematic sense of that term. As mentioned above, Dick was not nearly as familiar

with the primary sources of the religious, mythological, and philosophical material that he drew

from as he was with psychological literature, and his readings (and misreadings) can sometimes

be loose, hasty, and ill-informed.

 552

Nonetheless, it would be uncharitable to see Dick as nothing but a middle-brow dilettante

armed with a set of encyclopedias and a delusional compulsion to forge associations. Dick’s

intellectual work in the Exegesis, threaded as well through VALIS, presents a rich, manic,

excessive, and sometimes desperate model of visionary hermeneutics—of textual “seeking.” A

scholar of religion, and particularly of esotericism, can only be struck by Dick’s startling,

ingenious, and sometimes visionary engagement with theological systems, world mythologies,

and the archetypal magma of the creative religious imagination. If he didn’t always perform the

operation with finesse, Dick knew what he was doing when he compared religions, and he also

knew that the practice of comparison also constituted a peculiarly modern stance, a move in a

growing game of assembling religious meanings and metaphysical systems in an era of

psychology, cultural difference, and growing linguistic self-consciousness. As Jeffrey Kripal

remarks, “Dick understood himself to be a kind of gnostic comparativist, that is, he saw the

deepest truth of things as being available to us in the history of religions, but also as ‘splintered

up over thousands of miles and years.’”779

A fine example of such gnostic comparison is Dick’s discussion of his inner voice in a

letter to Claudia Bush in July of 1974, at a time when the white heat of the initial events was just

beginning to cool and the first Exegesis letters were composed. “I would not wish to confine the

identity of my inner voice with one special term such as the Christian term ‘Holy Spirit,’ which

implies belief in a formal doctrine,” he writes, aligning himself explicitly with the distinction,

endemic to seekers, between doctrinaire “religion” and a more provisional and ad hoc

“spirituality” (though Dick very rarely uses the latter term). Dick’s experiences were too

individual, too singular for dogma. “To me it is a female spirit and this fits into no known

religion, at least none today.” This is a bold (and untrue) claim against tradition, and yet he

779. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 280.

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immediately follows it with a brief excursus on, of all things, the exploration of the history of

religious traditions as a research protocol.

Much of my view since March comes from non-Christian/Jewish sources, such as

Hinduism, from Persia—then later on the Pythagorean mystical cults of Greece and
Rome. Much of it is Gnostic, Orphic, but much is still a part of present day religious
reality; it is both heretical and orthodox, so it is everything. It would please no one,
satisfy no one, and offend everybody.780

Here we see Dick reflecting on his own practice of seeking through the global encyclopedia with

an eye towards discovering a counter-normative position or thread that might resolve the

meaning of the voice and his other squirrelly experiences in a way that would affirm both

traditional sources and “present day religious reality.” But we also sense Dick enjoying the

practice of researching itself, not so much discovering his position as constructing it. In the letter,

Dick is aware that he has built himself a crossroads or point of intersection both in and outside of

traditions, between global and singular, orthodox and heretical. Elsewhere in the Exegesis,

however, Dick would frequently decide upon and enthusiastically declare a specific religious

identity, usually as a Christian or, less often but consistently, as a Gnostic; sometimes he would

expand his “I” to Whitmanesque proportions and take in all the world’s faith communities.781

But even his most orthodox positions—which can, in relationship to abortion and homosexuality,

appear quite “conservative”—would themselves almost inevitably begin to morph.

780. Dick, Selected Letters: 1974, 172.

781. “I can say I am a Buddhist or even the Buddha, that in Brahmanist terms I have an avatar in me; I am an
Orphic, a Neoplatonist, a Christian, a hermetic—all these statements are true; and also I have to some extent
formulated my own system (as Bruno did). I have seen God but it was not God; it was more (and I have a
cybernetics-biological model). I am with Boehme perhaps most of all — and with his teacher, Paracelsus, most of
all.” Dick, Exegesis, 401-2.
 554

Recall the association Dick makes between Jesus Christ and Dionysus/Zagreus, a

Nietzschean coincidentia oppositorum that he returns to throughout the Exegesis. Though Dick

is singularly focussed on Christ in the Exegesis, his Christ also wears a mask. In one 1978 folder,

Dick offered a speculative “but probably accurate” identification of this entity as “Shiva-

Cernunnos-Dionysus-Christ-St. Sophia.” As if this hyphenated portmanteau god wasn’t

ecumenical enough, Dick also declares that it is “Greek, Hindu, Iranian, Jewish, Celtic,

Christian, Manichaean and Lord knows what else (Buddha too).”

Here we might say that Dick finds himself on top of that perennialist mountain peak

where all paths converge. “Mani was right when he saw all the religions as one.”782 But Dick’s

perennialism is a peculiar sort, one that stretches to encompass the secular as well. Indeed, a

number of Dick’s revelations suggested that the true identity of Dick’s shape-shifting God was

the humanist scholar Erasmus, whose presence in Dick’s phantasmic theater indicates the

author’s continued secular and existential identity. Dick does not so much rest at the mountain

top, where all local forms die aways, as dance through an endlessly unfolding landscape where

each new element at once resolves and displaces the spirit moving through him, a spirit that in

many ways becomes the very differential shift between elements in the archive. Here we should

recall Foucault’s constructionist comments on the modern imaginary initiated by Flaubert’s

Temptation of St. Anthony: “The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or

compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstices of repetitions and

commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the intervals between books.”783 With Dick, of

course, this “phenomenon of the library” has been condensed even more, rendered pocket-sized

and paperbacked: even the library has condensed into the encyclopedia.

782. Dick, Exegesis, 282.

 555

As James Burton reminds us, Dick composed the Exegesis in part by assembling and

reassembling “object-ideas.” As such, he does not follow other perennialists in clearing the air of

dogma and cultural specificity in order to get at the universal phenomenological marrow.

Instead, inspired by his eccentric experiences, he hyperactively links or “laminates” references

upon one another until, at the extremes, specificities are lost, and the collage threatens to

fragment into a kind of primal chaos that remains, nonetheless, singular. In his discussion of

VALIS, which imports the referential universe of the Exegesis through the labors of the character

Horselover Fat, the literary critic Christopher Palmer complains that Fat’s feverish, eclectic and

encyclopedic speculations reflect a “retreat into textuality,” a movement of “rhapsodic

postmodernist restlessness” within which texts only refer to other texts until all real difference is

lost.784

However, while Palmer recognizes that one of the genres or discourses that the novel

splices is a religious one, he seems unaware that Fat’s recombinant “syncretism”—as Rossi

identifies it—is a basic hallmark of esoteric speculations, at least over the last few centuries and

most probably before. In her magisterial history of esoteric or “metaphysical” currents in

American religion, Catherine Albanese returns time and again to “the practice of

combinativeness so cherished among religious metaphysicians.”785 Long before postmodernity,

occult texts like Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) presented dense collages of cross-cultural

references and juxtapositions of appropriated and modified chunks of material, creating what the

poet Robert Duncan called a “midden heap” of quotations and unacknowledged borrowings.

Judge Schreber too made his own moves toward comparative religion in the context of his

783. Foucault, Michel, and Donald F. Bouchard, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews (Cornell University Press, 1980), 91.
784. Palmer, 228-233.
785. Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 423
 556

extraordinary experiences and delusions. For Schreber, human souls combine within faith

traditions into different “rays,” each of which would play upon his nervous system in turn: the

Jehovah rays, the Aryan rays, the Zoroastrian rays. Schreber also ties the binary godforms he

identified—the Zoroastrain Ariman and Ormuzd—to “identical” figures like Woten and Jupiter,

on the one hand, and Balder, Bielebog, and Poseiden on the other. 786 While Dick’s restlessness

is remarkable, his recombinations are not.

As argued above, Dick’s plunge into rhapsodic webs of “textuality” also reflects the

textuality that was already woven into his dreams and visions. The mysterious action of his

unconscious wordsmith, obsessed as it was with the religions of Antiquity, in turn inspired

Dick’s own metaphysical fascination with sacred semiotics as it was organized into the ancient

and polyvalent figures of the Logos, the figure of Wisdom-Sophia, and the Torah. Much more

could be said of Dick’s philosophical and visionary engagement with these ancient metaphysical

topoi, but they could all be said to embody a mode of semiosis capable of mediating between the

ordinary “textuality” of scripture, books, and encyclopedias into a visionary hermeneutics where

experience and interpretation become indistinguishable. Here we should recall again Augustine’s

own comparison between the dreamer and the allegorical exegete, each wandering through an

associational word of pregnant images that always point to more signifiers. Origin went so far as

to suggest that the allegorical method of interpretation was itself oneiric, and that “the holy

books breathe the spirit of plenitude.” 787 Fat may be mad, as Dick himself frequently suggests.

But he is good, and hardly postmodern, company.

With Burton’s comments about the materialist basis of the Exegesis in mind, I want to

emphasize here that while I am focussing on Dick’s comparativist hermeneutics here, I am doing

786. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 30.
787. Miller, Dreams, 92.
 557

so in part to bring forward the operative logic of its “informational forms,” and particularly the

conjunctive logic of the metamorphic networks it builds. Part of Dick’s metaphysical genius,

after all, was to reawaken idealist metaphysics through technological and therefore material

media. What results is what we might call is a menagerie of “allegorical machines”; that is, of

machines that function as allegories for all manner of phenomena associated with human

consciousness and affectivity, and that simultaneously serve as allegories of technology itself as

it morphs the human condition. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, we have

three significant allegorical machines: Mercer box, the Penfield Mood Organ, and the Voight-

Kampff empathy testing device. Dick’s allegorical machines tend to constrain the idealism that

overtly motivates so much of his metaphysics. Like Schreber, who insists in the first sentence of

his weird book that the human soul is a physical instrument, Dick balanced his dualistic idealism

with a canny and very S-F sense that mind is information and that information is stuff. And as

stuff, information is always marked by the effects of its own material inscription and

vulnerability to the noise and interference that, within the circuit, can nonetheless signify or

enact transcendence.

Dick’s visionary hermeneutics, which commingles with his mystical understanding of

Torah, receives a remarkable expression in one of the allegorical machines that appears in 1981’s

The Divine Invasion. The holoscope is a version of the Bible “expressed as layers at different

depths” within a multi-colored hologram,

each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-
dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read.
According to the tilt of the axis of observation, differing messages could be extracted.
Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became
 558

a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color.
Throughout it red and gold pulsed, with strands of blue.

This fantastic device, at once aesthetic and technical, image and text, captures the paradoxically

postmodern and premodern dimensions of Dick’s vision of sacred hermeneutics. The holoscope

is at once a technology of infinite interpretive potential and a work of art, or more properly an

“icon,” that incarnates a fecund matrix of divine mind. Roger J. Stilling argues that the

holoscope, in approximating the “immaterial existence of information in the mind,” becomes a

metaphor for the consciousness of the reader of Dick’s novel.788 But the holoscope equally

insists on technical maneuvers and the material forms that information takes in a text treated as a

multidimensional matrix. Comparison, in other words, is operationalized. “If you learned how

you could gradually tilt the temporal axis, the axis of true depth, until successive layers were

superimposed and a vertical message—a new message—could be read out. In this way you

entered into a dialogue with Scripture; it became alive.”789 And yet the dialogic life of the

holoscope, its “I-Thou,” is instantiated within a technical operation drawn from media.

“Superimposition was the critical factor.”790

Recall that for Derrida, superimposition describes the strategy of commenting on another

text by incorporating its own repetitions, of “superimprinting” one text upon the other, and

thereby moving beyond juxtaposition towards a more subtle criticism whereby a text mimes its

object of study. According to Gregory Ulmer, who reminds that with superimposition Derrida

moves from collage to photography, this superimprinting “is an attempt to devise a system of

reference or representation which works in terms of differance, with its reversible temporality.”

788. Discussed in Jason P. Vest, The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick (Scarecrow Press, 2009), 131.
789. Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion (Timescape, 1982), 60-62.
790. Ibid, 62.
 559

Indeed, for Dick superimposition is principally a figure of such time slips. Most famously, the

term describes the “return to Rome” that Dick experience; in VALIS, the ancient city’s

appearance in and as Orange County is compared to a “superimposition montage.” However,

Dick’s other uses of the term are also suggestive. Within the Exegesis, he uses it to describe the

overlap of the various personalities he hosted, as well as the merger of brain hemispheres.

Perhaps most revealing is his characterization, in a letter to a book editor, of the

“superimpositionary method” he used in his best novels, a layering of signifiers and frames of

reference that, in the end, may be indistinguishable from comparison as an art of the archive.791

As such, the holoscope serves as a marvelous allegory for the visionary hermeneutics of

the Exegesis, whose endless meanings reveal themselves through formal resonances and

statistical recurrences, through constantly “tilting” perspectives and the proper flick of the

interpretive wrist. Appropriately, the holoscope owes some of its visionary hermeneutics to the

pages of the Exegesis itself, or at least from a hypnagogic vision Dick records in his diary.

Hearing the repeated fragment “and he is alive,” Dick sees a luminous and finely woven red and

gold tetragrammaton that rises from the page “like a glowing scarab” and pulses in synchrony

with the auditory phrase.792

At first glance, one might presume the “he” here to refer to Christ. And yet it may be

more fit to link the pronoun to the text itself, both the holy name of God and, by metonymic

extension, the cosmos of Scripture. Such living and sometimes determining texts are found

throughout Dick’s work, from the holoscope to the I Ching to Spectowsky’s book How I Rose

from the Dead in my Spare Time and So Can You in A Maze of Death to the wub-fur animated

copy of De Rerum Natura in “Not By its Cover” (1968). It would be fair to extend this list to

791. Phiiip K. Dick, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1977-1979 (Underwood Books, 1993), 16.
792. Dick, Exegesis, 545; also see annotation on 542.
 560

include the Exegesis itself, with its patterns of superimpositions, and its myriad pulsing threads.

There are a myriad of strands one might follow within the overwhelming, transtermporal

hermeneutic weave of the Exegesis. For the remainder of this chapter, I want to tug out one small

but highly significant thread: a shred of ancient scripture that, not coincidentally, tells a story of

awakening and anamnesis through the lively intervention of texts.

The Hymn of the Signal

The Hymn of the Soul is one name given by translators to a numinous fable embedded in

the Acts of Thomas, a third century pseudo-epigraphical Christian text, most likely of Syriac

origin, that gives account of the journeys, trials and death of the apostle in the East.793 The

Hymn, which is an originally independent text framed as a song that Thomas sings to his fellow

prisoners, is a fable of remembrance and home-coming whose arresting vision of spiritual

awakening is embedded in a story with the imaginal economy of a fairy tale. Dick first tells the

story in a letter written to Claudia Bush in February 1975. He is, once again, discussing the

slumbering immortal spirit that was reawakened through the fish sign, the same “external

disinhibiting symbol” through which those who knew Christ were originally “engrammed.”

Unfortunately, as he explains, the fish sign had been obliterated by the symbol of the cross,

leaving our metanoia “programming” capacities latent and largely untapped. Then, seemingly

out of nowhere, Dick quotes directly from the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

793. Albertus Frederik Johannes Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (BRILL, 2003),
113. For a general background on the complexities of the text, see Klijn, 1-4.
 561

The theological doctrine of the soul and the myth about its celestial home, its fall, and its
redemption were inseparable. The sequence is beautifully told in the “Hymn of the
Soul”…The hero of the Hymn, who represents the soul of man, is born in the Eastern (the
Yonder) Kingdom; immediately after his birth, he is sent by his parents on a pilgrimage
into the world with instructions to take a pearl from the mouth of a dragon in the sea.
Instead of wearing his heavenly garment, he dresses in earthly clothes, eats earthly food,
and forgets his task. Then his parents send a letter to rouse him. As soon as he has read
the letter, he awakes and remembers his task, takes the pearl, and begins the homeward
journey. On the way, his brother (The Redeemer) comes to accompany him and leads him
back home to his father’s palace in the east.794

The Britannica concludes that the myth “is a figurative representation of the theological

doctrine of the soul’s fall and its return to heaven.”795 Bentley Layton, an important scholar of

Gnosticism, similarly declared the Hymn an allegory of the soul’s descent and return from the

body, which is represented by the local clothes the protagonist must don in order to disguise

himself. Reflecting the rationalist spirit of scholarship, Layton provides a structuralist grid in his

introduction to the text in The Gnostic Scriptures, which links elements in the story to features of

Platonic myth and images in other, so-called Thomasine texts related to the Hymn, including the

famous Gospel of Thomas.796 However, in treating the Hymn as a philosophical allegory, we risk

flattening something Dick recognized even in the clipped Britannica paraphrase: the Hymn’s

peculiar power as a story, a diagetical virtual reality which sways readers and listeners not by

doctrine but by fictional figure and event. Whatever the “school” of the anonymous author, the

simple form of the story enables the text to speak meaningfully to a variety of religious

orientations and traditions. Augustine, for example, tells us that the Hymn was widely in use

794. Dick, Exegesis, 93.

795. Ibid.
796. See Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (SCM, 1987), 366-370.
 562

among the Manichaeans, and allusions to it are found in the Manichaean Psalms.797 At the same

time, the text remained popular for Eastern Orthodox believers, which we know partly through

the numerous redactions of the Acts of Thomas that expunge the most heretical passages of that

text. In other words, many encounters can find themselves layered onto the narrative topography

of the Hymn.

Dick was certainly overcome with the resonance. To Bush, Dick claims that he had first

come across the Hymn only a day or two before writing; as soon as he read it, “I knew I had

found the key which put together just about everything I’ve been thinking, learning and

experiencing.”798 To prove his exuberant point, Dick immediately narrates, once again, the

delivery woman scene, after which he asks Bush, “Can you see how close this is to the ‘Hymn of

the Soul’?” In this iteration of the scene, though, he adds a crucial detail: he says he later went to

the pharmacy looking for the woman but found “they had no idea who she was, what her name

was, or where she had gone, but she was gone, forever.” This mysterious vanishing, coupled with

an enigmatic not-knowing that is made almost mythic through the poetic cadence of the writing,

is in turn linked by Dick to his own supposed lack of knowledge about the phenomenon of

anamnesis itself: “as I’m sure you realize I did not know, had never heard of, such matters within

the human heart, or mind, or history.”799

As noted above, this sort of disavowal of knowledge recurs throughout the Exegesis, and

it is often proclaimed in relationship to knowledge Dick already possesses. For example, it bears

mentioning that, similar to the Boehme flashback noted above, Dick’s letter to Bush is most

likely not the first mention of the Hymn in Dick’s diary. In an undated entry that appears between

797. Harold W. Attridge, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 6 (Bantam Doubleday Bell), 531;
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/actsthomas.html. (Accessed May 2013).
798. Dick, Exegesis, 93.
799. Ibid, 94.
 563

two letters dated December 23, 1974 and January 29, Dick addresses the topic of anamnesis,

specifically the long sleep of the right hemisphere, which he casts as “the seat of the

unconscious.”800

The moment at which it remembers (is disinhibited by the gold fish sign, the letter, etc.;
cf. Epistle of St. Thomas) is the moment at which the Kingship of God, the Perfect
Kingdom, floods back into being: back into awareness of itself, that it is Here; and it is
here Now.801

There is no extant Epistle of St. Thomas, so we have every reason to believe that Dick was here

referring to the Hymn, the song embedded in the Acts of Thomas. Though Dick most likely wrote

this extract only a few weeks before his letter to Bush, the discrepancy still underscores Dick’s

desire to be surprised by knowledge he already has.

As readers of Dick’s earlier letters know, Dick was an erudite man with a great memory,

and, like many autodidacts, liked to show off. Yet in the Exegesis, amidst the research and

knowledge he displays (both to correspondents and to himself), we often find the opposite

pattern: Dick claims to be unaware of something he already knows. Why?

One possibility is that, unconsciously at least, Dick yearned to recapitulate the structure

of anamnesis itself: the sudden re-emergence of knowledge ‘already’ known from a state of

occlusion. As such, while the Exegesis is stuffed with knowing, it is also regularly punctuated

with forgetting, a forgetting that in turn sets up a subsequent remembering or unconscious return

of knowledge. For Dick, recalled knowledge was coterminous with awakening; as he writes, “to

800. It must be mentioned again that the sequence of undated materials in the Exegesis is no proof of their date of
composition, though all the dated items in folder 4 are in chronological sequence.
801. Dick, Exegesis, 62.
 564

remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable.”802 In this way, Dick plays hide-and-

seek with himself, staging his “ahas!” in advance, performing a hermeneutics of forgetting and

remembering that transforms already written knowledge into a goad for awakening. In this way,

the iteration linked with the already-written character of scripts is side-stepped in order to stage

an experience that exceeds or ruptures the mere circulation of signs.

In the terms of Hans Jonas, whose influential account of Gnosticism Dick was certainly

familiar with by the end of the seventies, the letter in the Hymn literalizes the “call from

without,” whereby “the transmundane penetrates the enclosure of the world and makes itself

heard therein as a call.”803 Dick’s fiction had already played host to some remarkable examples

of such transmundane calls. In Ubik (1969), a group of commercial psychics with “anti-telepath”

powers visit the moon, where one of them—their boss Glen Runciter—is apparently killed in a

bomb explosion. In the world of the novel, the recent dead are able to be stabilized in a “half-

life” state that allows them to continue communicating with the living for a limited period of

time. But upon returning to earth and getting Runciter’s corpse into cold-pac and his spirit into

half-life, the remaining crew are not able to contact him. They also notice that ordinary objects

rapidly decay all around them—milk sours, cigarettes go stale. The crew start receiving peculiar

messages, apparently from Runciter: they hear his voice yammering on the hotel phone, find his

name on a matchbox and a note from him inside a cigarette carton. As the enigmas mount, one

character goes into the bathroom and finds, scrawled on the wall in purple crayon, this message:

802. Ibid, xxi.

803. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity (Beacon
Press, 2001), 74. At the same time it is possible that Dick was only familiar with Jonas’ “Gnosticism” entry in the
14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, though this was not the edition favored by Dick in his time in Orange
County. Conversation, Matthew Dillon, May, 2015.
 565

JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD. I’M THE ONE THAT’S
ALIVE. YOU’RE ALL DEAD.804

As their surrounding reality gives way to anomalous eruptions of entropy, the characters realize

that Runciter is right. It turns out the whole crew are stuck in a distorted version of half-life

constructed by one of Dick’s evil demiurgic figures, a deceased sociopathic boy who sustains

himself in half-life by feeding off the life-force of others.

Runciter’s bathroom message is a perfect example of what Dick critic Lorenzo Di

Tomasso identifies as an “in-breaking information vector,” a structural device that we can, with a

sort of backwards causality, clearly recognize in the Gnostic call-from-without.805 Moreover, the

concept of “half-life” also allows Dick to fuse two metaphors that Gnostic writings share with

many texts of spiritual enlightenment—ignorance and death—into one condition: characters who

are unaware that they are dead. This condition can nonetheless be healed through a third

recognizably Gnostic metaphor: awakening.

Though Dick may not have been drawing these connections at the time he wrote Ubik, by

2/3/74, he was quick to notice the similarities. Writing of the secondary personality he identified

initially with Pike, Dick notes that the Bishop “has been breaking through in ways so similar to

that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead

and he is alive, or—well, as in the novel I can’t figure it out.”806 Dick’s confusion reminds us

again of the indeterminacy that underlies his post-foundational gnosis: a transmundane signal is

received, but it has no coherent content, or no content beyond its effects as a traumatic and

804. Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s (Library of America, 2007), 715.
805. Lorenzo DiTomasso, “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” Science Fiction Studies
28 (2001): 56.
806. Dick, Exegesis, 22.
 566

ecstatic dislocation that requires constant construction to even begin to mediate.807 In Hans

Jonas, Dick would one day read a line from the Mandaen prayerbook Ginza Rba: “One call

comes and instructs about all calls.”808 But Dick didn’t get the instructions; or like the offworld

settlers who gather on the planet Delmak-O in the beginning of A Maze of Death, the taped

commands beamed from the satellite of the gods are garbled. Indeed, the entire Exegesis could

be described as emerging from what one could name the conundrum of the call: a clarion blast

has ruptured Dick’s reality field but, with epiphanic exceptions, the message has been terminally

deferred. Dick is left, as it were, on the line, holding the first link of a chain of signifiers that

recede into an infinity of possibilities.

The Conundrum of the Call

One could read the challenges of Dick’s call through a postmodern or Derridean lens,

emphasizing the incommensurable accounts of reality that characterize contemporary techno-

society or the endless deferral of meaning supposedly endemic to all signification. But we can

also see that Dick’s metaphysical challenge lies in the curiously referential dynamics of the call

itself, which both demands metanoia and leaves everything in the muddle where it already is.

Here Agamben’s discussion of the Pauline call (kaleo, klesis) may be helpful. In the opening

sections of his work on the apostle, Agamben takes on 1 Corinthians: 7:20: “Let every man abide

in the same calling wherein he was called.” This oddly recursive line comes in a passage in

which Paul seems to be counseling indifference to one’s worldly status in the light of the

807. Indeed, when Dick ceases to identify the secondary personality with Pike in 1975, the questions of the afterlife
that play an important role in the initial folders of the Exegesis recede, giving way to Dick’s elaborate theories of
time.
808. Jonas, 74.
 567

messianic call: gentile converts need not get circumcised before following Christ, and if slaves,

should not worry about their low worldly status.

For Agamben, the odd structure of the verse, with its two forms of klesis and its

somewhat indeterminate reference, itself illuminates a less settled meaning to the passage: that

the messianic calling is “essentially and foremost a calling of the calling.”809 Describing the

“tautegorical movement that comes from the call and returns back to it,” Agamben suggests that,

through its very openness, the call offers nothing but the repetition of the condition in which we

are called, but which is simultaneously undermined in light of the messianic event. Because the

call’s reference is open, “it may apply to any condition; but for this same reason, it revokes a

condition and radically puts it into question in the very act of adhering to it.” The call, the event

of awakening, changes everything but eludes semantic location or even direction. Here we are

with Phil at the end of VALIS, watching TV, waiting for a sign. “Vocation calls for nothing and

to no place.”810

Here Jonas hits the nail on the head when, in discussing Hippolytus’s account of the

Gnostic Peretae, he notes that “the call as such is its own content, since it simply states what its

being sounded will effect: the awakening from sleep.”811 The call here is an imperative event

whose content, initially at least, is nothing more than its own eruptive character as an event. In

the Hymn of the Soul, whose full translation Dick would have had access to in Jonas, the

personified letter, after announcing its origins to the protagonist, issues this curious command:

“Up and arise from your sleep, and listen to the words of our letter!” In this self-referential

809. Here Agamben relies here on the notion of the anaphor, which is a linguistic entity—a pronoun, like “he” in the
verse—that indicates a referential tie to some other linguistic entity specified in the same text—a proper name, for
example. However, the anaphor’s exact reference in the proximate text can be, as in this verse, somewhat
indeterminate, which makes it a particularly challenging problem in natural language processing, as computers have
a tougher time with contextual inferences than humans do.
810. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans (Stanford
University Press, 2005), 22-23.
 568

sentence we do not encounter signification so much as signal, or even less: the startling clamor

of an alarm-clock, a displaced imperative whose content is non-semantic noise. Strictly speaking,

the pure event of the awakening call cannot be directly or referentially tied to signification.

Abruptly awakened from sleep by a brash alarm, there is always a gap, a little abyss, between the

noise and the cognitive crystallization of a represented world that the very non-representational

event of awakening has, as it were, undermined in advance.812 Mark E. Smith put it well when he

sang, in the Fall classic “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man,’” that “the only thing real is waking and

rubbing your eyes.”813

In this light, we might recognize the hero of the Hymn as a peculiarly Dickean redeemer:

he bumbles along in hapless ignorance and is awakened passively by an “in-breaking

information vector” that alerts him—in a manner that destabilizes both represented reality and its

possible alternative—to knowledge he already has but that has been erased, or to use a favorite

phrase of Dick’s, “occluded.” In the Hymn, this recognition is sufficient to bring both the buried

self and the reawakened self into sync. Unfortunately, Dick himself was allowed no such

integration. Recall that one of the features of the spring and summer of 1974 was Dick’s

conviction that various cognitive and behavioral changes indicated that another personality had

intermittently taken possession of him. So while Dick regularly insisted that 2/3/74 brought

himself an extraordinary state of knowledge, peace, and bliss, he often associated these states

with the secondary personality he believed had appeared within the self, and which he often saw

as smarter or superior, but certainly separate.

811. Jonas, 80.

812. Lacan offers a fascinating examination of the function of the real in the phenomenon of awakening from a
noise, in which the sleeper moves from the dream to the realm of representation. “The real may be represented by
the accident, the noise, the small element of reality, which is evidence that we are not dreaming. But, on the other
hand, this reality is not so small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind the lack of that which takes the
place of representation—this, Freud says, is the Trieb (drive).” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller, (New York: Norton, 1998), 56-60.
 569

Dick initially associated this personality with James Pike, perhaps because Pike himself

was, towards the end of his life, obsessed with Spiritualism and the spectral others it sought to

contact through the veil. At other times, Dick attributed this secondary personality variously to

Paracelsus, a government thought control program, and Dick’s own self from the future. By the

late seventies, however, when Dick began writing VALIS, the Exegesis generally identifies this

double as “Thomas,” a first-century Christian who bonds with Dick across time and space.

Thomas makes an appearance in VALIS, where Horselover Fat explains that Thomas did not

knew Christ, but knew people who knew him, and so awaited the parousia.814 In the novel

Thomas is also characterized as a homoplasmate: a human being who had “cross-banded” with a

plasmate of living information, associated here and elsewhere in Dick’s writings with VALIS,

the Logos, and the Torah. In the novel, Dick also gives vent to some of his Exegetical

speculations about Thomas, who, we learn, was able to cheat death by performing a ritual

involving pink food and a pitcher of cool water. Through this method, Fat explains, Thomas was

able to “engram” himself onto the Christian fish sign so that one day his slumbering reborn

identity would see the sign and reawaken.

It stands to reason—or at least the weird reason required to make your way through this

sort of material—that when Dick named his second personality Thomas, he chose that name

because of the active resonance of the Acts of Thomas, with its marvelous Hymn, as well as the

Gospel of Thomas, an ancient scripture that Dick knew and sometimes cited.815 In other words,

“Thomas” came to embody the encounter Dick had had with these texts and the loosely

813. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7mp9elK49I&noredirect=1; accessed March 2013.

814. Philip K. Dick, VALIS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 117-120.
815. Variants of “Break a stick and I am there”, a line from logion 77, recur in Dick’s letters and the Exegesis (173,
223, 508). Anne Dick remembers him quoting this “Russian proverb” in the early sixties. Though the complete
Gospel of Thomas was not recovered until the Nag Hammadi findings, the saying was also among those fragments
of that gospel found in the Papyrys Oxyrhynchus 1, which was discovered in 1900. Anne Dick, 66.
 570

“gnostic” mysteries they contained.816 Further synchronicities lie in the name Thomas itself,

which simply means “twin” (t’oma’ in Aramaic).817 Within the Thomasine Christianity

represented by the Acts of Thomas and the Gospel of Thomas, Thomas the twin is amalgamated

with Jesus’ brother Judas (Mark 6:3) to become Judas Thomas, the twin of the Lord. According

to Pearson, Judas Thomas served as a paradigm of the individual Christian vis-à-vis the living

Christ who can, as both the Hymn and the Gospel of Thomas suggest, also be found within. “To

know oneself is to know one’s own ‘double,’ construed as a twin of Christ. A person’s double is

of heavenly origin and, as a result of self-knowledge, can return again to heaven.”818 Thomas’s

doubleness is all the more remarkable when you consider the likelihood that Dick did not know

the etymology of the monicker when he named his secondary personality; as far as I can tell, he

nowhere mentions it. And of course, soaring angelic over all these secondary personalities and

otherworldly cross-banding plasmates, is the absent presence of Dick’s own twin sister Jane,

who died of malnutrition a little over a month after the two were born, and who haunted him

(and his Exegesis) throughout his life.819

816. Though both these texts emphasize self-knowledge, many scholars do not class them as Gnostic texts per se, as
they lack distinguishing mythological elements like Sophia, the demiurge, and the emanations of the Pleroma. Along
with the Book of Thomas the Contender, these texts are sometimes linked with a specific “Thomas Christianity,”
centered in Mesopotamia (the origin of the Acts), and drawing from Middle Platonism. For an account of Thomas
Christianity, see Birger Albert Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions And Literature (Fortress Press, 2007), 256-
72. For modern readers who recognize an important difference between Christianity and Gnosticism (as Dick did),
“Thomas” himself therefore represents an ambiguous middle ground, one that similarly marks Dick’s religious
identity: is Dick a Christian, a Gnostic, a dualiist, or something else entire?
817. The name itself is doubled within the Greek of the Gospel of John, who refers to “Thomas, one of the twelve,
called the Twin (didymus)” (John 20:24).
818. Pearson, 257. The prophet Mani may have adapted his notion of the heavenly twin or syszygos from
Thomasine texts; in any case, the appearance of the divine double in the Hymn helps explain the text’s popularity
among the Manichaeans. This appearance occurs in the Hymn’s denouement, which is unfortunately elided in the
Britannica summary. In it, the hero, having returned home and divested himself of his worldly clothes, sees again his
heavenly robe. “As I gazed on it, suddenly the garment / like a mirror reflected me, / and I saw myself apart / as two
entities in one form.” Barnstone and Meyer, The Gnostic Bible (Boston, MA: Shambbhala, 2003), 393.
819. Despite her profound influence on his psychic life, Dick mentions Jane only occasionally in the Exegesis, and
usually at moments of intensely sober affect, as if he must emotionally earn this particular revelation. In one
withering entry from 1979, Dick splits himself into both sides of a Q&A dialogue, with the respondent taking a
relentlessly skeptical and deflationary stance regarding the meaning, cause, and interpretation of 2/3/74. The
respondent, for example, suggests that Dick is a deluded manic depressive who may have just stumbled into the
 571

There is also a recursive, self-referential dimension to this sacred doubleness. Jonas, for

example, reads the curious duplicity of the Hymn’s protagonist through the Manichaean notion of

the “redeemed redeemer,” or salvator salvandus, which Dick refers to consistently as “salvador

salvandus” when he latches onto it in the folders of the Exegesis. Kurt Rudolph defines salvator

salvandus as “a redeemer who sets free the ‘souls’, as particles identical with his nature, by

means of the knowledge of this identity and thereby suffers the same fate as these souls or

particles of light.”820 This element of shared suffering, of mutual submersion in ignorance, is

what allowed Dick to personally identify with this figure, who becomes thereby a kind of

messianic “ordinary Joe.” And while the protagonist in the Hymn does complete his sacred

mission—the recovery of the pearl, which takes up very few lines—he is not identified as the

redeemer himself.821

Dick’s novels are of course filled with such anti-heroic heroes, ordinary Everymen who

achieve whatever moral actions and insights they manage alongside modest and often deeply

flawed attempts to just keep going in the face of social entropy, personal conflict, capitalist

predation, and ontological disruption. In his letters and the Exegesis, Dick parallels this

affirmation of the mundane by representing himself as passive and receptive in relationship to

the call, which is one of the reasons he often figures himself as confused or as “not knowing.”

Hence his attraction to the Hymn, whose scene of anamnesis presents an economical resolution

to the conundrum of the call. But just as important is the fact that redemption, revelation, and

wrong cocktail of chemicals (lithium and vitamins to be precise). Dick concludes the dialogue with himself with this
question: “Do you have any intuition or guess as to who and what the Valis mind is?” The unembellished answer:
“Yes. It is female. It is on the other side—the postmortem world. It has been with me all my life. It is my twin sister
Jane.” Dick, Exegesis, 520.
820. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature And History of Gnosticism (Continuum International Publishing Group,
1998), 122.
821. According to the Britannica, this role is given to the “Brother” that finally leads the protagonist back home,
although in the Syriac version of the Hymn, this guide takes the form, once again, of “my letter, my awakener.”
Klijn, 185.
 572

recall arrive through the medium of writing—a writing, moreover, that is both within and

without. For when the protagonist hears the words of the letter, he discovers that the same

message was already inscribed within. Indeed, the Hymn itself uses a core metaphor of

internalized techne that goes back at least to Proverbs and Jeremiah, stating that the letter’s

writing was already “traced on my heart.”822

In the Exegesis, Dick himself notes this identity, writing of the Hymn’s protagonist that

“it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the

Pearl).”823 Even here, the call from without is shadowed by the script from within. This recursive

identity, mediated through textuality, arguably drives the entire Exegesis, in which Dick attempts

to resolve the indeterminacy of his puzzling visions through reading and writing, and to do so in

a way that also accords with the literature he has already produced. In order to achieve this, he

must in a sense externalize his texts from his own controlling authority, or, more finely put, he

must magnify those aspects of writing that are always outside of authorial control.

In the “Constitutional Crisis” document in the Exegesis, for example, Dick squeezes a lot

of humor out of insisting that his books are forgeries because his “magic typewriter” actually

wrote them.824 More serious is his handling of the final scene of Flow My Tears, in which the

inclusion of his own dream material should be seen as an authorial practice that paradoxically

reduces his responsibility as an author, allowing his own texts a divinatory power that the future

Dick could in turn pick up on. As mentioned earlier, Dick also came to believe that Flow My

Tears alluded to Acts in ways that Dick did not or could not have consciously intended, given his

insistence that he was unfamiliar with the New Testament book at the time. In these ways, Dick

822. Proverbs 3:3, 7:3; Jeremiah 17:1.

823. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis, 84. Writing in Science Fiction Studies, Dick biographer and critic Gregg Rickman
even suggests from this entry that Dick may have sent himself the Xerox missive. See Gregg Rickman, “The Nature
of Dick’s Fantasies,” Science Fiction Studies Vol 19 (1992), 107.
 573

came to understand his own work as being or containing information of soteriological import, a

belief that in turn drives the endless allegorical interpretations of his earlier works that he offers

up in the Exegesis.

In this light, it is crucial to note that, despite the manic inflation that drives much of the

Exegesis, Dick is generally loathe to make his person—rather than his texts—the locus of

messianic power. More typically, he casts himself as a more or less passive relay node in a

salvational network, an ignorant messenger who channels texts that know more—and do more—

than he does. In this light, Jeffrey Kripal places Dick squarely within a broad cultural narrative

that figures the human relationship to the paranormal, which he considers to be modernity’s own

“sacred,” as a condition of being written. Kripal insists that paranormal encounters not only

consistently take the form of wild, impossible stories, but that the absurd details themselves point

toward an offstage author. Kripal cites a question Dick asks himself later in the Exegesis: is

“something writing through us?” Dick provides an answer of sorts:

In my writing I seek to abolish the world—the effect of which aids in our restoration to
the Godhead … for years I did it in my writing, and then in 2/74 I did it in real life,
showing that my writing is not fiction but a form … of revelation expressed not by me
but through me, by (St.) Sophia in her salvific work.

Dick’s trashy novels were or contained transmundane letters like the one in the Hymn,

letters that Dick as author was forwarding unbeknownst to his readers through writing and

publishing. These hidden letters do not just proclaim the illusion of the world but abolish the

world through their very status as revelatory events. However, the transition that Dick traces

here, from abolishing the world in “writing” to doing so in “real life,” can also read as an

824. Dick, Exegesis, 22.

 574

admission of the degree to which Dick’s own writing—before and after the fish sign—was

scripting 2/3/74 itself. I have no doubt that Dick suffered a raft of extraordinary experiences in

1974, and that anomalous ecstasies, temporal stutters, and I-Thou encounters with apparitions

brought him to the very heart of himself. But that very heart was also already inscribed.

Missive

We cannot leave the matter of the nested letter that helped awaken Dick without

acknowledging the most important actual letter to feature in the drama of 2/3/74—a letter that,

unsurprisingly and against all surface differences, is eventually linked by Dick directly with the

Hymn. In March of 1974, Dick received a letter that, in the version of the episode related in

VALIS, had no name or return address.825 Dick, who according to Tessa had already been

anticipating a letter that might “kill” him, refused to open or read the missive, having Tessa do it

in his stead. Rather than a letter proper, the envelope contained photo-copies of two book

reviews from a leftist newspaper, with words like decline and stagnation underlined with blue

and red pen (Dick called them “die messages”). In VALIS, a name and return address were

included on the back of the Xerox but not on the envelope.

Throughout March, Dick felt intensely threatened by the letter, which he believed might

have been a loyalty-testing trap laid by the FBI or, worse, a Manchurian Candidate-like trigger,

which is why he refused to read the letter. Deeply fearful that the authorities would take him for

a Soviet sympathizer, especially given the Marxist critics and East European S-F writers

interested in his work, Dick eventually read and sent the document to the FBI, who responded

with a form letter. Tessa Dick confirms the basic outlines of the story, though she said that the
 575

original envelope did feature a return address—a hotel in New York—but no name. She also

noted that Dick dumped most of his subsequent flurry of letters to the FBI in the trash, figuring

that if he were indeed under surveillance, they would read them anyway.826

Dick dubbed this incident with the doubling name of “the Xerox missive.” Even more

than the fish sign, the Xerox missive became a signal feature of 2/3/74, one that fueled a myriad

of Dick’s plots and speculations throughout the Exegesis. Here we must remember that the

published Exegesis, a challenging enough text in its own right, represents merely a tenth of the

extent text, and that, according to editor Pamela Jackson, a “good deal” of this vast remainder is

taken up with restless and incessant paranoid speculations whose feverish, mind-numbing

prolixity would try the patience of even the most die-hard Dickhead or fan of pulp conspiracy

lit.827 We might think of this as the “junk DNA” of the Exegesis, since Dick’s desperate

speculations, with their interminable permutations of KGB agents, satellites, doomsday devices,

and fiendish mind-control technologies, generates what Lawrence Sutin describes as “much heat

but little light.”828

But while these scenarios don’t make for engaging reading, their volume alone speaks to

Dick’s palpable sense of political oppression and his increasing inability to imagine state power

in anything other than its most claustrophobic and insidious forms. This loss of personal and

collective agency this implies is already visible in his late sixties and early seventies fictions, and

was only heightened by the break-in and the break-in’s subsequent confirmation through

Watergate. For suspicious and esoteric exegetes like Dick, the high weirdness of the early

825. Sutin, 215-217.

826. Tessa Dick, 81-83.
827. See the annotation by Pamela Jackson, in Dick, Exegesis, 513. As a supporting editor on the project, but based
only my thankfully partial exposure to the totality of the Exegesis, I can concur with her editorial judgment. That
said, there is no doubt some gold in those hills.
828. Cited by Jackson, ibid.
 576

seventies encouraged untraditional mysticism and pathological paranoia to form a perfect

syzygy. Whatever ecstatic and religious bliss was visited upon Dick in 1974 were more than

matched by fear, intense suspicion, self-defeating literalism, and profound ontological anxiety.

However, the Xerox missive did provide a glint of light in the dark tunnels of Dick’s

Chapel Perilous. Specifically, Dick came to invest great ethical and ontological significance in

his initial refusal to read the letter. The block he threw up against the incoming vector of text

becomes paradigmatic for a compelling theory of “ethical balking” that Dick develops later in

the Exegesis, an ethics of refusal that rests atop a novel, almost systems-theoretical conception of

Christian freedom.829 Mckee clearly lays out the ethical double bind that Dick recognized: “The

challenge is to perceive the injustice of the system of the world and to refuse to cooperate with it.

The problem is that the logic of the visible universe is internally consistent and contains no clear

indication that it deserves to be rejected.”830 For Dick, the logic of the world was not just

consistent and totalizing but deterministic: an unforgiving machinery of necessity. This engine

appears in Dick’s writings in various guises: the Black Iron Prison, fate, and “astral

determinism,” the ancient astrological notion that destiny was controlled by the daemonic

clockwork of the heavens.831 Another term Dick used was karma, a Hindu concept that, as

Wouter Hanegraaff insightfully argues, had already been transformed by Theosophy into a kind

of scientific mechanism or impersonal “natural law” by the time Dick came to use the term.832

Ethical balking is the paradoxically nonlogical but nonetheless technical hack of these

fell engines; as Dick put it later in the Exegesis, by refusing to read the Xerox missive, Dick had

829. Dick, Exegesis, 271

830. Gabriel Mckee, Annotation, in Dick, Exegesis, 271.
831. Dick was quite aware that salvation through Christ was sometimes represented in antiquity as the defeat of
astrology and fate. See Tim Hegedus, Early Christianity and Ancient Astrology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), esp
163-171.
832. See Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 455, 480.
 577

“short-circuited” his Karma. Balking is a crucial gesture in what can only be called the politics of

Dick’s information theory. As we saw Anthony Enns explain earlier, Dick associated entropy

with stasis and repetition, a concept that blends the locked grooves of media loops with the

“tomb world” of remorseless torpor that Bingswanger associated with the huis clos of

schizophrenia.833

Against the stagnation of repetition, Dick trumpeted the irruption of genuine novelty,

which he usually imagined as penetrating from outside the system. As such, the refusal to read

the Xerox letter introduced a new element—“tiny, bordering on ex nihilo, on nothing, yet

something”—into an “otherwise closed system.”834 The transformative power of the small, meek

ethical gesture is, in this view, still allied to a transcendent point of view, a view from outside the

system that, as Mckee argues, “impels immediate disobedience.” As such, balking disrupts the

causal machinery of fate, a “groove override” that also refutes, in the terms relevant to the above

discussion, what Dick calls “cause-and-effect script-programming.”835 While Dick sometimes

associates balking with rebellion, its more negative or no-saying valence also recalls one of the

curious properties of Socrates’s own “AI Voice”: that it only intervened to tell the philosopher

what not to do.

Balking also had a media-theoretical character in Dick’s mind, a link between

information processing and balking’s groove override that first appeared in a hypnogogic vision

Dick experienced in the late seventies and later reformulated for The Divine Invasion. “4:30

A.M. Hypnogogic: If the messenger arrives in time with the white—i.e., blank—document, your

punishment is abolished. I.e., the blank white paper is substituted—intervenes—for the bill of

833. Enns, 76. As examples from Dick’s fiction, Enns points to the short story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” as well
as the close of A Maze of Death, where the astronauts find themselves returning once again to the hallucinated
nightmare of Delmak-O.
834. Dick, Exegesis, 633.
 578

particulars that lists the sins (or crimes) for which you are being tried and punished.”836 Dick is

here imagining a “cybernetic info system” of judgment, a deterministic engine of karmic

punishment that can only be “shorted out” through the insertion of a blank white paper in place

of one’s inevitably spotted record. Again following the S-F logic of literalizing the figurative,

this blank paper offers a technical and almost bureaucratic parallel of the spotless lamb of Christ,

who, in Luther’s doctrine of vicarious atonement, is offered in our own place, and whose Love

thereby jams the machinery of Law. In contrast to the typically weightless New Age

appropriation of cybernetic imagery and media technology, here Dick establishes an information

theoretical iteration of traditional eschatology, one that ingeniously combines machine

programming with the more archaic media tech of text. However, in this new vision, Jesus does

not have to suffer directly. As Mckee explains, “It is a substitution, not of one being in place of

another, but of misinformation in place of accurate data.”837

The allegorical tension that Paul established between the letter and the spirit in 2

Corinthians (3:6) is transformed by Dick into two different kinds of letters, letters of fate and

letters of freedom. However, through their formal identity as letters, these two ethical vectors

nonetheless oscillate, or “flip/flop,” a term of binary Californiana that Dick prefers. For Dick,

dualistic oppositions actually lie very close to one another; in many cases, the structure that is

shared is more important than the positive or negative “sign” affixed to it. (This perhaps explains

why Dick, as a newly confirmed Episcopalian, could so readily and so wickedly have parodied

the Eucharist in Three Stigmata without thereby questioning his faith.) Many of the cosmological

schemas that Dick develops in the Exegesis, a good number of which rely on binary or dualistic

structures, mutate precisely by swapping their positive or negative valence. The resemblance of

835. Ibid, 291.

836. Ibid, 560.
 579

this “flip/flop” to binary code is significant, but the concept also takes in Jung’s notion of

“enantiodromia” as well as Dick’s experience of generating I Ching hexagrams, in which yin

lines and yang lines often transform into one another.

The operation of the flip/flop also allowed Dick to use the sacred narrative of the Hymn

in order to organize and refract the nightmare of the Xerox missive. In other words, by inverting

values, Dick was able to reframe the phantasmagoric trauma of the Xerox missive by

superimposing the Hymn onto the March ’74 event through the formal match of the two letters.

In an Exegesis entry made in 1980 or so, Dick affirmed the direct relationship between the two

letters, and squeezed out this underlying significance:

The Xerox missive is part of the Gnostic legend of the Pearl: the letter to the prince who
has lost his memories…This ‘legend’ is actually a sacred myth/rite. The letter coupled
with the golden fish sign restored my memories due to my faithful participation in this
complex sacred mythic rite of anamnesis and rebirth…So all this took a Gnostic turn—
the cryptic sign (golden fish), the letter reminding me of my mission (albeit a profane
Pigspurt one; the myth sanctified it, turned a profane thing into something noumenal).838

In this account, receiving letters (whether they are read or not read) and responding to

signs (the fish sign) become ritual recapitulations of a larger myth, a myth whose soteriological

reference is then, as it were, incarnated in the ritualist through anamnesis. If all this sounds a bit

like Eliade, it should—on the previous page of the manuscript, Dick cites Eliade’s notion that a

mythological event unfolds illo tempore, in another kind of time. “Therefore if you can get (your

self) into a mythological narrative you will enter this dream time.”839 For Dick, this dream time

837. Gabriel Mckee, Annotation, in Dick, Exegesis, 271.

838. Dick, Exegesis, 603.
839. Ibid, 603.
 580

was of course “orthogonal time,” perhaps his most complex and original metaphysical concept: a

surreal and psychedelic twist on Platonism that explained, to take just one example, the

superimposition of ancient Rome onto Orange County, circa 1974. Entering into mythological

time, however, requires a rite, and here we find the final nuance of the idea of the Hymn as

providing a script. By reading the Hymn as a ritual script, a script that moreover provides its own

protocols of reading and interpreting signs, Dick attempted to render the anomalous and

sometimes traumatic events of 2/3/74 as not only meaningful but redemptive. Even the profane

and terrifying experience of the Xerox missive becomes “flip-flopped” and sanctified by its role

in the enacted sacred narrative.

As Jeff Kripal points out in his annotation to the above passage, “what Eliade imagined

in his comparative theorizing Dick seems to have realized in his experience of Valis.”840 From

the perspective of the study of religion, this reminds us how much the imbricated braid of text

and experience that characterizes 2/3/74 is both an extension of and response to the mid-century

enterprise of comparative religion, replete with its own critical superimpositions and resonating

constellations of concept, symbol, and phenomenological structure. Here, then, are more scripts:

scripts about how to read and compare texts and the experiences embedded in texts. We may be

condemned to learn about the life of the spirit and be awakened to it through books, as Eliade

complained. But Dick would suggest, no doubt slyly, that the writings themselves may be alive

with spirit—or at least, are animated by a dynamic information system capable of rewriting us at

any time.
 581

CONCLUSION: PROFANE ILLUMINATIONS

As befits a project with the title of High Weirdness, many of the material covered herein

is, frankly, rather weird. In the course of close readings of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton

Wilson and Philip K. Dick—readings at once of their extraordinary experiences and their

extraordinary accounts of those experiences—we have encountered UFOs, synchronicities,

bizarre drugs, pulp fictions, conspiracy theories, mystical technologies, paranoid visions,

esoteric sexual practices, and alien voices—a lot of alien voices—emerging from within the self.

My approach to these experiences and these accounts has also been, if not weird, than at least

moderately unconventional.

While questions of psychopathology have necessarily arisen, both in this project and for

these very intelligent men, my readings have nonetheless refused to pathologize the experiences

and events themselves. Instead, I have tried read these experiences and their corresponding

accounts, not simply as symptoms, but as forms of cultural, psychospiritual, and intellectual

work—constructive work that requires nuanced elucidation rather than diagnoses. Similarly,

while much of this work has involved the excavation of biographical, cultural and cognitive

contexts that directly contribute to this work, I have also sought to puncture the now hegemonic

hermeneutic of historical contextualization by returning to those sometimes radical philosophical

840. Ibid, 603.

 582

and existential problems introduced by radical forms of experience. However bizarre and

unseemly, these are events that, in some way or another, announce the Outside, rupturing

established discursive formations that are carried, not only within the subjects in question, but

within and between observers and commentators. In this way, I have sought to invite a

reverberant echo of the weird into the methods as well as the objects of this study.

But to what end? It is true that the course of cultural studies over the last thirty years has

already reaped many rewards from the study of phenomena conventionally considered marginal,

unseemly, and even bizarre. However, my focus on white male countercultural weirdness—here

largely decoupled from organized forms of political, ethnic or subaltern struggle—seems to

demand a higher bar of relevance than novelty or fascination. While the now canonical status of

the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick merits looking at his extraordinary experiences from a

religious rather than a strictly literary perspective, I have sought to provide something of more

general heft as well: two intertwined inquiries into the mutation of American religious

experience, one historical and one theoretical. I would like to briefly recap the territory covered

in this caduceus-like undertaking, recapping each strand in turn, before making some concluding

comments and suggestions for further research.

The historical framework of this project is largely drawn from the dynamics that

countercultural seeking took in the early to mid- seventies (again, “early seventies” from now

on), especially as they are manifested in the lives of three highly weird Californians. To perform

this work properly, I needed to separate and distinguish the historical understanding and cultural

memory of the seventies from the more dominant concern with the exceptionally dramatic,

colorful, and politically supercharged sixties. In both popular and scholarly discourse, the first

half of the seventies is essentially cast as the decline—the fracturing and, at best,
 583

commodification—of the robust cultures of resistance and transformation that emerge in the

sixties (which were themselves fractured and commodified, but that is another story). In this

dominant narrative, the early years of the decade feature the collapse of the large scale

“Movement” associated with both mass political action and the transformative destiny of a new

“culture of consciousness.” What results in the seventies, then, is a sort of traumatic twilight

zone characterized by a pervasive sense of anomie, retrenchment, and bitterness coupled with a

broader cultural embrace of hedonism and a dramatic psychological turn towards that famous

narcissism. As my own first chapter showed, there are very good reasons for this account.

However, one result of this historical shorthand is that the radical, creative, and transformative

dynamics of the early seventies are themselves obscured by dominant narratives of decline and

popular commodification.

Indeed it is precisely the traumatic failure of the counterculture’s transformative

destiny—whether conceived politically or spiritually—that produces the desperate necessity that

drives the positive or creative activity of the early seventies. This is true whether or not we hear

such productions in a minor key compared to the major progressions of the late sixties, or

whether we underscore the political and existential positivity of emerging social, technological,

environmental and psycho-spiritual developments. These developments include the communal

experimentation with new social forms, the establishment of organic agriculture, the emergence

of eco-philosophy as an ideological force and widespread theory of design, and the sifting of the

millennialist political intensity of the sixties into a wider range of identity positions that help

enact the cultural and institutional emergence of a more multicultural and postmodern America.

Most importantly for this project, the early seventies also witnessed an explosion of psycho-

spiritual activity that, besides absorbing radical political disappointments, helped seed or
 584

intensify a variety of influential and important trends that would grow in the ensuing decades:

the human potential movement, the New Age, the esoteric “weirding” of popular media, Asian

religions in America, and the emergence of the “spiritual but not religious” sensibility that is now

becoming a major (if paradoxical) determinant of American religious identity.

While the story of sixties psychedelia has been long and lovingly told, I have been

interested here in a specifically “seventies” mode of visionary experience and alternative

religiosity, one lodged in the liminal drift that emerged between the collapse of the Movement

and the rise of the New Age in the later seventies. It was a time when the only revolution still

conceivable would occur in consciousness, but before the coming “Aquarian conspiracy” had

self-consciously consolidated that faith. Indeed, rather than speak of the New Age that waited in

the wings, what centrally distinguishes the seventies is the widespread reach of the occult

revival. While occult elements had of course long been woven into bohemian and hippy scenes,

the occult revival as a cultural and popular media phenomenon—manifested in book publishing,

films, Tarot cards, and the emergence of esoteric fairs, metaphysical bookstores, etc—does not

begin to grow pervasive until the turn of the decade.

Along with this thickening symbolic stew, the early seventies also staged a sort of pre-

Cambrian explosion of new religious movements, as growing flocks of countercultural refugees

made their way into the arms of spiritual communes, guru scenes, and authoritarian social

assemblages—aka “cults”—that often fused secular-psychological and esoteric discourses with

transformative practices that deconstructed the conventional personality. Like the turn towards

explicit violence by some leftwing extremists in the era, many of these cults could be considered

radical, not in their political goals, but in their fusion of highly disciplined, strongly counter-

normative command structures with an irrational or “liberated” zone of indeterminacy. And, also
 585

like the domestic political extremism of the era, the rise of such new religious movements needs

to be seen against the distinctly seventies backdrop of executive malfeasance, the growth of the

surveillance state and its attendant paranoia, and the bitterness and sense of defeat that followed

the collapse of mass social solidarity.

From the perspective of the history of American religions, the scholarly obsession with

new religious movements in the early seventies makes sense. However, by focussing on

relatively well-bounded groups and “dogmatic” sensibilities, scholars risk overlooking the more

informal, pervasive, and heterodox assemblages that Campbell referred to as the cultic milieu,

and that I have largely preferred to name with Christopher Partridge’s term occulture. My

particular concern here has been to focus on more informal occultural actors who response to the

chaos, drift, and delirium of the early seventies is to intensify their own individual pursuits with

extraordinary experiences. The encounters that result are as conceptual as they are spiritual, and

fuse—in ways that decidedly confuse conventional distinctions between religion and science—

skepticism and wonder, discovery and derangement. I chose to focus on three remarkable

individuals, all intellectuals and writers, two of whom were principally motivated by their

psychedelic raptures, and one of whom wrestled with forms of visionary experience that are

impossible to extricate from the problems of psychopathology.

Although all of these avatars were “religious geniuses” of a sort, the point was not to

underscore their visionary heroism but to emphasize the existential, contingent, and altogether

provisional forms of meaning (and meaninglessness) required to navigate and narrate the sheer

weirdness presented by extraordinary experience when it is encountered outside of particular

faith communities or religious-esoteric collectives. Rather than drawing from relatively fixed

maps or discursive orientations toward extraordinary experience, whether found in the etic
 586

language of social scientists or the emic language of gurus, these writers and thinkers instead

offered rich, complex, idiosyncratic, and demonstrably constructed frameworks that attempt to

process, narrate, and further intensify extraordinary experiences that, even in an era saturated

with such extremes, probably strike most readers as well beyond the pale.

Space has limited the degree to which I have been able to establish the historical

connections and acute resonances between our three avatars, not to mention the scores of figures

whose texts and testimonies could have been brought into this dense network of relation.

However, here I would like to join our three mutant bricoleurs of the counterculture together

under the heading of seeker. While the root metaphor of seeking is often associated with the

notion of a “religious quest” or a “spiritual journey,” I don’t believe either “religion” or

“spirituality” helps us appreciate or clarify either the promethean urgency of our avatars nor one

of their most significant dimensions: a robust (if inconsistent) embrace of naturalism, skepticism,

and hedonism that leavens the mystagoguery of both religion and spirituality with forms of sense

and sensibility more in keeping with a secular, post-Enlightenment, and even libertarian

orientation.

Stripped of qualifiers, however, I think the term seeker still helps us understand our

avatars. Seeking is more of a practice than a substance, an existential orientation towards

experience and inquiry that is, in addition, more applicable to individuals than groups. Self-help

seminars, devotional collectives, and “cults” are vital in the early seventies, but so are those

interminable rovers who resist such social forms, or pass in and out of them out through

restlessness, dissatisfaction, or further desire. Moreover, seekers are almost by definition open-

ended crafters of shifting and provisional frameworks, and their construction requirements

almost equally demand border crossings into psychology, physics, neuroscience, anthropology,
 587

and literature. But even as the seventies seeker challenges the boundaries of “religion” and even

“spirituality,” her practice (and self-description) is still rooted in America’s own religious past.

Recall that the first self-styled “seekers” emerged from the progressive transformation of liberal

Protestantism in the late nineteenth century, marked by an unlikely confluence of bohemian

Transcendentalism, global internationalism, comparative religion, and the reborn esoteric

currents represented by Theosophy and New Thought.

Some seekers emerging from this stew found themselves skirting or plunging towards

more bohemian liberties and lifestyles, and eventually, in the postwar period, they found their

way into a variety of Beat, hippie, and freak enclaves. As such, seekers played an active role in

the sixties counterculture from the get-go, helping to ensure that esoteric, alternative, mystical,

and Asian religious currents were an integral part of countercultural consciousness. At the same

time, seekers also challenged the purely “spiritual” or sectarian orientations of these pursuits

through a wider and more polymorphous remix of elements as profane as they were sacred.

For countercultural seekers, alternative religious currents offered two compelling

attractions that are, in a sense, as secular as they are religious. One was the existential possibility

of discovering—a verb we might gloss more closely as “inventing”—modes of authenticity that

transcended instrumental reason, consumerism, and conventional American institutional

identities. The other opportunity was the related invitation to explore—and, as bohemians, to

enjoy—heterodox domains of consciousness, sensation and perception. While deeply bound up

with the perennialist discourse surrounding mysticism, these experiences almost

indistinguishably blended the spiritual and the aesthetic in a manner already anticipated by the

European avant-garde. That said, the pursuit of “altered states” also runs deep in American

religious history, not only through the Christian traditions of enthusiasm and Pentecostalism, but
 588

through the more esoteric currents of Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and New Thought—

all of which, not accidentally, also contributed to seeker subjectivity.

In the postwar period, this amorphous interest in the fringe phenomenology of perception

was greatly magnified by the widening knowledge and use of powerful psychoactive substances,

and especially the newly-named category of psychedelics: peyote, mescaline, psilocybin

mushrooms, and the grand dame LSD (with marijuana thrown in for good measure). Whether or

not these substances necessarily occasion visionary experiences that mime or recapitulate the

religious imagination, the association between drugs and “religious experience” came to

dominate the psychedelic intelligentsia, postwar bohemia, and the hippie-freak revolution. As the

psychiatrist Humphry Osmond famously put it to Huxley in the fifties, sounding at once like a

sacred psychopomp and a Madison avenue jingle man, “To fathom hell and soar angelic / Just

take a pinch of psychedelic.”

The performance of countercultural spirituality—the protocols of yoga, the absorption of

esoteric and mythological symbol systems both indigenous and ancient, the “Orientalist”

appropriation of largely counter-normative Asian traditions—is inextricable from the ecstasies

and confusions occasioned by psychedelic use. This should not, however, distract us from the

importance of other forms of visionary experience: meditation, sexual trance, “freak-out”

dancing, biofeedback, yoga, occult ritual, DIY parapsychology. Sometimes these were practiced

in conjunction with drug use, but oftentimes not. In either case, the “sacred” pursuit of visionary

or extraordinary experience was dialectically bound up, not only with the profane pursuit of

kicks, but with existential and naturalistic pursuits of limit experiences that skirted religion but

did seek its resolutions. Just as some spiritual practitioners of the era abjured the new chemical

sacraments, so too did tribes of enthusiastic psychonauts and consciousness freaks keep the large
 589

claims of the religious imagination and even “spirituality” at a cautious remove from their own

explorations, even as the visionary phenomenology they encountered frequently resonated with

the religious imagination.

In other words, the pursuit of “religious experience” by many counterculture seekers was

not restricted to individuals already operating with religious frameworks. Instead, psychedelics

and other visionary modalities also wove something like religious experience into more secular

ways of being that draw from existential, literary and philosophical orientations informed by

skepticism, the aesthetic avant-garde, and, to varying degrees, psychological and social scientific

perspectives.

Here is where the historical framework of this project dovetails with a central driving

question within the scholarly (and popular) interest in religion: how should we think about the

vexed question of “religious experience”? Despite the desire of some contemporary scholars to

remove the question from the table, it remains inextricable from both the study and experience of

religion in modernity, and particularly in the United States. Whether you consider it as an

analytic reflection or an ideological construction, William James’ defining work in The Varieties

of Religious Experience represented the establishment of individual consciousness as a zone of

psychological phenomenology and religious meaning distinct from social or doctrinal

understandings of religion. Two outcomes of James’ epochal work have been important for this

study, one cultural and one conceptual. The cultural effect has been the establishment of a clear

desideratum for those American seekers who, like James, were riding the currents of liberal

Protestantism into the increasingly global religious field. With James in mind, spiritual aspirants

came to privilege religious (and particularly “mystical”) experience as, at once, an overriding

goal and a fundamental source of self-authentication, a source that could, moreover, be detached
 590

from socially bounded or dogmatic forms of religion. Loosed from traditions, forms of “religious

experience” in turn commingled with the bohemian and avant-garde pursuit of visionary and

extraordinary experiences for their own sake.

The conceptual result of James’ work was, again, the sui generis model of religious

experience: the notion that religious experience, for all its varieties, represents an essential

possibility of human consciousness tout court. As such, James’ model of religious experience

flows into and supports the rise of the perennialist concepts that became central to many seekers:

the notion that, beneath the variable surface of different religious cultures of practice lie

universal modes of experience that can be pursued and tasted beyond their particular socio-

cultural enframings.

While this concept helped to glamorize the twentieth-century fetish for religious and

mystical experience as a source of meaning and clarification of ultimate concerns, its flaws and

blind spots also presented an almost inevitable target for more critical and contextualizing

scholarship. Suitably historicized, Kantian critiques were brought to bear on the very notion of

generalizable, articulable and universal structures of “religious” consciousness and the

corresponding rhetorical claims of immediate and self-authenticating experience. In a series of

attacks initiated by Stephen Katz, the sui generis model of religious and especially “mystical”

experience was exposed as a theoretical construction that obscured the extreme degree to which

such experiences are, according to this line of critique, inextricably mediated by and bound to the

traditions, discourses, and culturally inherited practices—hermeneutic and otherwise—that

inevitably condition and constitute individual experiences. While there are considerable nuances

to this critique—and a considerable degrees of nuance in the manner in which they are

presented—I have approached it in this project through the intentionally loose notion of
 591

“scripts.” Even ineffable and extraordinary experiences are, to some degree, scripted; that is,

they are marked in their generation, their articulation and interpretation, and even their

phenomenological unfolding with behavioral protocols, fixed symbolic associations, and

discursive formations which bias, mediate, and “pre-program” the experience.

From one perspective, the stories of McKenna, Wilson, and Philip Dick all represent

strong support for this view, which is often referred to as constructivism. After all, much of my

work here has been the performance of an archaeology of extraordinary experience by

excavating the cultural, political, and esoteric “scripts” that are blended within their robust

accounts. At the same time, my presentation also interrogated Katzian constructivism on a

number of points. One prong of my attack was to underscore the anomalous and unexpected

novelty lurking in extraordinary experience—those elements whose bizarre and “pathological”

force cannot be easily reduced to iterations of a well-established “tradition” of cultural scripts

except through the ungainly expansion of the notion of tradition or cultural information to the

point of absurdity. Without allowance for real anomaly, for the unexpected, and for events that

rupture both etic and emic models, our understanding of extraordinary experience will be

vitiated.

A related goal was to draw attention to the significant differences that the construction of

religious experience undergoes when the “religion” in question is no longer rooted in a well-

defined tradition of language and practice—as it is for Katz and many constructivists—but

instead takes place in the heterogenous and multi-centered domain of the countercultural cultic

milieu. Not only are scripts lifted from a “postmodern” cornucopia of sometimes contradictory

religious traditions, occult systems, and indigenous mythologies, but the very genre of the scripts

themselves are broadened to included sources like science fiction, avant-garde art, social science,
 592

bohemian hedonism, and materialist psychology—sources that are decidedly outside the

boundaries of religion, mysticism, or even esotericism.

It is the more naturalistic of these influences that contributed to my third major rejoinder

to the Katzian constructivists. This point is less of an outright critique than a description of a

form of reflexivity that profoundly reframes religious experience within the countercultural

milieu. Here the very distinction between the etic language of scripts (seen from the outside) and

the emic language of immediate experience (tasted from the inside) re-enters the preparatory

language and protocols surrounding religious experience. In other words, the very concepts that

allow the social scientist to contextualize and “explain” religious experience from the outside

are taken up as operational tactics by the very actors pursuing religious experience.

As such, within countercultural thought and experience, we find a widespread and

sometimes sophisticated understanding of the very process of scripting itself. The social

scientific rejoinder to proponents of sui generis religious experience—that seemingly immediate

events are mediated by all manner of scripts—is recognized and even turned on its head,

becoming itself part of the apparatus of seeking and the continued cultivation, in particular, of

transformative extraordinary experiences. Leary’s famous formulation of “set and setting”

stitched this constructivist self-consciousness into the core protocols of psychedelic experience.

This reflexivity is also implied by a popular term of art within the political and psychological

discourse of the counterculture: the notion of “programming.” Within this view, conventional

subjectivity, as well as public discourse and popular media, are understood as products of social

programming. The radical gambit, both from seekers and political vanguards, is that this

programming can be interrupted or redeployed by establishing agency on the level that John

Lilly termed, in relationship to the pre-staging of psychedelic experience, metaprogramming.

 593

The dynamic operation of scripts, rather than serving the deflationary critique of claims of

immediacy, is actively taken up as part of the productive apparatus of limit experiences

themselves, and therefore establishes recursion as a central feature of the countercultural

reframing of extraordinary religious experience.

The “strange loop” introduced by this recursion required, in a sense, a new ontological

category: weirdness. By developing the marginal cultural category of weirdness into a substantial

notion, I attempted to integrate all three prongs of my own meta-constructivist critique. The

anomalies that partly characterize extraordinary experience, that puncture expectations or present

impossibilities, may not be supernatural or even preternatural—but they are weird. As is

suggested by the now common reference to “quantum weirdness,” the substantive remains on the

fringes of a specifically naturalistic spectrum.

Weirdness underscores the inevitable irruption of anomalies and extraordinary

unlikelihoods but without the commitment to the separate orders of being established by most

religious, spiritual, and explicitly paranormal orientations. At the same time, weirdness also

describes a particular aesthetic orientation and cultural location. Here deviance—social,

intellectual, or otherwise—drifts across a host of affective categories—the bizarre, the fantastic,

the uncanny—and the intertwined fringes of a variety of cultural imaginaries: comic books,

conspiracy theory, pulp fiction, fringe science, marginal and extreme religion. Finally,

weirdness—and especially high weirdness—is designed to mark some of the phenomenological

and even ontological oddities that result from the particular re-entry loop described above,

whereby the consciousness that scripts drive extraordinary experience is not only fed back into

the programming protocols of visionary experience but seems to mark the experiences

themselves.
 594

Here the best example remains Terence McKenna, glimpsing his first UFO over the

Columbian canopy. Recall that McKenna’s initial shock at the startling appearance of this craft

was followed by his recognition that elements of the vision alluded directly to corny B movies

and known UFO hoaxes from the fifties. For McKenna, however, the citation of these scripts

only intensified the uncanniness of the encounter. Despite (or because of) the absurdity of

McKenna’s experience, it remains in a sense paradigmatic for the cultural and phenomenological

mutation I have attempted to articulate here in High Weirdness. Here visionary phenomena are

understood (and experienced) at once concretely and critically, and the identification of scripts

within the social and individual construction of reality leads not to the mere deflation of

ontological claims but rather towards a deeper (and weirder) level of scripting, of reading and

being read, that itself demands a more capacious and variegated sense of ontology. As such, I

hope that my effort contributes to the renovation and reflexive complexification of extraordinary

experience as both a category of scholarly and historical inquiry and a valid object of spiritual

and philosophical pursuit.

 595

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