New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Author: Matthew Levi Stevens

  • Typhon Rising: The Magical Legacy of Kenneth Grant

    Typhon Rising: The Magical Legacy of Kenneth Grant

    From New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016)

    Five years on from the death of British author, occultist and poet Kenneth Grant (1924–2011), we are only just now beginning to see the first attempts at assessing the impact and legacy of the man who was the last-ever student and secretary of the notorious Aleister Crowley, and thought by many to be his natural successor. 

    Grant was also a close friend to the magical artist Austin Osman Spare, supporting him in his final years, counted the godfather of Wicca, Gerald Gardner, as a colleague and sometimes rival, and during his time with Crowley met New Age Priestess, Dion Fortune. As such, Grant had direct contact with four of the most influential figures of the Magical and Mystical Revival of the mid-twentieth century. 

    Regarding his own work, the nine volumes of Grant’s three ‘Typhonian Trilogies’ written across the three decades from 1972 to 2003 – as well as several volumes of occult-themed fiction, and memoirs of the magical personalities he encountered – range across Alchemy, Cabala, Dream Control, Egyptology, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, Left Hand Path, Sex-Magick, Surrealism, Tantra, Thelema, Tibetan Buddhism, UFOlogy, Witchcraft, Voodoo, and back again, and are a unique portrait of the Modern Occult Revival, as well as arguably one of its most creative currents.

    So, just who exactly was Kenneth Grant?

    Born 23rd May 1924, very little is known of Grant’s background or actual biography. He was an intensely private man, who despite – or perhaps even because of? – the nature of his work and the notoriety of his mentor, Aleister Crowley, nonetheless pursued a rigid policy of non-disclosure, akin to the erasing of personal history advocated in the books of Carlos Castaneda. 

    Portrait of Steffi and Kenneth Grant by Austin Osman Spare

    By his own admission something of a bookish, dreamy youth, fascinated by magic and mysticism, the young Grant had experienced astral projection and, at the age of 15, what he felt were spontaneous contacts from a being calling itself Aushik or Aossic, which he would later identify as his Holy Guardian Angel. Grant had come across Magick In Theory and Practice by ‘The Master Therion’ (a pen-name of Crowley’s) in the Charing Cross Road bookshop, Zwemmer’s, and, feeling here might be a key to understanding – or even controlling – his experiences, had prevailed upon Michael Houghton, proprietor of The Atlantis Bookshop, to put him in touch with the author. Houghton declined, however – the reasons for which are unclear – but what is a matter of record is that Grant, after first writing, finally met with Crowley. It was December 1945, and as they shook hands for the first time the song Shine On Harvest Moon was playing on the radio in the background.

    So it was that the young Kenneth Grant became, for a while, an informal assistant-cum-secretary to the aged Magus upon forsaking Blitz-battered London for the peace and quiet and relative safety of a lodging-house on the South Coast. It was at ‘Netherwood’ in Hastings, where The Great Beast ended his days just three short years later, that Grant would become apprenticed to Crowley’s Magick in earnest, be initiated into his Ordo Templi Orientis, meet the likes of Dion Fortune, Gerald Gardner, and Lady Frieda Harris, the gifted artist who illustrated Crowley’s superlative Book of Thoth Tarot-deck. He also became aware of Crowley’s still-extensive network of correspondence with occultists overseas – such as Karl Germer and Eugen Grosche in Germany, and Jane Wolfe, W. T. Smith, and Jack Parsons in America. For a while it even seems that the ageing Beast was grooming young Grant to be a possible successor, referring to him as a “Gift from the Gods,” and noting in his diary:

    …value of Grant. If I die or go to the USA, there must be a trained man to take care of the English OTO.

    But even at this early stage, Grant’s propensity for daydreaming and otherworldliness bewildered and frustrated the older man, who – after all – was looking for practical, day-to-day assistance first, and to train as heir, second. Eventually it all became too much – particularly for Grant, who was missing his fiancée Steffi – and Crowley let him go, but not before initiating Grant into the IXO O.T.O. and furnishing him with a Charter to set up an encampment of the Order.

    Shortly before Crowley’s death, Grant also met a man who would later prove to be almost as much of an influence on him as The Great Beast: albeit more in the form of an éminence grise, who influenced Grant from behind the scenes. He provided an initiation and inspiration that had a definitive impact on Grant’s reformulation of Thelema, the purpose and rituals of the branch of the O.T.O. he founded, and much of the focus of his Typhonian Trilogies. His name was David Curwen.

    A practicing Alchemist and student of Tantra, who had taken the step of devotion to an Indian Guru – unusual for a Westerner at the time – David Curwen was first mentioned in Grant’s 1991 memoir, Remembering Aleister Crowley:

    David Curwen was first mentioned in Crowley’s diaries on 2.9.1944. When I met him, shortly before Crowley’s death, he was a member of the IX° O.T.O. His passion for Alchemy was all-consuming; so much so that he had nearly died after imbibing liquid gold. His knowledge of Tantra was considerable. It was through Curwen that I received, eventually, full initiation into a highly recondite formula of the Tantric vama marg.

    In discussing Crowley’s attempted formulation of an ‘elixir’ as part of his sex-magickal workings, Grant mentions a detail of key relevance to his later weaving of Tantra and Thelema, which would be essential to his own journey of initiation:

    There exists a document relative to this formula compiled by Curwen’s erstwhile guru, a South Indian tantric. It is in the form of an extensive commentary on an ancient text of the Kaula School. Curwen lent Crowley a copy of it.

    The document in question was a copy of the Anandalahari, or ‘Wave of Bliss’, annotated by Curwen’s South Indian Guru and with a Commentary explaining the physiological – and explicitly sexual – symbolism. This provided Grant with a key to unlocking the hidden mysteries of the Sanskrit Sacred Texts, from which he was able to develop – with Curwen’s help – a deeper insight into Tantra than his former mentor had ever achieved:

    In the instructions which accompany the higher degrees of the O.T.O., there is no comprehensive account of the critical role of the kalas, or psycho-sexual emanations of the woman chosen for the magical rites. The commentary was an eye-opener for Crowley, and it explained some of his preoccupations during my stay at ‘Netherwood’. These involved a formula of rejuvenation. The O.T.O. lacked some vital keys to the real secret of magick which Crowley claimed to have incorporated into the higher degrees. Curwen undoubtedly knew more about these matters than did Crowley, and Crowley was piqued.

    Despite his outsider credentials as an occultist and sometimes transgressive attitudes as a drug-taker and promiscuous bisexual, Aleister Crowley was still in many respects a product of his time: he may not have been an out-and-out misogynist, but he suffered from a male chauvinism all-too-typical of his Victorian, privileged, white male background. He also had little-or-no knowledge of authentic Tantra from original sources, whereas when I exchanged letters and briefly met with Kenneth Grant in 1981, he made it clear that despite his lifelong dedication to Crowley and the Law of Thelema, really his “first love,” spiritually speaking, was Advaita Vedanta. This ancient Hindu philosophy of non-duality asserts that Atman, or the True Self, is essentially no different from the Highest Universal Principle, or Brahman. Grant would become for a while in the 1950s a follower of the Sage of Arunachala, Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, and saw his essential meditation “Who am I?” as equated to Thelema’s pursuit of realising one’s True Will, writing:

    The natural spirit of the East, in its deeper rootage, is in complete accord with the doctrine of Thelema. That this is so may be proved by comparing the basic tenets of Thelema with the Chinese Way of the Tao, the Vedantic doctrine of Advaita, and the pivotal philosophy of Hindu and Buddhist Tantricism.

    A number of articles that Grant wrote for Anglo-Indian journals were later gathered together and published as At the Feet of the Guru.

    After a period of association with Gerald Gardner – who was also a member of the O.T.O., likewise with a charter to set up an encampment (although there is no evidence that he ever put it to use) – Grant would set up a Working Group of his own, “evolved… for purposes of traffic with the Outer Ones,” of which he wrote:

    Between the years 1955-1962, I was involved with an occult Order known as New Isis Lodge. It functioned as a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), with headquarters in London. I founded the Lodge to channel transmissions from transplutonic sources… The body of these transmissions forms the basis of the Typhonian Trilogies.

    This caused a falling out with Karl Germer, nominal Head of the O.T.O. upon Crowley’s death, who felt that Grant had exceeded his authority. There were also personality clashes because New Isis Lodge had issued a manifesto in conjunction with the former Grandmaster of the German Fraternitas Saturni, Eugen Grosche, with whom Germer had fallen out previously – the net result being Grant’s expulsion from the Order. This Grant disregarded, however, considering his authorisation to have come from Crowley himself, and also his own ‘Inner Planes’ contacts. Thus began the parting of the ways between Grant’s Typhonian Order and the so-called ‘Caliphate’ O.T.O. reformulated in America by Grady McMurtry.

    A key to understanding the notion of ‘Typhonian Gnosis’ is Kenneth Grant’s emphatic identification of Typhon – a monstrous entity from Greek mythology, leader of the Titans, who make war against the gods of Olympus, and decidedly male – as the Mother of Set. Grant does not hesitate to appropriate this gigantic, multi-winged and snake-limbed chthonian monster, Primal Typhon, as an avatar of The Great Mother, i.e. ‘Mother Nature’ Herself, and boldly asserts:

    She typified the first parent at a time when the role of the male in procreation was unsuspected. Because she had no consort she was considered to be a goddess without a god, and her son – Set – being fatherless was also godless and was therefore the first ‘devil’, the prototype of the Satan of later legends. 

    With regard to Set – a dark, primal figure of raw potency from aboriginal, pre-Dynastic Egypt, later cast as the killer of the god-king Osiris and thereafter prototype of the “God against the Gods” – Grant wrote in the Foreword to the 1990 edition of what had originally been his first book, The Magical Revival:

    “For us, who have the inner knowledge, inherited or won, it remains to restore the true rites of Attis, Adonis, Osiris, of Set, Serapis, Mithras, and Abel.”

    These words of Aleister Crowley inspired me as a youth, and, imagining myself as one of those to whom they were addressed, I soon discovered that for some reason I have not been able to fathom it was the god Set I was being called upon to honour. I accordingly took it upon myself to penetrate the Mysteries of this, the most ancient of deities, and to trace the history of his rites from an indefinite antiquity to the present day. 

    Kenneth Grant (1983)

    The Egyptian Mysteries very much form the core of the Western Magical Tradition, and were certainly the basis for the mythos and rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Crowley had learned most of what he needed for his later development. Ancient Egypt as a source of supernatural power sanctioned his role as Prophet, and as much as Grant built on Crowley’s Aeon of Horus and The Book of the Law, the primary source for his Typhonian Gnosis was the controversial work of self-taught Esoteric Egyptologist, Gerald Massey. 

    In monumental works such as Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, Massey set out in no uncertain terms what he claimed was the Afrocentric and physiological basis of Gnosis: “The oldest symbols and religions originate in Africa.” He conceived of Typhon as equivalent to the Egyptian Tauret, or Ta-Urt, the hippopotamus “Mistress of the Birth-House.” She was the Goddess of the Seven Stars of the North, and Her son was the Dog Star, Sothis or Sirius (equated with Set), whose heliacal rising appeared above the horizon just before the inundation of the Nile. ‘Typhonian’ referred to those who worshipped this Primal Goddess, and members of Her Stellar Cult had fled East, taking their wisdom with them, when the Solar worshippers gained the ascendancy. In many ways, Kenneth Grant’s major innovation was in linking this Typhonian Tradition to Modern Occultism.

    While Grant built extensively on the works of other occultists that had gone before him – Blavatsky, Crowley, Fortune, Grosche, Spare – and cited academics and scholars, from pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis to ‘Egyptosophist’ Gerald Massey, he also had the curious habit of referencing works of fiction with the same apparent seriousness. Thus, discussions of the Stellar Wisdom and survival of pre-Dynastic worship from earliest Egypt may include, as well as references to archaeological sources, also speculative material drawn from the Akashic Record. Comparisons with writings on Tantra and Voodoo are all mixed together with the horror stories of Bram Stoker, the pulp novels of Sax Rohmer, supernatural fiction of Arthur Machen, and the ‘Weird Tales’ of H. P. Lovecraft. 

    Grant had a special affection for Lovecraft (pictured left), apparently believing that he was “onto something” – that his dread grimoire, The Necronomicon, in fact existed on the astral plane, and that HPL had apprehended this through his dreams, but was unable to accept the ‘truth’ of what he had discerned – that he was, in effect, an unconscious magician. To add to the apparent confusion, in a number of works Grant has given accounts – allegedly from the Annals of his New Isis Lodge – that read like something from the purple prose of supernatural horror writers, and talked about fictional characters as if they were “real” – and then in his supposedly fictional works he has drawn on presumably biographical elements from his own life, also ‘real’ characters and locations.

    To my mind, this over-literal examination of certain writings, such as Grant – or even Carlos Castaneda, with whom he has sometimes been compared – can miss the point. Whether or not Don Juan ‘really’ turned Castaneda into a crow, or that they jumped off the mountain together – or whether Crowley ‘really’ asked Kenneth Grant if they were distantly related via a shared cousin in an extended clan, who just happen to have been in possession of a family heirloom in the form of a grimoire documenting their generations-long traffic with otherworldly intelligences – is neither here nor there. What Grant is trying to stress – what he was an undoubted Master of – is the use of fiction or literature as a form of magical Glamour. 

    Words can weave worlds, words can conjure ghosts – words can transport and transform, and alter consciousness – the only limit being imagination. It is to be remembered that imagination is concerned with creating images, in which respect it is directly related to the Ancient Egyptian Heka: a word that meant both ‘Magic’ and “the making of images.” The roll-call of writers who were also magicians – or alternatively, occultists who employ fiction as a means of expressing magical concepts – is a long and distinguished one. 

    Grant himself follows in the footsteps of Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, both of whom had a background in the Golden Dawn and its offshoots, as did Algernon Blackwood, J. W. Brodie-Innes, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, Bram Stoker, and A. E. Waite. Grant saw the occult implications in the work of such writers as being not that dissimilar to his own:

    Machen, Blackwood, Crowley, Lovecraft, Fortune, and others, frequently used as a theme for their writings the influx of extra-terrestrial powers which have been moulding the history of our planet since time began…

    Get the issue this article appears in

    As well as other Decadent and Symbolist poets and writers such as Baudelaire, Huysmans, Lautréamont and Rimbaud, Surrealist painters like Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy come in for special appreciation. Dali in particular was praised as “One of the foremost magicians of our time” – with Grant going on to make the comparison with Spare explicit:

    Spare had already succeeded in isolating and concentrating desire in a symbol which became sentient and therefore potentially creative through the lightnings of the magnetised will. Dali, it seems, has taken the process a step further. His formula of ‘paranoiac-critical activity’ is a development of the primal (African) concept of the fetish, and it is instructive to compare Spare’s theory of ‘visualised sensation’ with Dali’s definition of painting as ‘hand done colour photography of concrete irrationality’. Sensation is essentially irrational, and its delineation in graphic form (‘hand done colour photography’) is identical with Spare’s method of ‘visualised sensation’.

    The emphasis on the use of such creativity, charged with magical Intent and directed by the trained Will, is a key concept of the Typhonian Gnosis:

    Dion Fortune emphasised the importance of the consciously controlled day-dream. Basing her practices on aspects of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, she demonstrated the magical value of “dreaming true,” an expression derived from George du Maurier’s novel, Peter Ibbetson. The theory is that if one weaves a day-dream with sufficient intensity it induces so total an abstraction of the senses that the dreamer merges into a waking dream, wherein he is the creator and master of his own fantasies. If powerfully formulated, these concretise, reify, and assume a reality equal in degree – and often more so – to that which is experienced in ordinary wakeful consciousness. The advantages of being able to induce such a state are evident…

    Perhaps more than any other modern occult writer, Grant stressed the importance, potential and power of such creativity, writing in Aleister Crowley & The Hidden God that, “Great art is always simple… true art expresses Eternity.” From the beginning, Art by the likes of Austin Osman Spare and Grant’s wife, Steffi, is essential to the function of the Typhonian Trilogies – the text illustrates the pictures as much as the pictures illustrate the text. Later, in Outside the Circles of Time, Grant writes regarding artists such as Dali, Sidney Sime, Spare, and Tanguy: 

    These artists accomplished a leap into other dimensions and – this is the important point – returned to record their extra-dimensional experiences… Art, in the true and vital sense, is an instrument, a magical machine, a means of occult exploration which can project the seer into the realm of the Unseen, and launch the waking mind into the seas of the subconsciousness.

    As much as Kenneth Grant’s works can stand as invaluable documents of the evolution of contemporary occultism – as well as records of the contribution of many of the pioneering figures that he had personal contact with – it is to be hoped that the greater contribution of his books will be as magical catalysts for the reader who is prepared to approach them in the same light. As Grant’s former protégé, Priestess of Maat Magick, Nema, wrote: “These aren’t just books about Magick; they’re books that are Magick.” 

    Used as portals to the Nightside, the nine volumes of the Typhonian Trilogies – as well as Grant’s various other books – can ultimately serve as guides to that place of exploration and inspiration beyond such distinctions as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ that he liked to call “the Mauve Zone.” 

    The Typhonian Trilogies – available from www.starfirepublishing.co.uk

    As such they can serve as launch-pads or even vehicles to that place which each of us needs to find for ourselves: the place where the Magick happens.

    Finally, in closing, I know that a picture of Grant is often painted as autocratic, even ‘Old School’ authoritarian, which may well have been so – several people have lead me to believe that he was actually easier to get on with if you weren’t a member of his Typhonian Order! – but there is no doubting his obvious dedication to the Daemonic Feminine. The Fellowship of Isis, whom Grant supported, have asserted he was “totally for the Goddess.” His championing of the work of Dion Fortune, of Marjorie Cameron – at a time when most people, if they were aware of her at all, just thought of her as “Jack Parsons’ widow” – his active encouragement of successive generations of strong women occultists such as Janice Ayers, Jan Bailey, Linda Falorio, Margaret Ingalls (the aforementioned Nema), Mishlen Linden, and Caroline Wise – as well as his life-long devotion to his wife, the artist Steffi Grant, whose works vividly complement and illustrate his books – all attest to this.

    The last living link to Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Eugen Grosche, and Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant’s legacy is yet to be fully assessed and we shall not see his like again.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 156.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Further Reading

    The Works of Kenneth Grant have appeared via a number of publishers down the years. Long out-of-print First Editions are quite rare, and prices on the Collector’s Market tend to reflect this. All of the following titles – unless otherwise indicated – are still available in relatively recently reprinted editions from Starfire Publishing, who are committed to ensuring the continuing availability of Grant’s Work.
    The Typhonian Trilogies: The Magical Revival [1972]; Aleister Crowley & the Hidden God [1973]; Cults of the Shadow [1975]; Nightside of Eden [1977]; Outside the Circles of Time [1981]; Hecate’s Fountain [1992]; Outer Gateways [1994]; Beyond the Mauve Zone [1999; reprint forthcoming]; The Ninth Arch [2002; reprint forthcoming]
    Starfire can be contacted via their website www.starfirepublishing.co.uk, or at: Starfire Publishing Ltd, BCM Starfire, London WC1N 3XX, United Kingdom.
    Also: Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare [1975; re-issued Fulgur, 2003]; Remembering Aleister Crowley [Skoob, 1991]; Zos Speaks! Encounters with Austin Osman Spare [with Steffi Grant; Fulgur, 1998]
    In addition, there are several volumes of Grant’s fiction, including Grist To Whose Mill?, a semi-fictionalised “Nightside Narrative” from the mid-1950s, featuring intriguing portraits of a number of occultists Grant was associated with, such as Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, and Austin Osman Spare.
    As yet, the study of Grant and his work is in its early stages, but two interesting and quite diverse starting points are Dave Evans’ The History of British Magick After Crowley [Hidden, 2007] – which contains several chapters relating to Grant and the influence of his Work – and Peter Levenda’s The Dark Lord: H. P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic [Ibis, 2013].

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Doctor John Dee: The Dream of Empire, The Nightmare of History

    Doctor John Dee: The Dream of Empire, The Nightmare of History

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 11 No 3 (June 2017)

    I grew up and went to school in England, and am just old enough that when, age 12, I went to the newly mixed Comprehensive Secondary (which had been until the year before the Girl’s Grammar School), all the atlases and textbooks still spoke proudly of the British Empire.

    Our classroom walls were adorned with increasingly outdated maps, showing something like a third of the world coloured red as territories of that Empire – even if by then they had faded to a slightly dusky pink, perhaps faster than memories of British imperialism had faded in the minds of the adults tasked with teaching us about ‘Great’ Britain, its place in history, and the world.

    With all of the recent fracas over Brexit, withdrawal from Europe, Scottish and Welsh lobbying for independence, and uncertainty regarding the future of the ‘special relationship’ with its increasingly self-interested and self-isolating Big Brother, America, surely any lingering echoes of that Britain of yesteryear must be long gone? Is it perhaps time to examine the curious origins of the Empire on which, famously, it was boasted the Sun would never set? With all the confusion and pessimism, would it help or make things worse to reflect that the British Empire was birthed amid hopes of re-uniting the faithful of Christendom, and building a New Jerusalem? That its primary architect – indeed, the man who conjured the words ‘British Empire’ for the first time – was in his own lifetime accused of alchemy, necromancy, and worse, and spent the latter part of his life ‘conversing’ with Angels.

    It is almost a cliché to speak of Doctor John Dee (1527–1608) as one of the greatest minds of the Elizabethan Renaissance. Professor Ronald Hutton, an expert on Early Modern Britain and authority on historical and contemporary paganism, has said that if one wanted a latter-day comparison for Dee, you could do no better than a figure like Stephen Hawking.

    Dee has been largely overlooked, at least until relatively recently, by regular historians and more orthodox commentators on the Elizabethan Age. They are comfortable enough with the idea of Dee the polymath, a sort of one-man clearinghouse for information, putting his knowledge of cartography, optics, and navigation to good use where English expansionism was concerned – but not so sure what to make of a man mostly remembered by posterity, if at all, as a kind of eccentric ‘Merlin’ to Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘King Arthur’.

    Alchemist, necromancer, and (alleged) communicator with Angels… a man with the ear of the Queen, involved in Court intrigue, and likely a spy – the good Doctor Dee turns up as a convenient clothes-horse on which to hang all manner of conspiracy theories, historical and supernatural. This is the Dee that performed a ritual with playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe to mark the founding of the British Empire – very possibly the siting of the zero degrees longitude marker at Greenwich Observatory as an act of magical intent, making Britain the centre of Time & Space, a New Jerusalem – and Marlowe was really killed to ensure his silence about this act; Dee not only predicted the storm that favoured the British encounter with the Spanish Armada in 1588, but literally conjured the winds, like a real-life Prospero; Dee designed the mysterious Newport Tower, a massive ruin that stands in the town of Newport, Rhode Island (the approximate location of his proposed North American colony). All extend the already remarkable Dr. Dee into the realm of fantasy.

    Undoubtedly true is that Dee put his not inconsiderable energies into a series of works aimed at shifting English foreign policy into a new, expansionist, adventurous mode. The main work – a veritable magnum opus setting forth his ideas regarding a proposed “Brytish Impire” – was the four-volume General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577), previously believed lost, but recently come to light again (shown on page 26). Ensuring his proposal of a British Empire was not missed, Dee designed a frontispiece featuring Elizabeth enthroned at the helm of a ship named Empire, masts topped by symbols of Christ, led on by a winged, sword-brandishing angel – while alongside, Britannia kneels on the shore, beseeching the Queen to protect her Empire by strengthening the Navy. It is as if Dee had woven a veritable spell to enchant Elizabeth: magicians of today would probably consider it a form of Sigil Magic. Roy Strong, author of Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, described it as a “British hieroglyphic.”

    Dee also delivered a smaller, concise work, written especially and exclusively for the Queen, his Brytanici Imperii Limites – “The Limits of the British Empire” – in which he summed up his belief that England’s territorial claim extended far beyond the British Isles, even including a map he had drawn up, indicating what he felt Elizabeth could claim dominion over (sadly, now lost.) Dee’s argument was based on accounts of the voyages of King Arthur, said to have sailed as far as the seas around the Pole in 530, bolstered with references to Brutus, the equally-legendary founder of Britain, and Welsh Prince Madoc, who was believed to have crossed the Atlantic in 1170, proving that:

    [of] a great part of the sea coasts of Atlantis (otherwise called ‘America’) next unto us, and of all the isles near unto the same, from Florida northerly, and chiefly of all the islands Septentrional [=northerly], great and small, the Title Royal and supreme government is due.

    Arthur, Brutus, and Madoc were all thought authentic historical figures at that time. This was the entire basis of the claim Dee set before Queen and Court: if the so-called ‘New World’ of America was, in fact, the legendary continent of Atlantis, which had been discovered already by these earlier British rulers, then surely Elizabeth, as their descendent, had prior claim?

    Dee was not above profiting from the proposed expansion himself. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert – the man who started the search for the Northwest Passage, thought a route to the Orient, and, like Dee, a believer that America was really Atlantis – succeeded in getting royal backing for a company set up with his brother, Adrian, and half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, to “discover and settle the northerly parts of Atlantis, called Novus Orbis” (i.e. North America.) Gilbert agreed with Dee that if their mission succeeded, he would get “the royalties of discoveries all to the north above the parallel of the 50th degree of latitude” – in other words, most of Canada and all of Alaska.

    In an age ravaged by the schism between Catholic and Protestant, Dee believed in the need for reconciliation. He had been imprisoned as a young man, accused of conjuration and heresy by Queen Mary’s Catholic Inquisition, and was lucky to have survived when many of those around him were tortured or put to death. When his beloved Elizabeth became Queen, the Protestants took their revenge, but Dee wanted the hatred, fear and bloodshed to end. He proposed that in the colony of the New World, all men and women – Catholic, Protestant, and Native – be allowed to live together, peacefully: it would be an example for all Christendom, a veritable New Jerusalem.

    At first, Dee’s plans were well received, his sheer daring catching the mood of grand ambition at Court. He helped define the sense of mission, even of destiny, that drove adventurers across the Atlantic. Writing of how English Gentlemen could consider themselves equal to any Frenchman, German, or Spaniard, diplomat Charles Merberry also boasted how “this most Royal Prince (her Majesty’s highness)” [i.e. Elizabeth] could likewise consider herself equal, if not superior, to any foreign monarch, on the basis that:

    Master Dee hath very learnedly of late… shewed unto her Majesty, that she may justly call herself LADY, and EMPERESS of all the North Islands.

    But it was not to be. Elizabeth’s ever-conservative chief minister, William Cecil, was alarmed by Dee’s vision. He feared antagonising powerful Catholic Spain, and doubted the North American lands would be of much value. Dee had worked hard to conjure a vision that might build a New Jerusalem and ultimately re-unite fractured Christendom, initially capturing Elizabeth’s interest, and the enthusiasm of courtiers such as Robert Dudley and Philip Sidney, but in the end it was all undermined by Cecil.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Not long after, Dee withdrew from such concerns, and ultimately from Court, Elizabeth, and England itself. In March 1582, Dee met a man who would be instrumental in leading him on a voyage of discovery every bit as exciting and, ultimately, hazardous as any exploration into unknown territories. He was none other than Edward Kelley, the man who facilitated his attempts to communicate with otherworldly, non-human intelligences. Soon after, Dee & Kelley embarked on adventures all their own, consuming them for the next seven years, taking them into new worlds beyond this one: The Angelic Conversations – but that is another story…

    Ironically, much of what Dee set forth in the writings he put before his Queen did come to pass, one way or another. England broke the monopoly of the Spanish once-and-for-all, with the spectacular defeat of their Armada in 1588 – and, as Dee had proposed, building up the Navy would be the key to English strength on the world stage. North America was colonised, and – although it later required a War of Independence to throw off British rule – the foundations of this particular new world order were indeed based on ideas of equality, fraternity, and freedom from religious persecution.

    Certainly the British Empire came into being, and undoubtedly the expeditions Dee suggested and helped plan played a significant part in laying its foundations. But it is hard to believe Dee would have recognised his dream of a New Jerusalem, a utopia worthy of Christ’s return, in the birthing of an empire built on the nightmare of colonialism and imperialism. Ultimately, Doctor Dee’s kingdom was not of this world.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 11 No 3.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • William S. Burroughs: His Search for “The Visitors”

    William S. Burroughs: His Search for “The Visitors”

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 11 No 2 (Apr 2017)

    I get these messages from other planets. I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet.
    – William S. Burroughs

    In 1989, the American author William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) wrote to Whitley Strieber, a writer previously best known for his successful horror fiction, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, about his alleged experiences of alien contact and abduction. In his first supposedly non-fiction book, Communion (1987), and its sequel Transformation (1988), Strieber asserts that he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York on the evening of 26 December 1985 by non-human beings. Although the books are generally thought of as accounts of alien abduction, Strieber draws no conclusions about his alleged abductors nature, referring to them as “the visitors” – a name he chose to be as neutral as possible. Burroughs read both Strieber’s first two books on his experiences with the visitors, and wrote saying he would very much like to contact them.

    Strieber’s wife, Anne, wrote back, saying they received a lot of crank letters and had to be sure he really was who he said he was. His next letter, in which Burroughs assured the Striebers, “I am indeed really me,” convinced them, and they invited him to spend the weekend at their cabin in upstate New York, where the experiences were alleged to have occurred.

    Burroughs later said:

    I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences, and I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth. He told me this. ‘When you experience it, it is very definite, very physical, it’s not vague and it’s not like an hallucination, that they are there’.

    For his part, Strieber said Burroughs was almost overly polite during his visit, but was clearly genuinely interested, and very curious about every detail of his experiences. Although the visitors he describes do travel in what appear to be ‘nuts-and-bolts’ physical craft, which manifest very much in the classic ‘flying saucer’ mode – and as for the beings themselves, roughly humanoid, mammalian beings, wearing at one point what appear to be blue overalls – Strieber himself had not ruled out the possibility they may not be extraterrestrials at all, but rather exist in his mind. Burroughs, himself no stranger to altered states, other realms of perception, and psychic manifestations, and a lifelong champion of Count Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics – which opposes the so-called “Aristotelian straitjacket” of either/or thinking – could certainly concur.

    Regrettably, the visitors did not choose to manifest themselves when he was around, but he remained open-minded about the possible reasons for this:

    It may mean that it was not propitious for them to come and pick me up at that particular time. It may mean that they would contact me at a later date or it may mean that they regard me as the enemy… We have no way of knowing what their motives are. They may find that my intervention is hostile to their objectives. And their objectives may not be friendly at all.

    Strieber referred to the visitors in his books also by the name “grays” – a meme which took on a life of its own, and has become very much the standard way of referring to at least one type of alien being that is apparently a regular visitor to our world: small, roughly humanoid, with a large, bald domed head, and usually large, black, wraparound eyes. This idea and image soon found its way into Burroughs’ own personal cosmology. He continued to be fascinated by them, and in a diary-entry for 3rd February 1997, written just five months before his death, and later published posthumously as part of Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, he wrote:

    The Grays apparently [are] Control Aliens, who have lost the ability to create, a dying race that needs blood and semen from humans. Bad folk those Grays.

    I recall that Whitley Strieber was accused of working for the Grays… Why are abductions and contacts always to mediocre or inferior minds? Why don’t they come and see ME?

    Because they don’t want to, are afraid to contact anyone with advanced spiritual awareness.

    The Grays want to make people stupider. Anyone with real perception is a danger to them. A deadly danger.

    The following exchange from an interview conducted by his friend, David Ohle, shows how much the whole business of Whitley Strieber and his experiences with “the visitors” had made an impression on Burroughs:

    DO: You went to New York a few weeks ago to see some aliens. What happened?

    WB: I talked to Whitley Strieber, who wrote Communion, and he invited me up to his cabin. I just read his book, Majestic, about the cover-up that followed the alleged crash of an alien ship [referring to the infamous Roswell, New Mexico case of 1947, as documented by Kevin D. Randle & Donald R. Schmitt in their UFO Crash at Roswell of 1991.]

    They recovered a body which was taken to Los Alamos for autopsy. It had no stomach. Apparently these creatures are nourished by some kind of very sophisticated photosynthesis. Chlorophyll people. They also have very large eyes and they cluster together in their space-ships, which are like hives.

    All this upset [then President of the United States] Truman a great deal: ‘They live in hives’. He said. ‘It makes my blood run cold. Got no stomachs and their genital organs are vestigial. Are they Communists?’ he wanted to know.

    My God, the dumbness, to alienate the aliens.

    The fact that the recovered alien body was allegedly taken to Los Alamos would have been a particularly portentous detail for Burroughs: it was where he had been sent to a ‘boy-scout’ style ranch school as a boy, which he had hated – and was the facility later taken over by the US military to be used as a Top Secret base for the development of the atom bomb, details that recur with ominous significance throughout a number of his works….

    Later, towards the end of the same interview, Ohle asks, “Is there something out there?”, and Burroughs’ reply shows, among other things, an interesting knowledge of UFO lore:

    There’s something out there. It may be far away in Space and Time, but remember – Time itself is a human invention, as are measurements.

    Remember Betty and Barney Hill, the two people abducted by aliens in Exeter, New Hampshire? Well, the aliens noticed that Barry had false teeth… They asked about this, and Betty said, ‘Well, they’ve worn out. Age, you know. Length of time’. And the aliens said, ‘What is time? What is age?’ They had no concept of it. Time is both a human invention and a human affliction.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    In a collection of essays published in 1986 as The Adding Machine, Burroughs summed up a lifetime of musing on the intricate and mysterious relationship between the creative impulse he had explored, both as a writer and, in later years increasingly as a painter, and the mysterious ‘other’ realms of altered perceptions and expanded consciousness that he had long sought to come to terms with, characterised in terms of the impulse to get into Space – in which he contrasts the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ efforts of the Space Program, with perhaps more subtle and creative methods:

    We are not setting out to explore static pre-existing data. We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new models of consciousness. As Brion Gysin [painter, poet, and Burroughs’ long-term friend and collaborator] said, When they get there in their trillion dollar aqualung they may find that artists are already there.

    What you experience in dreams and out of body trips, what you glimpse in the works of writers and painters, is the promised land of Space.

    Towards the end of the 1980s, not showing any signs of slowing down and still reaching out to new forms of creative expression, Burroughs collaborated with American avant garde theatre director, Robert Wilson, on an opera called The Black Rider. It was based on a German folktale, Der Freischütz, in a version that had come down via “English Opium Eater” Thomas De Quincey, and Burroughs wrote the libretto to accompany music by Tom Waits. Flushed by the apparent success, towards the end of 1991, Wilson approached Burroughs about a further collaboration, and Burroughs put forward an idea he was calling Paradise Lost:

    I had an idea… of an opera based on Paradise Lost, where Lucifer and the fallen angels have been the victims of an atomic attack and they’re picking themselves up out of the ruins of Hiroshima.

    Based in part on Milton’s original poem, it would also include material to do with aliens, abductions, UFOs, and in particular, the infamous crash alleged to have taken place at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. [Although nothing came of this at the time, following Burroughs’ death, his former companion and manager – now literary executor – James Grauerholz gave the material to former Hüsker Dü drummer, Grant Hart, who used it as the basis for his 2013 album, The Argument.]

    As part of the promotion and publicity for The Black Rider, Burroughs was interviewed at home in Lawrence, Kansas, on 10 June 1991, by Nicholas Zurbrugge. Asking him about his current interests and reading material, Burroughs showed the interviewer some books on Native American Indian Shamanism, then explained:

    So I’m interested in shamanism. I’m also very interested in all of these space aliens – their flying saucers, and all that… I’d just like to see some myself, that’s all. As a matter of fact, there’s been sightings in Kansas, and some out at the lake – where I have my house on the lake – but I have not been favoured.

    That same year, the writer Victor Bockris visited his old friend at home in Lawrence to talk with him for Interview magazine. During a discussion about Strieber’s alleged experiences – and how Burroughs was finding the Nineties “a very un-funny… very grim decade” – at one point Bockris was very upset about “a sense of being invaded,” and the reply shows that for William S. Burroughs, many of the old concerns about Control and possession had not gone away:

    You are no more invaded than the rest of us. When I go into my psyche, at a certain point I meet a very hostile, very strong force. It’s as definite as somebody attacking me in a bar… What you have to do is confront the possession. You can do that only when you’ve wiped out the words.

    For Burroughs, any escape into the altered state of consciousness that he saw represented by the freedom of Space would always be achieved in SILENCE. Back in the 1960s, amid the all-too-often drug-fuelled paranoia of Sci-Fi Conspiracy Theories, in which he seriously considered the possibility women were an alien species, and that, famously, “Language is a virus from Outer Space,” Burroughs had written:

    To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live it alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.

    As the decades progressed, and the Space Race failed to deliver on its promise of Brave New Worlds and the High Frontier of the Stars, Burroughs’ interest waned in the possibility of ‘nuts ‘n’ bolts’ solutions to getting out of the body and off the planet. His already longstanding interest in magic, the occult, and psychic phenomena took him further in the direction of astral projection, dream control, remote viewing, and the like, as well as actual forays into ritual magic.

    During his final years in the Midwest, as well as his interest in UFOs and possible alien contacts, such as those written about by Whitley Strieber, Burroughs explored the possibilities offered by an encounter with an anthropologist neighbour who was working with a Lakota Indian Medicine Man, Black Elk, and was also initiated into the Chaos Magic order, the Illuminates of Thanateros. [All of this is detailed at length in my book, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs (Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.)]

    Later, in the collection of Notes from his dream-journals and related musings that were published as My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), Burroughs wrote:

    I was convinced that the aliens, or whatever they are, are a real phenomenon. The abductions, in several accounts, involved sexual contacts. Indeed, that would seem to be their purpose.

    After some consideration, Burroughs came to the opinion that the aliens – if “the visitors” were indeed beings that originated physically outside of the collective unconscious, or some other such psychic realm – were, in fact, abducting people primarily to have sex with them. He was struck by the fact that in one of Strieber’s accounts of just such a “close encounter,” the beings wanted him to get a bigger erection than the one they had somehow been able to induce in him.

    In an attempt to attract them to his home in Lawrence, Kansas, Burroughs decided to let the grass grow long on his lawn, and then had somebody cut a patch of it into the shape of an erect penis – like making a crop-circle – in the hope this would attract their attention. Although Whitley Strieber continued to receive further visitations, which he would write about in subsequent works such as Breakthrough: The Next Step (1995) – and, latterly, Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come (2011) – the visitors never came for William S. Burroughs.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 11 No 2.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted: The Untold Story of Brion Gysin

    Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted: The Untold Story of Brion Gysin

    From New Dawn 154 (Jan-Feb 2016)

    If Brion Gysin had not existed, it probably would have been necessary to invent him, as the saying goes. Pre-eminent multimedia psychedelic shaman of the latter-half of the twentieth century, Gysin was something of a jack-of-all-trades: artist, calligrapher, entrepreneur, kinetic sculptor, novelist, performance artist, photographer, poet, raconteur, restaurateur, and traveller in this-and-other worlds. Brion did it all.

    Even a brief list of the names he crossed paths with sounds like a veritable who’s who: Laurie Anderson, Francis Bacon, David Bowie, Paul Bowles, Ira Cohen, Ornette Coleman, Max Ernst, Marianne Faithfull, Leonor Fini, Jean Genet, Keith Haring, Billie Holliday, Brian Jones, Timothy Leary, Iggy Pop, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, Gore Vidal – and, of course, his long-term friend and collaborator, William Burroughs – are among the friends, fellow-travellers and sometimes collaborators that have spoken of their admiration for the man and his work. As his biographer, John Geiger, wrote:

    Brion Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of.

    ‘Brion Gysin’ was originally John Clifford Brian Gysin, born 19 January 1916 in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England. He never knew his English-born father, who had emigrated to Canada, just in time to marry and father a child, before joining up and getting sent back to Europe to die in the First World War. After moving back to Edmonton in Canada with his young widowed mother, Gysin always preferred to stress his Swiss ancestry via his paternal grandfather, but even then he would complain later in life concerning the ‘delivery’ of his birth:

    Wrong address! Wrong address! There’s been a mistake in the mail. Send me back. Wherever you got me, return me. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong colour.

    The young Gysin wanted to “have adventures and see visions” and figured that Paris was the place. Moving there at 18, his career as a painter should have got off to a spectacular start: a chance encounter with Marie-Beth Aurenche – then still the first Mrs Max Ernst – gave access to the hottest scene in town, the Surrealists. Without formal art tuition, Gysin got some basic tips from the Argentinian spitfire, Leonor Fini, but the main lesson came from visiting Ernst’s studio and seeing that the objective was “to make the paint make the painting.” Barely 19, Gysin was soon invited to exhibit alongside Ernst, Fini, and Valentine Hugo – as well as Dali, Magritte and Picasso – but before the show’s opening his work was taken down by poet Paul Eluard, on orders of the ‘Pope’ of Surrealism, André Breton. Gysin never really found out why, but he was sure the fact he had just come out as homosexual had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, it was a crushing blow.

    Disillusioned, Gysin took off travelling, first to Greece and then Algeria. On his return to the States in 1939 he met a number of former Surrealists who had fled war in Europe. He shared a studio with the Chilean Roberto Matta, the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and also worked on Broadway as a scene painter, befriending the successful songwriter John La Touche. A lifelong enthusiast of cannabis, Gysin also started to hang out and ‘turn on’ with Black Jazz musicians such as Billie Holliday. Another significant connection was Eileen Garrett, celebrated society medium and psychic, whose abilities landed her in trouble with the authorities. During a séance, Garrett had apparently been contacted by the spirit of the captain of the British dirigible R-101, who gave such convincing details concerning the airship’s terrible crash that she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act on suspicion of espionage!

    “That’s My Music!”

    Serving during the Second World War, Gysin became a naturalised American, changing his name officially from ‘Brian’ to ‘Brion’. In the army Gysin was sent on a 18-month course to learn Japanese, including calligraphy, later to have a major impact on his art. He also met Tex Hanson, grandson of Josiah Hanson – inspiration and basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 bestselling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Through this friendship and the access it gave him to the world of Black Canadians, Gysin wrote To Master – A Long Goodnight, which was published in 1946 thanks to Eileen Garrett. This and the related text, A History of Slavery in Canada, won Gysin one of the first-ever Fullbright Scholarships. He used the money to travel to Tangier, Morocco with his new friend, composer and novelist Paul Bowles. Together they would explore the trance music of the ecstatic brotherhoods, and one day in 1950, attending a festival on the beach outside Tangier, Gysin had what would be for him a decisive encounter:

    …it was the first time I’d seen large groups of people going into trance – [that in itself] was enough to have kept my attention, but beyond and above all of that I heard this funny little music, and I said: “Ah! That’s my music! – I just want to hear that music for the rest of my life. I wanna hear it every day all day.”

    It turned out to be the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a collective of Berber Sufi trance musicians originating from the small village of that name, south of Tangier in the foothills to the west of the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco. As Gysin would later write in respect of his first encounter with the stirring, primal, hypnotic music of reeds, pipes, and goat-skin drums:

    Magic calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space. In Morocco, magic is practiced more assiduously than hygiene though, indeed, ecstatic dancing to music of the brotherhoods may be called a form of psychic hygiene. You know your music when you hear it one day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.

    After managing to attend the Festival of Bou Jeloud in Joujouka for the first time, Gysin recognised that:

    Their secret, guarded even from them, was that they were still performing the Rites of Pan under the ragged cloak of Islam.

    Gysin’s interpretation was that Bou Jeloud was an avatar of the Greek god Pan that survived from pagan times, as had been put forward by the pioneering socio-biologist, Edvard Westermarck, in his 1933 study Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilization. So, the “magical music” of the Master Musicians was, quite literally, a manifestation of the Pipes of Pan.

    Meeting William S. Burroughs

    In Tangier, Gysin would also meet the American writer William S. Burroughs – who later became his greatest friend and collaborator – but at first neither made a particularly favourable impression. Burroughs was still in the throes of a full-on heroin addiction, and had not yet written the monstrous masterpiece, Naked Lunch, that would make his name. He dismissed Gysin as catering – quite literally – to Tangier’s expat community of “uppity queens” with his restaurant, The 1001 Nights. It boasted Arab dancing boys, an in-house residency by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, and Gysin’s friend Hamri – ‘The Painter of Morocco’ – was main cook. It all ended in tears, though. Brion would later tell how he had been the target of a curse intended to oust him from his business:

    …while getting the restaurant ready I found a magic object, which was an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing, and the writing when deciphered by friends who didn’t even want to handle it, because of its magic qualities, which even educated Moroccans were not anxious to get in touch with, but it said something like, an appeal to one of the devils of fire, the devil of smoke – to take Brion away from this house: as the smoke leaves this chimney may Brion leave this house and never return…

    The Third Mind

    Relocating to Paris, after briefly enjoying the hospitality of the Princess Ruspoli, Gysin moved to completely the other end of the social spectrum, moving in to the nameless fleapit hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter. It was here in Paris that Gysin would run into Burroughs again, and this time they hit it off. Burroughs, likewise, moved into the so-called ‘Beat Hotel’ and the two of them embarked on their own equivalent of the poet Rimbaud’s “sustained and systematic derangement of all the senses” – the psychic fusion they referred to as “The Third Mind.” Gysin helped steer his new friend through the emotional rapids of heroin withdrawal, and allowed Burroughs to watch him at work on his art. Burroughs was wide open without the safety blanket of junk, and Gysin felt vulnerable and exposed working in front of his new friend. He rarely if ever let people see him paint, saying it was a more private act than masturbation. It must have been incredibly raw bonding indeed. It was as if the first cut-up they created together, this “project for disastrous success” as they called it, was with their very souls: and it was out of this commingling that all their subsequent collaborations would proceed. The very notion of ‘The Third Mind’ was itself a kind of psychic cut-up, named for the idea in Napoleon Hill’s 1937 self-help book, Think and Grow Rich:

    No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.

    The atmosphere around Burroughs and Gysin in those early days at the Beat Hotel was steeped in the occult, with daily experiments in mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs. Scrying is the very old and almost universal practice of gazing into a crystal ball, mirror, or other reflective surface, so as to access a form of spirit vision, usually for the purpose of divination. Brion conducted scrying marathons, sitting cross-legged in front of the mirrored armoire in his tiny room for up to 36 hours, tears streaming down his face from unblinking eyes, as friends passed the occasional cigarette, cup of coffee, or joint to help keep him going. He described how:

    …you see great galleries of characters, running through… scientists… in their sort of 19th century labs… whole events or whole scenes sort of frozen… And faces which never existed, and great chieftains of unknown races, and so forth and so on, going back and back further and further in time and history… after certainly more than 24 hours of staring… where there seemed it was a limited area that one could see only a certain distance into, uh, where everything was covered with a gently palpitating cloud of smoke which would be about waist-high… that was the end, there was nothing beyond that…

    From tales of Hassan-i Sabbāh, Old Man of the Mountain and Master of the Assassins, to magic and music in Morocco, Brion was a spellbinding storyteller. As psychedelic guru Timothy Leary later wrote:

    Brion dispenses blessings, visions, communications, poetic sermons, and wicked gossip – the world of the occult is his planet. Gysin is one of the great hedonic mystic teachers.

    [alert type=”info” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider a subscription to New Dawn magazine.[/alert]

    The Cut-Up Technique

    September 1959, and Brion Gysin was using a Stanley knife to cut through paper to make mounts for some drawings he was working on. In the process Gysin sliced into copies of the New York Herald Tribune spread out as a cutting mat. Seeing the various strips of paper and reading the chance combinations his blade had produced, he laughed so uproariously the neighbours were concerned for his sanity. When Burroughs returned, Gysin showed him the results – almost as an afterthought, “an amusing Surrealist diversion” – but Burroughs was immediately struck by the technique and its potential:

    The cut up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera… And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents… writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut up method… had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

    Gysin himself felt that, ultimately, he was unable to make the cut-ups work for him the way they worked for Burroughs. Instead, he focused more on permutations: he would take short, simple phrases and run them through every conceivable combination and juxtaposition, producing hypnotic, mantra-like formulae, such as:

    Come to free the words
    To free the words come
    Free the words to come
    The words come to free
    Words come to free thee!

    But even with such an apparently impersonal process as this, Brion the self-mythologiser was able to see occult forces at work, claiming:

    The permutations discovered me – because permutations have been around for a long time; in the whole magic world permutations are part of the Cabalistic secret…

    The notion of ‘Cabalistic secrets’ also applied to the latest developments in Gysin’s visual art: he had begun painting calligraphic works, based on the writing of Japanese in vertical columns and Arabic to be read right-to-left, overlaid in grids inspired by the very ‘magic square’ that had been used to curse him in Tangier. The results ranged from the subtle to the truly complex, each uniquely his own. As the painter George Condo would later remark:

    [Gysin] built up an authentic Eastern painting in an authentic Western manner.

    The Dreamachine

    A startling visionary experience Gysin had in the back of a bus in December 1958 lead to the next experimental revelation. As he recorded in his diary:

    Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseilles. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?

    When Burroughs later read The Living Brain by W. Grey Walter, he made the connection with his friend’s strange visionary experience immediately. Walter, an American-born British neurophysiologist, had been researching the effect of controlled flicker on states of consciousness via the use of precisely calibrated stroboscopes, and with the help of early EEG equipment had put forward a model of varying brainwave frequencies corresponding to different states of consciousness. Apparently a flicker rate of 8-to-13 cycles a second induced what Walter dubbed “alpha rhythms” which “predominantly originate… during wakeful relaxation with closed eyes” and, interestingly, also during REM sleep (i.e. during dreaming.) Obviously Brion had experienced a spontaneously-occurring flicker experience, no doubt caused by the exact rhythm of the sunlight flickering through the trees as the bus drove past, thought Burroughs. The question was, though, how to reliably reproduce the flicker effect? The answer came from their young friend, Ian Sommerville, a gifted mathematician, who had also read Walter’s book, and wrote:

    I have made a simple flicker machine; a slotted cardboard cylinder which turns on a gramophone at 78 rpm with a light bulb inside. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over the eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colours on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of colour are pounding to get in…

    Gysin was quick to promote both the ‘Dreamachine’ and his discovery of it – going so far as to register a patent, Procedure and apparatus for the production of artistic visual sensations (although many later felt that the credit really should have gone to Sommerville.) Ever the charismatic raconteur and self-mythologiser, Gysin spun a web of wonder about “his” flicker device, creating a suitably esoteric and esteemed pedigree, telling interviewers:

    …one knows of cases – in French history, Catherine de Medici for example, had Nostradamus sitting up on the top of a tower… and he used to sit up there and with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicker his fingers over his closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way which were of influence to her in regard to her political powers… they were like instructions from a higher power… Peter the Great also had somebody who sat on the top of a tower and flickered his fingers like that across his closed eyelids…

    Of course, it was too good to be true. For all that the “cosmonauts of inner space” of the Beat Hotel thought that the Dreamachine could be “the drugless turn-on of the 60s” illuminating the world for the price of a light-bulb, it was never really going to have the kind of mass appeal they might have hoped for. Marianne Faithfull – who would meet Gysin for tea in Mayfair during her “lost years” – recalled her first impressions of the Dreamachine, and her answer gives some sense of the associations that probably stopped the device from catching on commercially:

    I remember going to an exhibition of Brion Gysin, and there was the Dreamachine… I mean I knew it was really special ‘cos I think I was tripping… Only a magical creature could think up something like that – it is like a wonderful idealistic idea, but you know it’s never gonna fly…

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Here To Go

    In his 1969 novel The Process, Gysin declared rather grandly:

    Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: ‘What are we here for?’ is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I’ll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!

    In 1974 Gysin was hit badly by a diagnosis of cancer, followed first by unsuccessful cobalt treatment and then a colostomy. He returned to Paris “to die” he said – but eventually began to rally, and with the help and encouragement of friends resumed work. He wrote to William Burroughs:

    …I have decided to come back and finish my life’s work. Like the Old Chinese Painter I intend to work on to the point where I can bow three times and disappear into my picture.

    At the recommendation of David Bowie, Iggy Pop looked up Brion in Paris, later remembering: “Brion Gysin – what a beautiful guy. His painting is beautiful. He was a real human being.” English Cut-Up writer Terry Wilson recorded interviews with Gysin for what would become his definitive statement, Here To Go: Planet R-101, and also helped edit The Last Museum. New York graffiti artist Keith Haring visited Brion and later paid this moving tribute:

    I feel honoured to have known Brion and shared a short but timeless moment of our lives. He was my teacher, a role he took on with great passion. Perhaps the greatest teacher I will ever have, for he taught by example…

    Others that made the pilgrimage to Paris to see Gysin included Genesis P-Orridge and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson of Industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. They had been vocal about the influence of Burroughs, Gysin, Cut-Ups and the Third Mind from the beginning, and continued to pay tribute in successive projects Psychic TV and Coil. P-Orridge would later write, “Gysin was a transmediator, a 20th century renaissance man, a multi-media explorer and innovator,” and also that he and Burroughs were “cultural alchemists and practicing magicians,” while Christopherson’s partner in Coil, John Balance, simply acknowledged “Brion Gysin is a Teacher.” After his death, in a video tribute recorded for the Dublin Here To Go Show in 1992, Burroughs stated unequivocally:

    Brion Gysin is the only man I have ever respected, the only person of either sex. He was completely enigmatic because he was completely himself.

    In the final analysis, Gysin was perhaps right to complain that, as well as being born the “wrong colour” in the “wrong place,” he had also been born in the “wrong time”: what becomes more clear with each passing decade is that the single biggest misfortune of his various lives and careers was to have been born too soon. Brion Gysin is a prime example of the 21st century magical multimedia artist, psychedelic explorer, and techno-shaman, and he belongs to the Future. His Time is Now.

    I talk a new language. You will understand. I talk about the springs and traps of inspiration. Who Runs May Read.
    – Brion Gysin (1916–1986)

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 154.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    FURTHER READING

    Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, ed. Jason Weiss (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2001)

    Brion Gysin: Dream Machine by L. Hoptman, w/ J. Geiger, J. Grauerholz, et al. (Merrell, 2010)

    Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, ed. J. Ferez Kuri (Thames & Hudson, 2003)

    Here To Go: Planet R-101 by Brion Gysin & Terry Wilson (RE/Search, 1982; Creation, 2001)

    The Last Museum by Brion Gysin (Grove/Atlantic, 1986)

    Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger (Disinformation, 2005)

    The Process by Brion Gysin (Jonathan Cape, 1969; Overlook, 2005)

    The Third Mind by William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin (Viking, 1978; Grove, 1982)

    William S. Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, Brion Gysin, ed. Vale & Juno (RE/Search, 1982)

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs

    The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs

    From New Dawn 142 (Jan-Feb 2014)

    When the American writer William S. Burroughs passed away at the ripe old age of 83 back in August 1997, the media coverage was definitely more in keeping with his status as a counter-cultural icon than it was for his literary fame – or infamy – alone. All the usual well-rehearsed lines were trotted out, about how he was the Harvard-educated product of the WASP elite and scion of the family that founded the Burroughs Corporation, who had turned his back on it all to become a junkie queer, trawling the steaming jungles of South America, sleazy ‘Interzone’ of Tangiers, and shady back-streets of Paris and London for drugs and boys. That somewhere along the line he became an unlikely mentor to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, who had opened the way for the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

    William Burroughs had originally exploded onto the literary scene back in 1959 with his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch, causing hip critics everywhere to claim they had seen the future – even if nobody was really sure that they understood it. With his three-piece suit, glasses, hat and raincoat, Burroughs seemed like the ultimate undercover hipster, and that voice certainly didn’t hurt: pitched somewhere between T.S. Eliot and W.C. Fields, mixing camp twang and knowing drawl with the educated tones of an old-fashioned Southern gentleman. From the moment he received that ultimate 1960s imprimatur of cool, being included by The Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper (he’s in there between Marilyn Monroe and Fred Astaire), William Burroughs was the rock rebel’s choice of Literary Outlaw: from David Bowie and Jimmy Page to Patti Smith and Tom Waits, experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil, even Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain – generations of alternative rock stars have collaborated and paid homage.

    Norman Mailer once famously said that William S. Burroughs was, “The only American novelist living and working today who may conceivably be possessed of genius,” and as often as this was repeated down the years, Burroughs himself was at pains to point out that it was not saying he had genius or was a genius, but that he may at times had been lucky enough to be possessed by genius. When I interviewed him at the October Gallery in London in 1988, he had this to say on the subject:

    To me ‘genius’ is the nagual: the uncontrollable – unknown and so unpredictable – spontaneous and alive. You could say the magical.

    The fact that his answer uses a term, nagual, derived from the world of the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, as described by Carlos Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan and subsequent books, is telling indeed…

    There is also another kind of ‘possession’ that was very much a concern for William Burroughs, Man and Writer. From an early age, as much as he felt a definite sense of being ‘Other’ and not really belonging or fitting in anywhere, as much as he knew he was homosexual, he also believed in the idea of the Magical Universe. He was aware that an integral part of that universe was that there were inimical – even hostile – forces that threaten us, that may need to be bargained with and from time-to-time appeased, and that one of the dangers posed is that of possession:

    My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without (as if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer). I mean a definite possessing entity.

    Later, in the foreword for the autobiographical Queer (written in the 1950s but unpublished until 1985), Burroughs talks about the appalling circumstances of the so-called ‘William Tell’ shooting accident that caused the death of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer:

    I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

    The simple truth is that William Burroughs had always been a scribbler: in numerous articles and interviews he describes at length his literary efforts from childhood on, and the somewhat precocious sense that the bookish, physically awkward, shy young Billy had of himself as an aspirant writer – an image that was as hopelessly Romantic as it was coloured by a flouting of moral convention:

    As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

    The Cut-Up Technique

    As well as the monstrous masterpiece that is Naked Lunch, William Burroughs is perhaps also best remembered for championing the experimental technique of the ‘cut-ups’ – what appears to be at first glance the almost ludicrously simple idea of introducing collage techniques into writing. Collage, in all its various forms, may very well be the pre-eminent creative breakthrough of the 20th century: for better or worse, such techniques probably more accurately mirror the way the world is experienced by most people in an increasingly accelerated, fragmentary, and seemingly random datascape. Sampling, montage, collage: these methods really do come closer to representing or expressing what the facts of perception are for most of us in this post-technological, post-modernist, information overload. As William Burroughs put it again and again throughout his career:

    As soon as you walk down the street… or look out the window, turn a page, turn on the TV – your awareness is being cut: that sign in the shop window, that car passing by, the sound of the radio… Life IS a cut-up.

    Almost from the beginning, there was another aspect to the cut-ups acknowledged just as emphatically: they had the potential to be oracular. To William Burroughs, who would undoubtedly become the greatest champion of the technique, they introduced an element of randomness and also of Time: as he would later put it, whereas the basis of fiction was “once upon a time” – with the cut-ups it was “once in future time.”

    Among Burroughs’ earliest cut-ups were phrases that meant nothing at the time, but in hindsight took on an eerie prescience. This was like the seemingly arbitrary content of dreams, which lead Burroughs to speculate:

    Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.

    In Here to Go: Planet R101, Brion Gysin described how Burroughs would work with the material – and I think his choice of words is instructive:

    On the wall hangs a nest of three wire-trays for correspondence which I gave him to sort out his cut-up pages. Later, this proliferated into a maze of filing cases filling a room with manuscripts cross-referenced in a way only Burroughs could work his way through, more by magic dowsing than by any logical system. How could there be any? This was a magic practice he was up to, surprising the very springs of creative imagination at their source.

    The cut-ups would get a more public airing when UK publisher John Calder arranged for Burroughs to appear at the Edinburgh Conference in August 1962. After Burroughs stole the show with his presentation of an attempted “new mythology for the Space Age” – and an explanation of the innovative techniques that had made it possible, the cut-ups and their further extension in the newly-developed fold-in – a curious comparison was made by Stephen Spender, who queried the analogy between science and writing:

    It sounds to me like a rather medieval form of magic rather than modern science.

    It is in fact informative to compare this with a statement Burroughs made himself, in which his comparison of cut-ups with mediumship is explicit:

    Cut ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps.

    Experiments in Magic – Subverting Control

    It is to be remembered that the atmosphere around Burroughs and Gysin in those early days at the Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris was steeped in the occult, with daily experiments in mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a variety of mind-altering drugs. It is not surprising to think they may have considered these new developments in such terms.

    Burroughs, for all his Harvard education and intellect, also possessed a worldview that was informed – you might even say overshadowed – by a fear and fascination with the supernatural that had been shaped in childhood, and stayed with him ever since. His first biographer, Ted Morgan, states in Literary Outlaw that the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in what he referred to as “the Magical Universe.” Gysin himself was naturally inclined to intrigue and mystery, and come back from Morocco full of tales of black magic, curses and possession. Burroughs was an all-too-eager audience for the spellbinding storyteller. He felt his own travels in exotic parts had opened his eyes to a Bigger Picture:

    Now anyone who has lived for any time in countries like Morocco where magic is widely practiced has probably seen a curse work. I have.

    When Gysin, allegedly in trance, told Burroughs, “The Ugly Spirit shot Joan because…,” he thought he had the answer that no amount of psychoanalysis or self-examination had been able to provide: the unforgiveable slip that caused the death of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, come about because he was literally possessed by an evil spirit. This was indeed a War Universe, and Brion had identified The Enemy. If the Word was indeed the basic mechanism or unit of Control – the ‘virus’ by which Control or the Ugly Spirit exerted its malevolent influence – then surely a real understanding of the Word, what words are and what can be done with them – was essential.

    All these explorations and obsessions were not merely diversions, experiments for artistic or literary amusement, or the creation of novelty, but part of a deadly struggle with unseen, invisible – perhaps even evil – psycho-spiritual enemies. The only hope for deprogramming and self-liberation was to subvert the methods of Control and its various agencies, understand the tools used so that they could become weapons to turn back on the Control Machine itself.

    Gradually, as the 1960s progressed, it was clear the cut-ups were an idea whose time had come. Helped by Burroughs and Gysin’s gradually emerging status as counter-culture gurus, their ideas and influence began to spread. By the 1970s William Burroughs was the epitome of hip as far as drug savvy musos with literary pretensions were concerned: a coked-out David Bowie explained how he used “the Burroughs cut-up method” in Alan Yentob’s 1974 BBC profile, Cracked Actor, and then demonstrated it (badly). His friend Brian Eno would name a track ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’ as a nod to Burroughs’ Dead Fingers Talk, but would also look for ways to introduce chance with his Obliques Strategies, a set of cryptic aphorisms intended to encourage creative solutions by lateral thinking. Jimmy Page would be interviewed by Burroughs for Crawdaddy magazine, and as the clarion call of Punk was heard in New York, Patti Smith was the first to cheer the return of the Beat Godfather to his native land.

    [alert type=”info” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider a subscription to New Dawn magazine.[/alert]

    Genesis P-Orridge

    Around the same time that Punk was emerging in the UK, another home-grown genre drawing inspiration from Burroughs, Gysin and the cut-ups was the ‘Industrial’ music of Throbbing Gristle (TG) and related bands like Cabaret Voltaire and later, 23 Skidoo. TG prime-mover Genesis P-Orridge had actually met Burroughs while he was living on Duke Street in London in the early 1970s, and he and band-mate Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson were directly inspired by the Outsider stance of the ‘Literary Outlaw’ as much as they were influenced by his theories. Along with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, P-Orridge and Christopherson would help to invent a new genre of music they dubbed ‘Industrial’ – stripping back music even further than the back-to-basics of Punk to create a kind of Garage musique concrète, in which the processing and manipulation of found sound was a key part of the semi-improvised mayhem that was as often sonic assault as it was about the alchemy of sound.

    When P-Orridge first visited Burroughs on Duke Street in 1973, he asked him, “Tell me about magick?” and whether or not he still used cut-ups in writing. Burroughs replied, “No, I don’t really have to anymore, because my brain has been rewired so it does them automatically.” He cracked open a bottle of Jack Daniels, poured them both a stiff drink, then put on the TV to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E., explaining, “Reality is not really all it’s cracked up to be, you know…” He then began hopping through the channels on the TV with the remote – at the same time mixing in pre-recorded cut-ups from the Sony tape-recorder – until P-Orridge was experiencing a demonstration of cut-ups and playback in real-time – right there where he was sitting:

    I was already being taught. What Bill explained to me then was pivotal to the unfolding of my life and art: Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick.

    As part of his explanation, Burroughs showed P-Orridge one of his journal scrapbooks in which he had posted two photos: a simple black and white street scene, with the relevant building clearly visible, and then another beneath it from which he had carefully sliced out the ‘target’ with a razor blade, gluing the two halves of the photo back together so as to create an image of the street with the offending institution removed. The same principle could clearly be applied to photos of people that you wanted to ‘excise’ from your life, he said. These principles would have a profound effect on P-Orridge and Christopherson, as well as many of the ‘anti-musicians’ and sound-artists that they would collaborate with or inspire in their turn. It wasn’t just the sonic application of the cut-ups with tape-recorders, but rather the whole approach to challenging conventional wisdom, deprogramming the self from the imposed beliefs and values of mainstream society.

    After TG had split, P-Orridge and Christopherson went on to form ‘Psychic Television Limited’ – with its attendant Conceptual Art gag masquerading as fan club pretending to be a cult, ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’, or TOPY as it was known. For a while there was an inner circle that revolved around a strange hybrid of the ideas of occultists Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare regarding consciousness alteration, dream control, and sex-magic. The life and work of Burroughs and Gysin, with their cut-ups, Dreamachine, playback, and Third Mind equally offered a kind of toolkit for similar ends. It looked like if the Revolution was going to be televised after all, then Psychic TV were going to be first in line to put in their bid for the franchise…

    But all too soon cracks began to show, and P-Orridge and Christopherson parted company: Sleazy with partner John Balance to create a whole new world of magick and music as Coil, Genesis to develop PTV increasingly in the direction of Rave music. Each would continue finding ways to apply the cut-up methods of sampling, cut-and-paste and appropriation to the development of new music. TOPY became increasingly an umbrella for New Age Merry Prankster-style utopian tribalism, and Gen’s role as figurehead for these disparate anti-movements, and the cultural memes he was engineering – from cut-ups and sex-magick, to tattooing, piercing, and body modification – inevitably lead to conflict with the authorities, and P-Orridge had to flee England for a life of exile in the United States. Eventually he would come to perhaps the most radical application of his interpretation of the ideas of Burroughs and Gysin of all: Pandrogeny, in which P-Orridge and his spouse Lady Jaye would literally try and cut-up gender.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Engaging the Magical Universe

    When I first met William S. Burroughs in London at the time of The Final Academy series of events in 1982, I asked him about magic, and whether he would care to recommend any books on the subject. Without hesitation, he mentioned Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense, even though he qualified it as “a bit old-fashioned.” As he began to talk of black magic and curses in North Africa, travelling with medicine men up the Amazon, and describing his experiments with tape-recordings and playback on the streets of London’s West End and in the midst of the 1968 Chicago Democrat’s Convention and ensuing riots, I realised that for Burroughs this was utterly real. He told me about a dream he had as a young man, working as an exterminator in Chicago: watching from a helpless out-of-body point of view floating above the bed as his body got up and went out with some unknown and sinister purpose that he was powerless to influence… with a shudder, he told me that possession was “still the basic fear.”

    Even towards the end of his life, William S. Burroughs’ engagement with the Magical Universe (and struggle against the Ugly Spirit) did not wane. The magical, psychic, spiritual and occult appear in his later fiction like never before, from depictions of astral travel and “sex in the Second State” to descriptions of actual rituals, referencing everything from Crowley and the Golden Dawn to the myths of ancient Egypt and even the Necronomicon… all interwoven with increasingly ‘neo-pagan’ concerns for the environment, the impact on Man and Nature of the Industrial Revolution with its emphasis on ‘quantity, not quality’ and standardisation – as well as perceived turning points in history. His adoption of the ancient Egyptian model of the Seven Souls, continuing development of a very personalised myth of Hasan-i Sabbah and the Assassins of Alamut, made him of increasing interest and relevance to the new occultists who were emerging from successive generations of counter-culture that Burroughs had helped to shape through the example of his Life and Work.

    There was also still the loss, the pain, and – perhaps more than ever – the Ugly Spirit. After settling in Lawrence, Kansas – a small university town, far from the distractions and temptation of New York, and very much a reminder of his mid-Western background in St. Louis, Burroughs became friends with William Lyon, a Professor of Anthropology who had been apprenticed to Sioux medicine man Black Elk. A full sweat-lodge purification ceremony was arranged in an attempt to evict the Ugly Spirit, which was described by the shaman as:

    A spirit with a white skull face, but no eyes, and sort of… wings.

    Burroughs was impressed by the “strength and heart” of the medicine man, and felt that just to clearly identify the enemy in such terms was in itself something of a victory:

    If you see it, you gain control of it. It’s just a matter of, well, if you see it outside, it’s no longer inside.

    In the early 1990s, the elderly Burroughs was initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros, the leading Chaos Magic group. Perhaps this was not such a surprising development. Chaos Magic clearly felt a debt to Burroughs and his peers, sharing many of the same concerns as Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth: demystifying magic, yet at the same time distilling the best from Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, while taking advantage of the latest ideas emerging in computers, maths, physics and psychology.

    With the experiments started at the Beat Hotel that he then took out onto the streets of London, Paris and New York, William S. Burroughs was recognised as a pioneer and precursor: and with the later connections established through a younger generation of artist-occultists, the link from ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ to ‘psychonaut’ was assured.

    For more information about Matthew Levi Stevens, please see http://whollybooks.wordpress.com. The book-length version of his The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs is available from Mandrake of Oxford. To order go here: http://mandrake.uk.net/the-magical-universe-of-william-s-burroughs/

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 142.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.