Great book on the dark side of hippie ideology focusing on 60's rock and roll and the occult. By a member of Blondie and guitarist for Iggy Pop.
Turn Off Your Mind - The Mystic Sixties and The Dark Side Of The Age Of Aquarius by Gary Lachman.
http://www.forteantimes.com/exclusive/lachman.shtml IN THE KNOW: MUSIC, MAGICK AND MIND: AN INTERVIEW WITH GARY LACHMAN
Born in 1955 in New Jersey, Gary Lachman moved to London in 1996. He has contributed to Fortean Times, Mojo, TLS, Bizarre, Literary Review and Gnosis. Aside from writing he has been a bass player and composer for Blondie, a guitarist with Iggy Pop, and the leader of his own groups The Know and Fire Escape.
His first book, Turn Off Your Mind - The Mystic Sixties and The Dark Side Of The Age Of Aquarius (Sidgwick and Jackson, £12:99) charts the popular growth of occultism followed by a descent into the violence and madness exemplified by Charles Manson and his Family. A second book, New York Rocker - an autobiography - is due out in February 2002. He is currently researching a book on aspects of consciousness.
JACK PHOENIX met up with him at his "home from home", the British Library.
One critic of your book seemed to think that "there's nothing to explain why any of it should be of interest to anyone but the adolescent or drug addled." (Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday, 27 May, 2001). But you do make it abundantly clear that belief in occultism has always been politically and culturally relevant, particularly regarding the rise of fascism.
It's part of the territory. That's not to say that any group that gets interested in occultism has a direct link to fascism or authoritarianism, but it's linked to that plunge into the unconscious. Leftist politics are linked to Enlightenment ideas of reason and the rational state, even though in the book I show that sixties leftwing political activists were using tactics that the Nazis and other extremists were using: shouting people down and using violence to achieve their ends.
I want to write a book on politics and the occult. You hear a lot about the link with fascism, for example in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's excellent books The Occult Roots Of Nazism and Hitler's Priestess, and in Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning Of The Magicians which I discuss in the book. But there is another side: many of the Enlightenment thinkers were Freemasons and were involved in magical or occult investigation; Eliphas Levi was a rampant socialist and wrote socialist tracts before his books on magic [see FT120:28-31]; Blavatsky was involved in the Indian Independence movement. There is some debate about the centrality and depth of Nazi involvement in the occult. Whatever the case, it has coloured and monopolized the issue of occultism and politics.
I'd always thought of Timothy Leary as an important figure, if perhaps somewhat foolhardy in his dealings with the establishment. But you quote him as inciting murder!
In one sense he was opportunistic - taking advantage as much as he could of the zeitgeist. He was a criminal in the eyes of the US government, so you can understand how he would have not been impartial towards the police. Nevertheless it is amazing to see someone going quite quickly from making statements about how LSD is going to save the world and bring love and peace, to encouraging people to kill policemen. It's that swing to the extreme that's linked to very high expectations and that purity and idealism; if it doesn't happen fairly quickly, then people want to give it a push. That's another theme that runs through the book. I don't know how clear it is, but this hunger for extremes exists in all sorts of people. In the Beats, and in someone as obscure as Robert DeGrimston who was the head of the Process [see FT134:34-39]. In fact the tracts DeGrimston wrote are the clearest and most vocal expression of this desire for extremity. Again, this is understandable. I think most vital people at some time in their life want all or nothing. Not to sound like some grandma, but it can easily turn into a dangerous situation. I also find that there's something almost pathetic about it. DeGrimston couldn't handle the fact that 90 percent of our life is lukewarm mediocrity, so he thought "Well, let's destroy the world then"!
People want intense experiences.
Yes, and I'm not saying that's not good, but there's a certain point at which the hunger for that becomes so extreme and so overriding that it easily leads you into danger - it's what I call in the book "giving in to strange forces". Hermann Hesse, who was writing in the Twenties, was one of the few who gave pause and acknowledged that the plunge into the Unconscious led him close to becoming a criminal. There's a certain level where a criminal can be seen as a rebel against society, but that pose of being a rebel can also just be a front for self-indulgence and thuggery.
Tell me about your own involvement with the occult.
During the time I was in The Know (1978-1980), I got involved with a Crowley group in Los Angeles. I was actually a member of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis). I don't know their direct lineage, but it was interesting. I did all the rituals in Magick And Theory and Practice; there's a sort of DIY manual at the back.
Did you go into it as a believer?
Well, I was interested in it. I'd read Colin Wilson's The Occult, and New York friends had books of Crowley's like Diary Of A Drug Fiend and Moonchild. The Nietzschean aspects of Crowley interested me. I felt that Crowley's philosophy of the True Will was a bit like the Nietzschean concept of the Superman. Anycase, I thought it's better that I try it rather than just talk about it.
So were you interested in accruing some sort of occult power?
Nietzsche's always misunderstood - it's not about power over people, it's about power over yourself - self-discipline, creating yourself. The whole idea of the True Will struck me as basically reaching and making contact with some deeper part of myself. One of the reasons I got out of the Crowley group was that the people I was involved with seemed to think that they could define anything they felt like doing as their True Will.
If you submit to every impulse, you're not free, you're a slave of unconscious drives.
That's true. This is one of the fallacies with Crowley's philosophy. Even though he mastered all the occult techniques, he really had no discipline over himself and allowed himself every indulgence and rationalized it. This had obvious effects on his personality and character.
I've never understood the extent to which Crowley is admired. He was an appalling parent, husband, friend, and an uneven poet, a poor scholar and a failure as far as magical self-discipline goes.
I totally agree. There's a wake of shattered lives behind him. But his followers would say you must separate the man from his teaching, as with Gurdjieff - he wasn't as extreme as Crowley but still had an unsavoury side to him. But I think it's too easy to do that; I don't think Crowley was particularly successful even in his own endeavours.
Crowley's (right) broadest sense of magick seems to mean the achievement of anything desired, whether it's making a cup of tea or climbing a mountain. But in terms of what people might regard as special powers, he seems to have been remarkably unsuccessful.
I think he had some innate powers. Colin Wilson makes the point in his chapter on Crowley in The Occult that he had some kind of animal second sight. There's a story where he's walking along Fifth Avenue in New York and he makes someone trip over telekinetically. I'm inclined to think that he did. But it doesn't seem to me that desirable a thing to achieve.
Surely not that impressive either? I'm reminded of old catholic bishop Sean Manchester's comment in FT 148:52 about supernatural curses directed by occultists: "I doubt whether collectively worldwide they could muster enough Energy to soft-boil an egg, much less make me keel over."
Wilson points out that in his autobiography Crowley admits that he would have done better had he not got into magick and the decadent life. He talks about his mountain climbing and says that that was when he felt the best, when he had risen above his ego. As someone very involved in his ego, these moments unfortunately didn't last very long. Crowley couldn't escape from himself, and I think that's ultimately the problem: he really had a schoolboy's sensibility. He's not a hero, he's a moral lesson. If he didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. He's the Romantic, decadent sensibility taken to an extreme. His life shows us its limits.
In the book you say that the OTO rituals are basically tantric sex magick designed to achieve altered states of consciousness. Some of them seem to involve - how shall I put it? - the ingestion of bodily effluvia. Didn't it give you a tummy ache?
Well, I admitted in the BBC2 documentary Magick - Art of Darkness that I had participated in a Gnostic mass, which involved eating a communion wafer that was dosed with menstrual blood, but I mean it wasn't dripping or anything like that. I guess there was a little speck in there somewhere. There's lots written about the use of sexual fluids for magickal purposes - for example in Peter Redgrove's fascinating book The Black Goddess And The Unseen Real (1988). I don't know if eating them or drinking them gives you something in particular. I think they're most effective in situ rather than as an additive in a biscuit.
Perhaps it's partly the liberating experience of breaking a taboo?
That has something to do with it, sure. Crowley talks about using sexual fluids as elixirs in his diaries. After one of his sex magick episodes he talks about the consistency of the elixir he's produced. He even made tonic pills containing his semen. They'd probably sell very well today!
Did you continue exploring altered states after leaving the OTO?
I was interested in altered states of consciousness and consciousness in general. J.W. Dunne's book An Experiment With Time (1927) impressed me. And again, as with magick, I thought I'd check it out by doing as he suggests. I kept a dream journal from 1980 until the mid 1990s. Dunne claimed it would demonstrate the existence of precognitive dreams. He was right - I had quite a few which I discussed in 1997 in The Quest, an American magazine. I have no theory about how this works, but my experience is that it happened so many times that I'm willing to believe that it's common and it's real.
In Turn Off Your Mind you say that Jung's Philemon and Edward Kelly's angelic visitations are strong evidence for the objective existence of an external intelligence.
I think Jung is right when he says that there are things in the mind that are not voluntary or subjective. One area of research that's been very fruitful for me is the hypnogogic state. I read an interesting book on Swedenborg by a clinical psychologist named Wilson Van Dusen called The Presence Of Other Worlds (1974). It's a study of the states Swedenborg got into when he was having his visions. Van Dusen experimented with them himself, and of course the Surrealists had done it with automatic writing.
I pursued them myself, and suddenly I would hear things, get sentences, or see cenes and they were clearly autosymbolic - they were not just nonsense. I recognized these things were actually metaphors of either the state I was in at the time or ideas I'd been thinking about. There was an intelligent, autonomous, recognisable process taking place. It was neither random, nor the junk disposal mechanism that some dream theorists claim. I didn't have anything like Jung's Philemon or Edward Kelly's Enochian experience, but I do feel that these processes are not a result of my rational self, nor am I talking to or fooling myself.
Have you developed any reliable techniques for inducing hypnogogic states?
I used to be much better at before I had children. My two and half year old son wakes up around 6:30 so it's hard to linger in bed in the morning, and at night I'm too knackered. Occasionally if I'm aware enough and am dozing I can access it. One example: I was reading something about Jung and Freud, and how both of them were using themes from Greek mythology in their writing about the unconscious. I started getting drowsy and lay back and drifted off. As I did so, I had an image of cellar doors gradually opening. Clearly this was an image of what was taking place: as I was becoming unconscious, I was drifting down into the basement of the mind. Suddenly the door opened up and all these mythological characters came running out: Hermes and so on. And this happened spontaneously. That convinced me.
I think you have to be as disciplined about it as you do if you're doing meditation. There's the Mavromatis book; there's a chapter in Ouspensky's (left) New Model Of The Universe and in Wilson Van Dusen's The Natural Depth In Man (1972). I'm interested in Rudolf Steiner and think his reading of the Akashic Records were probably hypnogogic states. This isn't to say that it's all absolute baloney and dreaming. Mavromatis goes into this - there's evidence that these states are conducive to psychism and precognition. At the same time, they are like dreams, so you get this combination of reliable evidence and wacky stuff.
Do you think Crowley's encounter with the demon Choronzon, the qliphoth of the kabbalah, meetings with fairies and some alien encounters are related to this hypnogogic state?
I guess you can open that door, and who knows exactly what will come through it? As Aldous Huxley says in Heaven and Hell, the mind has its own exotic and unexplored continents. It's subjective in the sense that it's inside my head, but it's objective in the sense that there are common features to this inner landscape. I think Huxley was right about this. You don't know what's there. I'm not trying to be scary - there's a possibility there. There's no reason why you should immediately encounter qliphothic entities, but Perhaps if you're interested in that sort of thing, or your pursuits lead you in that direction you may attract that sort of form. <SNIP>