Psychedelia, p.66
Psychedelia, page 66
From a purely lysergic perspective Kleps deserves credit for his determination to approach and describe the LSD trip for what it is, not as a metaphor for something else, an attitude that he was almost alone in during the 1960s. Despite his professional background he refrained from the typical psychologization of the trip experience, nor did he fall into the Vedic-Oriental trap where the IFIF gang waddled around ineffectually. He shared the common acidhead admiration for the I-Ching, which in his interpretation fit the great attention he gave to synchronicity. The Neo-American Church, whose radical and often satirical teachings are summarized in the Boo-Hoo Bible (1967-71), grew to include a few thousand members and numerous local centers around the USA. The network was partly used for the distribution of the 'sacrament', meaning LSD (and at times peyote), which reportedly was produced for Kleps by Nick Sand.
In addition to the element of parody, it is clear that Art Kleps designated his psychedelic network a 'church' for the same reason as Leary would, in order to gain legal exceptions awarded to the peyote-based Native American Church. Despite being awarded a chance to present his case at a congressional hearing, these attempts did not succeed and look like meaningless pipe dreams in retrospect, in light of the obvious cultural and historical differences. Behind the fa'ade, Kleps himself was as skeptical as Huston Smith of the communal-ritual potential of LSD, although this insight may not have reached him until later (his original 1974 account is less dogmatic):
Every occultist-supernaturalist group I knew about which attempted to integrate the use of LSD into its communal delusional system self-destructed like Harbingers, although not in such a dramatic fashion. They disintegrate because The Psychedelic Experience cannot be made to conform to consensual expectations or indoctrination or peer pressure. Set and setting are important because they can make things easy or difficult, but they are not determinant, which is one of the great virtues of psychedelic experience. Nobody can control it.
(Millbrook by Art Kleps, 1998 revision)
Kleps' 1966 testimony before the senate sub-committee (initiated by presumed ex-acidhead Bobby Kennedy) was nevertheless lucid and inspired, unlike the similar appearance that a poorly prepared Tim Leary had given a few months earlier. The problematic chasm between the typical psychedelic congregation and the 'church' and 'religion' that Kleps, Leary and others were trying to sell lies open to see. Kleps generously describes Leary as a Jesus or Mohammed of the psychedelic religion, then admits that '…The Church actually is more in the tradition of the mystery religions of ancient Greece. – Replacing the 'religions' of that statement with the historically more accurate 'cults', and one finds Kleps explaining precisely why the psychedelic community of the time could not be given the peyote exemption of the Native Americans. The Washington politicians probably never seriously considered this idea, yet Kleps was told later by a DC insider that his testimony had done more to postpone the federal legislation against LSD than any other. In recounting the event, Kleps congratulated himself on having brought Leary away from the old IFIF idea of psychedelic 'training centers' with 'authorized guides', and to instead pursue the religious angle. The soundness of either idea is dubious, but the rapid developments in an increasingly lysergic America would soon make the whole question moot.
As a peculiar postscript to these '60s endeavors, the Temple of The True Inner Light was founded in 1980 in a style reminiscent of Aiken's organization. Based in New York City, this 'temple' was in actuality just a new variant of the old spiritual training center, the main difference being its focus on DPT, dipropyltryptamine. DPT and the closely related DiPT are one of several lesser known tryptamine variants that evolved out of Stephen Szara's DMT research in the 1950s-60s. Its effects have been compared to a strong dose of psilocybin or DMT proper.7 As brought up by Shulgin in TiHKAL, DPT has remained unscheduled while essentially every other conceivable hallucinogen has been strongly restricted. The reason for this is unclear, but the oversight allowed the Temple of Inner Light to conduct their guided trip services undisturbed for a long time. Those visiting the Inner Light's headquarters, which were operational well into the 2000s, were offered a brief introduction to the Temple's syncretic-Christian teachings, then given a chance to smoke or drink DPT while listening to music and a religious sermon. Some visitors reported feeling uncomfortable by the spaced-out behavior of the Temple officiants. Adding to its reputation as an unpredictable drug mainly for hardcore heads, modern psychedelic researcher Daniel Pinchbeck describes a rather harrowing DPT trip in Breaking Open The Head (2002).
4
During the early days of television, producers frequently spiced up the programming by putting exotic and mysterious phenomena on the air. Experiences way out of the ordinary could be broadcast into the homes of millions, and the preparation entailed nothing more than finding the sufficiently exotic person or object and place it before the rolling cameras. So things like Korla Pandit's wondrously dated TV show came about, or the manifestation of a living Zen master, or the strange spectacle of a Theremin operator. In 1948, American TV viewers were treated to a performance of the million-selling "Nature Boy" by Nat King Cole, enjoyable but not overly exotic. The unexpected appearance of the song's composer Eden Ahbez, entering the stage leading a bicycle with hair down to his shoulders before taking a lotus position on the studio floor, is likely to have filled the Korla Pandit quota for the day.
Ahbez, it was understood, led a genuine bohemian life very different from Middle-America, and the naturist praise of his hit song was not just Tin Pan Alley words on a paper, but the reality in which he lived. Unlike many outsiders Eden Ahbez accepted the games and glamour of Tinseltown, and for a few years he presented the persona the public requested (his hair was long, but very well- groomed) to become a much-loved household eccentric. In May '48 Life magazine ran a picture spread showing Ahbez' lifestyle of vegetarian meals, bicycle rides and outdoors sleeping, arguably the earliest proto-hippie media report in existence. Unaffected by the attention, Ahbez remained fully devoted to his quest for spiritual purity, and private photos taken during a period of cleansing self-starvation display a famished human skeleton that would have appalled Life magazine's readership.
As Eden Ahbez' story unfolded it became clear that he was not a single visionary, but rather a representative of something new in American society. Too small in numbers to be called a movement, the strength of the personalities involved nevertheless assured that they would not go by unnoticed. These were the Nature Boys, named after Eden's song and a popular element in the 1950s admiration for exotic lifestyles. Gypsy Boots was an early acquaintance of Ahbez and they shared a vagabond life in California's '40s, camping outdoors and surviving on fruit and vegetables, thereby laying a foundation for the pioneering knowledge of organic health food that made Boots famous in later years. Gypsy Boots remained a visible presence well into the hippie era, and has been credited with explicitly bridging the early efforts of the Nature Boys to the organic counterculture of the 1960s-70s. Another important figure in the alternative culture was Jack Lalanne, whose emphasis on physical fitness would exert a massive influence on later generations. Centered in Southern California, the Nature Boys included several other less familiar names, all following a lifestyle close to nature and looking very much like timewarped hippies with long hair and beards and handmade garments.
While slightly younger than the original Nature Boys, future Source Family leader Jim Baker (a k a Father Yod, Yahowa) formed another direct link between the alternative West Coast cultures of the 1940s-50s and the rural hippie communes of the 1970s. As a young visionary maintaining an organic lifestyle in Los Angeles in the 1950s, Baker was also an early bodybuilder and martial arts expert, and at the time worked among other things as a sandal-maker. In the '60s he opened one of the first all-vegetarian restaurants in the world while studying under Yogi Bhajan, before transforming into spiritual commune leader Father Yod in 1972 and selling the popular Source restaurant a few years later. Jim Baker's roots in alternative cultures ran all the way back to late '40s impulses from Ahbez and Boots, and may have been a reason why his spiritual-communal hippie Family proved more long-lived and credible than most similar endeavors.
Boldly pioneering as they may appear, the Californian Nature Boys were actually representatives of an even older and lesser known tradition of devoted naturists. To find the origins of the spiritual-pantheistic lifestyle that informed Eden Ahbez and his brethren, along with hundreds of hippie communes, one needs to go back to late 19th century Europe. In a Germany thoroughly marked by industrialization and urbanization there arose, almost at the same time, three distinct subcultures that would have repercussions on alternate lifestyles around the world. As described in Gordon Kennedy's Children Of The Sun (1998), the movements known as Wandervogel, Lebensreform and Naturmenschen all stood for distinct principles and ways of life, yet shared a substantial common ground.
This common ground may in turn be traced back to the pagan heritage of old Germania, to which Christening came late and unbidden, along with a pantheistic legacy expressed in Paracelsus' philosophy of nature, which spoke of 'the Light of Nature' and considered everything living to be interconnected. Paracelsus and other early Theosophists (distinctly different from the Blavatsky school) such as Jacob Boehme inquired into the mysteries of nature to find divine revelation, yet were often forced to adapt their philosophies to avoid accusations of heresy. In the 19th century pantheism arose again as a powerful current in the intellectual climate, affecting not only the aforementioned Transcendentalists in the USA, but also European Romantics, particularly in England and Germany. The influential Naturphilosophien of Joseph Von Schelling was the purest expression of a tradition whose recurring force was so strong that it later caused Friedrich Schlegel to contemplate whether there existed a special German philosophical bond with nature.
The young men and women who gathered into the radical lifestyles of Wandervogel and Naturmenschen were not philosophers, although some of them (such as the renowned painter Fidus) were artists. Most of all, these were children of the new bourgeoisie who were dissatisfied with the lifeless existence in the modern world of machines and cities, a background obviously shared with their grandchildren the hippie ruralists. While these German naturist schools took different routes, they shared a love and reverence for nature and the outdoors life, engaging in solarism (sun worship) and honoring a pagan-pastoral calendar of equinoxes and agricultural cycles. There was a great interest in natural medicine, and the homeopathic schools of today can be traced directly back to these German subcultures from the decades around 1900. The Naturmenschen let their hair grow long and the men sported unkempt beards, which together with their unassuming clothing of tunics, sandals or bare feet made them look very much like proto-hippies. Vegetarianism was a given element on the agenda, as was abstention from alcohol, and there was also an interest in nudism along with progressive thoughts on gender relations and sexuality. Drugs were presumably never an issue among these schools, due to the lack of psychoactive compounds (probably not even hashish) among the Continental young at the time.
As their name suggests, the Wandervogel roamed the German countryside, seeking paths through the forests and open land rather than the roads and towns of modernity, living off what nature provided. Many of them were deliberately 'wild' in their appearance and behavior, and there was clearly a streak of rebellion in these movements, much like in the 1960s-70s. The Swiss town of Ascona became a focal point for naturist bohemians from all across Europe, where writers like Hermann Hesse (who wrote a treatise about his experiences from naturistic living) and D H Lawrence came in contact with the German lifestyle radicals. Although not directly involved with the movements, Rudolf Steiner's influential Anthroposophy was a structured philosophy built on many of the same ideas, and the strongly felt wanderlust of the era also resounds with its leading poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.
While Rilke's curious lifestyle infatuation with the dying nobility of Europe stands in direct opposition to the egalitarian Naturmenschen, his sense of affinity with the rootless and often impoverished wanderers is visible in the collection from his early 'pilgrim' years, the Book Of Hours (1901-05). His later poetry deepens his immersion in a symbolic pantheism in which the observing eye transcends its usual human concerns to take an angelic-Orphic perspective that has a distinctly psychedelic feel. Rilke's many travels across a Europe in rapid transformation engendered a kind of impersonal vagabond aesthetic, which sweeps across inner and outer landscapes with equal authority. His major work Duineser Elegien (1922) is complex and notoriously difficult to translate, yet its unique qualities has made it popular among psychedelicists from Huston Smith to Terence McKenna. One of the more accessible translations was in fact made by the Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter (Duino Elegies, 1989).
Among the three German naturist schools, the Lebensreform stood for the most clearly expressed program, with tenets and visions that are remarkably similar to the typical rural commune of the 1970s counterculture, as well as the 'green party' politics that emerged in European parliaments. When the Nationalsocialists came to power in Germany there was an initial interest in these long-running naturist movements, but soon they, like everything else, were found to be incompatible with Nazi politics and life became dangerous for the devoted and leading Naturmenschen. Many of them migrated to the USA, and while their existence in Germany was eradicated, a new and intriguing chapter began that would bring the ideals and inventions of the 19th century naturist underground all the way up to modern-day hippie collectives. According to Children Of The Sun, the very first American 'nature boy' was the German immigrant Bill Pester, who arrived in the US in 1906. Long-haired and bearded, Pester wandered around California before building a small hut in a palm grove near Palm Springs, earning what he needed on crafts and vegetarian advise, and taking long hikes in the archaic desert landscape.
Man was intended to live in a state of nature' I would advise you to go back to nature' I have little use for money and I am not bothered by politics or religion as I have no special creed.
(Bill Pester c1920, quote from Children Of The Sun)
Pester became something of a regional celebrity, and the local Cahuilla tribe were impressed enough by this white man who lived near nature that they allowed him to stay on their land for decades. A young Eden Ahbez encountered him during his early vagabond years, and as a mentor to Ahbez, Bill Pester became a living link between the German Naturmenschen and the first generation of Nature Boys. Another ex-German naturist Maximilian Sikinger effected a similar cultural transmission when joining the pioneering Americans during the 1940s. In addition to these direct forebears of the hippie ruralists, Gordon Kennedy's book portrays several other German immigrants who with their Naturmensch background sowed the seeds in North America for homeopathy, modern vegetarianism, fitness training, chiropractics, and similar schools of alternative health and medicine.
5
In the afterglow of the Summer Of Love there was a moment when it seemed that the next step ahead for the psychedelic counterculture, whatever that step was, would mark the final break- through into mainstream society for the new generation and its ideals. In late 1967, clearly affected by the utopian atmosphere, psychedelic researcher William McGlothlin raised the question whether the on-going acidhead movement was in fact the beginnings of a new mass religion. The psychedelicized dropouts, McGlothlin argued, were in a position very similar to that of the early adherents to Christianity. His paper, which appeared in the Journal Of Psychedelic Drugs #2, was written in response to a presentation by noted religious historian Huston Smith at a seldom discussed LSD conference at Berkeley University in 1966. 8
Despite a benign attitude to psychedelic spirituality, Huston Smith outlined several reasons why the current psychedelic lifestyle would never attain religious status. In his response, McGlothlin suggests that while Smith's critique rang true in mid-1966, so much had changed during the 18 months since then that the notion of a new psychedelic religion could not be readily dismissed. Unfortunately for McGlothlin, events on the horizon would soon prove that it was he, rather than Smith, whose perspective was distorted by zeitgeist. Smith's skepticism towards the psychedelic scene as a religious 'movement' was largely validated by the rapid disintegration of the spiritual counterculture during 1968-69, when his concerns about the lack of organization, visionary leadership, formal doctrine, ethical and social code, and the poor integration with the mainstream community was laid bare for all to see. Beyond the psychedelic trip experience, the new rock music, and the hopelessly vague 'flower-power' outlook, the young bohemian generation seemed inadequately supported by consensual structures.
While McGlothlin's speculation on Psychedelia as a new major religion is easy to dismiss as a starry-eyed hippie fantasy, Huston Smith wasn't rejecting the idea on principle. After a powerful mescaline trip with Tim Leary at Harvard as early as 1961, Smith was generally favorable to psychedelic concepts, and he supported the hallucinogenic theory of the kykeon when this was still a controversial topic.9 In discussing the religious potential of the on-going LSD wave, he repeated a viewpoint first stated in the scholarly turmoil following the 'Miracle at Marsh Chapel' in 1964 (see Chapter IX), namely that psychedelic drugs produce visionary experiences that are indistinguishable from classic mystic-religious ecstasy. This was the formal scientific outcome of the Marsh Chapel experiment, and the controversial result fuelled the flames of what is probably the most prestigious academic debate ever to enter the annals of psychedelic culture.
