Origins of Psychedelic Music

Cage staged a “happening” at the Stock Pavilion.

Summer 1966. A Beat symposium is held at the University of Illinois where John Cage is artist in residence.

A local Countess who had a long-running affair with John Roselli is the most powerful person in town not connected to the University. Among other holdings, she owns the local newspaper and TV station, and frequently jet-sets off to Europe, LA, and Palm Beach, when not holding court at the Champaign Country Club.

After the Italian Count she lifted out of poverty (to buy her title through marriage) was caught poking his secretary, she fired him. He fled back to Italy to plot his divorce settlement, but ended up with a bullet in the brain courtesy of Handsome Johnny.

Bill Harvey had been the first assassin she’d approached and declined. Roselli did not, however, and did it for free because the Countess had recently bank-rolled his return from Federal prison. Her empire was supervised by a local lawyer who was also the only known conduit to the Chicago mob.

Local teen Joe Sanderson was backpacking around the world. He would eventually become one of two Americans killed fighting for the Salvadorian revolution. David Foster Wallace had just entered classes at Yankee Ridge elementary, in the newly built suburb for the University of Illinois faculty. He would become one of the most celebrated novelists of his generation.

Spokesperson for the newly forged John Birch society, whose odd name was a palindrome, could be seen slinking around campus in trench coat and fedora, from one conspiratorial meeting to the next. He had recently testified before the Warren Commission. His house on West Ohio Street radiated with spooky vibrations, and children were cautioned to keep clear lest they be subjected to a sermon on the dangers of globalization.

A British noble, Sir Thomas  Willes Chitty 3rd, had recently arrived in town, intent on taking acid and having sex with the hottest super hottie he could find, on or off campus.

Allen Ginsberg informs the leather-coated, long-haired teens attending the Beat conference that his first psychedelic experience was on glue and this leads to a rush to Lincoln Square to buy glue and then to the barn at the Shirley Farm where they hold their secret beer and wine-fueled ceremonies, only this time with glue, and out pops Only Me, an amazing song, written by 15-year-old Mark Warwick, the first psychedelic anthem I ever heard, a song that urged everyone to “let their minds be free.”

The word “psychedelic” was coined in the mid-fifties in a letter from Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley. Osmond gave mescaline to Huxley in LA and Huxley soon wrote The Doors of Perception. Both men began looking for a word to describe their experiences with altered states. The book’s title came from England’s greatest visionary poet.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit.” 

“To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.”

But Osmond chose “psyche” (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show). 

“To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” 

Huxley on his first mescaline trip courtesy of British Intelligence.

Osmond announced the new word at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957. That same year, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at JP Morgan, published a photo essay in Life magazine detailing a trip to Mexico to imbibe mushrooms with a Mazatec shaman.

Wasson would go on to publish a ridiculous book claiming Soma of the Rig Veda was a mushroom. This rabbit hole concealed the real identity of Soma, which was cannabis mixed with milk and spices, something known as bhang in India. At the time, Wasson was in close contact with intelligence agent Dr. Andrija Puharich who would soon be arranging seances with the rich and famous. Puharich had been a frequent visitor to Fort Detrick, where the CIA’s MK/Ultra project had originated. He would later become the biggest booster of fake Israeli psychic Uri Geller.

For those teens seeking a mind-altering experience in the early 1960s, Huxley’s book was often the first step. The rock band The Doors took their name from the book. Jim Morrison’s talents were staggering and their psychedelic jams were among the best of the era for evoking a mystical experience. All fueled by the band’s extensive tripping together. When I think of Morrison in the late sixties, I also think of Jean Michel Basquiat in the late eighties. They both died young, but left a massive body of work.

But in 1964, Timothy Leary had captured the center of gravity by publishing The Psychedelic Experience. Sadly the book was a complete mess of no use to anyone and inscrutable to the average teen as Finnegan’s Wake. Really it was just a money grab. Leary lifted ancient material from Tibet, so there wasn’t much original writing to do. The book led people into a rabbit hole and did zero to enhance enlightenment.

Leary’s book was nothing like Huxley’s poetic account of the spiritual effects of mescaline or Osmond’s descriptions of Native American peyote ceremonies, or Wasson’s description of the shamanistic use of magic mushrooms.

Instead Leary guided the youth (including the Beatles) to look east for enlightenment. It’s the same basic hoodwink laid down in The Razor’s Edge by British secret agent Somerset Maugham, who, like Osmond, worked for MI6. One thing about the early history of psychedelic studies is that most of the major players turned out to be secretly working for MI6, the CIA, or both.

The cliche of the bearded yogi living in a cave in the mountains who meditates until he reaches some satori moment and is transported to a permanent state of bliss is total jive. The religions of east and west are equally corrupt, run by oligarchies, and exist mostly to make money and ensnare acolytes. The Buddhists are perhaps the least corrupted (although there are good and bad in all cultures), but all talk of eternal life is complete bunk. Nothing lasts forever. There is no soul, no nirvana. But if you want to get popular fast, tell the people what they want to hear. If you are looking for enlightenment, take Zoroaster’s advice and just be as kind and empathetic in thought, word and deed as you possibly can. But also realize no state of bliss can last forever, and there is no bliss without an opposite: so everyone is vulnerable to spurts of paranoia, rage and jealousy and other states of mind from the dark side.

Westerners are used to looking east for enlightenment because eastern traditions are older and thought to be wiser. The Zoroastrians invented the word “magic,” and were among the first to learn the secrets of higher math, something learned through a study of harmony. They were also the most advanced astronomers and chemists of their time.

During the enlightenment era, secret societies based on eastern mysticism were all the rage and many fraudulent books were conceived purporting to reveal the true secrets of the universe. All these efforts were hoodwinks and money grabs.

Just as the emergence of psychedelics was carefully stage-managed by intelligence agencies, so was the evolution of these occult societies. Aleister Crowley was one of the first to declare himself an advanced yogi with magic powers out of The Razor’s Edge. In fact, it was Maugham who made Crowley famous through a novel titled The Magician. They were both secret agents plying dialectical games to advance secret agendas.

Groupies try to get close to the Beatles in LA.

Meanwhile, after Harrison laid down a raga in “She, Said” garage rockers across America began tinkering with eastern scales.

The 13th Floor Elevators were the first to use the word “psychedelic” in an album title in 1966 and had a minor hit with their first single, but never really fully penetrated outside Texas until Lenny Kaye released Nuggets. The Texas bands of the time had a distinctive sound with a lot of fast picking on the fat strings. The cowboy guitarist had been an icon for generations. Texas rock and surf rock shared similarities, but there were no eastern scales in Texas at the time. The first song to reference LSD was released by in 1960 by surf rockers, The Gamblers.

Mark Warwick’s song Only Me is a better example of psychedelic rock than Your Gonna Miss Me. Both songs were written in 1966.

Other songs in this vein also released in 1966 would include East West by Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a jam devised by Mike Bloomfield after his first gig in San Francisco, where he could have bumped into a slew of bands working on defining an emerging genre; and, of course Section 43 by Country Joe and the Fish, ranks high on the list of early psychedelia. The appearance of cheap, portable organs from England and Italy played a major role in crafting a psychedelic ambience, and most of the original psychedelic bands made use of either the Vox or the less expensive Farfisa.

In November of 1966, Bronx-based band Blues Magoos released the album Psychedelic Lollypop, which included the hit song We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet, which rose to #5 on the charts, far higher than anything by the 13th Floor Elevators. Ralph Scala on Vox and lead vocals.

One of the first novels to contain a description of having sex on LSD, it was written by a visiting Baron from England and set entirely in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The longhaired, leather-jacketed teens who pioneered the local garage rock scene make a brief appearance guarding the beer stash in the fridge at a student-faculty party.

The following year, Strawberry Alarm Clock and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band would form in LA, and H.P. Lovecraft in Chicago, while the Finchley Boys (Warwick’s band) would travel to San Francisco and become adopted by the Cockettes as “the next big thing,” only soon to break apart.

But it was the Cockettes themselves who became the next big thing as they launched glitter rock in a trip to New York City in 1971. Had the Finchleys hung around and gone on that voyage, they might have been as big as the New York Dolls. Glitter would eventually usurp psychedelia as the next big thing, and by the time punk rock appeared, the mystical excesses of acid rock were soundly rejected in favor of a return to more primitive garage rock.

After Peter Fonda gave Lennon and Harrison some Sandoz in LA in 1965, out popped She Said, She Said.

Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds were also there tripping. McCartney did not imbibe and left the later session when they were recording the song in a huff, refusing to contribute. In the week that followed their first trip, Lennon and Harrison could not relate to the other two because acid had changed them so profoundly. Although McCartney was the last to drop acid, he was the first to inform the public, which annoyed Lennon and Harrison.

Guy Maynard was the leader of the Seeds of Doubt, the principle rival to the Finchley Boys. In 2010, he wrote one of the best descriptions of an LSD trip in a book set in 1969 in Boston with flashbacks to 1966 in Champaign-Urbana.

She Said, She Said is an amazing tune that shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 while deploying a sitar scale. The seeds of acid rock were planted in Rubber Soul with a brief sitar solo, used only for its distinctive tone.  It was David Crosby who showed Harrison how to play raga scales on an acoustic guitar. He also suggested Harrison check out a dude named Ravi Shankar.

They kicked Fonda out of the party for talking incessantly about his gunshot wound in the stomach and how he was momentarily dead on the operating table from blood loss. Lennon was horrified and when Fonda showed the bullet wound, he said, “You make me feel like I’ve never been born.” Fonda’s talk of death while Lennon was tripping is reminiscent of Leary’s use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a tripping manual, something that undoubtedly led to some seriously bad trips. Pushing that sort of dogma on western teens was the equivalent of distributing The Book of Revelation to teens in India as a true road to enlightenment.

Compare the intro to Eight Miles High to the opening moments of Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album, released in 1961. Some critics believe The Byrds wrote the first real psychedelic song. It counterpoints some Texas-style fast picking with an open D played on a 12-string. That chiming D would soon appear over and over in songs like Hey, Joe by the Leaves and Going All the Way by the Squires. Many attributed the sound to Bob Dylan, but Dylan claims it was all the Byrds covering his songs, and he had nothing to do with spreading the chiming D chord.

Southern California is where LSD landed because the film business has long had deep connections to military intelligence. Fonda starred in the first LSD film, The Trip, but there were others in Hollywood getting a supply of LSD-25 from Sandoz chemists who secretly worked under CIA supervision. The real acid guru in California was John Griggs, founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and he got the acid by stealing it from the fridge of an LA film producer. Griggs would soon turn up dead and his group swiftly usurped by intel operative Ron Stark.

Uri Geller was a spy for the CIA

Puharich and Geller.

Magic, religion and fear are the foundations of mind control and always have been. The oldest power centers on earth are the major religions. But this is a slowly shifting landscape, which is why intelligence agencies have always had interest in occult influencers like Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, and why intel manufactures New Age cults like Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. This is nothing new. It’s possible the Church of Latter Day Saints was the Illuminati response to a wave of anti-Mason sentiment sweeping the country after the murder of Captain Morgan, who had revealed Masonry was a secret British plot.

After WWII, Dr. Andrija Puharich emerged as the Army’s foremost expert on magic mushrooms, seances, and all things occult. Puharich championed an Israeli magician named Uri Geller as the world’s foremost psychic. Reportedly, Geller’s psychic abilities had been taught to him by aliens. Before LSD became the CIA’s mind-drug of choice, Puharich had been investigating whether magic mushrooms might serve that same function.

Puharich was having secret meetings with high-ranking officers from the Pentagon, CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) at Fort Detrick, the heart of MK/Ultra, the CIA’s most closely guarded secret. Puharich was also organizing seances for the super rich. Most of this remains classified, the files sealed forever or just disappeared like most of MK/Ultra.

The spoon bending trick was an obvious scam from day one. If Geller really had telekinesis, why not reveal multiple proofs, and not stick with metal spoons, something easily rigged with some deft slight-of-hand? Hard to fathom how Geller achieved such fame with such a lame trick, certainly the CIA’s influence over the media was vital to his epic rise to fame. Faking psychic powers is standard ops for occult influencers, and Blavatsky and Crowley come to mind in this regard.

In 2013, a filmmaker from England released a documentary claiming Geller was working for national security all along. My instant thought was: is MI6 behind this film in order to bilk profits from an old operation? Otherwise, why would some of the biggest newspapers in England be promoting this conspiracy film?

One wonders how much money Geller was paid by various intelligence agencies over the years. Expect to see a Hollywood feature soon, a follow-up to the staring-at-goats flick that was so successful, which had been the first peek onto psychic weirdness at the highest level of the Pentagon.

“We use footage from the CIA-funded film record,” said the filmmaker, “and then track stories about Uri’s involvement in events ranging from the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe through to his participation in the search for Osama bin Laden, with a mysterious sidebar as a federal agent for the Mexican government. Forty years of psychic operations…Someone well positioned to know suggests that rather than being shut down in 1995, the use of psychic operatives by the US government and military has merely gone deeper black. If that’s the case, then perhaps Geller still works  in the shadows.”

The Fraudulent Founding of Modern Magick

Nicolas Flamel was a scribe, notary and bookseller in the late 1300s in Paris who grew immensely wealthy, eventually founding fourteen hospitals while donating handsomely to many chapels and churches. In the 1700s, several hundred years after his death, The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures appeared and purported to have been written by him. Its introduction described how for two guilders, the author purchased the Book of Abramelin the Mage, an unusual manuscript on tree bark written in a strange language by Abraham the Jew, an Egyptian magician. According to the book, the author decoded Abramelin’s formulas of magic and alchemy, learning the secrets of the philosopher’s stone, which accounted for his great wealth and success in life.

The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures immediately became the go-to manual for magic all over Europe and exerted tremendous influence over the development of Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn and OTO. Only one problem, however: it was an obvious hoodwink. Flamel lived into his eighties and designed his own tombstone (see below), which contained only images of Jesus, Peter and Paul. He was a devout Catholic with an extensive biography that never mentions alchemy or occult ritual even once. If Flamel had a secret source of income beyond his bookstores and notary offices, it has yet to be discovered, but it’s safe to say any claims he was turning lead into gold is a total fabrication. His great wealth and connections with ancient manuscripts made him the perfect foil on which to hang a magical hoodwink. No doubt Flamel rolled in his grave after being posthumously transformed into the world’s greatest magician, instead of the great benefactor of Catholicism he actually was.

Forget about the phony DaVinci Code and numerous other rabbit holes. If you want to decode the real story of religion and magic, you first must expose the hoodwinks and then follow the trail to their source to expose the charlatan. (It’s interesting Flamel was turned into the world’s greatest alchemist when Francois Rabelais remains a better candidate for that throne, and actually did the necessary work.)

In 1761, Etienne Villain claimed the book’s real author was P. Arnauld de la Chevalerie, the publisher who was profiting immensely off its sales. Unfortunately, Villain’s expose gained little traction and even Issac Newton was eventually taken in by the hoodwink. You find this pattern of fake secret knowledge appearing throughout the history of magic, all leading into rabbit holes instead of real enlightenment. A modern equivalent would be the Don Juan series of books that continue to hoodwink even today.

Eventually, the Book of Abramelin the Mage also appeared written in German, although in somewhat fragmentary form. According to this manuscript, the road to enlightenment required months of daily prayer at sunrise and sunset, chastity, fasting and avoidance of intoxicants (echoes of Pythagoras and Mani). With the help of your guardian angel, who will appear after months of prayer, the budding magician need only capture and bind 12 devils in order to usurp their powers. Once this is done, the ability to cast love charms, find buried treasure, fly and become invisible will be conferred.

The magical tools employed by Abramelin included a wand made from an almond tree, and an oil and incense derived from the Old Testament. There was also a lamp for burning the oil. Although the oil was identified only as Abramelin Oil, it was supposed to replicate the original anointing oil of Moses. It would become an essential tool in the rituals of the Golden Dawn and OTO, although they didn’t agree on the recipe. They both got it wrong, replacing kaneh bosem with calamus or galangal (a relative of ginger).

Here is the actual recipe from Exodus 30:22-25:

Take thou…pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half so much, even two hundred and fifty shekels, and of kaneh bosem, two hundred and fifty shekels, and of cassia five hundred shekels, and of oil olive an hin: And thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment, an ointment compounded after the art of the apothecary: it shall be an holy anointing oil.

The translation of kaneh bosem (fragrant cane) was not correctly identified until Sula Benet published Early Diffusion and Folk Uses of Hemp in 1967. Meanwhile, for hundreds of years, churches and magical societies have all been dutifully burning incense and anointing themselves with oil containing zero psychoactive effect. Although Crowley loved psychoactive substances, he too was taken in, for here is his personal recipe:

8 parts cinnamon oil, 4 parts myrrh, 2 parts galangal, 7 parts olive oil

All manner of nonsense was written about the purpose, effect and great power of Abramelin Oil. Fumigating temples with cannabis incenses and serving cannabis beverages were employed by numerous temples in ancient times to enhance the spiritual experience, much the same way a psychedelic garage band might hand out mushrooms before a concert today. But if you remove all psychoactive substances, there is no enhancement, and no magic, just a weak form of fake magic.

Suppression of the true story of the role of cannabis on the development of religion and myth has been so intense for so long that despite all the newly uncovered scientific evidence, most people still have no idea that cannabis was used as the primary medicine by Zoroaster, Moses and Jesus, among others and had a reputation for healing the blind and lame centuries before the arrival of the Jesus myth. Jesus was a Zoroastrian-Buddha hybrid, which is why the Magi attend his birth and why he preached against worshipping statue representations of Jehovah.

Perhaps the most important element of intel control over magic and religion has been diverting people away from cannabis and toward a poison mushroom, Amanita Muscaria. This op was launched by Robert Gordon Wasson, Vice-President and director of public relations for J.P. Morgan & Co., who had begun career by asserting his company had not been built on the back of selling defective weapons to the Union during the Civil War, an effort that largely failed to gain traction. Wasson next concocted an absurd story of wandering upon some magic mushrooms in the Catskills in 1927 and soon was peddling a phony secret history of mushrooms, which culminated with his falsely identifying Soma and Haoma as Amanita. Unfortunately, this hoodwink got massive traction. Since the scholarship was so sloppy and obviously directed by an agenda, one wonders why virtually nothing has been done to topple his absurd ideas and correct the historical record.  Soma is a form of bhang, in other words, cannabis and milk with spices. And the history of cannabis in ancient Judea has been scientifically proven, so why isn’t it widely known the burning bush in the Bible is a reference to cannabis intoxication? At least from the 1950s on, Wasson’s work in this area was funded by the CIA’s MK/Ultra program, and he was greatly assisted by having his efforts put on the cover of Life magazine.

In the 1970s, Wasson passed the Amanita baton to Andrija Puharich, an Army MD also working for MK/Ultra out of Fort Detrick. Puharich would launch the career of British-Israeli self-claimed psychic Uri Geller while also arranging seances for elite members of the oligarchy, a list that included various Duponts and Bronfmans, among others.

“We use footage from the CIA-funded film record of the Uri Geller experiments, and we then track stories about Uri’s involvement in events ranging from the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe through to his participation in the search for Osama bin Laden, with a mysterious sidebar as a federal agent for the Mexican government. Forty years of psychic operations,” writes Vikram Jayanti, a filmmaker who produced a puff piece for the BBC. Jayanti goes on to assert: “Someone well positioned to know suggests that rather than being shut down in 1995, the use of psychic operatives by the US government and military has merely gone deeper black. If that’s the case, then perhaps Geller is still at work in the shadows.”

Maybe, but no matter what Geller is up to, it’s really some staged hoodwink involving deception to create an illusion of magic power. Knowingly or unknowingly, religions work with the national security state to maintain a status quo magic show, and so do all the occult alternatives. Most of your so-called psychics who reach icon status are intelligence agents. Magic and religion are the same thing, and only work on believers, but then there are a lot of those people around.

Ira Einhorn and the Origins of Earth Day

Maybe you’ve read some of the disinfo stories about how the counterculture was supposedly a government plot to divide and destroy the country? How government agents secretly encouraged rampant drug use in the 1960s to poison the minds of a new generation, allowing them to be brought under the influence of “new age” ideas?

I don’t believe most of these stories, especially the ones that paint Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as being involved in such activities. Yes, Kesey did get his first taste of acid through a CIA-program, like a lot of people at the time, but anyone who studies his life immediately realizes Kesey was not on anyone’s leash. The same can be said for Abbie Hoffman, Stephen Gaskin and many other important leaders of the counterculture movement. Which is not to say intel wasn’t trying to exploit the counterculture, turn it violent and lead it off a cliff. Obviously, any social movement of any size will be quickly penetrated by intel. That’s what they do. And there are a number of suspicious characters, like Ron Stark, who obviously had secret agendas. Another such character is Ira Einhorn, who sometimes gets credited as one of the founders of the environmental movement.

Einhorn’s early claim to fame was his role as “master of ceremonies” at the first Earth Day celebration, but you won’t find that mentioned on the wikipedia page covering that event today, probably because he recently died on April 3, 2020 while serving a life sentence for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, who was found stuffed in a trunk on his porch in 1979. Although portrayed as a “hippie guru,” Einhorn’s associations and connections seem much more related to CIA activities than anything to do with the hippie counterculture.

He was mentored in paranormal research by Andrija Puharich, a former army officer who has interesting connections not only to the intelligence agencies but also to the oligarchy that really rules North America. Puharich is best known today for bringing Uri Geller to fame, but he was also involved with MK/Ultra research at Fort Dietrick, as well as organizing black magic seances in upstate New York with members of the Bronfman and DuPont families, among others. You can find background material on Puharich in both Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces (now out-of-print and very expensive), and Hank Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake (both published by Trine Day).

There’s probably enough in those two books to convince you that anyone mentored by Puharich should be looked at with suspicion.

After Einhorn’s arrest, Arlen Specter, the Warren Commission lawyer who invented the “single bullet” theory, came to his rescue along with Barbara Bronfman, heiress to the Seagram fortune. At the time, Einhorn claimed he was being framed by the CIA because of his left-wing political activities.

Specter managed to get him a very low bail, which Bronfman posted, and Einhorn fled the country, probably with funds provided by Bronfman. In 1997, long after he was convicted in absentia, Einhorn was located living in France under a new name with a Swedish girlfriend. After a long and protracted extradition struggle, Einhorn was finally brought back to Pennsylvania on July 20, 2001, and put in jail to serve his life sentence.

The lesson to be taken from all of this is the potential realization that all popular mass movements eventually become penetrated by intelligence operations. The environmental movement of today, spearheaded by Al Gore, is undoubtedly also a carefully-constructed operation. The rightwing has their apocalypse, centered on the Middle East and ideas about “rapture,” while the leftwing has their apocalypse, centered on the imminent collapse of our environment. Apocalyptic thinking is crucial to maintaining mass mind control because fear is the foundation. The most apocalyptic of all the sixties cults was the Process Church of Final Judgment.