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
A theme that keeps coming up in these occult posts is how to figure out what exactly is occult. One of the rewarding things about the Band is the freedom to look at larger patterns - to see what's going on behind the scenes and untangle the complexity and deception that makes judgment difficult. Specific things can be ambiguous, but if we understand the underlying assumptions we can determine the moral direction. The psychedelic occult is a pretty narrow moment in modern culture, but it brings together patterns that are easy to spot elsewhere.
The point is not to tell people what to like - moral perfection is impossible in this world and the Band lacks the authority and desire for that responsibility. The goal is to approach reality as truthfully as possible, and that means cutting through the lies and inversions that have alienated us from reality - nature and culture. Cool colors don't change the fundamental question of what can we know and how can we know it: observations of the real world and the logical reasoning to assess the connections. Empiricism and logos to guide your own judgment.
This requires personal moral responsibility and can be uncertain.But it is also self-correcting and is the only way to make sense in a world of personal interest and endless deception. Photo source.
When you can do this, you don't need to follow moral "leaders".
We need guides and influences, but moral reasoning is the opposite of blind following.
The first two posts start broadly then narrowed in. Looking at the problems with defining and identifying the occult showed that the meaning depends on your larger set of beliefs. So the occult is as diverse as the viewpoints of the people using the symbols. The most we can say these share is that they are all negative concepts - they all oppose aspects of traditional Western culture. But even this is splintered because different people invert different things. Some are anti-Christian, some anti-logic, some anti-human, etc. and these can mix-and-match in any number of ways. So the only way to approach this in anything close to a rational way is to look at the outcomes - the fruits - and the patterns that they trace.
Richard Biffle, Counting Stars by Candlelight, print
Part of the artist's Terrapin Suite, based on the Grateful Dead song Terrapin Station. The prevalence of traditional occult images in psychedelia is one of those observed patterns that suggests a connection that may not be obvious on the surface. Not so much "hidden secrets" as a common attitude towards truth or morality.
The Band uses imagery from Terrapin Station - it is an evocative song and a tremendous example of the wizardry of lyricist Robert Hunter.
If we consider attitudes to psychedelic use, some simple categories are visible. Realists take the perspective that a hallucinogenic experience is an artificial, chemically-induced state with predictable characteristics based on metabolic and neuro-chemical processes. Secular transcendentalists are the people that believe that the chemical opens a path to "higher" truths. The names were made up by the Band and are less important that the concepts that they label.
Realists don't offer much insight into occult patterns because they view the experience as a bio-chemical process like being drunk or stoned. Casual users are the vast majority - all the personal reasons someone chooses to trip. The clinical category is made up of all the "experts" looking to use the effects for some purpose.
Wes Wilson, poster for Love and Everpresent Fullness show at the Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, August 5-6 1966
Casual users make up the mass market for psychedelia. Their reasons for tripping are mainly aesthetic - they enjoy the experience for whatever reason - and they are drawn to music and images that look or sound interesting or cool. Any occult message is incidental to the sensory and cognitive effects, and many of these users get put off by excessive supernaturalism.
But this leaves them oblivious to the nature of the people producing the psychedelia. It's the perpetual problem of people projecting their own beliefs and good natures onto strangers. The counterculture was built off this.
1968 Poster for Hair, the musical
A base of support funds the producers and normalizes the message. If it becomes "cool" you have a movement. And all the moral inversion and dyscivic patterns baked into it come along like Greeks in the Trojan Horse.
Secular transcendentalist is a mouthful of a name, so we'll shorten it to
Visualize. Realists are realists because they accept reality. The "trip" is the consequence of introducing a predictable psychoactive agent to a somewhat unpredictable individual consciousness.
Twenty volunteers' fMRI scans on either LSD or a placebo. Normally sight data is processed in the visual cortex at the back of the brain. On acid, much more of the brain is involved when processing the same visual data. This is like synesthesia, only is if multiple response centers activated at once. The shifting visuals like visual drift and tracers also make sense.
The predictable consequences change the appearance of the world. Picture source. Note that it doesn't change the world. Where some get misled is in assuming that what we see normally "is" the real world in itself. It isn't. What we "see" is an internal translation of optical data carried to the visual cortex. If other parts of the brain take part, then the translation will "look" different. But it is the same world.
Visual drift and synesthesia may make the space between solid objects appear to be filled with fuzzy energy, but the objects remain solid. And you can still walk between them and feel nothing. It is exactly the same external world.
The only lesson is that there is a gap between reality in itself and experience. For some this is startling, but it is not a new insight. Nor does it tell us anything about that real world. What it does do is give us a new set of clouds to find faces in.
If you believe that what you see is exactly what's there, changing perception makes you think you are seeing something real that was previously unnoticed.
It literally boils down to 'the light looks more meaningful'. But in a demoralized world, people can sense that there is more to reality to our material experience but have no rational path to spirituality. There is no logos, no logical analysis of supernatural things because the very idea is excluded from any sort of official "serious" conversation. So when someone charismatic for any reason says the new perceptions really are real...
Psychedelic spirituality boils down to inversion and projection. The world is the objective. Perception is subjective. Start with the inversion that one is the other and whatever subjective way that you imagine the supernatural is projected onto the hallucinogenic experience. In short, the shapes you see in the clouds depends on you. Like the world seen differently vs. a trippy tarot card filled with stock occult symbolism. Note: the lobster is in the original.
The spray of symbols is important because it creates the illusion of meaning. By pretending to have this secret symbolic knowledge, the "guru" avoids having to present a rational account of their fake metaphysics. Look at the ravens and the balance! Follow me into the light! But it's all rhetoric.
There's never an empirical or logical reason to believe they have a clue what the light is or where their path is going.
This is where we pick up another thread of a pattern in an earlier occult post - the demoralization and inversion of modern mass media culture. In that case, we were looking at television, movies, and comic books, but it is the same process. Demoralization comes first - Christian American morality is removed from popular culture. This goes under the radar for what looks like absurdly flimsy reasons in hindsight - traditional values were just assumed in a purely secular context, and people were bedazzled with stuff. Then once morality is based on purely material wants and opinions, whatever occupies the center of centralized mass culture can redefine and invert it however it wants.
Giant-Size Super-Villain Team-Up #2, cover by Gil Kane, June, 1975, Marvel Comics
The illusion isn't the world - the illusion is the mass mediated, institutional, official narrative of 'how things are'. Notice how the ability to manufacture a "mainstream" directly correlates to how centralized media is. The earlier post pointed out one problem - that materialist mass culture is unheroic.
This gave us the anti-hero as the rational reaction to a fake reality. This is important, but not the only problem. Though battling "the humanoid hordes" may be predictive.
Materialist mass culture is metaphysically empty. It is strive to consume in an unheroic way until you die. That's it. But simple observation shows us that humans have an innate desire for deeper understanding. This is where the all-pervasiveness of official culture comes in - the flattened, demoralized vision of reality is pushed everywhere. Traditionally, American Christianity met this yearning with a broad spiritual dimension of limitless complexity and appealing simplicity. But the demoralization was so thorough that is became increasingly difficult to even consider Christian perspectives without inviting ridicule. So where does the savvy, sophisticated, not trusting anyone over 30, modern child of year zero go?
George Caleb Bingham, Stump Speaking, 1853-54, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum
American culture developed organically over time. It builds out from personal virtue, through family, to society. The only defense of democracy assumes this perspective - that moral, family-oriented people will select leaders that reflect their values. There was no mechanism to deal with weaponized rhetoric through centralized media and institutions.
Mass-media creates a demoralized illusion - a husk - of this. Quietly subverting the traditions and banishing Christian American morality altogether.
But the "news" is deceptive, the "heroes" aren't real...
Counterculture spirituality follows the same pattern as counterculture politics - it reacts against the soul-numbing illusion with a different illusion. There is no substance in the official culture - just hollow echoes of organic culture, so the rebellion is also symbolic. Taking up anything that suggests immorality or esoterica, but also in traditional terms. Alternative interpretations and "spiritualities". Anything that isn't the fake media interpretation of traditional American culture. But the media is very adaptable, marketing the "alternatives" back to the couch-sitters as rebellion.
Which brings us to a particularly annoying boomertype, the "spiritual seeker".
Pamela Colman Smith, The Fool, from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, 1909
It is important to be clear. The Band is not referring to people who are sincerely working through spiritual questions. Those are real seekers. This is the faux pop-culture version that keeps crystal shops and Deepak Chopra afloat.The basic formula is:
a) have no coherent sense of the supernatural, but
b) believe that there is higher wisdom "out there", but
c) these truths are unknown to the mainstream, but
d) you're can find them with minimal effort.
A few readings or videos and some "reflection" and you can claim to be more enlightened than the herd. It really is the gamma religion - the catechism of the low-energy secret king.
This is the basis of the psychedelic occult - that drugs are an effortless shortcut to the magic powers of the subconscious that took traditional mystics a lifetime of effort to unlock.
Our diagram split SecTrans into those who think the truths are purely psychological and those who believe the drugs provide revelations into external realities. There is a lot of overlap - the Jungian path that depths of the subconscious opens into the metaphysical. So the division is more conceptual than a hard and fast rule.
What makes it blurry is that Subconsciousists believe all non-rational processes are "psychological". They all stem from the same source in the subconscious mind, regardless of where they actually come from. It's like a religious belief if there was a religion that you made up - we could call it Psychologism. Then others like Jung agree that there are deeper truths hidden in the subconscious, but they are more than personal insights. Here we can be contacted by supernatural entities and understand external reality more truthfully. Reality gets rewritten accordingly.
Remember the Oracle? Psychedelicists "explain" her prophetic state as induced by the vapors she was reported to breathe. It's the different explanations that make it complicated.
A realist says she's tripping - seeing her visions as chemically-induced hallucinations. The interpretations come from shifty priests who are good at coming up with fortune-teller type statements that sound profound but can be taken different ways.
A SecTrans subconsciousist would say that there are deeper insights because drugs open unconscious pathways that can exceed the powers of the conscious mind.
A SecTrans supernaturalist believes the supernatural is real. The drugs allow the connection.
It's isn't this cut and dried, but it does give a sense for why it is hard to pin down.
There is a small subset of occult history focusing on entheogens, defined as a "chemical substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context". The problem with this is the problem with a lot of pre-Columbian American history and "spirituality" - the cultures were oral and the devastation so complete that there is no way to know what they actually believed.
Consider the Native American Church, also known as the Peyote religion or Peyotism. There is evidence of peyote use in pre-Columbian South America, but the ritual consumption only made it to North America in the mid-19th century. The Church itself was incorporated in 1918 and includes elements of Protestant Christianity.
The believers may be sincere, but the specific rituals can only be loosely based on ancient practices.
But Peyotism does have a consistent, if loose, set of beliefs about the supernatural. Even the connection between ethnicity and spirituality is a form of dogmatic consistency. Joining it means committing to a preset belief system.
On the other hand, we have the psychedelic occult in the form of SecTrans supernaturalism.
Fake history meets the occult with Mushroomism, also known as the Idiot Mushroom Cult. Here we see a dogged group of persistent but intellectually-limited "researchers" trip into the notion that mind-altering substances were the secret cause of all human religiosity.
If you're actually interested in this drivel, here is a link to one "scholar". This hack puts a lot of weight on the stylized trees in Medieval manuscripts resembling hallucinogenic mushrooms. He even includes lots of mushroom photos to somehow make the case. There is no irony in the tone - he actually seems to believe it is a mike drop moment, and not a thought that might drift by while on mushrooms. There are actually only three possibilities for a claim this retarded:
1. He is so stupid that the even the inkling of the notion that representational systems were conventionalized and that these images aren't communicating by mimetic resemblance never flickered across his mind.
Like this example from the Canterbury Psalter. The trees are supposedly mimetic depictions of mushrooms. So what do the stylized flames, ground, hills, people, etc. really mimetically represent? The kids call it artistic codes or visual culture, but "style" works too. This sort of decontextualized resemblance hunting is really common in hack retcon history.
It's like seeing this sign and assuming Hell, Norway was named for the afterlife.
2. He is so ignorant of medieval history and image culture that he's never seen how unmimetic and stylized their visual semiotics were, if he can define semiotic. See number 1.
Wolf sneaking up to the sheepfold, miniature from the Aberdeen Bestiary, around 1200, illuminations on parchment, University of Aberdeen, Ms.24
Medievals depicted things is stylized ways. The wolf isn't secretly evidence of alien crocadilians. The farmer doesn't have a jet pack either.
3. He's a liar. The Band is derisive because the blend of smug arrogance and cognitive ceiling are annoyingly common in gamma philosophies like occultism. It is typical of a certain brand of hack "history" that plucks things out of the past and uses them to tell whatever story they want. Usually on the basis of visual resemblance. Then historians that are actually aware of the breadth of the historical record have to waste time and resources excising the bullshit. But it's easy and sounds cool.
And demoralized, spirituality empty products of society, conditioned to being spoon-fed "truths" without need for critical thought or moral reasoning get a fun secret that's easy to follow but lets them feel special.
It is impossible to fit each individual manifestation of the psychedelic occult into a single taxonomy. It's all inversion, wizardry, and projected wish fulfillment, and even if we do trace categories, they blur and jump between them. The best we can do is trace out some basic approaches, and see what kind of world view they promote.
Here's one. The psychedelic occult is based on logical impossibility that you journey inward to move outward. It's supposed to be a paradox, and not just gibberish. But the idea of plumbing the depths to reach the heights is common in self-deifying, Gnostic-themed nonsense like Jung's.
Like this pearl from an earlier post. Note the wizardry in the framing: "it is said" gives it the echo of his fake wisdom of the ages. "Here's my spin on something Nietzsche made up" is less compelling. More truthful, but less compelling.
This is not far from the luciferian path motto "as above so below", itself a variation on the ancient pagan notion of man as the microcosm of the cosmos. Above and below, within and without are all in suspension, linked by "magic" forces that are not divine and can be controlled by mind and will.
Pamela Coleman Smith, The Magician from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, 1909
The idea is originally Hermetic, if these distinctions actually matter in something this garbled. According to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, "'that which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.' Thus, whatever happens on any level of reality (physical, emotional, or mental) also happens on every other level." This is the basis of Hermetic as well as Luciferian magic. In terms of the micro/macrocosm: "the macrocosm is as the microcosm and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) a person may understand the other."
These fake balance occultists love the infinity symbol, despite the infinite being literally beyond finite consciousness. Enlightened balance of made-up "opposites" forever or something
We can even make it psychedelic!
Occultists love to pretend random resemblances are meaningful... This resembles something...
Something like this...
So the psychedelic occult follows the same pattern as other forms of the occult - reason enough to give it a wide birth. Staying away from peddlers of chemical cures is never a bad idea. And what about the casual realists just looking for a good time that support and normalize this? How do we squeeze the realists and occultists into the same scene? What made this self-evident idiocy so appealing?
It seemed cool.
Richard Avedon, The Beatles, 1967, altered photographs published in Look magazine, 9 January 1968
This brings back to the anti-hero, but a particular kind. Another Super-Villain Team-Up, this time between the outlaw non-comformist and an ancient Dionysian pattern of intoxicated musical madness.
Henryk Siemiradzki, Bacchanalia, 1890, oil on canvas
Music, madness, mysticism, and intoxicated degeneracy had a long history in the West. But the inversion of social order was an outlet or a threat, not an aspirational way of life.
The Band looked at the media-created anti-hero as a logical outcome of the natural human desire for inspiring figures in an unheroic society. Where the Boomers and late Silents differed from their parents is that they never knew a world that wasn't a cradle of media and centralized institutions. For the massive middle class, safe, unheroic, systematic order was all they knew.
The Truman Show, 1998, directed by Peter Weir
Pleasantville, 1998, directed by Gary Ross
If you want to use a Hollywood analogy, their entire formative experience was a cross between The Truman Show and Pleasantville, only blown up to a societal level. And with all the insight into reality that you would expect.
It's natural a teenager in '63 or '64, coddled by high-trust, relatively high-functioning social structures and free from meaningful consequences, might feel stifled and restless. Pop heroes from the 50s and early 60s stood out because they were exceptional in ways impossible to actually aspire to. How does one become a hero in a society stratified by meaningless grades and blue ribbons, and where "leading citizens" have clay feet?
The space for the anti-hero opens up when the culture is so all-pervasive and unheroic that you have to reject aspects of it to express traditional heroic characteristics. Obviously, we're not talking about the violent anti-heroes yet. Those don't pop up in the movies and comics until a few years later, although the speed with which mass culture devolves is a tell that it wasn't organic. In an environment this centrally controlled, superficially conformist, and restrained by fake civility, we're referring to characteristics as basic as self-reliance and individualism. There is so much going on here - weaponizing a generation of compliant, self-righteous, consumerist egoists is at least its own post.
For now, we will limit it to what's relevant to psychedelia. What we are looking at is less anti-heroism than the inversion of heroism - turning a secondary quality into the defining one.
Lemuel Francis Abbott, Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, 1799, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum
Richard Westall, Nelson in Conflict with a Spanish Launch, 3 July 1797, 1806, oil on canvas, Royal Museums Greenwich
Pierre-Nicolas Legrand de Lérant, The Apotheosis of Nelson, between 1805-1818, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum
Heroes are defined by actions - self-sacrifice and responsibility. This is their primary quality , and on this level they are champions or even personifications of cultural values.
William Railton, E. H. Baily, and Sir Edwin Landseer, Nelson's Column, granite and bronze, 1840-1843, Trafalgar Square, London
But doing great deeds has the secondary effect of making heroes stand out from the people they represent.
You could say that on this level they are "non-conformist" because they do not conform to ordinary limits and are distinguished as individuals because of it. The same applies to anti-heroes - doing heroic deeds is what separates them from ordinary degenerates. They aren't heroes but they can be situationally heroic.
Thomas Davidson, England's Pride and Glory, 1894, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum
Action first, memorialization second.
But distinguishing yourself through heroic action is inconceivable in the all-pervasive unheroic mass cultural petrie dish of the 1950s and early 60s. There is a perfect storm of compounding factors:
Risk-avoidance and timidity from a life without meaningful consequences outside of the social.
Conceptual blinders that confuse the system with reality and make it impossible to imagine possibilities or consequences outside of its cocoon.
Gullibility from overreliance on being told what to think and who to trust by unquestioned though unearned authorities.
A shame-based civic "morality" based entirely on what others "think of you". Perhaps the biggest one - hypocrisy and selfishness as a value system.
So heroic action as a mean of standing out is unthinkable, but the secondary characteristic - individualism - is concievable and rebellious in the inverted morality of the day. Not individualism through great deeds, but purely through appearance, as seen in the eyes of others. Non-conformity not as exceeding limits but as the end in itself. It looks like this:
It isn't heroism, it's cool.
Cool is a broad concept that is impossible to narrowly define, so we will limit it to the strain that applies to popularizing the psychedelic movement.
The Beatles "behind the scenes" on the Sullivan Show, 1964
The inversion of morality in popular music resembles the comic book pattern, only with exponentially greater reach and impact. In both cases, a "youth" medium is the vector for subversion while the "elders" cluck about those kids today while funding the hedonism and deflecting responsibility. When your own morality is sham civility, there was no where to stand.
Rock could endlessly subdivide because it was a media construct based on fake inversion. The "values" have no positive rationally coherent substance to stand on. The only connective thread is negative - just so long as its "not the fake mainstream civility". You need a population that is almost pathologically incapable of thinking outside of the mass media/institutional world that the system provides in order to accept this level of total inversion.
Layers of inversion:
"Non-conformity" as literally the opposite of individualism. Wearing uniforms as standardized as the conformity that they grew up with, but designed to trigger mainstream civility.
"Non-conformity" as literally the opposite of individualism. Wearing uniforms as standardized as the conformity that they grew up with, but designed to trigger mainstream civility.
"Self-reliance" as living off family then state and clinging to child-like irresponsibility while "not conforming".
"Freedom" as sexual degeneracy, toxic narcissism, and pursuit of collective hedonism while "self-reliant".
It is historically remarkable how their g-g-g-generation froze in that moment in time, but that is an observation for another time.
The thing about the rock musician was that they did not represent a complete inversion of the hero or society. The musician, like the hero, was individualized by being able to do something. There were plenty of frauds, hacks, and scenesters, but some of these performers were really good. They did offer something exceptional to admire. Many also enjoyed success in very materialist terms, from blowing stacks on the lifestyle to supporting globalist social engineering, so they were aspirational to materialists of any political leaning as well. And their medium - lyrical music - was a primal powerful medium.
Monterey Pop, 1968, directed by D.A. Pennebaker
They represent safe "rebellion" for a gaslit generation incapable of imagining life outside the system. There is a blind spot in that generation about the man-made nature of societal institutions. But you need this obvious self-contradiction to invert culture and thing "the system" just keeps on truckin' as if by divine will. Only without God, because that would mean moral reasoning or selling out to the man or something.
The point is that the very idea of meritocracy - skill and effort should correlate with the chance of success - was a product of the high-trust morally-ordered values that they were inverting. It's culturally self-erasing. But we know that.
At this point, there are a lot of threads swirling around, so it is time to get more specific and see how they overlap. Pop psychedelia combines all the aspects of Realist and SecTrans drug use with the inverted morality of non-conformist cool in an identifiable way. The next post will get more specific and about how it blows up.
The Fugs, The Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, Can You Pass the Acid Test? Paul Foster, Acid Test Concert Poster for Muir Beach Dec. 11, 1965
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