Fascinating stuff, thanks. I’m glad I ran across your post. Weirdness attracts weirdness as I’m sure you know. I was also a teenage Jesus freak (well, a 20 year old Jesus freak) and I think you might be interested in my tale, especially as you mention a respect for Dylan’s gospel era. It’s up your alley—astral travels, rock and roll, sex and drugs, hidden messages. Take a look at my articles if you like, and be sure to start at the first chapter, where I tell my Jesus story. All the best,
Sadly, the UK missed out a lot on this. I solemnly read 7 copies of the bible, cover to cover, considered the sum total of discrepancies, and abandoned its accuracy, plus any statement suggesting inspiration from immortal sources. The pomp and carry on of the church of England tends to do this to you, with all the fancy costumes for the bishops etc. I considered the Quakers, stricter here than in the USA I understand. They are generally nice and tolerant folk, recently I met them at a Pride event handing out free food, welcoming trans people, and the one I spoke too said they were an atheist but accepted by the Quakers. Pacifists too, of course. I tried the Methodists too, but even non conformists have rules they want you to follow, though are less inclined to enforce them I discovered. So I chose to let believers of religion have their beliefs, so long as they didn't force it on others, or force cultural habits on others either. Or, of course, write such things into laws, or school education, or employment contracts, and so on........by the way Happy New Year!
Thanks Liz. I love your slice of seeking. Organized groups with rules are tough. I have always imagined the Quakers a bit about the fray but have yet to attend a meeting. Smells and bells has its appeal as well! Happy new year.
No future in that kind of low testosterone old lady liberalism I'm afraid. You are being pushed aside and demographically eclipsed by more traditional and aggressive cultures. Go talk to some Muslim youth in London, Paris or New York if you don't believe me. In 50 years your great grandchildren (if you have any) will curse your kind for their suicidal weakness and inability to preserve their cultures. As we enter the new Dark Age, the future belongs to barbarians and fundamentalists, imo.
But that's the thing: the experimental pluralism that you wrongly call old lady liberalism *is* my culture, my southern California post-counterculture milieu, not the dogma that comes before. Like subtlety or nuance, two marvels of human consciousness that I suspect you would find to be "low testosterone", that kind of openness may not fair well in the future struggles you describe. So be it. To adopt a reactionary militarism in creeds outworn for the sake of survival against rivals, with triumph over the future as your only criterion, seems both frightened and ethically weak.
Somehow I never thought about it but of course you’re a big *Illuminatus!* fan! Among my generation (Millennial) it’s sorely under-appreciated. I found an apparently unsalable copy with the cover torn off dumpster-diving behind the Capitol Hill Seattle Half-Price Books in 2006. Deeply influential on my worldview and aesthetic tastes. Still looking for stuff that scratches the same itch 2 decades later.
If you have any other recommendations in a similar vein that I may not have heard of I’d love to know!
Once again Erik we have such interesting similarities, in this case you went whole hog for the Jesus thing and I went to whole hog (or I should say 'whole rat thing'), and at about the same age for the jimson weed drinking Chumash Indian experience, and whenever I was high I was sure I was a Native American of some kind, became obsessed with survival in the wilderness except for me it was survival in the Anza Borrego desert and nearby parts where we learned how to trap rodents, desiccate them in the sun then pound them into a powder for soup, while stoned, or not. That was 'my' religion, and I still feel very connected to it. By coincidence or not, I met the chief, or one of the chiefs of the Chumash tribe, shared with him my experience and was grateful he thought it was more of an honoring not a usurpation of his religion. Thanks for directing me to the CSWR site.
PS I've been selling Southern California weirdness stuff, including the occasional Jesus freak relic to the Burke library at Colgate, I believe they have a large collection of material you might be interested in.
Obsessive hermeneutics is such a delightful and all-consuming mode of being!
Suddenly, questions that aren't really that pressing, like the sequence of events at the beginning of time or the way the letter yod works, become supremely urgent. Mundane considerations like rent and sleep fade into the background... It’s a solo sport, completely, but practised among a buzzing community of dead rabbis.
So, you gonna share a line or two of the Dungeons & Dragons era poetry?
I remember the Jesus Freak stuff, but I’ve always been suspicious of any religious tropes. Though my family was generally Church of God conservative, the permissive 60’s ideology did a number on them that’s amazing in retrospect. I did get into the Beats, and all the great rock music and daring cinema from the 1960’s-70’s. It’s been eye-opening, but strangely unsurprising, that all of the counter-culture, the drugs, literature and art, esotericism/occultism, new age, and the reactions to all this stuff, was created and controlled by intelligence agency assets.
Thanks brother Erik, I’m not sure if I’m a Jesus freak, mom practiced a mix of catholicism and Santeria, not sure what dad believed as he had a rough youth and didn’t say much.
Also not sure what I believe, but I cross myself at odd times, reminding myself of Eli Wallach’s character on the good the bad and the ugly. And my nickname is JC.
Incidentally, my first LSD experience was in early 1980.
All fascinating. I didn’t even begin to get into all the interesting JCs (for they are plural) related to Santeria and all manner of indigenous forms that remix the good lord in so many ways. Yet there is a thread that runs through them all. Its good to cross yourself at odd times. Crosses are odd.
Here is a funny CIA Yale story. I was friends with a guy named John Brewer, who was a long-haired, pot-smoking freak who loved the Stooges and Illuminatus! and was a far-right libertarian. He told me that in the late 70s there was a particular Yale college that had a large scene of hardcore LSD-using Robert Anton Wilson fans. When they graduated most went into the CIA.
Yes I remember you mentioning that in a previous post. Concerning Robert Anton Wilson, I see there is a biography out called Chapel Perilous. I'm expecting my copy tomorrow, but I am already disappointed and rather suspect. I want to know who killed RAW's daughter Luna in Berkeley in 1976. Don't you think it is odd that she is murdered just a year after Illuminatus! is published? Coincidence or MK Ultra experiment? You said the CIA kids loved it, but what about the CIA parents? Maybe someone didn't like it.
My favourite Jesus will always be Ted Neeley’s rock and roll saviour, probably due to the deep immersion I had when I played guitar in the orchestra for my high school’s production of JC Superstar. Runner up is the mythic mystery school Jesus that went on pilgrimage to India and Druidic Britain during his “lost years.”
I used to frequent the meetings of a group called The Holy Order of MANS back in the mid 70s. Religion is the poor man’s intro to philosophy but has the pitfalls of literalism and absolutism to contend with. I could never reconcile loving God with hating evil and puritan certainties. I often wonder how it was that there were so many Jesus freaks around back then. I knew a crazy young hippy chick who was used as a sex worker on the streets by her organization and that was not exactly a surprise to me. Something of this kind of wildness will always be out on the streets in every age and I’m glad I was exposed to it.
Thanks for your impressionistic ramble through your own voyages. I love it. The Holy Order of MANS has a fascinating history. To the degree that I am spiritual and religious it requires a lack of literalism and a resistance to certainty. How can one truly not know, truly remain uncertain, but not be a nihilist? There is a prayer…
Freaky Jesus- at least I think it's Freaky Jesus- makes arguably his first Hollywood appearance in the uncannily woke-like-it's-a-good-thing pacifist universalist and actually eerily prescient TV Christmas movie, Carol For Another Christmas*. Just saw it for the first time a couple weeks ago. Freaky Jesus, dropping ordinary-if-controversial** Christian good sense right and left on the Parental Generation white-collar conservative played by Sterling Hayden, as white collar conservative MIC quasi-Scrooge character.
Scripted by Rod Serling! Has longhaired freaky people in it- In 1964! back then, only in LA.
[*free, on Youtube. 86 minutes.]
[**even then.]
The biggest surprise in CfAC: Steve Lawrence, the singer, has a supporting part- and he can act! Better than Sinatra or Elvis, who could also act, at least sometimes, but not as good.
And then we Rockers had to betray Steve and Eydie with our horrid Boomer ignorance...we whitey hippies could accept Merle Haggard and Albert King, but not a talented vocal act and a horn band that could swing?
What was the matter with us? If you don't think those records are good, shift slightly over threshold into enhancement and have a listen to them!
But, agh, Culture Wars. Our own parentals, branding every type-R Boomer in America as a criminal, or brain-dead...how'd that work out for everybody? Our minds, polarized by life during wartime. Reaction all around. Alienation. Even then. To say nothing of what's happened since the 1970s.
In the spirit of continued US-EU cultural exchange, Heil Jesus!...did I say that right? is the name still 'Jesus', in German? Pronounced the same? Am I expected to be up on these fine points? I may be a hick from the sticks, but I'm up for learning new stuff.
An amazing find, this is on the list for sure. Those early 60s kidz were very hip in LA, lots of bohemians and proto-freaks about, it was only a couple years til Zappa established “freak” as a term of art…Thanks!
There's something about typing, or learning any skill, that seems to weave a metanarrative into the psyche.
I learned to type very young at exactly the same time I discovered Lovecraft, and in those days learning required vising a cold, clinical, classroom in the late winter nights weekly surrounded by pitch blackness, echoing empty corridors with nothing but a gulf of playing fields stretching out into the dark outside.
All manual skills evoke the eras of their founding and the 1920s echoed in my poorly educated imagination as the keys clattered, and the arms whipped while I worked my way though oddly placed sequences of letters UIOP and attempted to form words out of them as a game.
To pass the drafty, alienating 90 min classes I tried to recall the names of Outer Gods and how to spell them, convinced they might be discovered lurking in the sequences somewhere.
This was an extremely evocative and uncanny depiction of a training experience that most would consider too banal to mention or even recall. I will never look at HPL’s wyrd spellings the same way again…
Always nice to see a fellow head who has walked the path of the cosmic Jesus freak. Some of us still tread it and doubtless many more will find their way either for good or for a little sojourn, but always a fascinating cross pollination of worlds
Fascinating stuff, thanks. I’m glad I ran across your post. Weirdness attracts weirdness as I’m sure you know. I was also a teenage Jesus freak (well, a 20 year old Jesus freak) and I think you might be interested in my tale, especially as you mention a respect for Dylan’s gospel era. It’s up your alley—astral travels, rock and roll, sex and drugs, hidden messages. Take a look at my articles if you like, and be sure to start at the first chapter, where I tell my Jesus story. All the best,
Steven
hi Erik. I enjoyed watching your presentation again. (Met you at the Harvard thing.) Blessings, Ray Connolly (ex-cult guy.)
Sadly, the UK missed out a lot on this. I solemnly read 7 copies of the bible, cover to cover, considered the sum total of discrepancies, and abandoned its accuracy, plus any statement suggesting inspiration from immortal sources. The pomp and carry on of the church of England tends to do this to you, with all the fancy costumes for the bishops etc. I considered the Quakers, stricter here than in the USA I understand. They are generally nice and tolerant folk, recently I met them at a Pride event handing out free food, welcoming trans people, and the one I spoke too said they were an atheist but accepted by the Quakers. Pacifists too, of course. I tried the Methodists too, but even non conformists have rules they want you to follow, though are less inclined to enforce them I discovered. So I chose to let believers of religion have their beliefs, so long as they didn't force it on others, or force cultural habits on others either. Or, of course, write such things into laws, or school education, or employment contracts, and so on........by the way Happy New Year!
Thanks Liz. I love your slice of seeking. Organized groups with rules are tough. I have always imagined the Quakers a bit about the fray but have yet to attend a meeting. Smells and bells has its appeal as well! Happy new year.
No future in that kind of low testosterone old lady liberalism I'm afraid. You are being pushed aside and demographically eclipsed by more traditional and aggressive cultures. Go talk to some Muslim youth in London, Paris or New York if you don't believe me. In 50 years your great grandchildren (if you have any) will curse your kind for their suicidal weakness and inability to preserve their cultures. As we enter the new Dark Age, the future belongs to barbarians and fundamentalists, imo.
But that's the thing: the experimental pluralism that you wrongly call old lady liberalism *is* my culture, my southern California post-counterculture milieu, not the dogma that comes before. Like subtlety or nuance, two marvels of human consciousness that I suspect you would find to be "low testosterone", that kind of openness may not fair well in the future struggles you describe. So be it. To adopt a reactionary militarism in creeds outworn for the sake of survival against rivals, with triumph over the future as your only criterion, seems both frightened and ethically weak.
Somehow I never thought about it but of course you’re a big *Illuminatus!* fan! Among my generation (Millennial) it’s sorely under-appreciated. I found an apparently unsalable copy with the cover torn off dumpster-diving behind the Capitol Hill Seattle Half-Price Books in 2006. Deeply influential on my worldview and aesthetic tastes. Still looking for stuff that scratches the same itch 2 decades later.
If you have any other recommendations in a similar vein that I may not have heard of I’d love to know!
There is nothing quite like Illuminatus! — and I cant believe how perfect it is to have a dumpster-dived a copy of it.
Once again Erik we have such interesting similarities, in this case you went whole hog for the Jesus thing and I went to whole hog (or I should say 'whole rat thing'), and at about the same age for the jimson weed drinking Chumash Indian experience, and whenever I was high I was sure I was a Native American of some kind, became obsessed with survival in the wilderness except for me it was survival in the Anza Borrego desert and nearby parts where we learned how to trap rodents, desiccate them in the sun then pound them into a powder for soup, while stoned, or not. That was 'my' religion, and I still feel very connected to it. By coincidence or not, I met the chief, or one of the chiefs of the Chumash tribe, shared with him my experience and was grateful he thought it was more of an honoring not a usurpation of his religion. Thanks for directing me to the CSWR site.
Man that is quite the image, pounding desiccated rats for their powder in the Anza Borrego. You have me beat cold!
PS I've been selling Southern California weirdness stuff, including the occasional Jesus freak relic to the Burke library at Colgate, I believe they have a large collection of material you might be interested in.
Obsessive hermeneutics is such a delightful and all-consuming mode of being!
Suddenly, questions that aren't really that pressing, like the sequence of events at the beginning of time or the way the letter yod works, become supremely urgent. Mundane considerations like rent and sleep fade into the background... It’s a solo sport, completely, but practised among a buzzing community of dead rabbis.
So, you gonna share a line or two of the Dungeons & Dragons era poetry?
Marvellous piece Erik. Your teenage years pretty much mirror mine, I'm ten years older than you but weaned on the same authors, ideas, and adventures.
I remember the Jesus Freak stuff, but I’ve always been suspicious of any religious tropes. Though my family was generally Church of God conservative, the permissive 60’s ideology did a number on them that’s amazing in retrospect. I did get into the Beats, and all the great rock music and daring cinema from the 1960’s-70’s. It’s been eye-opening, but strangely unsurprising, that all of the counter-culture, the drugs, literature and art, esotericism/occultism, new age, and the reactions to all this stuff, was created and controlled by intelligence agency assets.
Thanks brother Erik, I’m not sure if I’m a Jesus freak, mom practiced a mix of catholicism and Santeria, not sure what dad believed as he had a rough youth and didn’t say much.
Also not sure what I believe, but I cross myself at odd times, reminding myself of Eli Wallach’s character on the good the bad and the ugly. And my nickname is JC.
Incidentally, my first LSD experience was in early 1980.
All fascinating. I didn’t even begin to get into all the interesting JCs (for they are plural) related to Santeria and all manner of indigenous forms that remix the good lord in so many ways. Yet there is a thread that runs through them all. Its good to cross yourself at odd times. Crosses are odd.
So you were a teenage Jesus freak before you were recruited by the CIA at Yale?
Here is a funny CIA Yale story. I was friends with a guy named John Brewer, who was a long-haired, pot-smoking freak who loved the Stooges and Illuminatus! and was a far-right libertarian. He told me that in the late 70s there was a particular Yale college that had a large scene of hardcore LSD-using Robert Anton Wilson fans. When they graduated most went into the CIA.
Yes I remember you mentioning that in a previous post. Concerning Robert Anton Wilson, I see there is a biography out called Chapel Perilous. I'm expecting my copy tomorrow, but I am already disappointed and rather suspect. I want to know who killed RAW's daughter Luna in Berkeley in 1976. Don't you think it is odd that she is murdered just a year after Illuminatus! is published? Coincidence or MK Ultra experiment? You said the CIA kids loved it, but what about the CIA parents? Maybe someone didn't like it.
My favourite Jesus will always be Ted Neeley’s rock and roll saviour, probably due to the deep immersion I had when I played guitar in the orchestra for my high school’s production of JC Superstar. Runner up is the mythic mystery school Jesus that went on pilgrimage to India and Druidic Britain during his “lost years.”
Two of my top faves for shore. The lost years traveler Jesus is always great to meditate upon. And did those feet in ancient time…
I used to frequent the meetings of a group called The Holy Order of MANS back in the mid 70s. Religion is the poor man’s intro to philosophy but has the pitfalls of literalism and absolutism to contend with. I could never reconcile loving God with hating evil and puritan certainties. I often wonder how it was that there were so many Jesus freaks around back then. I knew a crazy young hippy chick who was used as a sex worker on the streets by her organization and that was not exactly a surprise to me. Something of this kind of wildness will always be out on the streets in every age and I’m glad I was exposed to it.
Thanks for your impressionistic ramble through your own voyages. I love it. The Holy Order of MANS has a fascinating history. To the degree that I am spiritual and religious it requires a lack of literalism and a resistance to certainty. How can one truly not know, truly remain uncertain, but not be a nihilist? There is a prayer…
‘pixie dust residues of the preteen myth-mind’ 🤩 I might still be there 30 years later!
Erik —-I’d love you to read my short letter on JC … though I totally missed writing about the man himself… . 😝
https://erinmacairt.substack.com/p/omen-days
Freaky Jesus- at least I think it's Freaky Jesus- makes arguably his first Hollywood appearance in the uncannily woke-like-it's-a-good-thing pacifist universalist and actually eerily prescient TV Christmas movie, Carol For Another Christmas*. Just saw it for the first time a couple weeks ago. Freaky Jesus, dropping ordinary-if-controversial** Christian good sense right and left on the Parental Generation white-collar conservative played by Sterling Hayden, as white collar conservative MIC quasi-Scrooge character.
Scripted by Rod Serling! Has longhaired freaky people in it- In 1964! back then, only in LA.
[*free, on Youtube. 86 minutes.]
[**even then.]
The biggest surprise in CfAC: Steve Lawrence, the singer, has a supporting part- and he can act! Better than Sinatra or Elvis, who could also act, at least sometimes, but not as good.
And then we Rockers had to betray Steve and Eydie with our horrid Boomer ignorance...we whitey hippies could accept Merle Haggard and Albert King, but not a talented vocal act and a horn band that could swing?
What was the matter with us? If you don't think those records are good, shift slightly over threshold into enhancement and have a listen to them!
But, agh, Culture Wars. Our own parentals, branding every type-R Boomer in America as a criminal, or brain-dead...how'd that work out for everybody? Our minds, polarized by life during wartime. Reaction all around. Alienation. Even then. To say nothing of what's happened since the 1970s.
In the spirit of continued US-EU cultural exchange, Heil Jesus!...did I say that right? is the name still 'Jesus', in German? Pronounced the same? Am I expected to be up on these fine points? I may be a hick from the sticks, but I'm up for learning new stuff.
All out of digressions, for now. Happy New Year
An amazing find, this is on the list for sure. Those early 60s kidz were very hip in LA, lots of bohemians and proto-freaks about, it was only a couple years til Zappa established “freak” as a term of art…Thanks!
There's something about typing, or learning any skill, that seems to weave a metanarrative into the psyche.
I learned to type very young at exactly the same time I discovered Lovecraft, and in those days learning required vising a cold, clinical, classroom in the late winter nights weekly surrounded by pitch blackness, echoing empty corridors with nothing but a gulf of playing fields stretching out into the dark outside.
All manual skills evoke the eras of their founding and the 1920s echoed in my poorly educated imagination as the keys clattered, and the arms whipped while I worked my way though oddly placed sequences of letters UIOP and attempted to form words out of them as a game.
To pass the drafty, alienating 90 min classes I tried to recall the names of Outer Gods and how to spell them, convinced they might be discovered lurking in the sequences somewhere.
This was an extremely evocative and uncanny depiction of a training experience that most would consider too banal to mention or even recall. I will never look at HPL’s wyrd spellings the same way again…
Always nice to see a fellow head who has walked the path of the cosmic Jesus freak. Some of us still tread it and doubtless many more will find their way either for good or for a little sojourn, but always a fascinating cross pollination of worlds