Demon Muse

My new ebook: ‘Divinations of the Deep’

Matt Cardin — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:17:13 +0000

A heads-up to all of my readers here at Demon Muse: My first book, Divinations of the Deep, is now available in an ebook edition.

PURCHASE IT FROM THE PUBLISHER: Ash-Tree Press

PURCHASE IT FROM Amazon

First published in 2002 by Ash-Tree Press (which also published the new ebook), Divinations is a collection of five cosmic/supernatural horror stories that all deal with the intermingling of horror with deep religious and philosophical themes — just like my second book, last year’s Dark Awakenings. At least two of the stories pointedly address the issue of creative artistic inspiration in a manner that invokes the same psychological-spiritual reality I’ve been exploring here at Demon Muse and in A Course in Demonic Creativity.

“Notes of a Mad Copyist” is set in a medieval monastery, and it tells the story of a Christian monk whose job is to copy the Holy Scriptures by hand. His passionate spiritual life is invaded by a nightmarish horror, which he eventually learns to embrace and exult in, when he finds that his work has been taken over by a force that may be older than God, and that compels his hand to write a new scripture that speaks of a nightside reality impinging on God’s orderly creation. What’s more, the monastery’s abbot, who would otherwise be expected to condemn such blasphemy, proves to be an agent of that darkness itself. D. F. Lewis has said of the story, “Writing Horror, as I have done for many years, does bring one’s own abbot ‘shadow’ as tutelary guardian angel only to find out it’s a demon not an angel…This whole book is Fiction-as-Religion in action. It is truer than truth.”

The second of the two stories in question, titled “If It Had Eyes,” tells of a self-absorbed painter who, after years of being enchanted by the dreamlikeness of the nocturnal fog roiling over the Atlantic ocean, finally learns the secret of painting it: “When the fog began to roll in once more from the black waters, claiming first the breakwater, then the harbor, and then the town itself, I was shocked, overjoyed, elated beyond my wildest expectation when fingers of the most delicate whiteness curled lightly about my arm and hand, guiding me to the colors and strokes, the blendings and shadings, that would express at long last the color of my soul. I expended no effort, but simply tilted my head back to gaze up into the smoky white void while the fog worked through me to reproduce itself on the canvas.”

The other three stories likewise address in their respective ways the question or issue of the power that ultimately motivates and directs each of us by lying behind our souls and shaping our thoughts, emotions, actions, and lives. If you find the exploration of these matters in the context of the daimonic muse of creativity here at Demon Muse to be of interest, then you’ll likely find Divinations of the Deep to be interesting as well.

Here are what some readers have said about it:

Praise for Divinations of the Deep

“This collection was everything I’d hoped it would be, and that doesn’t happen often. Divinations of the Deep contains five stories that share the same Judeo-Christian religious theme. But this isn’t a book that you’ll find in Jerry Falwell’s library. This collection goes far beyond Judeo-Christian tradition, far beyond God, into the dark possibilities of what existed before God…Like Lovecraft and Ligotti, Cardin excels in creating a truly terrifying atmosphere of dread and decay by revealing what may lurk just beyond our view of reality. Few people succeed in this, but Matt does it with aplomb. His prose is intelligent and poetic, his execution, effortless. I believe this collection will become a classic of weird fiction.”

— Durant Haire, writing for Feoamante.com

“It’s a bold writer who, in this day and age, tries to make modern horror fiction out of theology, but Cardin pulls it off. Like most heretics, he may be wrong in the eyes of the Church, but he can cite texts: lots of scary Old Testament passages that suggest a gnostic mystery underlying perceived reality. What was the ‘face of the deep’ upon which there was darkness, before the first act of Creation? Was God’s act one of pushing back or containing a primal Chaos older and vaster than Himself? Cardin manages to turn this into a vision of terrifying, Lovecraftian nihilism. No mean feat, that.”

— Darrell Schweitzer

“Cardin massages the dark and hidden, and penetrates the ancient deep to fashion unique visions of horror and deity. Each piece has its own depth and unwavering regard to the theme. The settings are universally dark, murky, and decadent, putting you in mind of Poe especially, but also some of the more depressed turn-of-the-(20th)Century writers. In each of these stories, the author personalizes the apocalyptic question of ultimate power and order. It is a fascinating approach.”

— Cemetery Dance

“Matt Cardin’s stories display a thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about…[H]e knows that the Bible staked out the territory long before Lovecraft came on the scene. You might even say that he saw where Lovecraft went off the tracks by dismissing the power of the pre-existing symbols. In Divinations of the Deep, he has steered the train back onto the mainline of Western religion. I don’t want to suggest that these stories are devout or uplifting, or that they follow the Christian party-line. Far from it. The reputed consolations of faith are notably absent from Matt’s bleak universe. He comes by his credentials as a horror writer honestly: not by reading Stephen King with a felt marker in hand and one eye on the cash-register, but by suffering through a dark night of the soul that very nearly undid him. He merely writes what he knows.”

— Brian McNaughton

Writer’s voice and the unconscious mind

Matt Cardin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:59:27 +0000

In the latest installment (published just today) of the Guardian and Observer series of articles about “How to write fiction,” novelist Meg Rosoff offers some brilliant and exhilarating advice about finding your writer’s voice by learning to negotiate the relationship between your conscious and unconscious minds. (Or actually, she uses the word “subconscious,” which, while it carries a slightly different denotation and connotation, is close enough.) And she ties this directly to the question of not only writing authentically, but of knowing and living your life’s deep meaning. This is a subject and a discipline that, as you know, sits at the center of what we’re about here at Demon Muse, and also in Demonic Creativity.

Observe:

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place — from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind. This connection of subconscious to conscious mind is what gives a writer’s voice resonance. Read a great writer and you’ll feel the resonance – it’s the added dimension of power that can’t quite be explained by mere talent. An ability with words is nice, but it’s not a voice.

Connecting with your subconscious mind is not easy. It requires confronting difficult facts — about yourself and about the world…Of course the biggest, darkest question of all is death. Not an easy question to meet head-on. Some people naturally confront death. Some seem incapable of not confronting it. Woody Allen says that when he was a small child he lay in bed, terrified, contemplating eternal nothingness. So, apparently, did William Golding. Many people, however, live their lives in evasion of the central fact of existence. Of course it is perfectly possible to be a writer without facing death face-on, without years of psychoanalysis, and without a tendency towards depression. But the resonant, powerful, exciting voice that grips you in its thrall is likely to be a voice with a good deal of hard-won wisdom about humanity.

…Now think, for a minute, of your subconscious mind as the horse and your conscious mind as the rider. The goal is a combination of strength, suppleness and softness. If the rider (conscious mind) is too strong, too stiff or unsympathetic, the horse becomes unresponsive and difficult to control, or resistant and dull. The object of dressage is to create an open, graceful exchange of understanding and energy between horse and rider.

…A book written with an exchange of energy between the conscious and subconscious mind will feel exciting and fluid in the way that a perfectly planned and pre-plotted book never will. Writing (like riding, or singing, or playing a musical instrument, or painting or playing cricket or thinking about the universe) requires the deep psychological resonance of the subconscious mind.

– “How to write fiction: Meg Rosoff on finding your voice“

She follows this up with some useful advice about — surprise — taking up the practice of writing in the early morning, and writing with abandon, in order to feel your way into that living relationship between the two minds. It’s a great article, and I recommend it highly.

Ebook now available: “A Course in Demonic Creativity”

Matt Cardin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:19:09 +0000

The stars have aligned. The ebook has landed. Visit the download page. And remember, it’s free.

Ebook rescheduled for September 26 release

Matt Cardin — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:20:40 +0000

As I’ve gone about the task of making final edits and improvements to A Course in Demonic Creativity over the past few weeks, the text has unexpectedly begun to grow. Instead of the previously mentioned length of 30,000 words, the final version will clock in closer to 40,000. It’s an appropriate enough development, given the book’s — and this blog’s — focus on the inner genius, the daimonic muse, and the experience of creativity as an autonomous phenomenon.

The newly expanded version naturally requires a bit more editing, not only for orthographic purposes but to ensure that the whole thing fits together as a coherent and harmonious text. So I’m rescheduling its release from today to September 26. It will appear here first as a free pdf that has been intentionally formatted to look good on e-reader screens, and then a short time later (a few weeks to a month) in one or two other formats (Kindle, epub). The table of contents remains the same as previously announced.

Many thanks for your interest and patience. A lot of people have told me they’re looking forward to the book. In lieu of publishing it today, here’s its introduction:

Where does creativity come from? Why do ideas and inspiration feel as if they come from “outside,” from an external source that’s separate from us but able to whisper ideas directly into the mind? Why have so many writers throughout history—and also composers, painters, philosophers, mystics, and scientists—spoken of being guided, accompanied, and even haunted by a force or presence that not only serves as the deep source of their creative work but exerts a kind of profound and inexorable gravitational pull on the shape of their lives?

These are all questions addressed by the ebook you’re now reading. A Course in Demonic Creativity is a book about the deep nature of creativity in art and life. Its starting point is the understanding that we all possess a higher or deeper intelligence than the everyday mind, and that learning to live and work harmoniously and energetically with this intelligence is the irreducible core of a successful artistic life, and also of a successful life as a whole, if true success is defined as fulfilling the purpose for which you were born (and failure as its soul-crushing opposite).

We can call this intelligence the unconscious mind or the silent partner. We can call it the id or the secret self. But “muse,” “daimon,” and “genius” are so much more effective at conveying its subversive and electrifying emotional charge. The hundred-year history of modern-day depth psychology that started with Freud has numbed us to the radicalness inherent in the very idea of an unconscious mind, but we can begin to reclaim the transformative power of the original psychoanalytic insight by recognizing that right now, even as our eyes dance across this page or screen, and as a matter of brute, first-person fact, each of us is sharing his or her subjective space with a second self. Presently and always, there are at least two intelligences looking out from behind our eyes.

We can also begin to intuit the uncanny impact of this recognition by recalling that the idea of demonic possession in its distinctively Christian and pre-Christian form arose from the very same thought stream that gave us the muse and the daimon. The guiding daimon of the ancient Greeks, always an ambiguous and volatile figure, became the purely evil demon of the Christians, prone to usurp the personality and destabilize the community. At the same time, aspects of it were channeled into the emerging figure of the Christian guardian angel. So if we seek to enhance our art by fashioning ourselves into conduits for this force—a common enough goal, recommended by many popular books on creativity and self-development (very few of which, however, actually mention the muse, daimon, or genius)—then we’re playing, as it were, with fire. But that certainly shouldn’t stop us. Deliberately personifying your unconscious mind, whether as an act of pure attitudinal adjustment or a more concrete matter of giving it a name and imagining its visual appearance, makes it all the more easy and manageable to hand over your creative problems to it, and then later to accept the breakthrough insights and rushes of inspiration when they emerge.

What follows is a substantial expansion and integration of material that was originally published at my blog Demon Muse, as well as at other blogs and websites. To get the feel of it, imagine a college lecture course, or better, a graduate seminar, where the point isn’t so much to lay out a strict structure of assignments and information in lesson-plan format as to engage in an open, yet focused, conversation about the subject, and to see where it takes us. The first two chapters explain the philosophical, psychological, spiritual, historical, cultural, and general theoretical background to the book’s muse-based approach to daimonic creativity. The remaining six chapters explore the practical applications of this understanding for writers and artists. In all of them, I draw extensively on the work of many other writers about creativity and related matters whose work has informed and enriched my own understanding both philosophically and experientially.

Collectively, these discussions and explorations form a course in what might be called the Way of the Muse or the Path of Deep Inspiration. I’ve given it the overarching title A Course in Demonic Creativity not only because it has a nice ring to it, but because it captures the presiding spirit. As touched on above, and as will be explained in greater detail in Chapter Two, “A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius,” the word demon carries a host of deep meanings that have been largely lost to modern awareness, and their excavation reveals the fascinating, troubling, exhilarating, terrifying depths of what it means to be saddled with this pervasive and inescapable sense of a separate, guiding, inspiring, dominating presence within the psyche. Coming to terms with this presence, getting in stride with it, divining its leanings and desires, learning to embrace it, and identify with it, and “channel” its energy—this is the deep discipline of embodying and fulfilling your unique creative calling in life and art.

Your unconscious mind truly is your “genius.” Befriending it as such, and interacting with it as if it really is a separate, collaborating presence, puts you in a position to receive its gifts, and it in the position to give them to you. This book, drawn from my own personal experiences and studies as an author, musician, and inner explorer, is my attempt to explain what this really entails for writers and artists, and how you can verify its all for yourself.

– From A Course in Demonic Creativity (coming September 26, 2011)

Revised cover for demonic creativity ebook

Matt Cardin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:35:59 +0000

I got to looking at my rough/working cover for A Course in Demonic Creativity and realized that it’s pretty bland. I’m no graphic designer, but I can do better than that. After some tooling around and conferencing with my creative self, here’s the new version, which in addition to being more attractive offers a much better visual statement of the book’s guiding themes:

I’ve also added a few thousand new words to the book itself as I’ve been doing a final or penultimate revision of the text. The September 19 publication date is still firm. As previously stated, the ebook will be free and in pdf form. Watch this space for announcements about additional ebook formats.

Free Demon Muse ebook set for September 19 release

Matt Cardin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:14:20 +0000

I spent the past weekend speaking on various panels at the 33rd annual ArmadilloCon (the latest installment of the venerable science fiction/fantasy/horror publishing convention held each year in Austin, Texas). And since I mentioned the upcoming Demon Muse ebook to audiences there, and even gave a publishing date, I figured an update here at the website itself is obviously in order.

A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius will be published here as a freely downloadable ebook on Monday, September 19. The primary format will be pdf, but if enough people show an interest in a Kindle and/or ePub file (by sending me a message or leaving a comment here) then I’ll make those available as well.

Here’s a screen shot of the cover:

The ebook will be just over 30,000 words in length, and will bring together the contents of the core articles here at Demon Muse that deal specifically with the practical end of creative collaboration with the inner genius, along with one or two articles about the subject that I’ve published elsewhere on the Internet.

The contents will include:

Chapter One: Perspiration Meets Inspiration, or The Return of the Muse
Chapter Two: A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius
Chapter Three: A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche
Chapter Four: Getting to Know Your Creative Demon
Chapter Five: The Practice of Inner Collaboration
Chapter Six: Divining Your Daimon’s Rhythm
Chapter Seven: The Art of Active Waiting
Chapter Eight: The Discipline of the Demon Muse

I’ve spent considerable time revising and editing, and in some cases substantially expanding, this content from its original appearance here at the Website. This includes adding full information, in the form of footnotes and a bibliography, about the various books, authors, articles, and essays that I’ve read in my research about creative writing, the psychology of creativity, and the experiential reality of the daimonic muse.

Mark your calendar and use one of the subscription options offered below to make sure you don’t miss it.

ADDENDUM, 8/31/11: Check out the revised cover.

Revised cover for demonic creativity ebook

You and Your Inner Neanderthal, or The Muse in the Cerebellum (Theology, Psychology, Neurology – Part 3.2)

Matt Cardin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:28:24 +0000

This article continues the search for a possible biological basis of the muse experience, as explored in Part One, Part Two, and Part 3.1. The final paragraph of the previous article serves as the perfect lead-in to this one, so I’ll quote it in full and let it serve as a preface: “To summarize: The deep source of creativity truly feels to the ego like an independent and autonomous force or presence. Since the pineal gland is or may be centrally involved in the production of entity encounters, dreams, visions, and other experiences that display that same quality of intra-psychic autonomy as, and stand as first cousins to, the muse experience, and since psychedelics in general, including DMT, are so deeply associated with the stimulation of creativity, the pineal gland is worth considering as a possible biological locus of the muse.”

In addition to serving as a possible muse-location in its own right, the pineal gland transitions us to our next speculative/interpretive “lens” via its relationship to the cerebellum. Let’s allow the late Stan Gooch (1932-2010), psychologist and paranormal theorist extraordinaire, to launch the discussion:

[W]e have two brains: the cerebrum (the front brain) and the cerebellum (the back brain). The ancestor of all mammals had two pairs of eyes—one pair on top of the head and connected to the cerebellum. The second pair was in the front of the head and connected to the cerebrum. Originally, the cerebellum was the main brain. But in the course of time the pair of eyes on top of the head fused together and sank down into the skull to form what is today called the pineal gland, which is still actually light sensitive (of course the pineal gland is the “third eye” of ancient Hindu mysticism). Now the cerebrum and its pair of front eyes became the main brain. But when did you ever hear these astonishing evolutionary facts discussed? The pineal is located directly above the cerebellum, whose name is Latin for “little brain.” This is a structure beneath the forebrain.[1]

Although this passage touches on matters that we’ve already looked at in the previous section, it effectively slams us into the subject rather than easing us into it, and requires some backtracking to set the stage for explaining the cerebellar muse hypothesis—that is, the idea that the muse is located in, or perhaps simply is, the cerebellum — which was the proprietary theoretical creation of Gooch himself.

By the time he died an impoverished and embittered old man in September 2010, convinced that he and his ideas had been unfairly neglected, and living in what his friends described as almost inconceivable squalor,[2] Stan Gooch had achieved electric acclaim among a narrow but deep band of readers and thinkers for his radical theories about the evolutionary history of the human race and the fundamental nature of the human mind. Laid out over a span of several books, including Total Man: An Evolutionary Theory of Personality (1972), The Neanderthal Question (1977), The Paranormal (1978), Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom (1980; republished in 2006 as The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals), and Creatures from Inner Space (1984; republished in 2007 as The Origins of Psychic Phenomena), Gooch’s basic idea was that the ancient Neanderthal race possessed a highly developed culture that revolved around moon-worship, dreams, visionary states, and the like, and that this orientation clashed fundamentally with the solar-oriented aggressivism of their Cro-Magnon competitors. Neanderthal society, he maintained, was “a moon-goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, food-gathering society, where women governed all matters.” He believed theirs was a truly magical culture, in that they not only possessed a deep sense of kinship with the natural world and its cycles but a tendency to experience what we would today call mystical or visionary states, and more, what we would regard as paranormal manifestations. Cro-Magnons, by contrast, were masculine and militaristic, forming “a patriarchal, hunter-warrior society, of which men governed all aspects, including religious life.” When the two races finally encountered each other in Europe some 35,000 years ago, it was “an immense shock for both parties,” “a biological supernova,” because the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals were, as Gooch conceived them, fundamentally disparate and opposed to each other in a kind of racial-cultural Apollonian/Dionysian dualism.[3]

Stan Gooch

This all connects with the idea of creativity and the daimonic muse via the central biological and psychological — or rather, psychobiological — idea that Gooch drew from his theory. Contra the dominant scientific belief that Neanderthals went completely extinct while Cro-Magnons survived to become today’s homo sapiens sapiens, Gooch postulated that we modern humans are in fact the evolutionary result of the intermingling and interbreeding of the two species, and that the lasting effect of this event shows up both culturally and biologically as a foundational fissure in our societies and selves. We have, he says, a fundamentally dual nature corresponding to the ancient duality of our Paleolithic ancestors. “The offspring of crossbreeding between two widely separated species,” he reminded us, “often display two sets of opposing instincts, with which the offspring struggles (often in vain) to come to terms.”[4] On the cultural side, Gooch said we’ve inherited a peculiar overall sensibility that’s riddled with, and in fact characterized at its root by, an array of inbuilt oppositions and contradictions. To elucidate just one major area: “Cro-Magnon took over all the ‘magic’ and ritual of Neanderthal for his own. But he took it over without any real understanding of most of it, and also with certain appropriate changes to suit his own world view, his own existing social structure, his own biological imperatives. He took over essentially empty forms, while losing the priceless content.”[5] We now encompass this disparity within our singular humanness, as a fault line running all the way through our political attitudes (liberal vs. conservative), social mores (tolerant vs. intolerant), sexual dispositions (permissive vs. repressive), and everything else.

“A better name for the unconscious would be ‘alternative consciousness,’ a name that rightly suggests the separate identity, autonomy, and ‘own logic’ activity of this biological and psychological phenomenon.” – Stan Gooch

On the biological side — and here’s the real upshot — the physical source and manifestation of this duality is the fact of our “two brains” as described above. In our cerebrum, which Gooch, in agreement with pretty much everybody else, identified as the site of the conscious mind, we are Cro-Magnons. In our cerebellum, which Gooch, in disagreement with pretty much everybody else, identified as the site of the unconscious mind, we are Neanderthals. The most fundamental division in our psyche is, he said, a manifestation of our hybrid origin. The true depth and force of the idea comes across in his expressed reservation at using the term “the unconscious” to refer to this “self-governing part of the human mind that can function independently of normal consciousness.” He suggested that “A better name for the unconscious would be ‘alternative consciousness,’ a name that rightly suggests the separate identity, autonomy, and ‘own logic’ activity of this biological and psychological phenomenon.”[6]

After pausing to let the full import of such a statement sink in, we can observe that Gooch brings an array of proofs to his claim for the cerebellum as the physiological basis of the unconscious. His case includes both negative and positive arguments. The former consist of reasons to reject other possible brain locations for this role, such as the right cerebral hemisphere (regarding which, see the next article in this series) and the mid- and lower-brain centers. The latter consist of information about the exquisitely complex structure and function of the cerebellum itself, which, he says, render it in effect

a brain within the brain, a complete organism within the organism. . . . It looks very much in fact as if nature originally intended to make the cerebellum the headquarters of the total nervous system, but then changed its mind and developed the cerebrum instead. The cerebellum, however, was in business on its own accord before the cerebrum ever appeared.[7]

This part of his argument is significant, and Gooch is truly tasked with making a case for the cerebellum as a seat of “higher functioning” if he wants his theory to have any weight at all, because for decades the organ was almost universally described in mainstream medical literature as being primarily or even solely a control center for motor function. In other words, its job was seen as mainly physical, not cognitive or psychological, although — if Wikipedia can reasonably be taken these days as a gauge of current thought at any given moment — this has begun to shift.[8] Gooch needs the cerebellum to be reasonably regarded as an organ with qualities and capabilities that have traditionally been reserved for the cerebrum if he truly wants it to qualify as the seat of a second mind or “alternative consciousness.”

In this regard, I find it not a little fascinating that I, whose formal education in human biology and physiology reached its climax in an undergraduate survey course twenty years ago, was almost instantly able to locate an independent source with a palpable air of credibility that confirms something along the lines of what Gooch was getting at. Even more, this source distinctly echoes various tropes from other parts of Gooch’s theory as a whole. Observe especially the italicized portions:

With the development of new technology, a range of research (including tomographic regional cerebral blood flow [rCBF], computerized magnetic resonance [rCMR], and positron emission topography [PET] studies) now indicates that in humans the cerebellum contributes not only to motor control but also to affective and cognitive processing. . . . [H]igher-order cognitive processes in which the cerebellum has been implicated include the skilled manipulation of symbols, conceptual reasoning, and what are described as complex planning activities. In summary, several publications have suggested that the cerebellum is involved in a range of cognitive processes, including what has been described as pure mental activity and pure cognitive activity. . .

. . . Concerning motor function, it is considered that the cerebellum does not operate at the level of normal consciousness but, relative to the cerebrum, at an unconscious level. Similarly, cerebellar sensory processing operates not at a conscious level but rather as what might be described as an unconscious mind’s eye. Consequently, it is possible that cerebellar cognitive processing may constitute part of what has been called “the cognitive unconscious,” and may be particularly involved with the execution of automatized cognitive processes.

To summarize, the cerebellum is one of two cortical sub-systems capable of the cognitive processing of information from the environment and of controlling the behavior of the organism; in evolutionary terms it is, in part, the earliest to develop and therefore, in part, relates to earlier stages of cognitive development. It is particularly associated with unconscious control and cognition. In information representation and processing terms it may be described as a parallel processing sensorimotor sub-system of a relatively low level of discrimination, and from this perspective, it is complementary to the cerebrum.[9]

I find it impossible to read those passages against the backdrop of Gooch’s thought without feeling a thrill of fascination and amusement, even though the author patently had in mind nothing even remotely related to Gooch’s thesis. Cerebellar sensory processing as “an unconscious mind’s eye”? The cerebellum as an organ capable of “pure mental activity and pure cognitive activity” that may “constitute part of what has been called the ‘cognitive unconscious,’” and that can validly be viewed as “complementary to the cerebrum”? How close to Gooch’s thought can you get before you’re unconsciously ape-ing it?

In any event, the reader has probably already gathered that herein lies Gooch’s solution to the riddle of inspired creativity and the muse experience. To fully draw it out and understand it, we have to look back to his early life, before he abandoned mainstream psychology for a maverick’s career. The decisive spur to the development of his hybrid-origin theory came in 1958, when at the age of 26 he somewhat reluctantly attended a séance at the invitation of a new acquaintance. To his own utter astonishment, at the meeting he was overcome by a spontaneous experience of mediumship in which he lost consciousness and, as he was later informed, entered a trance state while several different entities apparently spoke through him. This understandably ignited a desire to understand what had happened to him, and also an enduring interest in paranormal phenomena, and so he commenced researching and experimenting with mediumship, trance channeling, automatic writing, and related subjects, even as he pursued an increasingly successful mainstream career as a research psychologist working for Britain’s National Children’s Bureau.

His specific course was set at another séance when he and the others present saw an ape-like “cave man” materialize in a corner of the room. Gooch became convinced that it was a Neanderthal [10]—an idea that would gestate for many years until he would finally introduce his hybrid-origin theory in Personality and Evolution (1973) and The Neanderthal Question (1977). But first came the book in which he laid the groundwork for those, the one for which he is arguably still best remembered and most widely praised: 1972’s Total Man. “On the surface,” writes Colin Wilson in a 1995 article lauding Gooch and his accomplishments, Total Man “was a fascinating combination of literary criticism and ‘depth psychology’. Arguing from works like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, [Gooch] suggested that man is a dual being, consisting of a rational ego, and a darker more instinctive being, which he calls the ‘Self.’” Although at first blush these ideas might sound conventionally Freudian or Jungian,

it is soon obvious that [Gooch’s] involvement with his ideas is on a deeper, more personal level, than with most psychologists. He regards the ‘Self’, which inhabits the ‘old brain’, as the source of legends about vampires, troglodytes, demons and other creatures from the world of the ‘occult’. Clearly, his experience of mediumship has made him aware of the unconscious as a mysterious realm of strange, dark forces.[11]

As explicated in the developing body of work that came after Total Man, among those “strange, dark forces” that dwell in the Goochian cerebellar unconscious are literal powers of paranormal manifestation and influence — entities, poltergeists, psychokinesis, and the like — as well as the power of inspired creativity, which Gooch viewed as being genetically related to mediumship and automatic writing. Indeed, in The Origins of Psychic Phenomena he broached the subject of the muse and its kindred in a chapter titled “Mediumship”:

[M]any artists of all kinds, though perhaps especially writers, feel that their source of inspiration is almost detached from them; it somehow seems to come to them from somewhere else, or someone else. . . . So the Greeks spoke of the Muses, actual goddesses who visited artists and philosophers to give them inspiration.

The Greeks also spoke of the “daimon” (our word “demon”), the active principle of a god that, similarly, visited and inspired human beings. Socrates had such a demon, to which he frequently referred. Artists, particularly romantic artists, have readily accepted these ideas. Even in common speech today we say “he painted like a man possessed.” Indeed, the experience of writing furiously for days on end with little or no sleep does feel very much like an act of possession.[12]

From the creative writer’s and artist’s point of view, the really fascinating point in all of this (as if all of the above isn’t attention-grabbing enough) is that Gooch’s theory offers a clear and rather compelling psychological and biological explanation for the typical phenomenological flavor of true engagement with an independent mind or will that infuses the experience of the creative demon muse. According to him, when we are creatively inspired, we — as in, our conscious, cerebral selves — are truly engaged with a separate mind and center of identity. We are literally encountering and interacting with an “other,” but the encounter is marked by an inherent feeling of strangeness and uncanniness because this “other” is not objective and separate but subjective and within us. Gooch writes that “Incubi, succubi, demons, and poltergeists”—and also, therefore, the muse and the daimon, which, as we’ve seen, he includes in this family of entities—“are not, after all, visitations from another world. No less amazingly, they seem to be visitations from another brain; we are haunted, it seems, by aspects of ourselves.”[13]

Even acknowledging that some or all of Gooch’s basic idea about Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals and the function of the cerebellum may be fanciful, especially since it’s all based not so much on empirical evidence as an intuitive leap of logic — although this alone isn’t enough to disqualify it, or else we’d have to disqualify scientific theorizing in general, which is all based on inference — it’s impossible to deny the marvelous evocative power of such a statement.

An attempted realistic rendition a Neanderthal child

And then there’s the fact that along with the increasing cognitive cachet of the cerebellum, recent research prominently trumpeted in the mainstream media has confirmed that modern humans really are part Neanderthal. I followed this story when it was first publicized in 2010, but it didn’t really come home to me until I was writing this article and beset by of one of those mind-warping synchronicities that so many writers and creatives are familiar with, the kind embodied in the oft-discussed “just the right book” phenomenon, wherein a needed piece of information comes to you as if by magic via the random appearance of an unlikely book. (“A university can provide you with a library,” William Irwin Thompson famously wrote, “but what makes the book you are not looking for fall off the shelf into your hands to give you the material you need is not understood by any university.”[14]) A few days ago while writing some of the above paragraphs about Gooch’s hybrid-origin theory, I took a break and went online to check my news and social media feeds, and was greeted by a dozen variations on a story that was probably conveyed most forcefully in a headline at the website io9: “Confirmed: All non-African people are part Neanderthal.” “The evidence,” the article said, “has been mounting for years that early humans and Neanderthals interbred, but now it’s pretty much a certainty,” thanks to the discovery, made by a research team led by Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal, that people of non-African origin carry a chromosome that originated in Neanderthals. The article’s author commented: “It’s kind of amazing to think that, as recently as just a few years ago, the scientific consensus was that humans and Neanderthals were completely separate species and probably didn’t interbreed. Since then, a ton of new evidence has come to light to change that position, and [Labuda's research] more or less completes this big reversal.”[15] CBS News added their own attitudinal gloss: “Next time you’re about to slam somebody for carrying on like a Neanderthal, think twice: You might be hitting close to home.”[16]

“We are haunted, it seems, by aspects of ourselves.” – Stan Gooch

Again, this is obviously a far cry from confirming Gooch’s unconfirmable hypothesis. But it’s enough to give us pause, and to lead us to savor again the emotionally energizing and catalyzing force of his overall argument and its upshot for understanding the muse: “We are haunted, it seems, by aspects of ourselves.” All creative artists are familiar to one degree or another with the exact experience these words point toward. Recall our earlier look at Crowley, Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, and the latter’s reference to “the Daemon or Holy Guardian Angel that haunts artists.” Thanks to Gooch, we have the theory of the cerebellar muse as one way to understand this experience, a theory that, if nothing else, sharpens our understanding of what’s really involved in the claim of an intra-psychic division between our conscious ego self and its unconscious daimon, and of the push-and-pull, give-and-take nature such a relationship necessarily entails for creative work.

Colin Wilson has said that he looks forward to a time when “it will be clearly seen that [Gooch’s] work represents one of the most impressive and exciting intellectual structures of the second half of the twentieth century.”[17] In its obituary for Gooch, The Telegraph pointed out that “Though the idea of interbreeding [between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons] was dismissed by scientists at the time Gooch first published, there does appear to have been an element of truth in it,” as witnessed by the new genetic evidence.[18] Gooch himself lived just long enough to see these developments begin to take place. Despite the manifest unhappiness of his overall life trajectory and the desolation of his final state, it would seem that his own demon muse was merciful enough to lead him to a not-utterly tragic end.

BONUS:

Here’s Carl Sagan’s explanation of the human brain from Cosmos. Although it has nothing to do with Gooch or his hypothesis, and although veritably galactic advances in our knowledge and understanding of the brain have taken place since this series first aired in 1980, Sagan’s approach remains one of the most entertaining and compelling tours of the subject.

NEXT UP:

Future installments in this series will discuss:

the venerable theory that the right brain is the seat of creative inspiration and perhaps the muse or daemon, as explicated in the work of, among others, Betty Edwards (author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), Anthony Peake (author of The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self), and Julian Jaynes (author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind;
and the rise of research into and theorizing about the “creative brain” that’s powered by cutting-edge neuroimagining technologies and focused on the role of the temporal lobes, the limbic system, and associated brain structures, as seen in the work of, among others, Michael Persinger, Alice Flaherty, and Shelly Carson.

NOTES:

[1] Stan Gooch, “The Doubly Divided Self,” Fortean Times, February 2011, http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/5176/the_doubly_divided_self.html.

[2] In an undated Internet plea (published sometime in the late 1990s) for people to send Gooch material assistance, Brent Logan, an aspiring author who idolized and befriended Gooch, described his situation thus: “[H]e has been marginalized to a rented caravan in a nearly abandoned Welsh trailer park—with neither telephone nor computer, his correspondence inked on the backs of galley proofs, and scarce personal contact—wholly lacking family, right at life’s raw edge.” See “An Urgent Appeal to Help the Acclaimed Author, Stan Gooch,” http://www.brentlogan.net/sg/stan_gooch.htm.

[3] The quotations from Gooch in this paragraph are drawn from his various books, and are gathered together in Oana R. Ghiocel and Robert M. Schoch’s extremely helpful and informative article, “Stan Gooch & the Neanderthal Legacy,” New Dawn, February 28, 2011, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/stan-gooch-the-neanderthal-legacy.

[4] Gooch, “The Doubly Divided Self.”

[5] Gooch, quoted in Ghiocel and Schoch, op cit.

[6] Ibid., 202-3.

[7] Ibid., 216.

[8] “The cerebellum (Latin for little brain) is a region of the brain that plays an important role in motor control. It is also involved in some cognitive functions such as attention and language, and probably in some emotional functions such as regulating fear and pleasure responses. Its movement-related functions are the most clearly understood, however.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Cerebellum,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum, accessed July 21, 2011.

[9] E.J. Parkins, The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science, Third ed., ed. W. Edward Craighead and Charles B. Nemeroff (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), s.v. “Cerebellum.” Emphases added.

[10] It’s worth noting that seeing a vision of this particular sort a séance, while conventionally outlandish-sounding, is not as unprecedented or arbitrary as it might initially sound, as pointed out in an article at Fortean Times that was written partly in response to a February 2011 essay by Colin Wilson about Gooch’s Neanderthal hypothesis: “Men and Apes,” Fortean Times, n.d., http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/ghostwatch/5710/men_and_apes.html.

[11] Colin Wilson, “Colin Wilson talks about the achievements of author Stan Gooch,” AULIS Online, 1995, http://www.aulis.com/twothirds_colin_wilson.htm.

[12] Stan Gooch, The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007), 111.

[13] Ibid., 217.

[14] William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1978), 73.

[15] Alasdair Wilkins, “Confirmed: All non-African people are part Neanderthal,” io9, July 18, 2011, http://io9.com/5822357/confirmed-all-non+african-people-are-part-neanderthal.

[16] “Confirmed: Non-Africans found to be part-Neanderthal,” CBS News, July 18, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/07/18/scitech/main20080408.shtml.

[17] Wilson, op. cit.

[18] “Stan Gooch,” The Telegraph, November 4, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8110857/Stan-Gooch.html.

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

PHOTO CREDITS:

“No Dreams” by gogoloopie, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Stan Gooch, from the Stan Gooch Archive by Hyperion Media
Neanderthal – A widely reprinted re-envisioning of what Neanderthals may have looked like (challenging the “cave man” image)

Third Eyes and Unknown Entities: Mysteries of the Pineal Gland (Theology, Psychology, Neurology – Part 3.1)

Matt Cardin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:49:56 +0000

Although this article can stand alone, it will mean more if you read Part One and Part Two first. Also note that I decided to publish this part of the “Theology, Psychology, Neurology” series in separate sections, hence the “3.1″ in the title. Future installments/sections will discuss other possible biological locations for the muse experience; see “Next Up” at the end of this article.

* * *

Introduction

From the previous post‘s focus on the experiences of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson in contacting or being contacted by a “higher intelligence,” we now turn to the question of the daimonic muse’s neurological aspect, to wit: When we feel as if we’re being guided and inspired in creative work by an independent, external force or presence, what’s going on in our body, and more specifically, in our brain? What are the neurological aspects of the experience of the demon muse? And how does this contribute to answering, or at least informing, our overarching question about its ontological status?

By way of continuity, we can note that in their respective ways Crowley, Leary, and Wilson were all deeply interested in the workings of the human nervous system. In fact, the veritable explosion of new interest over the past couple of decades in what are now commonly called the “neural correlates of consciousness” — the brain states corresponding to subjective experiences — directly fulfills Wilson’s oft-expressed wish for a widespread cultural recognition of our real epistemological predicament vis-à-vis the neural basis of all our knowledge,[1] which is, he maintained, an aggregation of impressionistic takes on a wildly rich and diverse primary reality by a multiplicity of nervous systems that experience fundamentally different worlds because they are “tuned” to different experiential wavelengths. For him, as well as for Leary and Crowley, the question of creative inspiration and the question of its neurological component were inseparable.

Basically, what we’re asking here is 1) whether and where the muse experience might be located in the brain or, more broadly, the body, and 2) how this might contribute to our understanding of what this experience “really is.” Several possibilities commend themselves immediately to our attention. Some of them involve the new knowledge made available to us by the two technologies propelling today’s functional neuroimaging wave, positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Others hail from different lines of inquiry. Collectively, they form a series of “lenses” through which to focus our question and gain a multipoint perspective on it.

Third Eyes and Unknown Entities: Mysteries of the pineal gland

Our first biological/neurological lens is the pineal gland, a pea-sized structure located deep within the brain that was determined in the mid-20^th century to help regulate our circadian sleep/wake cycle by secreting melatonin. Prior to that, nobody knew what it really did, but speculation ran rampant for more than two millennia. In the 4^th century B.C.E., the Greek physician Herophilus examined the pineal while dissecting corpses and speculated that it was involved in the functioning of the soul. Two thousand years later, the 17^th-century philosopher Descartes famously declared it “the seat of the soul,” the physical point where mind and matter are joined together, and from whence the former exercises control over the latter.[2]

Two centuries after that, the first real scientific findings about the pineal gland’s nature and function had the ironic effect of providing fuel for further mystical and metaphysical speculation. Based on the observation that we share this organ with other animals, including not just mammals but creatures of an older evolutionary age, such as amphibians and lizards, whose pineal gland is linked to a functional third eye called the dorsal or parietal eye (located on top of the head between the two main eyes), several scientists in the late-19^th century began to conjecture that the human pineal gland is a vestigial dorsal eye or third eye of its own, a relic of our phylogenetic history. This was immediately pounced upon by esoteric philosophers, including, most notably, Madame Blavatsky, the formidable head of the Theosophical movement, as scientific evidence of the reality of the mystical third eye or “Eye of Shiva.” Today the idea of the pineal gland as a vestigial eye is an accepted part of evolutionary biology, even as it has also become almost universally embraced among occult and esoteric thinkers for its spiritual third-eye resonance. Witness this typical passage from a 2003 publication by the Theosophical Society:

The mind and senses are paths for occult energies that work through various psychophysical centers or chakras, among the highest of which is the pineal gland. These centers continue to develop as we evolve towards spirit. So while the third eye or pineal gland has certain physiological activities in conjunction with the pituitary gland—together they regulate the rhythms of metabolism and growth—it is also the physical organ of intuition, inspiration, spiritual vision, and divine thought.[3]

On a less mystical but no-less philosophically and emotionally evocative note, renowned 20^th-century French writer George Batailles famously thought that

The cardinal phylogenetic fact in the development of the human species. . . is its vestigial unpaired eye. . . . Both sense organ and gland, both harbinger of light and remnant of inner darkness, the pineal eye is for Bataille the birthmark of human futility and fatality. It is the fleshy symbol of a hapless, hopeless struggle against animality and the earth, of a vain attempt to reach the heights of the open sky.[4]

So what is it about this unassuming, deeply buried gland that has inspired such interest and speculation? Medical doctor and psychiatrist Rick Strassman explains the matter concisely in his groundbreaking book DMT: The Spirit Molecule:

The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired, meaning they have left and right counterparts; for example, there are left and right frontal lobes and left and right temporal lobes. As the only unpaired organ deep within the brain, the pineal gland remained an anatomical curiosity for nearly two thousand years. No one in the West had any idea what its function was.[5]

Endocrinologist and chronobiologist Josephine Arendt gets at the same thing when she begins her Melatonin and the Mammalian Pineal Gland by referring rather lyrically to “The pineal gland, the mysterious unpaired organ of the brain, the ‘third eye’, the seat of the soul, a ‘calcified vestigial organ with no function’, subject of medical jokes.”[6] The New World Encyclopedia likewise conveys much the same point: “The pineal gland was the last endocrine gland to have its function discovered. This combination led to its being a ‘mystery’ gland with myth, superstition, and even metaphysical theories surrounding its perceived function.”[7]

Most pointedly for our own specific interests, in the 1990s the pineal gland was implicated in fascinating research involving the psychedelic substance DMT and its tendency to produce an experience of being visited by angels, demons, aliens, and other paranormal presences with a distinct first-cousin relationship to the muse, daimon, and genius. This research was conducted by the aforementioned Rick Strassman. As already discussed in one of the notes to the previous article in this series, beginning in 1990 Strassman conducted the first DEA-approved research into the effects of psychedelics on test subjects in over two decades, and wrote DMT: The Spirit Molecule, published in 2001, from his findings and reflections. In the book he describes how the deep origins of the project involved both the pineal gland and the question of creativity: he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he was alerted to the possible spiritual significance of the pineal by psychologist James Fadiman, who explained that one of his jobs was to help engineers learn to think creatively. “Little did I know,” writes Strassman, “that Jim had worked with Willis Harman, who was administering psychedelic drugs in an attempt to enhance creativity, at a nearby research institute. The published results of this work, over thirty years old, remains [sic] the only such data in the literature and showed great potential for stimulating the creative process.”[8]

For Strassman this all ignited an enduring interest in the pineal gland, and he approached his later DMT research under the guiding hypothesis, based on highly suggestive but inconclusive biochemical evidence, that DMT, which is produced endogenously—that is, naturally, internally—by the human body, and which can also be found throughout nature in plants and animals of all kinds, occurs with a particularly psychoactive relevance in the pineal gland, from whence it is responsible for spiritual and mystical experiences like those seen in religious visions, enlightenment experiences, and near-death experiences. In other words, he hypothesized that the pineal gland is the “spirit gland,” the biological locus of spiritual experience. The resonance of this idea with the long-enduring “third eye” meme is obvious.

His research consisted of injecting sixty volunteers with DMT and carefully documenting the results. One of the most common reports to emerge from these sessions was the experience of being propelled into what felt like other-dimensional encounters with independent, objectively existing “others,” entities that appeared variously as clowns, elves, aliens, angels, demons, robots, and insectoid creatures. These beings wanted to interact or communicate with, and sometimes even assault, the experiencer.

Both Strassman’s descriptions of these things and those of his research subjects, who not only conversed with him during and after their DMT sessions but composed written accounts of their experiences, are replete with tantalizing hints of muse-like elements. “[M]ost curiously,” Strassman writes,

there was a feeling of ‘the other’ somewhere within the hallucinatory world to which this remarkable psychedelic allowed them entrance. . . . Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another ‘intelligence’ or ‘force’ directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with ‘beings’. . . . Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street.[9]

In a follow-up conversation with Strassman about the long-term effect of the sessions, a volunteer named Aaron said, “I’ve found that the DMT experience intensified verbal, visual, and musical abilities.” A volunteer named Rex said, “I’ve had more creative urges, and I’ve been writing more. . . . I have written some poems of the Other. Many were written before, but some after getting started in the study.” Perhaps most pointedly, a volunteer named Nils said his first experience with DMT, which occurred a year before he got involved with Strassman’s research, produced a remarkably muse-like effect: “I became very excited as an inner voice spoke to me. This was my intuition directly relating to me. It was the most intense experience of my life.”[10]

We can note that it’s obviously only a short step, if indeed it’s a step at all, from the experiences described here to the related experience of communication with an inspiring and motivating daimon, muse, or genius, which similarly arrives from an invisible “hyperspace” (the popular term for the sensed psychic/daimonic space the DMT entities seem to inhabit) and feels like an autonomous, ego-alien force or presence that pushes, pulls, or otherwise influences a person’s actions and affect.

“I became very excited as an inner voice spoke to me. This was my intuition directly relating to me. It was the most intense experience of my life.” – Participant in Rick Strassman’s DMT research

Wanting to get more information about Strassman’s thoughts on all of these things, I contacted him in June of 2011 after starting to write this article, and found him quite accessible and willing to answer my questions. When I asked him about any experiences with a specifically muse-like presence that emerged from his research, he told me that none of his test subjects encountered “a specific entity that said ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that,’ although people felt inspired, either over the short or long term, to effect changes in their creative lives.” He said that when he performed some informal follow-up interviews with a few test subjects for the 2010 documentary film that was made from his book, some of them did describe “changes of interest” that indicated a kind of creative leading: “For example, someone began writing fiction based upon her experiences, which had led her to Peru and an investigation of some of the ayahuasca culture there. Someone else, a physician, changed specialties from family practice to a more obstetrics based practice because of some of his visions on DMT. Another volunteer was inspired to begin training as a body-therapist, but I don’t know if she followed-up in that regard.” He also described a creative impact on his own life and work: “Indirectly, my path changed course, as I’m less interested in the biology now than I used to be, and more interested in the spiritual meaning/message of the DMT effects.”

Rick Strassman

Of particular significance to our present consideration of the pineal gland in relation to the muse is a new focus in Strassman’s thought: the relationship between the DMT experience and the state of consciousness that produced the Hebrew Bible. Like the Christian New Testament, the Old Testament texts are commonly described as “inspired,” referring not only to their content but to their mode of origin. And whereas in DMT: The Spirit Molecule Strassman drew on ideas from theoretical physics, Buddhism, and shamanism to speculate about the nature and meaning of the DMT realms and entities, today he says he’s inclined to think that “the Old Testament model of prophetic states seems like a good one to explicate the DMT effect,” since these states “resemble, to a certain degree, DMT effects, suggesting a common underlying biology.” He’s currently (as of July 2011) writing a book about this subject. As he described it to me, his focus is mainly or largely on the possible value of this insight for gaining a better interpretive and even experiential grasp on the Hebrew scriptures: “Since the prophetic state inspired the Old Testament text, this overlapping biology may suggest that psychedelic states, to the extent they resemble prophetic ones, could facilitate a deeper resonance with the text.” For our purpose at hand, what stands out is the very notion that “the prophetic state inspired the OT text,” and that this may be directly related, or even identical, to the DMT effect and therefore originating in the pineal gland.

In the interest of factual accuracy, it’s important to remember that the pineal gland’s production of DMT is still awaiting experimental proof or disproof, although Strassman told me that recent evidence continues to suggest the distinct possibility that it really does happen.[11] But if it should prove to be true, then this would strongly implicate the pineal gland in the muse experience, especially in the context of such things as psychologist Benny Shanon’s description of the creativity-enhancing effects of DMT, which he witnessed and personally experienced in conjunction with the DMT-containing brew ayahuasca. The visionary state brought about by ayahuasca is, he says, “a time of grace during which ordinary human beings can. . . be like dancers or musicians when the Muses descend upon them.”[12] In his book Antipodes of the Mind, Shanon describes a state of muse-like empoweredness that came upon him once when he drank ayahuasca and played the piano:

In an amateur fashion, I have been playing the piano since childhood. I have played only classical music, always from the score, never improvising. . . . Once during a private Ayahuasca session, I saw the piano in front of me. A score of a Bach prelude was there. I played the piece repeatedly and felt I was entering into a trance. Then, I left the score aside and began to improvise. I played for more than an hour, and the manner of my playing was different from anything I have ever experienced. It was executed in one unfaltering flow, constituting an ongoing narration that was composed as it was being executed. It appeared that my fingers just knew where to go. Throughout this act, my technical performance astounded me. At times, I felt that a force was upon me and that I was performing at its command.[13]

Shanon says a friend who witnessed this performance later said it truly seemed as if he had been infused with the power of the Muses. One may of course argue that this serves not as evidence of the pineal gland’s muse-like function (or of anything else, for that matter) but of the psychological effects of DMT. But again, if Strassman’s hypothesis is true, and the pineal gland produces DMT that becomes psychoactive at certain life junctures, then the connection is drawn.

To summarize: The deep source of creativity truly feels to the ego like an independent and autonomous force or presence. Since the pineal gland is or may be centrally involved in the production of entity encounters, dreams, visions, and other experiences that display that same quality of intra-psychic autonomy as, and stand as first cousins to, the muse experience, and since psychedelics in general, including DMT, are so deeply associated with the stimulation of creativity, the pineal gland is worth considering as a possible biological locus of the muse.[14]

Trailers for the documentary film The Spirit Molecule:

NEXT UP:

Future installments in this series will discuss:

psychologist and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch’s location of the unconscious mind and the muse in the cerebellum;
the venerable theory that the right brain is the seat of creative inspiration and perhaps the muse or daemon, as explicated in the work of, among others, Betty Edwards (author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), Anthony Peake (author of The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self), and Julian Jaynes (author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind;
and the rise of research into and theorizing about the “creative brain” that’s powered by cutting-edge neuroimagining technologies and focused on the role of the temporal lobes, the limbic system, and associated brain structures, as seen in the work of, among others, Michael Persinger, Alice Flaherty, and Shelly Carson.

NOTES:

[1] Consider the following passage from the preface to renowned neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human—one of several high-profile titles published in its genre in 2011: “In the last decade we have even seen neuroscience becoming self-confident enough to start offering ideas to disciplines that have traditionally been claimed by the humanities. So we now for instance have neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroarchitecture, neuroarcheology, neurolaw, neuropolitics, neuroesthetics. . . and even neurotheology. Some of these are just neurohype, but on the whole they are making real and much-needed contributions to many fields” (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, xiii). Now consider this passage from the glossary at the end of Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy—published 32 years earlier, in 1979: “NEURO-: A prefix denoting ‘known or mediated by the nervous system.’ Since all human knowledge is neurological in this sense, every science may be considered a neuro-science, e.g., we have no physics but neurophysics, no psychology but neuropsychology and ultimately no neurology but neuroneurology” (New York: Dell, [1979] 1988, 542).

[2] For an easily available source of information about Descartes’ thoughts on the pineal gland, and also about the general history of scientific and esoteric speculation on the subject in general, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Descartes and the Pineal Gland” (accessed June 2, 2011).

[3] John Van Mater, Jr., “The Third Eye and the Pineal Gland: Ancient Clue to Spiritual Man,” Sunrise, February/March 2003.

[4] David Farrell Krell, Architicture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (Albany: NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 146. http://www.netlibrary.com.

[5] Rick Strassman, M.D., DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001), 59.

[6] Josephine Arendt, Melatonin and the Mammalian Pineal Gland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 1.

[7] New World Encylopedia, s.v. “Pineal gland” (accessed June 4, 2011).

[8] Rick Strassman, op. cit., 57.

[9] Ibid., 2, 149, 187.

[10] Ibid., 270, 271, 8. In a rather remarkable reversal on these types of experiences, a thirty-six-year-old waiter and writer named Don found that “His transpersonal high-dose DMT sessions destabilized his world view so much that he stopped writing for the first time in years,” since his psychedelic confrontation with “the vast and impenetrable nature of the source of all existence” conflicted with his staunch Roman Catholicism and threw him into despair (Strassman, 273).

[11] He told me, “Nicholas Cozzi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison submitted an abstract to this year’s Society of Neuroscience meeting in which he shows high activity of the DMT synthesizing enzyme in pineal, spinal cord, and retina. That abstract will be in their proceedings.”

[12] Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 366.

[13] Ibid., 210-11.

[14] A parting thought from Strassman’s and my conversation underscores the irreducible element of arbitrariness in all of these speculations. When I described my pineal-muse idea and asked for his gut reaction, he replied, “People seem to live normal lives without the pineal. And anyway, most endogenous DMT seems to derive from the lungs. Perhaps the lungs are the source of creativity more so than the pineal if you’re looking for a source of an endogenous psychedelic that stimulates creativity. You know, the association between breath and spirit, ‘inspiration,’ and so on.”

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

PHOTO CREDITS:

“Eye Spy“: by pareeerica via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Rick Strassman: from the book jacket for DMT: The Spirit Molecule

Muselinks for June 7, 2011: daimonic imagination, creative cycles, and marrying your muse

Matt Cardin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:31:01 +0000

“How to Marry Your Muse: An Interview with Jan Phillips,” Sounds True. An award-winning photographer, writer, artist, and national workshop leader shares her ideas on establishing a right relationship with your unconscious collaborator. “The whole point about the concept of ‘marrying your Muse’ is to recognize that our relationship with the inner world is every bit as important as our relationship with the outer world. If we want to experience the Muse, to really know and feel her as a collaborator in our creative work, then we have to commit our time and attention to her on a regular basis.”

“Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno,” Scott McDowell, 99%. This article draws practical tips from a new ebook about Brian Eno’s career and creative process, and relates his advice to recent discoveries in neuroscience about the necessity of building a relaxation phase into your creative cycle.

“5 Steps to Subconscious-Driven Creativity,” Patrick Ross, The Artist’s Road. An excellent procedure for directly engaging your unconscious mind by formulating targeted questions and handing them over to it.

“Writing above Your Head,” Clayton Luz, Glimmer Train. “Writing above your head makes something happen inside; it’s a process of self-realization, a self-knowing what Steven Pressfield artfully described as giving ‘birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.’”

“Finding a ‘Muse’ at the Beinecke,” Iva Popa, Yale Daily News. “For the next several months, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will be providing insight into ‘the science of the soul.’ A new exhibition at the Beinecke, ‘Psyche and Muse,’ features a collection of pictures, handwritten letters, postcards, manuscripts and books belonging to influential figures from the history and development of psychology, ranging from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung.”

“Daimonic Imagination, Uncanny Intelligence.” This was a conference held on May 6-7 at the University of Kent. A number of abstracts, PowerPoints, and full papers that were presented are now available online. The original call for papers itself is richly evocative and informative in its own right, and is well worth quoting at length:

In this inter-disciplinary conference we will be addressing the question of inspired creativity. In many traditions the fount of creative vision and the source of divinatory insight is located in an intelligent ‘other’, whether this is termed god, angel, spirit, muse or daimon, or whether it is seen as an aspect of the human imagination and the activation of the ‘unconscious’ in a Jungian sense. From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, the sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly attested. Such communication may take the form of a flash of intuitive insight, psychic or clairvoyant ability, or spiritual possession. In art and literature many forms have been given to the daimonic intelligence, from angels to aliens, and in the realm of new age practices encounters with spiritual beings are facilitated through an increasing variety of methods including shamanism, hypnotherapy, mediumship, psychedelics, channelling and spirit materialisation. Theories of divinatory practices such as astrology, tarot or I Ching often assume a spirit or god-like intelligence at work in symbolic interpretation, and guardian angels abound in self-help literature.

This conference is not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings. Rather, we would invite papers that address the theme of how the ‘numinous other’ is conveyed and depicted, how its voice is heard, how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. We would like to engage the imagination and open up discussion, particularly around the subject of how researchers might best approach the study of such marginalised and culturally anomalous visions and experiences, and what their value might be.

Image credit: “Dark as my soul can be” used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) from formerlydumb

In Search of Higher Intelligence: Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson (Theology, Psychology Neurology – Part Two)

Matt Cardin — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:25:44 +0000

NOTE: It’s tempting to begin with an exclamation like “And we’re back!” For the past several months, Demon Muse has been on hiatus as I’ve done some necessary clarifying and recharging in communion with my creative source. If you’re a long-time reader, I thank you sincerely for your patience, and for the expressions of ongoing interest that some of you have sent me. If you’re new to Demon Muse, then I hope you’ll enjoy and profit from this ongoing exploration of the theory and practice of inspired creativity, and will add your voice to the conversation in each post’s comment section. In particular, you may find it worth your while to explore the Course in Demonic Creativity, which organizes this blog’s “backbone posts” into a coherent course of self-study in the art of creativity as a muse-driven or daimon-driven pursuit. (For an even more easily accessible and portable presentation, look for an ebook version later this year.)

Be advised that the present post inaugurates a new format that will include 1) occasionally longer articles with endnotes and 2) a drastic reduction in the number of in-text links. For a rationale concerning the second part, see “Experiments in delinkification” by Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and its book-length expansion, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Also see “To link or not to link? That is the question” at The Economist and “The Hyperlink War” at the Barnes & Noble Review. Or do a Google search for hyperlinks + distraction. For a rationale concerning the first part: Endnotes keep a reader engaged in the same text instead of leading attention away.

* * *

To review, in the opening post of this series I raised the question of whether the personification of the creative force that we’ve been pursuing here at Demon Muse is “really real.” Is the muse, the daimon, the personal genius — that gravitational center of our creative energy and identity — truly a separate being/force/entity with an independent, autonomous existence? Or are such words and the experience to which they refer simply convenient metaphors for the unconscious mind? The first thing we discover when we truly begin to consider the issue in depth is that arriving at a viable answer will not be, and cannot be, as straightforward a matter as it might first appear. All of our attempts run us into immediate difficulties, because whichever side we try to choose, we find we’re automatically skirting important issues and begging crucial questions. Hence, the value of reviewing some of the various ways in which intelligent individuals have understood the experience of guidance and communication from a muse-like source.

Of all the myriad strands in the cultural conversation about this issue, it would be hard to identify a more pertinent — or fascinating (and entertaining) — one than the line of influence connecting 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary to counterculture novelist-philosopher and “guerilla ontologist” Robert Anton Wilson. The dividing line between objective and subjective interpretations of the experience of external-seeming communication from an invisible source is highlighted not only in their individual stories but in the plotline that connects them. In particular, Wilson’s final “resting point” in terms of a belief system to encompass the whole thing is helpful and instructive in our search for the muse’s ontological status, and can prove a helpful tonic for dogmatism, because what he ended up with was more of an anti-belief system that highlights and hinges on the irreducible indeterminacy of any possible answer.

By way of a warning: Prepare for high weirdness! What follows is a strange story.

The Great Beast and his Holy Guardian Angel

Aleister Crowley in his middle years

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was arguably the most influential occultist of the 20th century. Not only did his ideas fundamentally impact, and in many cases essentially define, the outlook and practices of virtually all subsequent participants in Europe’s and America’s thriving subculture of ceremonial magicians and mystical occultists, but his outrageously colorful, theatrical, and transgressive life — some of which he hyped in the retelling of it, but much of which was truly bizarre and depraved by conventional standards — ensured him an enduring place in popular culture. For decades his name, memory, and iconic visual image — bald head, broad face, fiery eyes — have stalked through pop music (e.g., the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, legions of heavy metal albums), literature (especially the horror genre), graphic novels, movies, television shows, and video games. One of his favorite self-titles, drawn from the biblical Book of Revelation, was “The Great Beast.” Most would say he did a fine job of living up to it. (Example: Mussolini expelled Crowley from Sicily in 1923 when Crowley’s reputation as “the wickedest man in the world” — which was inflamed by sensationalized media reports — began to precede him.)

Crowley’s relevance to the muse-based or daimon-based approach to writing and creativity is found in his lifelong engagement with the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel — a topic or idea that I mentioned in passing in a previous Demon Muse post (“A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius”), and that, as noted there, is a specific iteration of the fundamental concept of the muse, daimon, or genius. By the time Crowley came along, the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel had already been around for several centuries in Western occult and mystical circles, or even longer if you factor in its long prehistory in Neoplatonism and various sister schools of philosophical mysticism. Crowley himself borrowed the term from an English translation of a medieval occult text. So there was nothing particular original in his use of it, or even in his fundamental philosophical framing of it. But it was he who made it central and definitive for subsequent generations when he founded the new religion of Thelema and devoted the remainder of his life to explicating and promoting its principles.

The founding event itself, which Thelemites still celebrate every year on the spring equinox as the Feast of the Equinox of the Gods, was the writing of Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. As the story goes, in April 1904, while Crowley was on honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt with his new wife Rose, the book was dictated to him over a span of three days by a voice that identified itself as Aiwass (or Aiwaz), messenger of the Egyptian god Horus. The book became Thelema’s central scripture, and Crowley identified Aiwass as his own Holy Guardian Angel. He also identified the event as a dividing point in history that signaled the end of the former “Aeon of Osiris,” a period characterized by belief in patriarchal monotheism and all that goes with it, and the new “Aeon of Horus,” whose guiding ethos would be individual liberty and the discovery of each person’s “True Will” in communion with his or her own Holy Guardian Angel.

Interestingly and importantly, his championing of Thelema and Liber AL didn’t happen right away in the immediate wake of his Cairo experience. In fact, he was initially not all that enamored of the book, and spoke more than once of the way its ideas were distasteful and contrary to his own thoughts. Wilson and co-author Miriam Joe Hill elaborate on this briefly in their encyclopedia Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups, and their comments again underscore the question of what Crowley’s experience with Aiwass “really was”:

At first, Crowley did not like the experience or the book, and managed to largely ignore them for ten years. After 1914, however, he felt increasingly under their spell, and eventually he devoted the rest of his life to the “mission” the book imposed on him. After 1919, he spoke of the Cairo experience as an encounter with a superhuman intelligence; one of his disciples, Kenneth Grant, has claimed the communicating entity emanated from the system of the double star, Sirius, while another student, Israel Regardie, prefers to say Crowley reached the depths of the human evolutionary unconscious unknown to either Freud or Jung.[1]

This can all sound outlandish to those who are unfamiliar with the subcultural stream it represents, but it’s important to recognize that Crowley’s experience with Aiwass falls right in the mainstream of a significant tradition in Western history, the very tradition, in fact, of the muse/daimon/genius that has also come down to us in the more familiar idea of the creative muse, and in the even more familiar Christian idea of the personal guardian angel. Thelema is erected entirely upon and around the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel. Its central organizing concept is the necessity for each adherent to achieve the “knowledge and conversation” of his or her own Angel, and thereby to discover the aforementioned True Will, a term that is basically coeval with the idea of a life mission or divine purpose. The most famous statement from Liber AL — the oft-quoted “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” — was borrowed and modified from Rabelais, but in Thelema it assumes the radically specific and transformative meaning of discovering one’s guiding daimon and thereby accessing, activating, and actualizing one’s cosmic/divine destiny. The classical daimon or genius, we will recall, encapsulated the idea of an invisible spirit that accompanies a person through life and exerts a kind of existential gravity or magnetism that evokes experiences in accordance with the divinely ordained life plan. This idea, paired with that of the muse, forms the heart of the inspiration-based approach to creativity we’re pursuing here. When Crowley spoke and wrote about the Holy Guardian Angel, and also, significantly, when similar-minded people and organizations in his time did the same — as with the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose founder was in fact the translator of the book that provided Crowley with the term “Holy Guardian Angel” — he was pursuing the very same thing from a different angle.

His experience is also relevant because his interpretation of it, which continued to evolve throughout his lifetime, underscored the tension or confusion between objective and subjective views. Until the end of his life he kept issuing what seemed to be contradictory statements about the matter. Sometimes he even planted them side-by-side in the same writing, as in The Equinox of the Gods (1936), the book where he tells the story of how The Book of the Law came to be written. At one point he describes the Holy Guardian Angel as “our Secret Self — our Subconscious Ego,” clearly favoring an interpretation of the Angel as a layer or presence within the psyche. But in the same chapter he says that even though the words of The Book of the Law were physically written by him as “ink on paper, in the material sense,” still they

are not My words, unless Aiwaz be taken to be no more than my subconscious self, or some part of it: in that case, my conscious self being ignorant of the Truth in the Book and hostile to most of the ethics and philosophy of the Book, Aiwaz is a severely suppressed part of me. Such a theory would further imply that I am, unknown to myself, possessed of all sorts of praeternatural knowledge and power.[2]

In other words, Crowley says here that the simplest and therefore the best explanation is to consider the Holy Guardian Angel an independent intelligence, since the subconscious explanation strains credulity even more.

Four decades after Crowley wrote these words, in June 1973, Robert Anton Wilson took “a programmed trip on something an underground Alchemist told [me] was LSD,” where part of the “program” involved listening to a taped reading of Crowley’s Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel. As Wilson recounted in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, he achieved, among other experiences, “a rush of Jungian archetypes, strongly influenced by the imagery of Crowley’s Invocation, but nonetheless having that peculiar quality of external reality and alien intelligence emphasized by Jung in his discussion of the archetypes.”[3] He also “laughed merrily at Crowley’s joking seriousness in telling one disciple, Frank Bennett, that the Holy Guardian Angel invoked in this ritual is merely ‘our own unconsciousness’ and meanwhile telling another disciple, Jane Wolf, that the Holy Guardian Angel is ‘a separate being of superhuman intelligence.’[4] Again, the paradox or contradiction is deliberate and central.

Title page of a published edition of Crowley's THE BOOK OF THE LAW

The reference to Frank Bennett, not incidentally, comes from a conversation that he and Crowley both recorded separately, Crowley in his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography and Bennett in his diary of the time he spent with Crowley in 1921. Bennett was a British-born Australian who became one of Crowley’s chief disciples, and Crowley wrote in his Confessions that he once revealed something to Bennett that shocked him into an initiatory experience of his Holy Guardian Angel. Editors John Symonds and Kenneth Grant filled in the other half of this story in a footnote to their edition of the book: “We know from Frank Bennett’s diary what Crowley said to him on this occasion. . . . Crowley told him that it was all a matter of getting the subconscious mind to work; and when this subconscious mind was allowed full sway, without interference from the conscious mind, then illumination could be said to have begun; for the subconscious mind was our Holy Guardian Angel.”[5]

For our present purposes, perhaps the most helpful expression of the interpretive tension we’re seeing here — a tension that can, I think, generate its own creative fire to fuel artistic work — comes from Israel Regardie, who served as Leary’s personal secretary from 1928 to 1932 and went on to become one of the most influential figures in modern Western occultism. In his introduction to The Law Is for All, a collection of Crowley’s commentary on The Book of the Law, Regardie wrote, “It really makes little difference in the long run whether The Book of the Law was dictated to him by a preterhuman intelligence named Aiwass or whether it stemmed from the creative deeps of Aleister Crowley. The book was written. And he became the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, accurately expressing the intrinsic nature of our time as no one else has done to date.”[6] One is free to disagree with Regardie regarding Crowley’s prophetic value and insight, but his basic point — that it doesn’t matter whether one opts for the supernatural or psychological explanation, because the end result is the same — is worth pondering at length and in depth by those who are seeking to navigate a relationship with their own deep creative selves.

The strange case of Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary flashes his famous smile on the cover of INFO-PSYCHOLOGY (a revision of his EXO-PSYCHOLOGY)

The leap from Crowley to Leary and Wilson is, culturally speaking, a drastic one. It’s a leap from Edwardian and post-Edwardian England to the America of Woodstock and rock and roll; from World Wars I and II to the Vietnam era; from black-and-white movies and the age of radio to the shimmering visual-electronic culture of McLuhan’s global village. But even so, the basic theme of perceived guidance and communication from an invisible, alien presence remains constant. Moreover, the fact that the early 21^st century saw a surge of fresh interest in Leary’s life and legacy, and also in the general history of the psychedelic movement and the possible therapeutic and spiritual uses of psychedelic drugs, [7] only reinforces the pertinence of our attempt to understand the nature of this internal guidance and its emergence as an alien-seeming force — something that is characteristic of many psychedelic experiences.[8]

The basic outline of Leary’s life is more than just well-known, it’s legendary. His “first career,” as it were, was as a mainstream psychologist and professor. In the 1950s he taught psychology at Berkeley and performed research for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most famously, he taught at Harvard from 1959 to 1963. Some of his early work has had a lasting influence; while serving as head of psychological research for the Kaiser Family Foundation he came up with a system of analyzing human personality along two axes, love-hate and dominance-submission, that produced eight possible personality types with two subdivisions each. It was a brilliant idea (with roots in the work of earlier psychologists) that ended up expressed in a diagram that has come to be known as the “interpersonal circle” or the “Leary circumplex.” Leary’s insights helped to lay the foundation for what would become the standard personality tests that are still in use today, e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (which is mostly extrapolated from Jung — who had deeply influenced Leary).[9]

Leary’s progressive fall (or ascent, depending on your perspective) from formal respectability was initiated in 1960 when, encouraged by the cultural tenor of the time and the specific incitements of friends and colleagues from both academia and the emerging counterculture, he traveled to Mexico and ingested psilocybin mushrooms. Some years later he said, “I learned more about my brain and its possibilities, and I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than I had in the preceding 15 years of studying, human research and psychology.”[10] When he returned to Harvard, he enlisted the aid of his colleague Richard Alpert, who would later achieve fame as writer and spiritual teacher Ram Dass, to launch a formal study of the psychological effects and possible therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs.

The story of how the whole thing spun out of control is long and fascinating, but the short version is that after achieving some interesting and promising initial results — such as an indication that the integration of psychedelics into the counseling programs offered to criminal offenders might drastically reduce recidivism rates — Leary, who was naturally antiauthoritarian and free-wheeling, grew fed up with the constraints of conventional research, reputation, and respectability, and ended up getting fired from Harvard in 1963, along with Alpert. The university shut the research program down, and within a few years the U.S. government had banned the use of all psychedelic drugs for any purposes, scientific or otherwise.

The provocation for the government ban was traceable most directly to Leary himself, who upon his departure from Harvard rapidly transformed himself into the colorful prophet of psychedelic liberation that he’s best remembered as today. Naturally, this incurred the wrath of civil authority, and so began a trend that was eventually epitomized by Richard Nixon’s televised proclamation circa 1970 that Leary was “the most dangerous man in America.”

Agents Howard Safir and Don Strange of the BDDA (predecessor to the DEA) arrest Leary in 1972

Irrepressible to the core, Leary refused to back down, and his life path rapidly mutated into something like a thriller novel with a plot involving imprisonment, escape, flight from the U.S., entanglement with prominent anti-government groups (e.g., the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground), kidnapping, flight from country to country, and eventual return to the U.S. in 1973, at which point he was thrown back in prison, first at Folsom and then at the Vacaville California Medical Facility. At Folsom he was kept in solitary confinement, and also, for a time, in a cell next to Charles Manson.

It was in those prisons that his story dovetailed with our overarching theme of guidance by the muse/daimon/genius, for it was there that he began to experiment consciously with opening himself to thoughts and ideas that, as it seemed, “wanted” to be expressed through him — in other words, with channeling. Viewing the operation as a form of telepathy, and setting as his goal the contacting of “Higher Intelligence” (his specific term) of an expressly extraterrestrial sort, he recruited his wife Joanna, a fellow prisoner named Wayne Benner, and Benner’s girlfriend, a journalist, to participate. The resulting writings — Starseed (1973), Neurologic (1973), and Terra II: A Way Out (1974) — introduced his famous 8-circuit model of consciousness and advanced the idea that life originally came to earth from outer space, and that humanity is destined by DNA coding and evolutionary impulse to colonize space and return to the stars for transcendence and fulfillment via reunion with the galactic source of our being, which is none other than the Higher Intelligence he and his team were in contact with.

To back up a bit and draw a crucial connection: by this point in his life Leary had come to see himself as deeply connected to Aleister Crowley. He had long felt an interest in Crowley’s life and ideas, but by the time he arrived at Vacaville in 1974 he was convinced that he was, in his very person, a “continuation” (as distinct from a reincarnation, since his and Crowley’s lives overlapped) of Crowley and his work. In the words of John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, in the early 1970s Leary came to believe “that his role in life was to continue Crowley’s ‘Great Work’, that of bringing about a fundamental shift in human consciousness.”[11] This was the result of several mind-blowing events that seemed to indicate a profound connection to Crowley. Most dramatically, in 1971 Leary and English beatnik artist and writer Brian Barritt tripped together on LSD in the Sahara desert at Bou Saada, “City of Happiness,” reputedly a site of magical influence. It was the night of Easter Saturday and Sunday, and Leary and Barrett witnessed massive celestial imagery and visionary symbolism. A year later they discovered that some of the things they had seen and experienced paralleled in eerie fashion a series of visions reported by Crowley in his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Unknown to them at the time of their Sahara experience, Crowley had engaged in a weeks-long magical ritual in 1909 with the poet Victor Neuberg on the very same site in the very same riverbed at Bou Saada. Barritt later wrote that he and Tim were “pretty freaked out” when they discovered this, and he speculated about a “mysterious force” in the form of an “unconscious directive” that had dictated in parallel fashions the motivations and even the life events and circumstances of Crowley-Neuberg and Leary-Barritt across a span of decades.[12]

Augmenting the Crowleyan vibe, in 1972 Leary asked a deck of Crowley-designed tarot cards, “Who am I and what is my destiny?” and then randomly cut the deck to the Ace of Discs — the very card that Crowley had identified as his own representation. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Hope Fiend (a title he chose as a deliberate blending of Crowley’s Confessions with his Diary of a Dope Fiend), Leary wrote, “The eerie synchronicities between our lives [i.e., his own and Barritt’s] and that of Crowley, which were later to preoccupy us, were still unfolding with such precision as to make us wonder if one can escape the programmed imprinting with which we are born.”[13]

“It is a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far outstrips the human mind and energies which are very ancient.” – Timothy Leary, describing the LSD experience

It was in the wake of all these Crowleyan synchronicities that the incarcerated Leary began his channeling experiments. He approached them in the full sway of his sense of carrying on Crowley’s planetary consciousness-altering mission, and in full view of the fact that Crowley had attempted similar contact with a higher intelligence. And although Leary made no mention of the Holy Guardian Angel, his emerging extraterrestrial hypothesis or viewpoint corresponded with that of the subset of Thelemites, mentioned earlier, who thought contact with one’s Holy Guardian Angel was actually a form of contact with a literal extraterrestrial intelligence. (Others, by contrast, vehemently insisted and still insist today that such a view is false, ridiculous, and detrimental.)

Wilson began exchanging letters with Leary a few month after the commencement of Leary’s telepathic “transmissions,” and later offered a succinct description of the concrete nature of the experiments: “The Starseed Transmissions — ‘hallucinations’ or whatever — were received in 19 bursts, seldom in recognizable English sentences, requiring considerable meditation and discussion between the four Receivers before they could be summarized.”[14] What’s of prime interest to us here is that even though the resulting writings clearly advanced and proceeded from the extraterrestrial view of higher intelligence rather than the unconscious or daimonic/muse-based one per se — in Terra II, for example, Leary asserts the truth behind humanity’s long history of belief in higher intelligences (as in religious beliefs) but modifies it in a science fictional direction: “The goal of the evolutionary process is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with the galactic network. Contacting the Higher Intelligence.”[15] — other things said by other people about the Learyan view of communicating with perceived higher or external intelligences, and even things said by Leary himself, clearly link his experiences to a more traditionally muse-ish view.

For instance, in a bit of archival footage featured in the “Summer of Love” episode of PBS’s American Experience series, Leary describes the LSD experience by saying, “It is a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far outstrips the human mind and energies which are very ancient.”[16] There’s no indication of the context or time period in which he said this, but it resonates interestingly with something he told Wilson when the latter came to visit him at the Vacaville prison:

[Leary said] Interstellar ESP may have been going on for all our history. . . but we just haven’t understood. Our nervous systems have translated their messages in terms we could understand. The “angels” who spoke to Dr. Dee, the Elizabethan scientist-magician [who had figured in both Crowley-Neuberg’s and Leary-Barritt’s visionary experiences in the Sahara], were extraterrestrials, but Dee couldn’t comprehend them in those terms and considered them “messengers from God.” The same is true of many other shamans and mystics.[17]

Note that despite the outrageous-sounding nature of such speculations to the modern secular-materialist ear, Leary was not insane. Or at least that was the medical-psychological opinion of the mental health professionals who evaluated him, according to Wilson:

It should be remembered, in evaluating the Starseed signals, that, a few months before this experiment, three government psychiatrists testified (at the escape trial) that Dr. Leary was perfectly sane and possessed of a high I.Q. Since so many extremists of Left and Right have impugned Leary’s sanity, it should also be entered in the record that Dr. Wesley Hiler, a staff psychologist at Vacaville who spoke to Dr. Leary every day (often to ask Tim’s advice), emphatically agrees with that verdict. “Timothy Leary is totally, radiantly sane,” he told me in a 1973 interview.[18]

Nor was Hiler’s judgment made in ignorance of the telepathy/channeling experiments that Leary was engaged in. In fact, Wilson says Hiler regarded Leary’s project from an informed long-historical/psychological view, and Hiler’s actual words resonate wonderfully with the vibe of ontological uncertainty that we’re chiefly concerned with exploring:

I asked Hiler what he really thought of Dr. Leary’s extraterrestrial contacts. Specifically, since he didn’t regard Leary as crazy or hallucinating, what was happening when Leary thought he was receiving extraterrestrial communications? “Every man and woman who reaches the higher levels of spiritual and intellectual development,” Dr. Hiler said calmly, “feels the presence of a Higher Intelligence. Our theories are all unproven. Socrates called it his daemon. Others call it gods or angels. Leary calls it extraterrestrial. Maybe it’s just another part of our brain, a part we usually don’t use. Who knows?”[19]

Bob Wilson’s excellent adventure

Robert Anton Wilson at the National Theatre, London, in 1977 for the 10-hour stage version of ILLUMINATUS!

And so, having journeyed through the wild worlds of Crowley and Leary, we arrive at Robert Anton Wilson, known affectionately to friends and fans simply as “Bob,” in whose person and work these themes all continued to thrive, interbreed, and effloresce until his death in 2007. It’s fairly impossible to do him justice by assigning a single term for his role, e.g., by calling him a science fiction author or philosopher. Although he’s most famous for co-writing, with Robert Shea, the legendary Illuminatus! trilogy and (by himself) its semi-sequel, the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy — the first a satirical head trip of a science fiction/occult conspiracy novel that became an instant counterculture classic when it appeared in 1975, the second a more quantum weirdness-oriented take on the same general ideas — he also wrote a huge number of additional books, both fiction and non-fiction, and some of them falling in the fuzzy-fertile area between, that dealt with consciousness, evolution, mysticism, occultism, linguistics, semiotics, self-programming, intelligence increase, life extension, quantum physics, the philosophy of science, space migration, human idiocy, religion, meditation, money, and more. Richard Metzger’s description of Wilson and Illuminatus! is hard to top for its pinpoint accuracy in identifying the crux of the man’s appeal:

To outsider teenagers in the 1970s, Illuminatus! became an intellectual touchstone, a way of figuring out a world they’d been born into that seemed increasingly surreal. Once you read it, you were changed forever. There was no way you could look at the world around you in the same way once you digested its subversive message. The Illuminatus! trilogy was a nifty way of imprinting a skeptical worldview on an impressionable mind. A magical initiation in book form, you might say, on sale at shopping malls across America. And our parents were never the wiser![20]

(Note that outsider teens from the 1980s were also deeply impacted, a case in point being me. I discovered Illuminatus! in late high school, circa 1987, and was affected in ways that I’m still hashing out two and a half decades later.)

As already indicated in the above discussions of Crowley and Leary, Wilson resonated with the ideas of both men, and was in direct contact with Leary during the Starseed period. He even helped Leary in the crystallization and promulgation of his 8-circuit model of consciousness; although the model was first laid out by Leary in Neurologic (1973) and Exo-Psychology (1977), Wilson gave it an energetic and entertaining publicity boost, and also provided a work of genuine substance, in his 1983 book Prometheus Rising, which featured an introduction by former Crowley secretary Israel Regardie. So it’s no surprise that in addition to being aware of and interested in Crowley’s and Leary’s experiences in communicating with angels and aliens, Bob had his own encounters with “higher intelligence.”

The primary account of it is found in his Cosmic Trigger (1977; later retitled Cosmic Trigger I when Wilson wrote two sequels). Again, Metzger zeroes in on the emotional heart of the matter when he writes that, notwithstanding the trippy and subversive delights of Illuminatus!, “Cosmic Trigger was different. This time the mask came off. In this book, Wilson came clean, in the most intellectually honest way that 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?’”[21]

Wilson, who had a Ph.D. in psychology, contextualized the book’s content in a valuable introduction that he wrote for a new edition published in 1986: “Cosmic Trigger, he explained, “deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-76. This process is called ‘initiation’ or ‘vision quest’ in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology.”[22] In the course of this “initiation” he came into perceived contact with a number of external-seeming intelligences and was thrust into the same surreal world that Leary and Crowley had likewise explored.

Cover of an early edition of Wilson's COSMIC TRIGGER

The high point emerged from his commencing a new “course of neuropsychological experiments” in 1971, in response to the feeling that he had deciphered a hidden message in Crowley’s The Book of Lies. “The outstanding result,” he wrote, “was that I entered a belief system, from 1973 until around October 1974, in which I was receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a planet of the double star Sirius.” [23] Although he never describes anything like Crowley’s experience of supernatural dictation that resulted in The Book of the Law or Leary’s experience of extraterrestrial telepathy that resulted in the Starseed books, the question of his supposed Sirius contact, and of the general idea of psychic contact with alien-seeming forces or entities, dominates the bulk of Cosmic Trigger and forms the guiding thread of Wilson’s journey through “Chapel Perilous,” his term, borrowed from Arthurian legend, for the frightening state of psychological uncertainty in which the walls of a person’s belief system have been broached and he can’t tell what’s real or unreal. Wikipedia defines Chapel Perilous in this sense as “an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain if he has been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or if what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of his own imagination.” (Wikipedia also attributes the original use of the term for this purpose to Wilson himself.)[24]

In describing the various synchronicities and paranormal events that began to unfold in his life, Wilson forcefully foregrounds the questions of ontology and epistemology, of what’s really real and how or whether we’re even capable of making that determination, and he describes various reversals and mutations in his own viewpoint. For example, he explains how it was a meeting in October 1974 with Dr. Jacques Vallee, the internationally renowned astronomer and UFOlogist, that led him away from the belief that he (Wilson) was literally receiving telepathic transmissions from Sirius. Wilson says Vallee told him this type of other-worldly communication is a centuries-old phenomenon “and will probably not turn out to be extraterrestrial,” since the extraterrestrial slant can be chalked up to the influence of modern cultural beliefs. In former eras, Vallee said, “The phenomenon took other and spookier forms.”[25] Bear in mind that this is the same Dr. Jacques Vallee whose combination of solid, mainstream scientific credibility and long-running UFOlogical involvement has brought some respectability to the sometimes loopy UFO field. It’s also the same Vallee who served as the real-life model for the French head of the covert, government-sponsored UFO contact team in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Wilson says Vallee’s viewpoint “made perfect sense to me, since I had originally gotten in touch with ‘the entity’ by means of Crowleyan occultism. The extraterrestrial explanation was not the real explanation, as I had thought; it was just the latest model for the Experience, as angels had been a model for it in the Middle Ages, or dead relatives speaking through mediums had been a model in the 19^th century.”[26] This framing of all belief systems in relativistic and provisional terms — an attitude that, as we might do well to notice, is implicit in the very concept of a “belief system” itself, since to recognize belief systems as such automatically subverts the unreflective and wholesale adoption of any of them — became for Wilson the touchstone of his entire outlook. He began that new preface to Cosmic Trigger, written ten years after the book’s first publication, by proclaiming in all capital letters, “I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING.”[27] In explaining this position over several pages, he quotes approvingly Alan Watts’ characterization of the universe as “a giant Rorshach [sic] ink-blot” and describes his own position as “neurological model agnosticism — the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself.” [28]

Most significant for us are his specific thoughts in this vein about the status of all those invisible entities/intelligences encountered in psychic space:

Personally, I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here — the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius — are necessary working tools at certain stages in the metaprogramming process [i.e., the process of accessing and altering one’s unconscious “programming”].

That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these “keys” to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion.[29]

With this, we’re back once again to Crowley and his continual dance on the edge of mutually exclusive interpretations. “I don’t believe anything,” Wilson insisted, and also Crowley and Leary in spirit. The question for us is: Can we learn anything from this?

Angels, daemons, and haunted artists

It doesn’t necessarily mean audible voices and telepathic transmissions, but it definitely means a sense of something impinging on or communicating with our conscious self “from the outside,” or perhaps from the deep inside, which experientially amounts to the same thing.

For our specific purpose here — the purpose being, again, to divine the meaning and reality status of the muse, the better to invite the experience of creative inspiration — what’s valuable in the stories of Crowley, Leary, and Wilson is the vivid picture they show us of people dealing with a real force or forces in the psyche. As already mentioned, the Holy Guardian Angel and its supernatural and extraterrestrial kin are explicitly connected in historical-cultural-conceptual-psychological terms to the ancient muse, daimon, and genius, and a Wilsonian attitude of thoroughgoing “neurological model agnosticism” toward them serves only to remove any categorical interpretations of what’s really happening in the perceived experience of inner communication, not — not — the fact of the experience itself. Regardless of what we think or how we feel about this experience, it really did happen to these three men. It really has happened to people throughout history. And it really can happen to you and me. It doesn’t necessarily mean audible voices and telepathic transmissions, but it definitely means a sense of something impinging on or communicating with our conscious self “from the outside,” or perhaps from the deep inside, which experientially amounts to the same thing. The really electrifying jolt comes when we realize, as our three present case subjects did, that such impinging and communicating is always happening whether or not we’re consciously aware of it, as a constant psychic undercurrent. If we’re skilled and sensitive enough to tune in and hear it, the rewards in terms of creative vibrancy can be exquisite.

Needless to say, none of this is intended to recommend that everybody ought to stop reading right now and immediately take up the practice of magick and the use of psychedelic drugs. I don’t do either of those things myself. The Crowley-Leary-Wilson connection is simply instructive and engaging, in the way a great cross-genre fantasy/SF/horror story is engaging.

Alan Moore

What’s more, it can be actively inspirational, in the sense of inspiring creativity in others. For two very visible illustrations of this, consider the forceful pop culture presences of comic book writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Both are living legends in the field of comics and graphic novels, and Moore has achieved a vast exposure beyond that already vastly visible creative realm via the popular movie adaptations of his work, the two most prominent probably being V for Vendetta (2006) and Watchmen (2009). Both men are actively interested and involved in the Crowleyan/Learyan/Wilsonian view of the human psyche as a realm of strange contacts, and both are creatively driven by these very ideas and experiences.

Moore, for example, famously announced in a 2001 interview with the Guardian that his creativity had become utterly bound up with his experiences of felt contact with other intelligences while practicing ceremonial magic. This largely arose, he said, out of an unexpected utterance from the mouth of one of his own characters:

One word balloon in From Hell [Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, adapted into a 2001 movie starring Johnny Depp] completely hijacked my life. A character says something like, ‘The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind’. After I wrote that, I realised I’d accidentally made a true statement, and now I’d have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician. . . . I’m dependent on writing for a living, so really it’s to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you’re going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

– Alan Moore being interviewed by Steve Rose, “Moore’s murderer,” Guardian, February 2, 2002

In other interviews and writings, Moore has spoken at length about the deep influence that the related ideas of Crowley, Leary, and Wilson have exerted on his life and work in this vein. In March 2007, two months after Wilson’s death, he even spoke at a tribute event for Wilson at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

As for Morrison, his legendary 1990s comic book series The Invisibles, with its epic-trippy story of superpowered anarchists standing off against a race of alien gods that dominate humanity, bears the clear imprint of the Crowley-Leary-Wilson thought world. Morrison has spoken candidly of his own experience of contacting his Holy Guardian Angel and finding it a source of both life guidance and creative energy, and in doing so has explicitly referred to the names and work of our three presiding figures. Perhaps most famously, in a talk he delivered at the 2000 DisinfoCon — a convention organized by Richard Metzger in support of his BBC television show Disinformation and its publishing wing, The Disinformation Company — Morrison said the following:

I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson’s books when I was 20 years old, which is 20 years ago now. And I figured, is this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens, we can talk to people from Sirius. Is he talking crap? He said Aleister Crowley’s got methods for contacting alien intelligence and for changing the world. Is he talking crap? So I did it. And no, he’s not talking crap. And we can all do it. . . . Suddenly, I found out that if you do these things that you’re told by Aleister Crowley, by Wilson, by all these people we read and these people we’ve been consuming, but we don’t do it — if you actually do what they say, things happen. Things occur exactly as it’s described. And we can all do it. So I decided to put this to use in the comic book that I was doing, this thing called The Invisibles. And the idea was to kind of get all this down on paper, to somehow look at it. Not to accept it as reality, but to accept it as purely, “This is part of human experience.” It’s a part of human experience that has been described to us for thousands and thousands of years, but for the last 200 has been hidden and made occult, for some reason that I don’t understand, but that seems to have something to do with the industrial revolution and corporate culture. So these things happen. Magic works. And when I started doing the comic, I found that you could actually make magic happen by writing things and changing the operating system of the universe. It works, and I’m here to tell you to try it when you go home today, because it fucking works.

[You can listen to Morrison saying all of this himself in the video recording of his speech. In this YouTube video, the portions I've transcribed start at 1:10 and 9:40.]

In closing, and in case the main point needs driving home, consider this: entirely aside from all of the far-out details of his (possibly) paranormal experiences, at least twice in his life Robert Anton Wilson directly equated the autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that drives artistic creativity with the ontologically indeterminate Higher Intelligence that communicated (or “communicated”) with him, Leary, and Crowley. One of these instances appears in an essay he wrote (under the pseudonym of one of his own fictional creations, book critic Epicene Wildeblood) about Raymond Chandler and his work. In describing Chandler’s decade-and-a-half hiatus from the literary life, Wilson wrote, “Chandler spent 15 years, the prime years of a man’s life, in the oil-executive game before the Daemon or Holy Guardian Angel that haunts artists got its teeth into him again.”[30]

The other instance is found in an interview Wilson gave to the late, great genre magazine Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction. The interviewer asked, “Is a book fully organized in your mind before you start writing or does it take shape as it unfolds?” Wilson responded:

Sometimes I have a clearer idea of where I’m going than other times, but it always surprises me. In the course of writing, I’m always drawing on my unconscious creativity, and I find things creeping into my writing that I wasn’t aware of at the time. That’s part of the pleasure of writing. After you’ve written something, you say to yourself, “Where in the hell did that come from?” Faulkner called it the “demon” that directs the writer. The Kabalists call it the “holy guardian angel.” Every writer experiences this sensation. Robert E. Howard said he felt there was somebody dictating the Conan stories to him. There’s some deep level of the unconscious that knows a lot more than the conscious mind of the writer knows.[31]

The unconscious mind? The demon? The Holy Guardian Angel? All and none of the above? For purposes of accessing and aligning with the experience of creative inspiration, does it really matter?

NEXT UP:

A consideration of the neurological aspects of creativity and what these can tell us about the experience of the muse, as found especially in the work of Harvard professor and neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, and Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.

NOTES:

[1] Robert Anton Wilson and Miriam Joan Hill, Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 134.

[2] Tim Maroney, “Six Voices on Crowley,” in Richard Metzger, Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2003), 168-9.

[3] Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, [1977] 1991), 83.

[4] Ibid., 84.

[5] Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (New York, Penguin Arkana: 1989), 936, n. 4.

[6] Quoted in Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 133.

[7] See for example Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (2010), Peter Conners’ The White Hand Club: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (2010), Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner’s Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (2010), Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006), John Higgs’ I Have America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary (2006), and more. Regarding the (very mainstream) rebirth of scientific research into the uses of psychedelics, see, for example, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development (2010) by Neil M. Goldsmith, Ph.D. In a more “news of the moment” vein, see “LSD finds new respectability” (ScienceDaily, September 1, 2005), which reports that although “In the 1960s, as the media increasingly associated the drug with love-ins, anti-war demonstrations and the counterculture, governments intervened to criminalize LSD, restricting and then terminating medical research into its potential therapeutic effects,” today the “therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs are resurfacing.” Similarly, see “‘Party on’ for psychedelic drug research?” (September 1, 2010) from Nature News Blog, the online news service of venerable Nature magazine, as well as Nature’s four-part blog series from August 2010, “Hallucinogenic Drugs in Modern and Mental Health.” Conceived and edited by Nature’s neuroscience editor Noah Gray, the series starts with the provocatively titled “The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry” by molecular and developmental neurobiologist Moheb Costandi and ends with the equally provocatively titled “Visions of a Psychedelic Future” by clinical and research psychologist Vaughan Bell. Also see Steve Kotler’s blog entry at Psychology Today titled “The Psychedelic Renaissance: The Drugs Are Back, And They Mean Business This Time!” (January 5, 2011). The American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology reported in 2010 that “Forty years after federal laws criminalized the use of psychedelics for non-medical purposes in FDA-regulated psychological and drug research, the study of these drugs is picking up again, and their use in treating certain patients shows promise” (“Research on psychedelics makes a comeback,” Monitor on Psychology 41, no. 10 [November 2010]: 10). Reuters reported in 2010 that Swiss scientists had found evidence that “Mind-altering drugs like LSD, ketamine or magic mushrooms could be combined with psychotherapy to treat people suffering from depression, compulsive disorders or chronic pain” (“Scientists suggest fresh look at psychedelic drugs,” Reuters, August 18, 2010). In “Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs” (Miller-McCune, May 5, 2011), journalist Sam Kornell reported that in the first decade of the 21^st century “research into the effects of psychedelic drugs on consciousness has become a growing field of study in American academia,” and has been conducted under the auspices of prestigious mainstream institutions such as UCLA, John Hopkins Medical School, and NYU.

[8] In this regard, the work of medical doctor Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000), is of enormous interest. Subtitled “A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences,” the book grew out of Strassman’s research in the 1990s — sanctioned and funded by the U.S. government and conducted at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine at Albuquerque — into the effects of the psychedelic substance DMT on human consciousness. Points of note include the following: 1) Many of Strassman’s research subjects reported “convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences,” including aliens, angels, and spirits. 2) Strassman was inspired in his work by the late Willis Harman, with whom he was personally acquainted. Harman was widely renowned as a futurist and a visionary researcher into the nonordinary reaches of human consciousness and potentials, and he co-wrote the first-ever study of the effects of psychedelics on creativity: “Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training” (written with James Fadiman, published in Bernard Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond, Eds., Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Psychedelic Drugs, 1970). He also co-wrote, with Howard Rheingold, Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights (1984), which presented a rich vision of the unconscious mind as an independent or independent-seeming source of guidance and inspiration in creative work and life as a whole. 3) Strassman’s psychedelic research was the first to be conducted in the U.S. since the federal government instated a ban on all such research in the 1960s. In other words, adding up the preceding points produces the realization that the “family history” of the modern revival in psychedelic research can be traced, at least in part, through Strassman back to the inspirational influence of Harman and his muse/daimon-esque theories about the role of the unconscious in creativity and culture. Significantly, Strassman’s findings and ideas were given a far wider audience when his book was adapted and released in 2010 as a documentary film titled The Spirit Molecule.

[9] On a personal note, when I was an undergraduate communication major at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s, I was shocked when I took a class in interpersonal communication and found the Leary circumplex reprinted and offered as a useful psychological tool in the course’s required textbook. At the time I had already become intensely interested in the cultural legacy of the 1960s, so I found this subversive-feeling evidence of Leary’s enduring influence in the “official” academic-intellectual world to be rather delightful.

[10] Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, directed by Mickey Lemle (2001), Netflix.

[11] John Higgs, “The High Priest and the Great Beast,” Sub Rosa 4 (March 2006, pdf): 15.

[12] Brian Barritt, The Road of Excess: A Psychedelic Autobiography (1998), excerpted in Book of Lies, 155, 152.

[13] Ibid., 153.

[14] Cosmic Trigger, 105.

[15] Timothy Leary, “Starseed: A Way Out,” excerpted from Terra II: A Way Out (Starseed, A Partnership: 1974), reprinted in Brad Steiger and John White, eds., Other Worlds, Other Universes (Pomeroy, WA: Health Research Books, [1975] 1986), 15.

[16] “Summer of Love,” American Experience, PBS, transcript.

[17] Cosmic Trigger, 118.

[18] Ibid., 104-5.

[19] Ibid., 163.

[20] Richard Metzger, Disinformation: The Interviews (New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2002), 14.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Cosmic Trigger, ii (Wilson’s emphasis).

[23] Ibid., 8.

[24] “Chapel perilous,” Wikipedia, accessed May 19, 2011.

[25] Cosmic Trigger, 9.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., i.

[28] Ibid., iv. The Copenhagen Interpretation is the most popular interpretation of what the paradoxical findings of quantum physics, which violate or transcend both the laws of classical physics and the very basis of normal human conceptual categories, may mean for reality as a whole. In holds that quantum particles exist in all possible states at once until the act of someone’s observing them forces them to “choose” a specific state. Applied to life at large and reality as a whole, the analogy would be that reality for each of us exists in a fuzzy, indeterminate, “all at once” state of multiple potentials until we observe and interpret it, at which point it obligingly assumes the face or form we’ve projected — but a face or form in which the essential otherness and transcendence of the unknowable reality in itself may well result in bizarre and impossible-seeming manifestations.

[29] Ibid., v.

[30] Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1980), 127, emphasis added.

[31] Jeffrey Elliot, “Robert Anton Wilson: Searching for Cosmic Intelligence,” Starship: The Magazine About Science Fiction, Spring 1981, reprinted at Robert Anton Wilson Fans, accessed May 19, 2011.

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

PHOTO CREDITS:

“Consciousness”: By uzorita via Multimedia-Stock
Aleister Crowley: By Sólyom Csaba (http://www.crowley.tar.hu/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Front pages from Crowley’s Liber AL: By Aleister Crowley / Aiwass, publ. Ordo Templi Orientis (Ordo Templi Orientis) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Leary smile: Cover of Info-Psychology
Leary arrest: By DEA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Robert Anton Wilson: By Wingspeed at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons
Cosmic Trigger: Cover image of an early edition
Alan Moore: By Nikki Tysoe from London, UK (Alan Moore) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons