For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an intro to the Band see the featured post to the right or check out the archive
Other links: The Band on Gab
The last occult post was pretty broad because it had to set up the idea of the psychedelic occult in a coherent way. This meant laying out the role of belief in assessing the occult, and the importance of focusing on patterns of behavior - what is actually happening - to work around this. The main thing we noticed is that secularists tend to project their credulity onto everyone and get bogged down on things like 'do they really mean it?' when assessing occult patterns. Looking at outcomes on the other hand simply assigns the appropriate blame for consequences. On a societal level, it doesn't matter what each individual really believes. What matters is whether or not the society can protect itself from corrosive forces. Outcomes. We also met the jobbers - hypocritical defenders of culture who lose in ways that build globohomo stars and narratives. It all took a while, so it made sense to wrap there and leave it as a general intro. Check it out if you want to see where we are coming from.
With the conceptual background worked out, we start looking at the psychedelic occult itself. This is more complicated than it appears on the surface. As has proven to be the case with the occult in general, there is a tangle of beliefs, ideas, and agendas here, some sincere and some fake, with varying degrees of coherence in their relationships. It isn't a strict school of thought as much as a series of attitudes swirling around the two poles of chemically-induced altered states and the eqo-centric rejection of reality - psychedelia and occultism. So the best way to start is by defining the terms.
There are a lot of posts considering the definition of occult because it is a slippery term that means different thing to different people. Looking at the underlying pattern, it belongs to the larger category of Satanic inversion where personal will and desire are placed above reality. This becomes occult when it involves appealing to the supernatural.
Victor Moscoso,
Poster for The Grateful Dead. Steve Miller Blues Band, Moby Grape at the Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, December 23-24, 1966
Just some wacky fun on the Christmas Eve before the Summer of "Love".
There is a lot going on here.
Psychedelic is a term that we haven't looked into. Here's the etymology under the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary:
This is where we'll start. The word is often used to describe a vivid "electric" aesthetic based on high-intensity and often contrasting colors and blurry fluid pictures and writing. But the origin of the term refers to the use of chemical agents to induce a perceptually or cognitively altered state. It was coined by Humphrey Osmond, an early pioneer in hallucinogenic psychotherapy, in a letter to drug advocate and author Aldous Huxley, one of his early subjects. Note how a year later her is promoting it as a tool for improving self-awareness.
Pepsi ad from 1969
The aesthetic comes from an attempt to represent the perceptual alterations of a psychedelic experience visually. This is different from making art when under the direct influence of a psychedelic.
Here's the first adjective definition:
This raises the difference between psychedelic and hallucinogen, since both refer to the same class of compounds. The etymology is important.
The word hallucinogen literally puts the unreal - hallucinatory - nature of the experience front and center. Your normal perceptual-cognitive relations are temporarily altered, however you define them.
This is not to claim that an altered state can't let you observe previously unnoticed relationships, but any alternative perspective on things can do that. Different and better are not the same thing - that's the diversity is a strength lie in another coat. Any psychedelic insight still has to withstand logical empirical scrutiny after the psychoactive agent has been metabolized. And the objective reality is that the vast majority of them... don't.
Osmond's term means "mind-manifesting" which is a fundamental inversion of the hallucinatory. His notion is that the psychedelic brings reality in the form of the "true" self into clearer focus rather than representing an artificial interruption of it.
According to Psychology Today, hallucinogens are
The psychedelic occult begins when someone decides that a psychoactive chemical has metaphysical powers.
We aren't going to spend time on the pharmacology of hallucinogens - there are a bunch of them with different effects, and the neurological processes are not precisely understood. Here's Infogalactic with an overview. This article looks at the complex nomenclature and classifies psychedelics as a sub-category of hallucinogenic but points out that that isn't universally accepted.
Skeletal formula and ball-and-stick and space-filling models of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) molecule, C20H25N3O; perforated sheet of tabs of blotter acid.
Acid, or LSD is the drug most commonly associated with psychedelia as a 20th century movement. It was first synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann of Sandoz's pharmaceutical research lab, though he didn\t discover the mind-altering properties until ingesting it by accident in 1943. Information on structures, delivery mechanisms, and side effects are easy to find.
The problem with a lot of information on this subject is that it provides little on the qualitative effects of the substance that makes it appealing in the first place. Consider this from our Psychology Today:
Reading this, it sounds almost like a chemical weapon. It's not untrue - it just focuses on the the negative side-effects likely to be encountered in a medical emergency and discouraging overall use.
But this isn't going to do much for someone who is alienated from or distrusts the system. Especially after they have tried psychedelics without the "bad trips" that sites like this pretend are ubiquitous.
Patrick Lundborg, Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture A Modern Way of Life
Lundborg is a drug-addled solipsist that resembles Jordan Peterson on acid rather than mental illness. There's the nonsense spray of epistemologically-incoherent symbols and references providing cover for an ineffectual and interior-focused form of self-deification. But it sounds deep.
Spiritual Progress! - let's call it Spirituality! - as an illusory, chemically induced phantasy that ironically makes sure real progress never happens. You get the guru you deserve.
Lundbord is as credible as an acid flashback, but compare this excerpt from rambling inteview on his Unified Psychedelic Theory with the public health passage above:
the psychedelic experience is a mystical revelation of its own. It doesn’t need to be explained or interpreted through some existing tradition. The psychedelic compound provides its own distinct properties: how the trip evolves, its extremely rich impact on your cerebral processing, the lingering effects on your world-view. This wonder is given to you from nature, and you should let it unfold itself in all its magnificent glory. The tenets and forms surrounding a tryptamine mystery cult should obviously be designed by the experience itself, not by importing learning from poorly related realms.
It's like they're speaking different languages. All the public health notices in the world aren't going to reach the sort of lost soul who can read this and actually find some deeper meaning to grasp onto. More on that later. For now we need to break down the hokum around psychedelia into some general patterns to see where and how the occult fits in. Begin empirically.
Both Psychology Today and Lundborg both reflect realities of hallucinogenic use - just different perspectives. There are health risks with the induction of any altered state - anyone who ignores that reveals their moral character. But the altered state can seem feel mystical and enlightening. Both can be real.
The post-war psychedelic movement revolved around LSD - psilocybin mushrooms were also popular, but acid drove the culture. So we'll focus here - looking for patterns, not a comprehensive survey.
It is important to understand the nature of this altered state to grasp why is was so appealing to manipulators and charlatans alike. This raises a similar dilemma to perverse imagery - how to expose what is important without inadvertently promoting degeneracy? Discussing the qualitative experience of a mind-altering substance like LSD is not an endorsement, or even a suggestion to experiment. There is no fear-mongering in the objective truth that it best to leave these things alone. We just have to be clear about what made this so seductive and misleading.
Two Life magazine covers from 1966 playing both sides. People need to be attentive to how media narratives not only distort reality, they are not even internally coherent. When we say modern media culture is fake, it means completely disconnected from the search for truth. This is not "spin" - it is whatever fake narrative the media controllers prefer at the time. Then consider who controls the media and how it connects to mass culture and politics.
Qualitatively, acid affects different people differently. An altered state doesn't change who you are on a fundamental level, so your personality and circumstances will determine the results - outcomes depend on inputs and the drug is just one of them. Set and setting was Timothy Leary's term. At the same time, Lundborg and others are correct in identifying general patterns in a trip because the drug metabolizes in a predictable way and the mind adapts to the experience. The term hallucinogen is a bit misleading for acid because users generally don't see vision-like images of things that aren't there like leprechauns or temples. The world remains the world, but perception - perceptual relations, conceptual associations, all of it - is shifted. Like dropping a gel over a stage light, if the gel filtered a lot more than color.
Shimmering lines and colors make the familiar strange. Then the human tendency to see patterns takes over. Some are actual insights. Most are faces in the clouds. This picture captures how a distorted house looks like a face. The important point is that it is the same house seen differently. It isn't a spirit of the earth contacting you directly.
At first, it is dissociating - the onset is powerful, and as reality seems to shift, it can be traumatic. Especially if the user is otherwise intoxicated or unprepared. Otherwise it is fascinating and mildly euphoric. Lines and colors shimmer and blur, and there appears to be waves or pulses of energy flowing between things. This called visual drifting and is common with LSD.
It's easy to see where the compatibility with various forms of New Age "Eastern spirituality" comes in - the blurring and shimmering of visual drift look like the dissolution into formlessness associated with Nirvana.
The shifts and enhancements in color and light can electrify.
Wes Wilson, poster for The Byrds, Moby Grape, Andrew Staples at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 1967
Psychedelic art styles relate to this in two ways - the flowing letters and contrasting colors try to simulate the visual effects of an acid trip and they are stimulating to people on acid.
But you you don't need mysticism to explain what is happening empirically. The lack of pink elephant-type visionary hallucinations is the key - you aren't seeing into a hidden inner or higher world, you're seeing the same material reality from a different perspective.
Mentally, perception is a process of transformation. Our sense organs transmit light and sound waves to the brain where they are translated into what we see and hear. There are uncertainties around the details of these processes, but that doesn't change that this is what's happening. Qualitatively, acid seems to change this translation process - the same light and sound from the same world going into the brain, but different perceptual relations seen and heard.
The shifts in color and form can be accompanied by something like synesthesia where one form of sense data - like sound - is processed as if it were another. Researchers think synesthesia involves cross-activation in parts of the brain - something similar may happen with LSD.
The "mystic" unifying energy is pretty much just variations in the appearance of light plus things like sounds and wind registering visually instead of aurally or tactily Same world, different translation.
If there is any potential value in this, it is no more than what can be gained from any new perspective - a fresh take on old patterns. In other words, nothing that can't be found without the use of mind-altering chemicals and all the real risks that come with them. As we said, we need to be clear from the outset what we are talking about on a basic empirical level. The vivid perceptual changes and fascination with types of stimuli create vulnerabilities to certain influences and the emotional effects of such a powerful experience are very real. Clarity demystifies a lot of the nonsense around psychedelia.
Things get more interesting when we look into what this experience "means".
We can place the interpretations into overlapping groups. Here, we don't mean users as much as the people trying to control or shape the experience for some external purpose. Call them realists and secular transcendentalists, or people who see potential for manipulation in a chemically altered state and people who believe that supernatural things that are only knowable by faith are somehow found in that chemical. It's the same split the Band had shown again and again.
W. V. Caldwell, LSD Psychotherapy: An Exploration of Psychedelic and Psycholytic Therapy, Grove Press, 1968
The realists are called that because they accept the empirical reality that the LSD produces a chemically induced altered state with predictable patterns. The motivations are all over the place - all sorts of clinicians were interested in this unusual new drug. What makes them all realist is that they treat the experience as chemical rather than mystical and administer the acid in controlled settings to manipulate the subject in some way.
An example that can be called bad-intentioned would be the famous MK-Ultra and other secret experiments that experimented with acid in mind control. Consider the effects - the dissociation, susceptibility to certain stimuli, and openness to new associations - and it isn't hard to see why. This is nefarious but not occult. An example of the supposedly well-intentioned would be LSD therapy. Osmond, who coined the term psychedelic, was one of the first. Take this with a grain of salt, given what we know about scientific studies and reproducibility, but it is possible that the claims that LSD could help treat alcoholism have some grounds.
But we also know that psychotherapy has been a haven for frauds and whack-jobs, and in this field, the line between empiricism and phantasy is as blurry as an acid trip.
In 1958, actor Cary Grant - a typically tortured Hollywood soul - began taking LSD under the supervision of Mortimer Hartman, a Beverly Hills doctor. According to the article, Grant, tripped 100 times with Hartman and called him “my wise Mahatma.” To be fair, Grant does appear to have reached a better mental state, but not because of Hartman's special insights. The "doctor" is actually quoted as calling acid “a psychic energizer which empties the subconscious and intensifies emotion and memory a hundred times.” This simply isn't true. Whether and however the experience managed to help Grant, Hartman was lying.
Osmond came up with the term psychedelic in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, the occultist and author who had taken mescaline under Osmond's supervision. Click for some background on Huxley's "psychedelic visionary experience promoting mind altering drugs as part of a religious trip interwoven with eastern mysticism, secular humanism and psychology".
You may wonder why we give a crap about Huxley and Osmond in the 21st-century West. It's partly because they were at the start of this "movement", but it is also because we're shifting ranges to make a point. This is one of those specific instances that lights up larger patterns. Huxley wove altered states into chemical mysticism and secular transcendence.
Osmond was arguing LSD opened true insights into ourselves in a Scientific! way. Put it together and the realist approach crosses into something else.
The inventor of LSD Albert Hofmann reflects on Huxley prior to their meeting in 1961. It is worth quoting the passage at length because it points towards a chemical version of that occult psychology from an older post. They were popular books.
We are obviously no longer in the realm of anything empirical. Read the highlighted passage carefully then ask the Band's guiding question: what can we know and how can we know it? What are the grounds for this deep, timeless existence? How does chemically altering sensory data processing in the brain - a physical process - jump the gap between our temporal, material world and "timeless existence"? Keep reading - the "grounds" come into view...
To the surprise of hopefully no one reading this, it's the same spray of associations technique that we see in all the Hermetic/gnostic/ esoteric "unity of all religions" bullshit that midwitted charlatans peddle to less clever marks. It sounds deep to people who don't understand the references and lets the charlatan posture as a superior authority who knows what things really. mean. What all these share is the desire for secret or at least special knowledge into higher truths without having to work very hard or be intellectually coherent. Artificially alter your brain chemistry, read some objectively false blather, and presto, your finally a special boy. It's the gamma school of "thinking".
Here's an insight: sanctity, mysticism, and artistic creation aren't the same thing.
The transcendent becomes secular. Something you'd classify as supernatural, spiritual, metaphysical or "higher" in some way is simply claimed to be a property of the physical material world. There's generally a spray of symbols and references offered up as "justification" that are just historical spin and references to older fables. It's a simple process:
1) make something up
2) pick symbols and quotes that seem profound
3) pretend the symbols and quotes are all examples that "prove" the made up thing.
There is never any empirical evidence for any of this - it's just wish projection from a secret king with special, but oddly easily to attain insights into hidden truths. And it's not really something that can be "argued" because it's made up. There doesn't have to be internal consistence or coherence because it isn't based on anything real. You can make up whatever you want. In this case, historically and philosophically ignorant wizards made up the phantasy that chemical side-effects are a gate to transcendence.
It is not nit-picking to point out that the things Hofmann and Huxley claim are simulated by hallucinogens are not the same. Their whole metaphysical "philosophy" depends on the deeper notion that the key to Truth, however defined, is locked within the mind. Anything that seems extra-normal is therefore that.
Readers of the Band know that secular transcendence takes many different forms - it's an underlying pattern that you learn to see. The version here is the psychoanalytic one - that the subconscious is where metaphysical things like higher truths actually come from.
The pattern looks like this: Freudian psychology invents the concept of the subconscious. It's plausible because we do have unconscious thought processes, dreams, and so forth - it seems to correspond to our empirical experience. But Freud makes up an imaginary mental world that operates in ways that were traditionally thought of as supernatural. The main idea for our purposes is that you have a "true" nature beyond subjective awareness of the empirical world, but instead of a "higher" power, it is hidden in your own mind. Therefore any kind of experience that is outside regular conscious life becomes classified as different variations on the same subconscious impulses.
Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 1665-1668, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Portrait of a Zen Master, 15th century Muromachi Japan, lacquer on wood with inlaid crystal eyes, Metropolitan Museum, New York
It's typical of these false priests of fake truth that they have the one master theory that gives them the secret but oddly easily to master key to reality. Mystical theology, artistic creativity, meditative states, and acid trips are empirically and theoretically not the same thing.
This is the critical inversion. Seeking the truth starts with empirical knowledge - the small-t truth of what can be determined objectively. Accepting what is real with logic and sincerity will point towards larger capital-T Truth, if only as seen through a fog or a blurry window. We refer to these as "higher" truths because it is a familiar metaphor to make metaphysical ideas easier to conceptualize for readers who aren't accustomed to them. It isn't a physical direction as much as beyond us, in the sense that ultimate truth - the true nature of reality, the meaning of life, being, etc. - can't be perceived by limited subjective humans.
It is important to understand the self and its impulses. Deceivers like to works off a distorted truth - what the Band calls a philosophical bait and switch is based on taking something temporary and conditional and pretending it is a universal law. Self-understanding is where the truth-seeker's journey starts, because a commitment to following truth or logos is an inner one - it starts with the personal. But that's the start.
Your understanding of yourself should grow with your understanding of reality. It's a cyclical process, where the commitment to truth builds external knowledge, which is then applied back inward, deepening the understanding of the self and it's place in the logos of the world. It never really ends, because ultimate truth is beyond our grasp.
It is the complete opposite to the notion that our knowledge of the world is produced within our minds. This is the sort of ignorant fridge-magnet version of "Eastern spirituality" that psychedelic and psychological occultists love. The Swami didn't exactly scream logos, but thought wasn't this dim.
And Magic Science Man. Starry backgrounds don't make things profound. What makes thing profound is truth.
And Magic Science Man again. Perhaps a gratuitous shot, but the perverse inversion of modern "culture" is apparent in the absurdity of their heroes. Imagine thinking that this media phantom is an authority on anything. This is the result of progressive abandonment of truth.
To generalize, Freud's brand of secular transcendence takes something metaphysical - the unobtainable goal of transcendent Truth - and transforms it into a material mental process with no credible empirical evidence. The "no evidence" is especially important, because it establishes the foundation of a new Science! that wasn't based on data or logic. He can set the terms of a fake transcendence that can be whatever he wants because it's fake. Don't get caught up in the historical specifics of Freud's life - personally he was a degenerate piece of shit, but the offshoots of his idea have done incalculable harm to civilization. What matters is the general inversion - pretending truth is in the subconscious. This is what carries over after other charlatans replace his fake specifics with fake specifics of their own.
The traditional occult became a fake specific in an overt way through the ravings of Carl Jung - a perennial favorite with hidden wisdom charlatans.
Jung applied the idea that higher truth comes from objectively non-existent unconscious properties to humanity as a whole - postulating a supernatural collective unconscious that was also objectively non-existent. Empirical non-reality was no obstacle to Jung, and he dreamed up all sorts of examples of human nature that his non-existent magic could account for.
Remember the process: make something up, pick symbols and references that seem deep, pretend that the made-up thing "explains" them. For Jung it was
Jung was unable to keep this nonsense "all in the mind" or minds, to be collectively correct. He moved on to actual occult practices and watered-down Eastern mysticism - is there a difference? - by linking the collective unconscious the the traditional supernatural.
Philomon, from Jung's Red Book
This was the mystical dream guide that took led Jung to deeper truth, including by automatic writing.
If this seems convoluted, it is. It's a great example of how imaginary mystical nonsense gets built off of older nonsense, like geological strata. Each new spray of symbols adds another layer of "meaning" to the mess and piles up the illusion of "depth". 'This fraud is quoting a fraud from Babylon! They must be right!' The appeal to human vanity in it all is enormous because it lets man posture as the ultimate source of knowledge in a way even Enlightenment rationalists couldn't. Everything - religion, morality, human nature, etc - is all in the mind.
This is why it is so susceptible to luciferianism. The subconscious is a descriptive category of human behavior. Higher truth is a supernatural one. Swapping them is conceptually the same thing as claiming to be your own god, if the god is a secret inner one.
Psychedelic frauds used the fake truths built out from the psychoanalytic notion of subconscious to claim that hallucinogens have magical powers. Only now, it's not hypnosis, meditation, or automatism opening the secret inner key to higher truth, it's a drug.
John Collier, Priestess of Delphi, 1891
Remember the Oracle and her vapors? There were historical patterns for the psychedelic occultists to misrepresent. The Oracle fit the traditional understanding of the occult because she was possessed by a supernatural entity. Psychology converts the supernatural to the biological, calling things like this delusions or hallucinations that are all in the mind. But this is an insufficient explanation, so occult psychology brings the supernatural back in. Not in the old forms of the god Apollo or the Christian demons, but a... third way.
Instead of delusions, the visions are tapping into timeless archetypes. From here, it is a short step to say that it is the drug that creates the altered state that makes the whole process possible.
Now that we know we are dealing with, it is a good spot to wrap. This post has looked at the tangle of themes and ideas that went into the psychedelic occult, and how they bring chemistry, psychology and the supernatural together. Adding drugs just extends the pattern. But they also change it in ways that have big cultural consequences. The next post will look at how the drugs make it cool.
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