Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Psychedelics in the 1950s. An excerpt from
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens

Huxley was invited to the American Psychoanalytic Association's annual convention, where he was the only nondoctor to participate in the panel on psychotomimetics. His reception by "the Electric Shock Boys, the Chlorpromaziners, and the 57 Varieties of Psychotherapists," was not effusive—compared to that of the Lab Madness Lobby. What might have been called Aldous's Visionary Potential Party was limited to himself, Osmond, Heard, and a small population of peripheral "crackpots" like the parapsychologist Andraj Puharich, who had already entertained Aldous at his Glen Cove, New York, headquarters. The specifics of Puharich's "strange household" are worth recording for the insight they provide into this parascientific fringe movement. Besides Puharich and his wife, who had behaved in a "conspicuously friendly way" with a girl named Alice, the menage had consisted of

Elinor Bond, doing telepathic guessing remarkably well, but not producing anything of interest or value in the mediumistic setting she gave me; Frances Farelly, with her diagnostic machine—which Puharich's tests have shown to be merely an instrument, like a crystal ball, for concentrating ESP faculties; Harry, the Dutch sculptor, who goes into trances in the Faraday cages and produces automatic scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphics; Narodny, the cockroach man, who is preparing experiments to test the effects of human telepathy on insects.

"It was all very lively and amusing," Huxley wrote to Eileen Garrett. "And, I really think, promising; for whatever may be said against Puharich, he is certainly very intelligent, extremely well read and highly enterprising. His aim is to produce by modern pharmacological, electronic and physical methods the conditions used by the shamans for getting into a state of traveling clairvoyance and then, if he succeeds to send people to explore systematically the Other World."

Actually, Huxley and Osmond had proposed something similar to the Ford Foundation, although they had worded it differently. What they had proposed was that mescaline be given to a hundred world-class scientists, artists, and philosophers in hopes that a definitive answer might emerge to such questions as: Could mescaline free the mind from its habitual patterns? Did it truly allow for an expansion of sensibilities?

Although Aldous was friends with Robert Hutchins, the Ford Foundation's director, his scheme was promptly rejected, causing him to fume that "the Mesozoic reptiles of the Ford Foundation are being as Mesozoic as ever. The Trustees are so frightened of doing anything unconventional—for whenever the Foundation gets any adverse publicity, people go to the nearest Ford dealer and tell him that henceforth they will buy Chevvies—that the one overriding purpose is now to do nothing at all."

Other foundations were approached with equally negative results.

It is difficult to tell, judging from the polite prose of his letters, whether Huxley's frustration was beginning to erode his enthusiasm. In any case it didn't matter. Because just as things appeared at a standstill, along came a fresh explosion of interest named Al Hubbard—Captain Al Hubbard, "Cappy" to his friends.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/stevens2.htm

[Hammer of Los]

...

Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop out.

...

[Hammer of Los]

...

I don't worship at the altar of Our Ford.

...

[American Dream]

...

Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop out.

...

I'm rollin'...

[American Dream]

http://www.lsdbritain.com/page40.htm

The Spider's Web - John Esam's Sixties

by Andrew Schmidt

http://mysterex.blogspot.com/

There's a famous photograph of John Esam sitting in London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday 11 June 1965, eyes behind dark glasses, roll your own in his right hand, watching, smiling, as the woman next to him throws her arms to the sky in joy, and Allen Ginsberg, Aiden Mitchell, Gregory Corso, Paolo Leonni, Richard Fainlight, Michael Horowitz, Laurence Ferlinghetti, and Simon Vinenoog - a new generation of poets - shine their light on the tribe-gathering Poets of the World - Poets Of Our Time reading director Peter Whitehead is filming as Wholly Communion.

The Spider, as his English friends have dubbed him, is waiting his moment to read, at this, the real dawn of the 1960s in England. He's leaning forward, excited, not at all daunted to be in such high company. A Kiwi poet from Hastings.

Although little known at home his tale is sprinkled liberally through the history of the 1960s counter culture in Britain, Europe, and America. His gift was being there. Being involved. In publishing. In drug experimentation. In film. Avant garde music. A complex web of sightings and happenings.

When I contact him early in the new millennium he says he's never been back to New Zealand. That no one will remember him. And it's true. His New Zealand trail is light. A childhood on an orchard in Hastings. Time spent time in Auckland and Wellington. Sightings at free jazz nights. Self confessed drug experimentation. In a 1961 letter to his friend, Margaret Garland, Esam, describes stumbling down the hill from Victoria University high on Nembutal. "There was a circle of intense light about me. I was looking down a tunnel at a field. Then I heard a voice coming through the grass, the tree in the corner of the field—Nature—calling my name, “John ... John ... Come ... Come ...’ beckoning me. The life went out of me into that world; I possessed nothing of mine any more, no talents, no personality possessions, no life of my own ... I considered this for awhile, then straightened up, and went down the hill to find a chemist, a florist and a stomach pump.”

In June 1961 he'd have a poem - Knowledge and Wisdom - published in literary journal, Landfall. The first of three that decade. When I tell poet and writer Kevin Ireland, who was at the Wholly Communion I’m writing a story about New Zealand beat poet, John Esam, he's first fractious and angry, relenting only at the second interview. Ireland met Esam in Wellington in the early 1960s when he hung out with artist Ivan Johnston. “There was symbiotic relationship - self fashioned and self created - between Johnson and Esam. A symbiotic friendship,” Ireland remembers, before describing the poetry scene in those years. “We were bohemians before there were beats, then we read Kerouac, and realised this was what was happening. It was an Australian, United States, and New Zealand thing. There was no beat alternative in London. They were way behind. They were more into the Young Communist League and French surrealism while we were into existentialism. A true alternative lifestyle not based on anything that went before.”

Sometime in 1963 John Esam left New Zealand in search of that community. Successfully it seems. He's spotted in Paris in October 1963 at a reading with Australian beat Daevid Allen as part of Arts Du Language Biennale de Paris.

His next confirmed sighting is London in 1964 when English counter culture pioneer and king pin John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins remembers him blowing in from Greece with mime artist/ actor Daniel Richter, who had a part in Planet of the Apes. Richter and his wife Jill had had a bookstore and magazine, Residue, in Athens, and were connected to the New York underground. In London Esam lived with them at 101 Cromwell Rd with writer George Andrews, the house’s owners' Nigel and Jenny Lismore-Gordon, friends of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, folk singer and TV show host Julie Felix, poet/ film-maker Paolo Leonni, and City Lights publisher/ poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

It was there they hatched their mad idea - Esam and the Richters - for a poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall highlighting the international nature of the new poets. Jill Richter put up the hall hire money. Her husband, their flatmate Esam, and poet Alex Trocchi organised the show. The first major coming together of the British counter culture. From then on Esam would never be far from the unfolding action. He became an enthusiastic disciple of LSD, then still legal, after meeting Michael Hollingshead, the man who introduced Tim Leary to acid then returned to England to set up the World Psychedelic Centre in Pont Street to recreate the environment from Milbrook, Leary’s acid retreat. In 1966 Esam appeared with some of his heroes in Conrad Rooks’ cult movie, Chappaqua, a semi-autobiographical surreal movie about a withdrawing heroin addict and his cold turkey hallucinations set in Paris, and filmed by cult great Robert Frank.

Esam plays The Connection alongside William Burroughs (Opium Jones), Ravi Shankar (Sun God), Allen Ginsberg (Messiah), Jean-Louis Barrault (Dr Benoit), Ed Sanders of the Fugs, and Ornette Coleman (Opium Eater), whose soundtrack was considered “too good” by the directors of the movie, and has only recently been released by Get Back Records. The Jazz fan in Esam was also busy, getting together with Steve Stollman, brother of avant garde jazz label ESP Records’ owner Bernard Stollman, to establish the Sunday afternoon Spontaneous Underground at the Marquee club. A series of happenings which linked the earlier beat events with the rising psychedelic movement by featuring ESP artists and the early avant-garge period Pink Floyd. All that activity attracted attention and in February 1966, John Esam was busted at his home in South Kensington throwing several thousand trips impregnated in sugar out the window. Despite the fact LSD wouldn’t be illegal until September 1966 Esam was charged with possessing ergot, thought an ingredient of LSD, and illegal under the Poisons Act. John Esam, 31, described as a freelance writer, appeared at the Bow Street Magistrates Court on 6 April 1966 along with 19 year old Russell Page, like the Lismore-Gordons, another of the Cambridge set, soon become one of the men behind Pink Floyd’s pioneering light show. They were charged with conspiracy to distribute the drug known as lysergic acid diethylamide and remanded for a fortnight. Esam was also charged with receiving a tin containing a quantity of LSD-25 knowing it to be stolen. Frederick Klein, aged 25, actor, jointly charged with them, absconded, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.

The next day, The Times - under the headline - Vision of Hell Drug Charges - Two Men In Court - quoted prosecutor George Shindler as saying, "LSD-25, which has recently received much publicity, was a hallucinatory drug, and it was an offence to sell it without a prescription. “It is clear that Esam is in touch with people all over the world who are taking this drug,” he added. They were back in court on 10 May 1966 charged with unlawfully selling the drugs LSD25 and DMT without a prescription between 14 June 1965, and 21 February 1966. Esam was also accused of receiving a tin containing LSD 25 knowing it to have been stolen. Esam’s counsel said his client was pleading Not Guilty to the charges and reserved his defense. Page also reserved his defense. When Esam was told that he had no right to sell drugs as he was not a chemist. Esam replied: “I am quite aware of that, but until you have used this stuff (LSD) properly you do not know how exhilarating it can be." Bail for both was renewed.

When the LSD furore broke in the tabloid press, Michael Hollingshead fled, but Esam stayed put, and if legendary hash dealer Howard Marks is to be believed, kept using the drug. In David Leigh’s High Time - The Shocking Life and Times of Howard Marks, Leigh recounts a visit by an acid bearing Esam to Marks at Oxford in August 1966. Esam banged on Howard’s door at the top of a Balliol stairway. “Hi, we’ve been told you were a groove,” he said. He had a pocketful of sugarcubes at three pounds each. “I can get you as much as you like. I’m making it at home in the kitchen.” Marks bought Esam’s sugarcubes and pushed them hard around Oxford.

Then Esam together with psychologist Steve Abrams, and Paolo Leonni organised a Legalise Marijuana meeting which eventually lead to The Times full page ad signed by many notables. The meeting included guests such as singer and model Nico, and the Police, drawn by the event’s effective advertising. The police raid was announced next day in the press with a photo of the participants with their eyes blacked out under a Smoking Marijuana after Midnight headline. In January 1967, nearly a year after they were busted, John Esam and Russell Page were acquitted of all charges after Professor Ernst Chain, a Nobel prize winner for medicine said in evidence that in his opinion the drug did not conform to the existing poison rules. Albert Hofmann, the original distiller of LSD, then gave evidence that the ergot used to make LSD was different from the one banned in the Poisons Act.

No one would have blamed Esam for lying low after that but 1967 proved just as furious a year. He was assistant director on Peter Whitehead’s “swinging London” documentary, Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London, which featured Allen Ginsberg, The Small Faces, and Mick Jagger, amongst other period movers. The hard rolling times were beginning to take a toll on Esam. His friend Jenny Lismore-Gordon thought him full of fear. "Esam had already been busted in Paris in the early 1960s, and had been in prison, and was very bitter about that. He was very paranoid,” she recalled. Steve Abrams concurs: “After the trial Esam was a changed man. He wouldn’t have anything to do with drugs. He didn’t take another drug for ten years. He was so miserable, he’d have been happier to have taken them.” He may not have been taking drugs but he was still heavily involved in the counter culture editing Image, a glossy magazine that ran to over ten issues in 1967 and 1968. Contributors included Oz artist Martin Sharp and photographer David Larcher.

When an issue was confiscated in the United States a fund raising concert was organised in a fortnight. There was only time for one press ad. Christmas on Earth Revisited was named after a Barbara Rubin film of a 1966 Allen Ginsberg poetry reading. The all night show, designed to follow up successful psychedelic gatherings 14 Hour Technicolour Dream and Love-In Festival, both held at Alexandra Palace, was staged in the cavernous Kensington Olympia on Friday 22 December 1967, and featured the top English acts of the day including The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Soft Machine, The Move, Pink Floyd (Syd’s last major show before flipping out), Graham Bond Organisation, Sam Gopal Dream, DJ's John Peel and Jeff Dexter, The Move, and Tomorrow. The Who, scheduled to play, didn’t turn up. Despite the attendance of up to ten thousand fans the show was a failure financially. It was a really cold winter and the venue was out of the way, and many hippies had gone home for Xmas.

Those who went saw three simultaneous 360 degree light shows on towers, bumper cars, a plastic inflatable hanging from the roof, movies, and a fashion show. A movie filmed of the event was a disaster. The old 16 mm film stock was degraded. In the end little was useable because the footage was too dark although some shots appear at the beginning of Jimi Live in Monterey film, and the See My Music Talking video (now called Experience). A similar event at the Paris Olympia to recoup the losses was an even greater disaster. That's where John Esam drops off the radar. There was Haiku, a poetry collection in 1968 with Tom Raworth and Anselm Hollo. He also penned the sleevenote for Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper’s left field solo album, 1984, in 1972. Other than that details of John Esam's movements in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are scant until 1998 when Australian beat eccentric Daevid Allen discovered while visiting avant garde composer Terry Riley that John Esam was living near San Francisco. He found Esam immersed in the teachings of Gurjieff’s Third Way. A founding member of a thriving agricultural community set in low hills on red soil with a magnificent fountain surrounded by a thriving and carefully composed selection of herbs, vegetables, and flowers. In 2000, Esam finally got some due in his native land when Knowledge and Wisdom was included in Auckland University Press' Big Smoke - New Zealand Poems - 1960 - 1975. Four years later he released Orpheus Eurydice - Songs Late and Early, Poems 1954 - 2002, a live CD of Esam reading his masterwork on 21 Septembert 2003, which included the voice of friend and avant garde composer Terry Riley.

[American Dream]

Howard Marks - Former drug smuggler, intelligence servoce 'assett', now author and performer:

"Even John Esam, one of the beat poets who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall’s Wholly Communion, graced the premises with his presence. He turned up unannounced in my room and offered to sell me some LSD, which I had never heard of. Each dose was in the form of a sugar cube. The cost of each treated sugar cube was £3. John Esam told me it was like hashish, but infinitely more powerful and not in the least bit illegal. He was telling the truth on both counts. I purchased a few cubes and stored them away for use on another day. I made enquiries among my firneds. A few had heard of LSD, but none had taken it nor knew anyone who had. It was all very mysterious. Someone said that LSD was like mescaline, which Aldous Huxley had written about. Someone else said that a Harvard scientist, Timothy Leary, had experimented with LSD and written about it.

About a week or so later, I was invited by Frances Lincoln, a vivacious Somerville student, to come to her rooms for tea. On the strangest of impulses, I decided that this would be an opportune moment to take one of the sugar cubes, and I ate on about an hour or so before my appointment. No discernable effect had occurred by the time I left Balliol, and when I reached Somerville I concluded that I must have been well and truly conned into the purchase of this so-called wonder drug. Halfway through eating my teacake, the effects suddenly hit me. The pictures on the wall came to life, the flowers in the vases breathed heavily and rhythmically, and the Rolling Stones record that was being played sounded like a Handelian heavenly choir singing to the accompaniment of African tribal drumming. It was impossible to explain to Frances what was happening inside my head, but she was politely intrigued by my descriptions. When the four Beatles on the front of the album cover of Please Please Me jumped up and played, I said I ought to leave. Frances escorted me back to Balliol and left me at the front gate. I wandered around the quads and the Junior Common Room in a giggling stupor. Fellow students were used to seeing me in various states of intoxication, and I doubt if my condition occasioned any alarm. At about midnight, a full eight hours after ingesting the sugar cube, the effects wore off, and I went to bed. The next few weeks, spent partly in Oxford and partly in Wales, were devoted to finishing off the sugar cubes. Several friends joined me in this experimentation. John Esam came again, and I purchased more sugar cubes. I took one which resulted in what came to be generally known as the ‘horrors’. These are extremely difficult to describe. Instead of finding the LSD experience an amusing, interesting, thought-provoking state of instant Zen, replete with benign and wondrous hallucinations, one finds it frightening and grave, and one experiences instant psychosis. Flowers no longer gently breathe. They turn into werewolves and bats/ The hallucinations turn into menacing demons. It’s not funny, and I became uncharacteristically depressed and perturbed about the meaning of life, its futility and my identity. Although the severe effects wore off after the usual time period, the problems they caused remained. I was convinced that then only way to resolve these problems was to take more LSD to try to come to grip with whatever was disturbing me. This didn’t work. The ‘horrors’ continued to manifest themselves in diverse forms.

Between acid trips I read anything I though remotely relevant to the LSD experience: Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Doors of Perception, and Island; Evan Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Sidney Cohen’s Drugs of Hallucination; and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. None of these did anything to dispel the intense depression I was suffering. I became unusually introverted, morose, suicidal, and probably crazy. My miserable demeanour did nothing to deter people from maintaining the almost non-stop ‘happening’ at my college rooms, but it seemed to have less and less to do with me. I just sat discontentedly in the corner, occasionally smiling weakly at whoever came in….I ceased being morose, reverted to my previous heavy indulgences in sex, alcohol and marijuana, and did not take LSD again for a number of years.

Mr Nice: Howard Marks, Vintage 1998 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mr-Nice-Howard- ... 091&sr=1-1 **********************************************************************************************************************

Another view of Marks' meeting with John Esam can be found in David Leig's biography of Marks:

So Esam banged on the door: 'Hi, we've been told you're a groove.' His project was to sell Howard some acid. He had a pocketful of sugar-cubes at £3 each. 'What is it?' 'LSD. It's much stronger than hash. Impossible to describe. Like a weekend in Paris, but cheaper. I can get you as much as you like. I'm making it at home in the kitchen.' Howards liked the idea of a new high. He took a cube and went off to keep an invitation to tea with a girl in Somerville College. Then the face of a painting on the wall began to animate. The shadows started to breath. Waves of delicious physical sensation swept over him. When he urinated, it felt like an orgasm. Time melted. Howard liked it. The next time he took LSD, in his familiar room with the net, he got the horrors. Julian and Terry Deakin, who were with him, spent hours trying to reassure him. 'It's ok, it's just the other side of the coin. Hold on Howard.' 'I don't know who I am! I don't know my name|I think I've died! There isn't any difference between being alive and being dead. It's the ultimate reality! The horror!' He was screaming, and crying and whimpering.

High Times: The Life and Times of Howard Marks by David Leigh (Unwin, 1985) ______

http://www.lsdbritain.com/page36.htm

[American Dream]

http://swallowingthecamel.wordpress.com ... defectors/

The Prodigal Witch Part XVII: More Illuminati Defectors

So far in this series, we have seen two people who claimed they were born into the Illuminati (John Todd, Doc Marquis), two women who claimed they were enslaved by the Illuminati (Cisco Wheeler, Arizona Wilder), one guy who says he joined the Illuminati of his own free will (BIll Schnoebelen), and another guy who hints he had some dealings with the Illuminati (Mike Warnke). Their accounts differed, dramatically so in some cases, but they all agreed on one thing: The Illuminati is pure evil, and all its members worship Satan or Lucifer. These next two Illuminati defectors have used that same basic script, adding a few of their own twists.



Leo Zagami in 2008, being interviewed by Kerry Cassidy

Leo Zagami

Leo Zagami is the first European in this series, the youngest person in this series, the first one to claim he has returned to the Illuminati to help reform it, and the first to establish his own religion. He surfaced online in 2006, on a now-defunct site called Illuminati Confessions, and quickly gained a small but devoted following in the conspiracy community. No one had stepped forward to take the place of Arizona Wilder after she went quiet in 2003, so Zagami was offering up the first brand-new revelations from an Illuminati insider in three years. By this time, Todd was confined to a psychiatric ward, Schnoebelen had moved on to talking about his vampirism, and the other defectors had been out of the Illuminati for at least a decade.

I have to admit, I don’t have much love for this guy. He’s certainly not as despicable as convicted rapist John Todd, but he definitely lacks the hucksterish charm of Warnke and Schnoebelen. I found much of what he had to say to be bigoted, hateful nonsense. This guy doesn’t like Jews, Catholics (though he used to be one), Muslims (though he used to be one), or occultists (though he supposedly used to be one). He basically says the Third Reich was a Jewish creation, set up for the sole purpose of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He says all Catholics are spies for the Vatican. He says Islam is a Jesuit-created deception. He tells us the Vatican is riddled with high-level Muslim moles and Satanists. (1)

Everything he has to say could have been gleaned from conspiracy paperbacks and a few websites; he has no startling revelations to offer, though he acts as if he’s dropping pearls of rare wisdom. Talking about demons, he tells us, “If you knew the reality what these entities were, you would not even touch them, you would just drove the other way.” (That’s another problem: His English is so dodgy that listening to his interviews or reading his website is an agonizing ordeal.) (1)

Personal feelings aside, though, Zagami’s information simply doesn’t stand up to any amount of scrutiny.

Leo’s Story

Unlike Marquis and Todd, Zagami wasn’t exactly born into the Illuminati. He claims, however, that some of his relatives were high-ranking members. This, combined with his aristocratic background, opened doors for him when he was in his early twenties. That’s when a family friend introduced him to Freemasonry, one of the most powerful branches of the Illuminati.

Zagami was born in Rome in 1970. His father, Elio Zagami, comes from an aristocratic Sicilian background (he is the son of the late Sicilian senator Leopoldo Zagami and the Marquisa di Gregorio). His mother, Jessica Lyon Young, is descended from European aristocracy. His maternal grandmother, the late bohemian novelist Anne Cumming (Felicity Mason), was a prominent member of the Illuminati. His maternal grandfather, writer Henry Lyon Young, was a first cousin of the Queen Mother. (2)

“That means I’m technically a Sicilian Don and a Prince of the Sacred Roman Empire and a person protected by their own Vatican secret constitutions, so they can’t touch me,” Zagami once boasted to conspiranoid radio host Greg Szymanski.

Zagami was raised as a Catholic, but introduced to the occult at an early age. His grandmother Mason gave him a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth when he was just 11 years old, and he often dipped into his father’s magical library. (1)

In 1993, 23-year-old Leo was initiated into an irregular Masonic lodge. Between that initiation and his departure from the Illuminati in 2006, he was connected to a bewildering array of Masonic lodges (all irregular, with one exception), as well as the Ordo Templi Orientis, a few fraternal organizations, and some secret societies. Ultimately he became a member of something he calls the Committee of Monte Carlo, a Freemasonic lodge that serves not only as a hub for arms-dealing (Leo’s primary source of income at that time), but as a meeting place for “senior Masons” of various nationalities and traditions. It is also, of course, a front for the Illuminati.

Zagami tells us that this Monte Carlo lodge was an offshoot of Propaganda Due, or P2, the infamous Italian lodge, and that he was groomed to take over the reigns of power from P2′s enigmatic “Puppet Master”, Licio Gelli. Thanks to his aristocratic background, he moved rapidly through the Freemasonic ranks to join the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree (a degree conferred only by the Scottish Rite Freemasons)

I have long been fascinated by Propaganda Due and the banking-related scandals that erupted around it in the ’80s. It’s a staggeringly complex web of fraud, murder, and blackmail that I can’t even begin to cover here, and much of what occurred remains a mystery.

So you would expect this Zagami guy to offer up a lot of juicy, inside information about Gelli, P2′s inner workings, and the banking scandals, right?

Then you’ll be disappointed. Wikipedia has more to say about Gelli than Leo Zagami does, and his brief recap of the scandals is P2 101. Seriously, you’ll learn more from listening to 5 minutes of Robert Anton Wilson than you will from listening to 5 hours of Zagami – and unfortunately, I did listen to 5 hours of Zagami.

P2 effectively ceased to exist after its membership was exposed in 1981, and that occurred when Leo Zagami was about 11 years old. Are you telling me that one of the most powerful secret cabals in Italy was grooming a grade-school student to take over for the Puppet Master? Besides, Gelli already had a second-in-command, his business partner Umberto Ortoloni.

Zagami’s mentor and “boss” within the Illuminati was the head of the Monte Carlo lodge. I thought Gelli was the head of this lodge? Well, never mind. That’s not the last contradiction you’ll see in this story.

Leo made his money by dealing in weapons. He also worked as a club DJ and music producer, attracting fans all over the world. Somehow, he was also linked to NATO’s Operation Gladio. He went by several aliases. (2)

Zagami’s Illuminati isn’t headed by the Rothschilds, as most of the other Illuminati defectors in this series have stated, nor by Arizona Wilder’s horny French noble “Pindar”. And the Illuminati isn’t headquartered in California like John Todd, Mike Warnke, or Wilder would have you believe.
No, this Illuminati is centred in Jerusalem and Rome. Zionists and the Vatican are at the top of the power pyramid. Jesuits (or as Zagami calls them, “Jesooites”), in particular, are very powerful within the Illuminati. The pope takes all his orders from the Jesuit General (in 2006, when Zagami first appeared on the conspiracy scene, this was Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, the “Vatican’s top Satanist”). (3)

This Illuminati strongly resembles the one described by Bill Schnoebelen, a surreal mishmash of occultism and ritual magick, Catholicism, Freemasonry, and New Age beliefs. The Ordo Templi Orientis is part of the Illuminati, as are Opus Dei and the Rotary clubs. Zagami even claims there’s a real Priory of Sion, though it’s not the same one Dan Brown used in The Da Vinci Code. (4)

Aleister Crowley’s 1904 revelations are extremely important to them. The closest thing the Illuminati has to scripture is Crowley’s Book of the Law, though the Bible and the Q’ran also play significant roles (as we have seen throughout this series, no one can seem to agree on the central texts used by the world’s Satanic elite).

Zagami says the primary goal of the Illuminati is to usher in the endtimes and the earthly kingdom of God. But its members are also Satanists who outwardly adhere to the three main religions. So I guess that makes them….Christians pretending to be Satanists pretending to be Christians, Muslims, and Jews? And if that’s not complicated enough, we have Muslim cardinals pretending to be Catholic (yet Zagami points out that Islam forbids the practice of magic, and the Vatican is steeped in occult practices – how does that work?).

For centuries, the Jesuits and the Pope have been practicing magicians who know how to summon demons from other dimensions. Today, these demons masquerade as aliens. The elite want you to believe that UFOs and ETs are unknown phenomena, because they can’t admit they’re conjuring demons with the use of black magic rituals. (1)

Sometimes, demons manifest as Reptilians.

Like Arizona Wilder, Zagami identifies the late pseudohistorian Zecharia Sitchin as a source of disinformation. His 2007 book The End of Days was written by order of the Vatican to distract people from the real aliens and the real endtimes preparations.

The late Monsignor Caraddo Balducci, one of the few high-ranking Catholic clerics to express interest in UFOs, was really an Illuminati demonologist. When he declared that ETs are not demonic, he was lying.

The Jesuits, too, are masters of disinformation. They invented Planet X and Nibiru, and they are behind much of the ersatz spirituality of the New Age movement. Meanwhile, they were eager to establish an observatory on Mount Graham despite Native American opposition because they know that demons dwell on top of that mountain, and they like to keep an eye on the sky for astrological purposes. You see, the Vatican’s demon-invoking rituals have to be conducted at precise times in order to be effective.

Never mind that the Mount Graham Observatory is an international establishment, actually consisting of several different observatories maintained by different nations. The site was selected for its elevation and the low level of light pollution in the vicinity, as most observatory sites are.

Zagami insists the Jesooites churn out disinfo to mask the reality of our situation: We are in the midst of a continuous war waged between good and evil, angels and demons. Um. Isn’t that precisely what the Catholic Church teaches?

Muslims, too, know how to summon djinn and use them for their own purposes. Zagami tells a rambling story about one of his ex-wife’s relatives, an “uncle or granddad” who had a farm. Using secret codes from the Q’ran, this farmer was able to summon demons to do all his farm work for him. (1)

Zagami’s Illuminati differs from Bill Schnoebelen’s in many key aspects. Leo apparently didn’t have to have sex with a fallen angel or converse with the dead as part of his initiation process, and he wasn’t required to become a Catholic priest. He didn’t have to convince seven people to sell their souls. These are all steps that Schnoebelen identifies as essential for all high-ranking Illuminati members. After a certain stage of illumination is reached, the initiate has to decide between lycanthropy and vampirism. Zagami has nothing to say about vampires and werewolves at all, so I guess he skipped that step.

This Illuminati also differs from John Todd’s version. Zagami has worked as a club DJ, yet he doesn’t have anything to say about the demonic evils of music, while Todd told churchgoers that each and every musical artist signed to a major label must sell his/her soul to the Devil, and described how Satanic rituals were used to implant demons into every master recording. Also, Todd stated that very few Illuminati members are Jewish, while Zagami says the entire organization is controlled by Jews and Catholics. Todd said the central scripture of Satanism is the fictitious Necronomicon; Zagami says it’s Crowley’s Book of the Law.

Zagami doesn’t drop as many names as Arizona Wilder once did, but he’s not as close-mouthed as Doc Marquis. He identifies key members of the Ordo Templi Orientis as CIA-controlled Illuminists. In addition to the Jesuit General Kolvenbach, he names the late Alberto Moscato as a high-ranking member and 33rd degree Mason, in charge of all the O.T.O’s Satanic activities in Italy. The now-defunct political party Alleanza Nazionale was flush with Illuminati members. Giorgio Balestrieri, head of the Rotary Club in New York, was one of Zagami’s superiors. Zagami claims Balestrieri is a weapons dealer and a P2 member. (1) Olympic athlete Jean-Pierre Giudicelli is a P2 member. Massimo Introvigne is a Satanist, and was present for a Black Mass held in the Vatican in 2000. (3) These are just of the names – some obscure, some well-known – that Zagami sprinkles into his interviews.

A dramatic conversion…sort of

Zagami began to have differences of opinion with Opus Dei and the American faction of the Illuminati in 2003. He knew that some of the demons being invoked by himself and his cohorts posed a threat to the rest of mankind, and wanted to put a stop to the rituals associated with them. The CIA-controlled American arm of the Illuminati would not be swayed. This was the beginning of his disenchantment with the occult practices of the Illuminati.

According to Zagami, rifts and battles are common among the various Illuminati factions. For example, Opus Dei and the Jesuits are at odds, each struggling for control. He was aligned with the Opus Dei faction, which doesn’t practice black magic as enthusiastically as the Jesuit faction.

Zagami tried to distance himself from the Illuminati at this time, but was unable to extricate himself from it entirely. Instead, he fomented a small revolution within the ranks of the European Illuminati. (1)

In 2004, Zagami secretly established his own religion, Matrixism. Go ahead and guess what it’s based on.

Given the heavy gnostic Christian overtones in that film, you’d think gnostic Christianity would be the natural choice for Zagami. But no. He’d rather make up a religion based on a freaking movie. I’m not really sure what this religion is all about, and frankly I don’t care. For all I know, you take some drugs, sit in a chair, and pretend to do Kung Fu. If you’re interested, its tenets are laid out on Zagami’s website.

A year later, Zagami married a Sufi and converted to Islam. He wished to “infiltrate the bloodline of Prophet Mohammed”, whatever the hell that means. (2)

But he was still a…what, exactly? A Catholic Satanist Matrixist?

In June 2006, Zagami discovered that former Italian president Francesco Cossiga had ordered Giorgio Balestrieri to have him killed if he didn’t follow a specific set of orders. (2)

The previous month, his wife had a dream about Balestrieri working for the Antichrist.

In July 2006, Zagami visited London and observed first-hand the Illuminati preparations for the staged attacks of 7/7. Being a loyal Illuminati member at that time, he didn’t alert anyone to what was happening.

On the day the attacks actually occurred, Zagami’s son (his second child) was born. These events led him to the realization that the Illuminati isn’t working for the betterment of mankind, and he finally decided to break away. He emerged as a “whistleblower” later that year. His former cohorts were displeased, of course, and for his own safety Zagami relocated to Norway with his family. This contradicts his boast about being untouchable because he was “protected by their own Vatican secret constitutions”.

His first English-language interview was given to Greg Syzmanski in October, 2006.

His popularity was limited mostly to rabid anti-Zionists like Szymanski, Jeff Rense and Henry Makow (whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog), hateful bigots like “Unhived Mind” (a conspiracy blog that refers to Mitt Romney as “Fagmaster”), and ultra-credulous conspiranoids like the Project Camelot duo.

Zagami’s new mission was to expose and interfere with the Illuminati to the greatest extent possible. He claims that his first counter-Illuminati actions led to his arrest and torture in Italy.

In February of 2008, Zagami was interviewed in his Oslo home by Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot. I’ve written about this wacky duo several times (here,for instance). Once, they declared that information from their sources indicated Earth would run out of oxygen in about three months (that was three years ago).

Nothing in the Zagami interview inspires me to change my mind about their work. At one point, Cassidy interrupts Zagami’s rambling discourse about demonic aliens to ask, “Now you haven’t sold your soul, is that correct?”.

Zagami displays to the camera a folder bulging with “official documentation” that can validate his various claims, but we don’t actually get to examine its contents.

Zagami and his wife separated in the same month this interview was conducted, and Leo promptly ditched Islam. He now denounces it as a Jesooite-created sham. This is a theory heavily promoted by Jack Chick, a key figure in the Rebecca Brown hoax and the John Todd hoax.
On his website, Zagami writes that he is also “affiliated with people connected with the gnostic congregation in Oslo (Ecclesia Gnostica Norvegia)”.

He was forced out of Norway in early 2008.

Now here’s where it gets confusing. In May 2008, after his separation from his wife and his departure from Islam, Zagami decided to rejoin the Illuminati – as a good guy this time. Now he “personally controls major parts of the Illuminati”, a faction he calls the Illuminati Resistance. It is supported, he claims, by a chivalric order known as the Knights Templar of the Apocalypse, with members recruited from the military, law enforcement, the FBI, and the CIA. Zagami’s Resistance also has its own paramilitary security corporation, Green Lyons Security Team, consisting of “approximately 12,000 troops”. (2) He’s starting to sound a lot like Benjamin Fulford. In fact, Fulford has played along with Zagami’s Illuminati stories, even though Freemasons are the good guys in his version of the Illuminati. Both men are enthusiastically supported by the batshit-crazy Henry Makow.

Reminds me of the time bogus Holocaust survivors Lauren Stratford and Binjamin Wilkomirski met up and “recognized” one another.

In 2009, with an Italian girlfriend, Zagami returned to Italy. Then the girlfriend ended up betraying him in some crazy conspiracy, and in March 2009 he was confined to a mental asylum on the Isola Tiberina.

He remains a faithful Matrixist. In fact, he is now Neo Leo Lyon Zagami, the Prophet of Matrixism. He claims to have 16,000 followers. I’m not sure if 12,000 of them are also his employees or not.

This year, Zagami published the first volume of a projected three-volume memoir (in Italian).

In the four years since his re-entry into the Illuminati, Zagami has fallen out of favor with many of his fans in the conspiracy community. Greg Szymanski, who believes “the Illuminati is the Vatican and the Vatican is the Illuminati”, denounced Zagami as a Luciferian Jesuit propagandist after an eccentric anti-Jesuit crusader named Slats Grobnik told him that Zagami can’t possibly be a 33rd Degree Mason unless he possesses a copy of a “secret” book given only to high-level Masons, Albert Pike’s Moral and Dogma. Never mind that you can buy it on Amazon.

Szymanski and Zagami seem to have buried the hatchet, however.

Disenchanted Zagami fans and critics have embraced some interesting theories about who he really is. One fellow thinks he’s a Reptilian, and another seems to believe he’s actually Aussie comedian Steve Hughes.

Back in 2007, Zagami warned that the Illuminati planned to “Nazify” the entire Western world by this year, persecuting all religious believers. Guess they’re a tad behind schedule.

More Deep Thoughts and astounding insights from Leo Zagami:

“Magic is the calculation of the arts, with peculiar calculations around the symbols, to evoke certain entities and have from them, if you want, certain gratifications.” (2008 Project Camelot interview)

“The president die, the president of the U.S., or no? Yes, he dies. One day, he will die. He can’t be mortal, okay? So he has to meet death. Well, for him to meet death without the approval of the pope, is to be basically scrubbed off the map. Because they themselves are relying on those blessings and that network to bring their power to their successors, to the people after them, and to the people after and after.” (Project Camelot interview)

“I also know for a fact the Satanist and Nazi, [Pope] Benedict, has a 24-year-old gay lover and that Satanic worshipping does go on at the Vatican. Most recently, in May of 2000, a Black Mass was celebrated with Satanist Aleister Crowley’s follower William Breeze present, as as Satanists Alberto Moscato and Massimo Introvigne, who are intermediaries for the Jesuits.” (2006 Greg Szymanski article)

“The P2 and the Jesuits keep their privileges alive in Monte Carlo because they blackmail even the gay Prince Alberto II of Monte Carlo who had been doing orgies with two black gay men and one black woman at the same time not knowing there was a P2 Brother with a camera living next door. The woman actually had a son from the Prince because of one of these encounters, as some of you in the gossip field might remember.” (Szymanski article) Even if this was 100% true, would any of it really matter? Who cares what kind of orgies the dude has?

“Wahabi or wahibi as you call them were created by the Zionists and their English friends who think they are the lost tribe of Israel as the same happened with Arafat and the so-called Muslim Brotherhood created by English intelligence.” (Syzmanski article) If you don’t know how to spell nor correctly pronounce “Wahhabi”, it’s safe to say you don’t know much about Wahhabism

“The reality of humanity’s existence now has changed for ever. Mr. Zagami’s arrival in Chicago on April 20 2008 a date chosen for its symbolic connotations, marks a watershed in the thus far unorganized grassroots resistance against the New World Order.” (Zagami’s website)

Why we probably shouldn’t take Zagami’s story at face value

He hasn’t provided much in the way of documentation, and what he does present is just silly. Take, for example, the ridiculous Masonic ID badge that he flaunts as proof of his Masonic affiliation.

We know very little of his background. Which schools did he attend? Does he have siblings, and are they supposedly part of the Illuminati, too?

To be unkind for a moment, his physical appearance and demeanor are not those of someone from a privileged, aristocratic background. His English is poor, and his writing skills are minimal. He rarely waits for anyone to finish a sentence before continuing his circuitous, disjointed ramblings. Cosmetic dentistry has clearly never been a part of his life.

We don’t have a shred of evidence for the existence of his 12,000-strong paramilitary force. Not one photo. Not a single video. Nothing.

We have absolutely no evidence that he was involved in arms trafficking. His only known source of income was his work as a club DJ.

His grasp of occult history is rather shallow. He can rattle off the names of famous magicians like Cagliostro and Crowley, but he doesn’t have much to say about them. Some things are just wrong. For instance, he states that L. Ron Hubbard joined the “Parsons lodge” (the O.T.O.’s Agape Lodge in Pasadena) after he established Scientology. In reality, Hubbard was briefly involved with Jack Parsons four years before Dianetics was introduced. You’d think an O.T.O. initiate would know this. He identifies the head of the American O.T.O. in 2001 as Lon Milo DuQuette. Since 1996, this position (national Grand Master General) has been held by Frater Sabazius X°. DuQuette is the Deputy Grand Master.

Most of his “inside information” about the Illuminati is stuff that can be found in conspiracy literature. The rest is either unverifiable or nonsensical, like the Satanists posing as Muslims posing as Catholics. If the Illuminati really existed and really operated in this fashion, it would be a hot mess unworthy of our attention.

He has had 6 years to provide solid proof of his involvement in high-level Freemasonry and arms trafficking, 4 years to provide solid proof that he is in command of a huge paramilitary force, and a whole lifetime to provide solid proof of his august lineage. He has not done so.

If Zagami wasn’t a big-time weapons dealer and Illuminati kingpin, then what was he?

Well, first of all, he wasn’t a real Freemason for very long. The website Masonic Info has examined some of his claims, and they have a page dedicated to calling bullshit on them. His Committee of Monte Carlo doesn’t seem to exist, P2 ceased to be an accepted lodge when he was still in kindergarten, and vanished completely when he was 11 years old. Zagami briefly belonged to only one regular lodge, Kirby Lodge 2818, and was ejected from it. This means that Zagami does not legitimately hold the title of 33rd Degree Mason.

From this history, it’s clear that Zagami attempted to become a legit Mason, failed, then joined as many irregular lodges and traditions as he could. If he was an “untouchable” bloodline Illuminati member, groomed to take Licio Gelli’s position, why did he get kicked out of the only regular lodge to which he ever belonged? Shouldn’t his lodge brothers have quailed before his tremendous power?

Furthermore, according to comments on a conspiracy forum, Zagami was ejected from the O.T.O. and the Order of Memphis and Misraim, as well. Nicholaj Frisvold has expressed regret for initiating Zagami into the Franco-Haitian order, and the Norwegian O.T.O. also gave him the boot.

Again, if the O.T.O. is a branch of the Illuminati, and Leo Zagami is a powerful figure within the Illuminati, just how did he get kicked out of organizations that his people supposedly control?

Zagami’s story is convincing to some people precisely because it is vague and full of unverifiable information. His supporters will say that Masonic lodges can exist in secret for decades (even though Gelli’s P2 was exposed after just 5 years), that some Catholic clerics might very well be Satanists posing as Muslims, that Islam was invented by Jesuits as a means of controlling the Middle East, etc.

But isn’t it also possible that an imaginative young DJ with the gift of gab used his interest in the occult and conspiracy theories to craft a personal history that would appeal to the more credulous members of the conspiracy community?



“Svali”


I’m not going to spend much time on the Illuminati defector known as Svali, because a “whistleblower” who won’t even use his/her name is about as useful and reliable as a mousetrap made entirely out of cheese.


“Svali” in 2003


Svali emerged in 2000, posting articles about Satanic ritual abuse and her own escape from a Luciferian cult on a blog called Svali Speaks (many of these articles have been reposted by others since that time).

Svali, then living in Texas, claimed she was raised by wealthy parents who belonged to an abusive Luciferian cult linked to the Illuminati. Born in Germany, she moved with her family to the U.S. in her early years. They settled in the San Diego area, where the cult has a large following.

She was subjected to extensive mind control programming and ritual abuse from a very young age. At 12, she was taken to a series of catacombs beneath the Vatican, filled with mummies. In one room was a large, golden pentagram, where she and two other children were to be officially inducted into the cult. An altar-like table of dark stone was set up in the center of the room. A small boy, 3 or 4 years old, was lying motionlessly on the table (appearing drugged or unconscious). The boy was ritually sacrificed in a ceremony that involved Latin incantations.

Terrified, Svali and the other two children didn’t intervene. After the completion of the ritual, Svali was ordered to swear her allegience to the New World Order. She was warned that she, too, would be sacrificed if she ever violated her oath. (The Illuminati was evidently bluffing, because Svali survived an appearance on national television, radio interviews, and numerous blog posts that exposed the Illuminati’s hideous deeds.)

By the age of 22, she was the cult’s youngest “leadership council” member in San Diego. She was trained to program the children of other cult members, and acted as a “head trainer” until her escape in 1996. This involved indoctrination, martial arts, and firearms training as well as mind control programming. Hypnosis and sedation were often used prior to programming, to render the children more calm and suggestible. Electric shock was used to discourage certain behaviours.

Svali was instructed to give false information to the kids, and gradually realized that she must have been deceived as a child, too.

In the ’80s, Svali was forced to marry another cult victim. They had two children together. Svali’s husband became a Naval officer. By day, Svali taught at a Christian school and raised her children in an outwardly normal manner. They even attended Christian schools (affiliated with the Illuminati). By night, she and her husband – like all Illuminati members – were programmed to attend secret meetings. Each attendee would drive to an Illuminati meeting place, change out of their street clothes, and don a military-style uniform. Training sessions would then be held in the middle of the night, in well-guarded locations.

In 1996, when she was in her late thirties. Svali fled to another state, breaking away from the cult. She was separated from her husband at the time, and the children were with their grandparents. Mr. Svali subsequently filed for divorce, but then changed his mind and joined his wife in exile. Though they weren’t menaced by vengeful cultists in the same manner that John Todd and Edna Moses claimed to have been, she was nervous enough to refrain from using her real name. Like Arizona wilder, she worked as a nurse.

Svali converted to Christianity, like most of the former Satanists and witches in this series. (5)

Svali’s Illuminati is centred in Europe and headed by twelve cardinal-like “fathers”. Each Illuminati centre is known as a “house”. The power structure she outlined bears no resemblance to any of the other hierarchies described in this series, and the terminology is unique. Children are raised to enter one of twelve disciplines dominated by the Illuminati. They can’t become, say, disc jockeys.

Svali told Henry Makow that although there are Jewish people in the Illuminati, bigotry prevents them from rising to high-level positions unless they renounce their faith. In fact, there is a strong Aryan, “Fourth Reich” element in the Illuminati.

The goal of this Illuminati is simply to control the world by the year 2050. Svali doesn’t mention the endtimes. (5)

Svali appeared on a November 3, 2003 installment of the TechTV program Conspiracies, “Satanic Panic”. Her story was embraced and promoted by many of the same people who fell for Zagami’s tales: Greg Szymanski, Henry Makow, Project Camelot. None of these people pointed to the obvious inconsistencies between Svali’s Illuminati and Zagami’s Illuminati.

She gave one interview to Szymanski’s Investigative Journal radio show on January 17, 2006. This was her last known radio interview.

At some point, a woman known only as Maria stepped forward to claim she was part of the same Illuminati Luciferian cult as Svali. According to Szymanski, Maria died mysteriously in St. Peter’s Square. As Maria never revealed her true identity, there’s no way to confirm this.

In 2006, Svali dropped out of communication, leading her supporters to worry she had disappeared. Project Camelot reported in 2009 that she was still alive and well, but after that she fell off the radar again. Her current status and whereabouts are unknown.

Sources

1. Project Camelot interview with Leo Zagami (February 2008)
2. Zagami’s official website, leozagami.com (audio NSFW)
3. “More High Level Illuminati Inside Info From Monte Carlo P2 Masonic Lodge Defector” by Greg Szymanski @ Arctic Beacon.com. November 7, 2006.
4. Greg Szymanski interview of Leo Zagami on The Investigative Journal radio show. March 31, 2012. (YouTube)
5. Greg Szymanski interview of Svali on The Investigative Journal radio show. January 17, 2006. (Project Camelot)

[American Dream]

Liz Mullinar - Treating the core problem of childhood trauma.

[American Dream]

http://swallowingthecamel.wordpress.com ... defectors/

The Prodigal Witch Part XVII: More Illuminati Defectors

So far in this series, we have seen two people who claimed they were born into the Illuminati (John Todd, Doc Marquis), two women who claimed they were enslaved by the Illuminati (Cisco Wheeler, Arizona Wilder), one guy who says he joined the Illuminati of his own free will (BIll Schnoebelen), and another guy who hints he had some dealings with the Illuminati (Mike Warnke). Their accounts differed, dramatically so in some cases, but they all agreed on one thing: The Illuminati is pure evil, and all its members worship Satan or Lucifer.

http://swallowingthecamel.wordpress.com ... hn-todd-2/

[American Dream]

The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
By Steve Silberman
Posted: April 21, 2011


Timothy Leary, Los Angeles, March 1992. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, used with permission of the Allen Ginsberg Estate. (Allen is visible in the mirror.)

In November of 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg made a modest proposal to a room full of Unitarian ministers in Boston. “Everybody who hears my voice try the chemical LSD at least once,” he intoned. “Then I prophecy we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.”

The poet had been experimenting with drugs since the 1940s as a way of achieving the state that his Beat Generation friends named the “New Vision,” methodically keeping lists of the drugs he sampled — morphine with William Burroughs, marijuana with fellow be-bop fans in jazz clubs, and eventually the psychedelic vine called ayahuasca with a curandero in Peru.

For Ginsberg, drugs were not merely an indulgence or form of intoxication; they were tools for investigating the nature of mind, to be employed in tandem with writing, an approach he called “the old yoga of poesy.” In 1959, he volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University, where two psychologists who were secretly working for the CIA to develop mind-control drugs gave him LSD; listening to recordings of Wagner and Gertrude Stein in the lab, he decided that acid was “a very safe drug,” and thought that even his suburban poet father Louis might like to try it.

By the time he addressed the Unitarian ministers in Boston, Ginsberg had become convinced that psychedelics held promise as agents of transformative mystical experience that were available to anyone, particularly when combined with music and other art forms. In place of stiff, hollow religious observances in churches and synagogues, the poet proposed “naked bacchantes” in national parks, along with sacramental orgies at rock concerts, to call forth a new, locally-grown American spirituality that could unify a generation of Adamic longhairs and earth mothers alienated by war and turned off by the pious hypocrisy of their elders.

Ginsberg’s potent ally in this campaign was a psychology professor at Harvard named Timothy Leary, who would eventually become the most prominent public advocate for mass consumption of LSD, coining a meme that became the ubiquitous rallying cry of the nascent 20th-century religious movement as it proliferated on t-shirts, black-light posters, and neon buttons from the Day-Glo Haight-Ashbury to swinging London: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.

Among those who took up the cause was the Beatles. John Lennon turned Leary’s woo-tastic mashups of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into one of the most profoundly strange, terrifying, and exhilarating tracks ever recorded: “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver, which swooped in on a heart-stopping Ringo stutter-beat chased by clouds of infernal firebirds courtesy of backwards guitar and a tape loop of Paul McCartney laughing.

As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Ginsberg and Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.

By the close of the ’60s — with ominous stormclouds on the horizon in the form of violent debacles like Altamont, a Haight-Ashbury that had been taken over by speed freaks and the Mob, and Charles Manson’s crew of acid-addled zombie assassins — Ginsberg was already looking for more grounding and lasting forms of enlightenment. He eventually found what he was seeking in Buddhist mindfulness meditation.

The poet retained his counterculture cred until his death of liver cancer in 1997, but Leary didn’t fare as well. Subjected to obsessive persecution by government spooks like Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy, Leary launched a series of psychedelic communes that collapsed under the weight of their own ego-trips. Years of arrests, jail terms, spectacular escapes from prison aided by the Black Panthers, disturbing betrayals, and bizarre self-reinventions followed the brief season when the psych labs of Harvard seemed to give new birth to a new breed of American Transcendentalism that was as democratic as a test tube.

The spectacular rise and fall of Leary and Ginsberg’s plot to turn on the world is the subject of a new book by Peter Conners called White Hand Society, published by City Lights Books. I knew Ginsberg well for 20 years and was his teaching assistant at Naropa, a Buddhist university in Colorado, yet I learned a lot about Ginsberg’s role in helping to create Leary’s public identity by reading the book, which is based mostly on the lively correspondence between the two men. (For more detailed analysis of White Hand Society, see this insightful review by poet, Buddhist student, and Ginsberg scholar Marc Olmsted.) I spoke with Conners when he came through San Francisco on his book tour. He is currently at work on an oral history of the jam-band scene called JAMerica.

Continues at: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/ ... onspiracy/

[American Dream]

ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

LSD was the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the late 1950s as various movie stars were dosed on the psychiatrist's couch. Participants in such sessions included several of the glamor elite, each capable of generating a flash of publicity. Cary Grant first took LSD under the guidance of Dr. Mortimer Hartmann and then with Dr. Oscar Janiger. His therapy was such a success that he became a zealous missionary for LSD. "All my life," Grant stated, "I've been searching for peace of mind. I'd explored yoga and hypnotism and made several attempts at mysticism. Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment." People from all walks of life echoed Grant's plaudits for the drug, and psychiatrists who practiced LSD therapy were inundated with inquiries.

Beatific, oceanic, redemptive -- these words have been used to describe the peak of an LSD trip. But there is another side to it. To be cast about as flotsam in the power draughts of the universe can be a hellish as well as a heavenly ordeal. Both possibilities are rooted in the experience of depersonalization or ego loss. The CIA was not interested in the therapeutic applications of LSD. On the contrary, the men of ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA defined the drug as an anxiety-producing agent, and they realized it would be relatively easy to "break" a person who was exposed to highly stressful stimuli while high on acid. As one CIA document instructed, "[Whatever] reduces integrative capacity may serve to increase the possibility of an individual being overwhelmed by frustrations and conflicts hitherto managed successfully." The powerful ego-shattering effects of LSD were ideally suited for this purpose. CIA and military interrogators proceeded to utilize the drug as an instrument of psychological torture.

That LSD can be used to heal as well as maim underscores an essential point: non-drug factors play an important role in determining the subject's response. LSD has no standard effects that are purely pharmacological in nature; the enormous range of experiences produced by the chemical stems from differences in (1) the character structure and attitudinal predispositions (or "set") of the subject, and (2) the immediate situation (or "setting"). If LSD is given in a relaxed and supportive environment and the subject is coached beforehand, the experience can be intensely gratifying. As Dr. Janiger put it, "LSD favors the prepared mind."

For the unprepared mind, however, LSD can be a nightmare. When the drug is administered in a sterile laboratory under fluorescent lights by white-coated physicians who attach electrodes and nonchalantly warn the subject that he will go crazy for a while, the odds favor a psychotomimetic reaction, or "bummer."

This became apparent to poet Allen Ginsberg when he took LSD for the first time at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, in 1959. Ginsberg was already familiar with psychedelic substances, having experimented with peyote on a number of occasions. As yet, however, there was no underground supply of LSD, and it was virtually impossible for layfolk to procure samples of the drug. Thus he was pleased when Gregory Bateson, [1] the anthropologist, put him in touch with a team of doctors in Palo Alto. Ginsberg had no way of knowing that one of the researchers associated with the institute, Dr. Charles Savage, had conducted hallucinogenic drug experiments for the US Navy in the early 1950s.

The experiment was conducted in a small room full of medical equipment and EEC machines, with no outer windows. Ginsberg was advised that he could listen to whatever music he wanted, so he chose Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and a recording of Gertrude Stein. "For some reason," he recalled, "I thought you were supposed to lie down like in a hospital on a psychiatrist's couch and let something slowly engulf you, which is what happened. I lay down and something slowly engulfed me." As he started getting high, Ginsberg was put through a series of psychological tests -- word association, Rorschach inkblots, arithmetic problems -- which struck him as quite absurd at the time. "What difference does it make?" he kept asking the attendants. While they measured his psychological responses, the poet -- having read Huxley -- was waiting for God to show up inside his brain.

When it came time for the EEC tests, Ginsberg proposed a rather unusual experiment that had been suggested by his friend William S. Burroughs. He wanted to see what would happen if he looked at a stroboscope blinking in synchronization with his alpha rhythms while he was high on acid. The doctors connected the flicker machine to the EEC apparatus so that the alpha waves emanating from his brain set off the strobe effect. "It was like watching my own inner organism," said Ginsberg. "There was no distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery around me. I began thinking that if I let this go on, something awful would happen. I would be absorbed into the electrical network grid of the entire nation. Then I began feeling a slight crackling along the hemispheres of my skull. I felt my soul being sucked out through the light into the wall socket and going out."

Ginsberg had had enough. He asked the doctors to turn the flicker machine off, but the "high anxiety" lingered. The clinical atmosphere of the laboratory made it hard for him to relax. As the trip wore on, he got deeper and deeper into a tangle: "I had the impression that I was an insignificant speck on a giant spider web, and that the spider was slowly coming to get me, and that the spider was God or the Devil -- I wasn't sure -- but I was the victim. I thought I was trapped in a giant web or network of forces beyond my control that were perhaps experimenting with me or were perhaps from another planet or were from some super-government or cosmic military or science-fiction Big Brother."

http://www.american-buddha.com/aciddreams.healacid.htm

[American Dream]

A Counter-History of the California Ideology

Excerpted from: http://deterritorialinvestigations.word ... -ideology/

From Cybernetics to Spies


The cast of the Macy Conferences

In 1946 a neurophsyiologist named Warren McCulloch joined together with the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation to launch a series of conferences that brought together some of the best minds of the Cold War era; now simply referred to as the ‘Macy Conferences,’ this extensive think-tank sessions marked the point in which cybernetic theory would emerge from the corridors of academia and break into into the mainstream with its full, interdisciplinary force. Found alongside one another in the conferences’ canopies were philosophers, mathematicians, anthropologists, medical doctors, psychologists… these included Norbert wiener, himself the de-factor ‘founder’ of cybernetics; Gregory Bateson and his wife, Margaret Mead, both anthropologists; scientific visionary J.C.R. Licklider, one of the fathers of nuclear weaponry, John von Neumann; and cutting-edge social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld. Common amongst this individuals was the quest for a new way to view the world both scientifically and socially, as well as a distrust for the totalitarian currents that had in the preceding years in Italy (fascism), Germany (National Socialism), and Russia (the USSR): Brian Holmes recounts rumours that the participants themselves had more than a passing interest in a work titled The Authoritarian Personality, published by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (the intellectual home-base of radical thinkers like Adorno, who had been a co-author of the work, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse).2 Though Holmes points out that the evidence “for direct connections between the Macy Conferences and The Authoritarian Personality is slim,” there is certainly room for at least indirection ties between the two moments: Paul Lazarsfeld, nearly a decade earlier, had been a director of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Radio Project, with Adorno playing a major supporting role.

Even if the curbing of authoritarian tendencies was a subtext of the conferences, many of the players operated in a fashion counter to this perceived goal. Von Neumann had worked at the Los Alamos laboratories during the heyday of the Manhattan Project, ultimately designing the explosive lenses that made the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki a functional weapon. wiener himself suffered a series of psuedomystical existential crises over his cybernetic model, which he perceived as both an inherent model of communication and as a form of control. Writing in his 1950 work The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, he foreshadows these later thoughts by drawing the direction relationship between these two mechanisms:

When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he communicates back with me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me. When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to effective, I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed… society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities that belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and the communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.3



Meanwhile, Gregory Bateson was playing a more active role in the foreign policy establishment, utilizing his anthropological work abroad as a cover for his activities with the OSS, the United States’s clandestine services organization during the years of World War 2. During a stay in Burma, he had watched as the bombs, developed in part by his soon-to-be colleague von Neumann, exploded over Japan, and realized that this sudden leap forward in technological warfare would generate a global shift in the methodologies of international relations. He promptly drew up a letter to spymaster William Donovan on his recommendations for covert action in the newly minted atomic age: no longer could the traditional branches of the armed forces, the Army and the Navy, be the single defense agencies, while economic and diplomatic pressure’s role, he argued, would crumble under the ability of country’s to wield the power of splitting the atom. Instead, there needed to be a new agency operating under the auspices of the State Department that would conduct “clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressure.” Within several years, the OSS would be dissolved, replaced by the new cloak-and-dagger organization of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.4

Psychedelic Militarization/California’s Dreaming

It was in 1943 when Albert Hoffman, a chemist employed by the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, accidentally absorbed a small amount of a drug he that called LSD, having synthesized it several years earlier. It had a profound effect: laying down, his perception of his everyday reality shifted to an uninterrupted parade of images and colors, swirling about in a kaleidoscope of shapes and designs. Three days later, he tried the drug again at a higher dosage. Feeling the sudden onset of change in his sensory perception, he left the lab on a bicycle for home. Anxiety and panic washed over him – am I going insane? he asked himself. But soon, in the spaces of his house and after a cursory check of his vital signs, he found that he “could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and play of shapes… Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.”



A decade later Sandoz held contracts with the US Food and Drug Administration, providing large shipments of LSD that were in turn given to the CIA.5 The rationale behind this was the new paranoid climate of the Cold War: just as American spies were embedded within the Soviet bureaucratic apparatuses, there was ongoing hunts for communist agents in the US. LSD’s uncanny ability to deconstruct the normal doors of perception could possibly allow, given the right circumstances, the ability not only to gain confessions from those trained extensively not to crack under pressure, but to unmake the human mind and rebuild it from the ground up. Research into these avenues was green-lighted in 1953 under the code-name of “MK-ULTRA,” and money flowed through both secret cut-outs and private foundations for funding. Amongst these organizations was the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which was by this time being headed up by the former OSS officer Frank Fremont-Smith;6 within several years, the foundation was to set up a series of conferences modeled on the earlier Macy Conferences (and complete with many of the same members) dedicated to the study of LSD.

Gregory Bateson reemerged into the fray of this psychedelic ferment. Psychiatrists had already latched onto other uses for LSD than clandestine shenanigans – the rearranging of the senses could given the otherwise sane individual a glimpse into the mind of the schizophrenic, which meant that the drug had plenty of legitimate clinical applications. Bateson himself was doing his own work on the causes of schizophrenia, arguing that the precipitating factor was the double bind, a confused mental state arising from contradictory messages in the familial environment. Thus, for Bateson, schizophrenia was first and foremost a social phenomena, foreshadowing the arguments made by Deleuze and Guattari in their two Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. Indeed, the layout A Thousand Plateaus is designed with Bateson’s work in mind: just as each chapter in the book is divided into “plateaus” that resonate harmoniously, the anthropologist took cybernetic living systems into a nearly holistic dimension with a model that linked together the mental and the greater ecological world in a series of intense, fluctuating plateaus. Its impossible to tell if LSD had any discernible impact on this turn Bateson’s thinking (though he occasionally hinted that it did), it is known that he did indeed receive LSD from none other than a doctor on the payroll of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.7

MK-ULTRA, by this point, had turned from vaguely sinister to the horrifying. Naomi Klein recounts much of the grimmer details in The Shock Doctrine, which traces a genealogy between the torture tactics deployed on prisoners during the War on Terror back to the CIA’s research, focusing mainly on the work that Dr. Ewen Cameron was conducting (on frequently non-consensual patients) at the Allen Memorial Institute, part of Montreal’s McGill University. Psychotropic drugs collided with electroshock therapy and sensory deprivation tanks in the psychiatric institute-turned torture changed; with agency funding, Cameron starved patients, bombarded their psyches with LSD and PCP, and with this cocktail, immersed them in the sensory deprivation tanks for upwards of a month. In one disturbing moment, one patient was put in a drug sleep for sixty-five days, only to be awakened from the drug induced comas to eat and use the bathroom.8 But yet the money continued to flow to Cameron, much of it through an agency cut-out called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a rather innocuous-sounding title for the actions conducted under its mantle; one the board of directors set Adolph Berle, a mainstay of the moneyed liberal elite. He too was disturbed by what he saw: in his personal diary he wrote that he “was frightened about this one. If the scientists do what they have laid out for themselves, men will become manageable ants.”9

Luckily for us, it didn’t turn out this way. In fact, the blowback of the operation would prove to be quite the opposite. Fast forward in time:

…someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eyelids… I was afraid, because I honestly thought that it was all in my mind, ‘and that I had finally flipped out.

I sought a person I trusted… he held me for a long time, and we grew closer than two people can be… our bones merged, our skin was one skin, there was no place where we could be separated, where he stopped and I began. This closeness was impossible to describe in any but melodramatic term… still, I did feel that we became merged and one in the true sense, that there was nothing that could separate us, and that it had a meaning beyond any that had ever been.10

This is the description of a journalist assigned to the first of the electric acid tests; against the backdrop of strobe machines and the bodies twirling and dancing to the Grateful Dead, she had consumed kool-aid that, unbeknownst to her, were spiked with high doses of LSD. These trip festivals, autonomous anarchic zones were psychedelics were consumed and bodily relations were freely traded, were the brainchildren of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a nomadic band of aesthetic revolutionaries who were busy bridging the gap between the Beat Generation and the blossoming hippy counterculture through the dual platforms of individual freedom and the use of hallucinogenics. Kesey’s introduction to the world of LSD had not, however, been in the domain of the counterculture…

Lovell told him [Kesey] about some experiments in the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with “psychomimetic” drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered.11

Kesey was turned on to LSD by the CIA, Kesey then helped to turn on an entire generation. He wasn’t the only one: Allen Ginsberg took the drug on the advice of Bateson, and Robert Hunter, who was to become the songwriter for the Grateful Dead, ingested LSD and mescaline under the watchful eyes of MK-ULTRA scientists at Stanford University. In the beginning, the CIA’s search for a medical antidote for the Cold War transformed the agency into not only a drug dealer, but one of the most important influences in the rising counterculture that was coalescing into the New Left.


Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters

Meanwhile, other research was being conducted in the military establishment, in the insulated offices and labs of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It was here that the advancements in cybernetic theory were frantically being applied in search of a new platform of network communication – just as Bateson had foreseen ha ow political alignments would shift in the shadow of the atomic bomb, the scientists there and at the related RAND Corporation had realized that a nuclear attack on the homeland would shatter the nation’s ability to govern and share information. The adequate response would be to development other methods of communication; to establish it in a pattern of interlocking networks, it could continue on in such an event.

To assist, ARPA brought into its fold a former Macy Conference attendee, J.C.R Licklider, who in 1963 had already envisioned a systematic virtual complex that he had called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Licklider would do very little physical work on the creation of the network, but through his position as head of the agency’s Information Processing Technology Office, he hammered out ideas that would come to be the entire paradigm of contemporary computer usage: windows, graphics, the keyboard, digital information shared through packets over the wires, the mouse. ARPA absorbed these ideas, and by the end of the sixties the organization had created a very rudimentary method for the transmission of these info-packets – the ARPAnet. Licklider continued to took towards the future, and in 1968 he published a paper called “The Computer as Communication Device,” which foresaw a state where inter-computer communication would take place through regional networks that would in turn grow into larger, multiregional networks: the internet.



The work being done on many of Licklider’s ancillary was taking place at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. There, with ARPA funding abound, Douglas Engelbart was developing early hypertext programs, forerunners to graphic user interfaces, and the technology that would become the modern day mouse. SRI was also a hotbed for government-funded LSD research – and Engelbart himself had been an earlier participant in the sessions.12 ARPA, however, was taking him in different directions. In 1967 he applied for a patent for the finalized mouse design, and the chorded keyboard was also nearly completion. Finally, in 1968, he put together a mass demonstration of these technologies and the others that were being developed by him and his colleagues: teleconferencing, bootstrapping (an idea he had conceived while on LSD), hypermedia, and real-time information editors. And assisting him by videotaping this conference, retrospectively called “The Mother of All Demos,” was a young countercultural entrepreneur by the name of Stewart Brand.

Commune Capitalism

Before he helped with the Mother of All Demos, Brand had cut his teeth in logistics work by assisting Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in putting together the infamous Trips Festivals and Acid Tests. Before this, he had received his first experiences with LSD through government-funded research on the drug; the session was supervised by Jim Fadiman, later the head of the SRI division where Engelbart conducted his work.13 Under the care of Fadiman and a team of psychologists, the trip took place in a highly procedural environment: under careful monitoring, he was directed to observe paintings and eastern mandalas and experience the soundscapes of classical music. “Put off by the highly structured, psuedoscientific trappings” of the session, Brand drifted into the fray of Kesery and the Pranksters, who he saw as practicing a strange urban “techno-tribalism” that was articulating, in its own distinctive way, the man-machine relationships being probed by the government researchers...

[American Dream]

And the rest of the above article:

Writes Fred Turner:
Although Brand later recalled that Kesey and the Pranksters were unfamiliar with Buckminster Fuller’s writings and with cybernetic theory when he first read them, their technological performances suggest a deep sympathy with both. For Kesey and company, body and landscape, community and state, and sometimes even biological and electronic systems were mirrors of each other… If all the world was a stage, they were living here and now, in the real, material space of everyday life, and at the same time inside a movie, in media space. They were both themselves and characters in a scene – a pattern of self-understanding that they saw as congruent with the experience of self on LSD.14

Like so many other wrapped up in the zeitgeist, Brand was fascinated by cybernetics. He had devoured the works of Wiener and others, in particular, the experimental ecology being forged by Bateson. Brand’s own vision of environmentally sustainable, bottom-up communities where individuals could live in touch with one another and the earth they traversed was clearly rooted in a spiritual-spin on systems theory, and Bateson’s work “spoke to the ‘clear conceptual bonding of the cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking.”15 The two quickly became friends, with the anthropological philosopher’s influence peppering the pages of Brand’s newly-formed Whole Earth Catalog.

The Whole Earth Catalog had been launched in 1968, the same year of the Mother of All Demos. With the subtitle “access to tool,” Brand used the magazine to attempt to ‘liberate technology,’ in a way, in order to fuse its advancements with the countercultural desire for creative, sustainable, do-it-yourself living. Inside each issue were seven sections, including one on ecological cybernetics titled “Understanding Whole Systems,” and others on “Communication,” “Nomadics,” “Industry and Craft,” and “Shelter and Land Use.” These sections were complimented with advertisements for various tools and books to use them, conversations on different forms of living shelter and the environments that they could be utilized in, schematics, and the prices and suppliers for the items. Thus, Brand’s communalism was countercultural in the sense that it stressed individual liberty and that it promoted ways to effectively “drop-out” of the greater system and build up alternative; at the same time,The Whole Earth Catalog was still market based, though in many ways it reflects Manuel deLanda’s later division between markets-as-meshworks and antimarkets (corporations and states). Years and years later, Steve Jobs would discuss the intricate layout of the catalog as a forerunner to the creative uses of Google search engines… but in 1968, Brand was busy networking his communal idealism with the researchers being carried out by Engelbart and his colleagues at SRI. The symmetry was clear, as Turner points out: “The Whole Earth Catalog… would ultimately embody many of the ARC group’s [Engelbart's unit at SRI] assumptions about the ideal relationship between information, technology, and community… the Catalog would link multiple, geographically distributed groups and allow them to collaborate – albeit not in real time. And like the hyperlinked texts of Engelbart’s system, the Whole Earth Catalog presented its readers with a system of connections.”16


In 1974 Brand took the proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog and launched a secondary journal, CoEvolution Quarterly. While the basic model of focusing on D.I.Y living and the tool market carried over from its predecessor, this incarnation heavily featured complex social and environmental commentaries: articles ran the gamut from the Gaia hypothesis to transcripts of talks given by Lewis Mumford and poems by Allen Ginsberg to libertarian arguments for the flat-tax system. Importantly CoEvolution Quartely had been established in part as a “homage of Bateson”;17 just as Bateson sought to implode the binaries separating disciplinary research, one of the aims of the Quarterlywas to unified ecology and technology by blending together the differing academic approaches taken in the sciences and the humanities.

The Techno-Utopian Digerati

Over the course of the next decade, the multiplicitous strands that had built up across the fifties and sixties triggered a major shift that dragged the world forward in its wake. 1976 saw the rise of microcomputer systems developed by kids who had grown up on the Whole Earth Catalog and periodic flirtations with LSD. In Palo Alto, California (where exactly twenty years prior Batson had lead his group of cyberneticians in crafting the ‘double bind’ theory of schizophrenia), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first apple computers, while in New Mexico Bill Gates and Microsoft were gaining traction. In 1981 the government relaxed the military monopoly of the internet when the National Science Foundation set up the computer science network; a year later the TCP/IP internet protocols were standardized and mass access began to trickle in. Stewart Brand held his stance as part of the new internet vanguard: 1985 saw him leaving behind ink and paper for cyberspace with the creation of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the WELL), in the beginning a dial-up digital bulletin board. Joining him as founder was Larry Brilliant, who would much later head up Google’s philanthropic arm.

As the internet transitioned in commercialized, public space in the late 80s through early 90s, the WELL began a hotbed of cyberintellectualism. The growing list of participants included the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation (including John Perry Barlow, who years earlier had been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead), and Kevin Kelly, Louis Rossetto, and Jane Metcalfe, the brains behind Wired magazine. In other words, through Brand, the WELL and its offshoot publications and foundations can be viewed as a manifestation of a series of strange and contradictory turns in the byways of cybernetic history: the interchange between control and revolt, countercultural idealism and market pragmatics. The ideological underpinning of this assemblage, the “California Ideology,” can be found in often-quoted statements by Timothy Leary. The first happened in 1967, with the suggestion that the generation of the New Left “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” After the rise of the microcomputer and the internet, he changed his stance: “PC is the LSD of the 1990s… turn on, boot up, jack in.”

In 1996, John Brockman looked back at this time in his work Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite.18 He bundled together the individuals of WELL, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wired with techno-entrepreneurs like Gates, Jobs, and Wozniak; beyond being electronic visionaries, they were also manifestations of the “New Economy,” where free markets gained a new sense of urgency with the global proliferation of information processing technology. Wired‘s own “Encyclopedia of the New Economy” elaborates on this, revealing that at its core their approach is no different than that of post-Fordist neoliberalism at large:

When we talk about the new economy, we’re talking about a world in which people work with their brains instead of their hands. A world in which communications technology creates global competition – not just for running shoes and laptop computers, but also for bank loans and other services that can’t be packed into a crate and shipped. A world in which innovation is more important than mass production. A world in which investment buys new concepts or the means to create them, rather than new machines. A world in which rapid change is constant. A world at least as different from what came before it as the industrial age was from its agricultural predecessor. A world so different its emergence can only be described as a revolution.19

Of course, the fact that proper “free markets” are an impossibility in the domain of anti-markets is utterly glossed over, as well as the problematic of uneven development planes between the global North and global South. At the same time, the expressly right-wing libertarian belief that the free market can generate the transnational smooth space may be an indirect hold-over from the utopian longings of the New Left, indicating the ability of post-Fordist to grasp precisely these ethos and recast them in its own light. Whats left of the story is then a tangled near-myth of one of more unlikely passageways between modernism and postmodernism, from discipline’s rigidities to control’s flexibility. But the question is this: can reflections of narratives like this shed any light on exodus, on how the machine (in both a literal and Guattarian transversal sense) could potentially be liberated?

[Lord Balto]

I prefer Tantra-Induced Titillation Syndrome.

Seriously though, has the medical profession now become the gate keepers for what is considered acceptable religion? Perhaps they should come up with an acronym for people who fall for those big-haired preachers one sees on late night TV. JEEEsus!

[American Dream]

I prefer Tantra-Induced Titillation Syndrome.

Seriously though, has the medical profession now become the gate keepers for what is considered acceptable religion? Perhaps they should come up with an acronym for people who fall for those big-haired preachers one sees on late night TV. JEEEsus!

TIDS is not like that, at all.

To understand, you need to go back to the beginning.

As to the "acronym for people who fall for those big-haired preachers one sees on late night TV":
"FIDS"- Fundamentalist-Induced Delusional Syndrome?