Introduction

Step into the world of Hakim Bey, a realm where anarchy meets mysticism, and freedom is a lived experience, not a distant dream. This guide is your portal to understanding Bey's revolutionary philosophies and a roadmap to living them yourself.

Who is Hakim Bey?

Hakim Bey, the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson, is a radical writer and philosopher known for his influential work on anarchism and the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). His ideas blend anarchist thought with mystical traditions, challenging conventional notions of society and freedom.

Hakim Bey's Philosophy

Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ)

The TAZ is a fleeting space where freedom reigns, free from external control. It's created through collective action, art, and the breaking of norms.

Immediatism

Immediatism is about engaging directly with experiences and people, stripping away the layers of mediation imposed by society. It's a call to live authentically and connect meaningfully.

Poetic Action

Poetic Action involves creating startling moments through art and actions that disrupt the ordinary, provoking thought and challenging perceptions without causing harm.

Historical Manifestations of TAZ

Bey's concepts are not confined to theory; they resonate throughout history where communities have formed autonomous zones. Below is a comprehensive timeline:

How to Engage with Bey's Philosophies

Embracing Hakim Bey's ideas is about transforming your approach to life. Here's how you can start:

1. Create Your Own TAZ:

   Organize a pop-up event, a secret party, or a spontaneous gathering that exists only for a moment.

2. Practice Immediatism:

   Engage in activities that require direct interaction—start a local art project, host a workshop, or form a discussion group.

3. Engage in Poetic Action:

   Plan a non-destructive prank or art installation that surprises and delights, prompting others to see the world differently.

4. Disconnect from Mediated Experiences:

   Reduce reliance on mass media and technology. Experience moments without filters or screens.

5. Embrace the Present:

   Focus on the here and now. Practice mindfulness and appreciate the immediacy of your experiences.

Your Journey Starts Here

You may already be closer to Bey's philosophies than you realize. Reflect on your daily life:

• Do you seek authentic experiences over virtual ones?
• Have you participated in spontaneous events that felt liberating?
• Are you drawn to art that challenges norms?

If you answered yes, you're already on the path. Continue to explore and push the boundaries of your freedom.

Appendix: Key Concepts Defined

• Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ): A transient space where individuals can experience true freedom, operating outside the control of established authority and societal norms.
• Immediatism: The pursuit of direct, unmediated experiences and interactions, emphasizing the importance of the present moment and authentic engagement.
• Poetic Action: Acts of artistic expression designed to disrupt the ordinary and provoke new ways of thinking, without causing physical harm.
• Anarchy: A political philosophy that advocates for societies without hierarchies or centralized authority, emphasizing voluntary association and mutual aid.

Hakim Bey’s Contribution to Hashisheen: The End of Law

Understanding the Role of an Anarchist Philosopher in an Esoteric Soundscape

Further Resources

• Hakim Bey - Hashisheen: The End of Law (Full Album Playlist) - This bandcamp playlist includes all tracks from the album Hashisheen: The End of Law, featuring Hakim Bey's contributions through spoken word performances.
  

  Fifth project by Bill Laswell for Sub Rosa, published in 1999.
  
  Hashisheen is the result of two years of hard work and collaborations. This conceptual project, guided and supervised by Bill Laswell, is presented through voices and music from artists such as William S. Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Jah Wobble, Paul Schütze, Techno Animal, Genesis P-Orridge, and many others.
  
  A series of pieces about the ancient (11th century) and mystic story of Hasan bin Sabbah, Alamut—the "Garden of Earthly Delights"—and the rites of the Hashisheens (also called the "Assassins").
  
  "The work of William S. Burroughs and collaborator Brian Gysin is the main inspiration and key to the initiation of The Hashisheen project," Bill Laswell explains. Their cut-up experiments influenced modern fiction, film, and contemporary collage music. Laswell delved deeply into North African and Arab culture, ritual magick, and the legendary story of Hasan-i Sabbah, whose libertarian doctrine declared: "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted."
  
  The project brings together spoken word performances by iconic figures like Iggy Pop, William S. Burroughs, and Hakim Bey, accompanied by musical contributions from artists such as Jah Wobble, Sussan Deyhim, Techno Animal, and others. This evocative journey into anarchist philosophy and mysticism unveils the inner history of the Hashisheens, their rituals, and their enduring legacy as a radical sect and secret society.
  
  Hashisheen: The End of Law blends ambient music and storytelling, creating a timeless experience that captures the essence of chaos, rebellion, and mysticism. It invites listeners into the rich tapestry of Islamic esotericism and the heretical traditions of the Assassins.

  Controversial and provocative, the album Hashisheen: The End of Law, produced by Bill Laswell, is the result of two years of intense collaboration and features contributions from a range of iconic voices such as William S. Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, and Hakim Bey. Published in 1999 by Sub Rosa, the album explores the mystical story of Hasan-i Sabbah, Alamut, and the Hashisheens, blending spoken word and ambient music to create a visionary experience.
  
  "The work of William S. Burroughs and collaborator Brian Gysin is the main inspiration and key to the initiation of The Hashisheen project," Bill Laswell explains. Inspired by Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up experiments and their obsession with mystical and heretical traditions, the project delves into chaos, ritual magick, and the shadowy tales of secret societies. This conceptual journey combines legendary texts, magical legends, and reflections from both admirers and adversaries of the Assassins.
  
  The album is a sonic tapestry featuring voices such as Genesis P-Orridge, Sussan Deyhim, Nicole Blackman, and Hakim Bey. It encapsulates the radical spirit of the Hashisheens, whose libertarian creed is summed up in their famous motto: "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted." Whether reflecting on the lush gardens of Alamut, the rituals of initiation, or the tumultuous power struggles of the Crusades, this album is a captivating exploration of anarchist philosophy and mysticism.

• Unraveling Hakim Bey’s Vision: Ontological Anarchy - This YouTube video offers an in-depth exploration of Hakim Bey’s philosophy of ontological anarchy, focusing on his radical ideas of freedom, autonomy, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). Embark on a profound journey into the heart of Ontological Anarchy with this immersive exploration of Hakim Bey's radical philosophy. Through this video, we delve deep into the principles of chaos, desire, and freedom, challenging conventional understandings of order, state, and societal structures. Discover how ontological anarchy critiques and reimagines our interactions, values, and the very essence of creativity, urging us not just to contemplate but to actively participate in the ceaseless flow of becoming. Join us as we unravel the layers of this complex ideology, sparking a transformation in how we perceive and engage with the world around us. Get ready to question, create, and transform with us.
  
  

  Exploring the Depth and Meaning of Hakim Bey’s Ontological Anarchy

  Hakim Bey’s Ontological Anarchy offers a profound and challenging vision of existence, one that calls for an active embrace of chaos and a rejection of imposed structures. Let’s delve deeper into the philosophy’s key ideas and their broader implications.

  Core Concepts in Depth

  Chaos as Generative
  Chaos, often viewed negatively as disorder or destruction, is reinterpreted by Bey as the source of creation. In this vision, chaos is life itself—dynamic, unpredictable, and fertile with possibilities.
  
  By drawing on myths like Tiamat (a primordial goddess symbolizing chaos) and scientific ideas from complexity theory, Bey elevates chaos as essential for growth and transformation.
  
  Chaos is a state of pure potential where creativity, freedom, and authenticity can flourish. It challenges societal fears of unpredictability, urging us to embrace it as the foundation of meaningful existence.
  
  The Rejection of Order
  Order, in Bey’s philosophy, is not stability but stagnation—a rigid framework that suppresses life’s natural dynamism.
  
  Systems of statehood, governance, and even morality are seen as artificial constructs designed to constrain human freedom.
  
  Ontological Anarchy asserts that these imposed orders are illusions, distracting us from the true fluidity of existence. The rejection of these constructs is not chaos for its own sake but a call to unfettered engagement with life’s inherent unpredictability.
  
  Temporality and Physicality in TAZ
  The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) embodies Bey’s vision of freedom in practice: an ephemeral space where individuals experience collective liberation and creativity.
  
  A TAZ is grounded in the real, thriving on the immediacy of shared energy and desire. It exists outside of formalized systems of control, offering a fleeting but transformative experience.
  
  Events like Burning Man exemplify this idea, creating spaces for self-expression and community while rejecting traditional structures of authority.
  
  Desire and Becoming
  Desire, for Bey, is a primal and creative force, akin to chaos itself. It is the driving energy behind human action and the key to authentic existence.
  
  Capitalism manipulates desire, transforming it into unattainable cravings that sustain cycles of alienation and scarcity. This suppression alienates individuals from their true nature and potential.
  
  Ontological Anarchy seeks to reclaim desire, aligning it with abundance and creativity. Life becomes a process of becoming, where individuals shape their values and experiences through interaction and mutual enhancement.
  
  Language as Liberation
  Traditional language, with its grammar and structure, is viewed as a tool of control—a means of defining, separating, and alienating individuals from one another and from their desires.
  
  Bey envisions a chaotic, transcendent mode of communication that connects and liberates. Words become tools of creativity, forging deeper connections rather than imposing boundaries.
  
  This approach invites us to rethink the way language shapes reality, offering the potential for a more authentic and imaginative mode of expression.
  
  Nomadism and Utopian Poetics
  Nomadism symbolizes a philosophical resistance to permanence and rigidity. It celebrates a life of fluidity, spontaneity, and risk—a rejection of societal anchors like work, ownership, and fixed identity.
  
  Utopian poetics, in this context, act as a visioning tool. They critique the present while offering glimpses of alternative possibilities. This creative practice becomes a means of practical transformation, inspiring both individual and collective reimaginings of the world.
  
  Art as Immediate and Communal
  Bey redefines art as a direct and participatory act that enriches life and builds community.
  
  This vision rejects the commodification of art—its transformation into a product for profit or preservation. Instead, art becomes a joyful, living process, reconnecting individuals to their innate creativity and to one another.
  
  Freedom as Process
  Freedom, for Bey, is not a static condition or a set of granted rights. It is an ongoing process of creation and engagement with the uncertainties of life.
  
  This view shifts the focus from external systems of governance to the individual and collective act of self-directed becoming. True freedom is experienced in the immediacy of existence, not as an abstract ideal but as a tangible, lived reality.

  Philosophical Implications

  Beyond Traditional Anarchism
  Traditional anarchism often critiques the state and advocates for alternative organizational systems rooted in natural law or inherent morality.
  
  Ontological Anarchy goes further, rejecting all predetermined orders as illusions. This includes systems proposed by anarchists themselves, which Bey sees as potentially oppressive.
  
  By embracing the fluidity of existence, Ontological Anarchy proposes a radical liberation that transcends political frameworks.
  
  Critique of Capitalism
  Capitalism thrives on the suppression of desire, creating systems of perpetual longing that commodify life and imagination.
  
  Bey’s philosophy critiques this cycle, suggesting that capitalism alienates individuals from their natural abundance and creativity. Instead of fulfilling desires, it perpetuates scarcity and negation.
  
  Ontological Anarchy fosters systems of gift exchange and creativity, where life is rooted in shared abundance rather than competitive accumulation.
  
  Existential Resonance
  Bey’s ideas resonate with existentialism, particularly its emphasis on freedom, responsibility, and meaning-making in a chaotic world.
  However, Ontological Anarchy expands this framework by emphasizing collective becoming. Freedom is not a solitary endeavor but a shared, dynamic process that evolves through interaction and creation.
  
  

  Conclusion: The Transformative Power of Ontological Anarchy

  Hakim Bey’s Ontological Anarchy challenges us to:

  • Reimagine chaos as a source of life and creativity.
  
  • Reject imposed structures that constrain freedom and spontaneity.
  
  • Engage in collective creation, fostering values of abundance and mutual enhancement.
  
  • Live authentically and immediately, embracing freedom as an ongoing process.
  
  

  Through its provocative critique and radical vision, Ontological Anarchy serves as both a philosophical framework and a call to action. It invites us to rethink our relationships with desire, creativity, and one another, offering a path toward a freer, more dynamic existence. By embracing the ceaseless flow of becoming, we transform not only ourselves but the very fabric of the world around us.

  Show Transcript

  "is anything truly certain when peering through the Kaleidoscope of existence imagine for a moment the profound uncertainty that surrounds the true nature of things hakeim Bay in his Manifesto on autological Anarchy challenges us to embrace this uncertainty here at the very precipice of philosophical exploration B posits that all societal projects as nche once suggested are founded on nothing yet it is from this void this philosophical nothingness that we must craft our realities and resistances it's a call to arms or rather a call to Minds to Envision a project and Uprising against every Proclamation that dictates the supposed nature of things as we contemplate the void the concept of nothing paradoxically begins to fill with substance chaos often misconceived as mere disorder emerges as a central theme in Ba's philosophy drawing from ancient myths and modern science alike chaos is portrayed not as a void but as a womb of potential here lies the Great Serpent be it Tiamat python or Leviathan encompassing the Primal chaos that heod and countless others have whispered about this chaos is not an absence but a pregnant silence before the cacophony of creation where nothing begins to take shape evolving beyond the confines of conventional Law and [Music] Order In The Narrative of ontological Anarchy chaos is synonymous with life itself consider the riot of colors in a blooming Meadow the Urgent protoplasmic movements of cells the unpredictable dances of subatomic particles all are embodiments of chaos through Bay's lens order is seen not as a natural state but as a form of death a cessation of the dynamic disorder that is life thus the anarchist Battle Cry that anarchy is not chaos becomes a profound misunderstanding ontological Anarchy Embraces chaos as the truest form of existence pushing back against the alien Silence of imposed [Music] order yet ontological Anarchy is distinct from traditional anarchism while anarchism seeks to dismantle the state and proposes Alternative forms of organization it often clings to a notion of natural law or inherent morality Bay diver emerging from this path suggests that such structures are anathema to True Freedom there is no natural order no predestined state of governance and Chaos all ontological claims to the contrary are inherently spurious thus ontological Anarchy is not merely a critique of statehood or societal structures but a deeper more radical rejection of all predetermined orders celebrating existential freedom and the spontaneous creation of new worlds the critique extends to the very concept of order and governance Bay's analysis posits that any form of order not born from direct spontaneous action is an illusion a mirage in the desert of existential reality such Illusions are powerful they shape societies inform laws and even dictate behaviors under the guise of morality and justice but for baay these are but Shadows on the cave wall flickering and insubstantial ontological Anarchy encourages us to wake from this Shadow play to recognize the Phantoms of order as the constructs they are and to dare to create a new even under the looming shadow of the state a giant sustained by dreams of order that metastasize into acts of spectacular [Music] violence at the heart of ontological Anarchy pulses the power powerful force of Desire this isn't mere wanting it's a fundamental drive a primal Force as described by Charles Fier Bay aligns chaos with Aros suggesting that just as chaos underpins creation so too does desire underpin all human Endeavors this alignment breaks down the barriers imposed by societal norms and capitalist structures suggesting that true Anarchy Embraces the chaos of Desire allowing it to lead where it may it's a stark departure from the notion that states and structures can contain or direct these Primal forces instead Bay posits that the only true state is one of constant becoming where governance itself is fluid and transient much like love or attraction capitalism according to Bay is an architecture of Illusion designed not to fulfill desire but to perpetuate its unattainability it creates a cycle of scarcity negation and alienation a far cry from the abundance that ontological anarchy seeks B suggests that capitalism claims to organize desire but actually originates in its suppression producing Commodities that can never satisfy because their real function is to sustain an economy of Perpetual longing the spectacle of capitalism like a malfunctioning virtual reality program ultimately reveals nothing but the skeletal remains of its promises leaving us with a taste of ashes in our attempts to consume the Ethereal language in base critique is far more than a tool for communication it is a medium of control each word each structure of grammar and syntax serves to separate and Define to alienate individuals from one another and from their true desires ontological Anarchy seeks to subvert this advocating for a form of communication that is Angelic Transcendent and chaotic free from the rigid constraints of grammar and normative structures this vision of language as a liberating Force invites us to imagine a world where words do not confine but connect creating a web of understanding woven from the very essence of chaos and creativity the dynamic between self and is Central to Ba's philosophy he argues that these are not fixed categories but fluid identities that complement and complete each other within a chaotically interconnected web of relationships this view challenges the dichotomies typically upheld by societal and political ideologies proposing instead a model where individual and Collective identities enhance and extend one another through interactions defined by Mutual enhancement rather other than competition or domination this is the strange attractor of ontological Anarchy the force that evokes patterns and resonances in the flow of becoming where values and relationships are continually recreated in response to desire and connection emerging from Ba's philosophy is a profound critique of values as they are typically understood in a world governed by scarcity values are often based on what is lacking however ontological Anarchy proposes a foundation of abundance here values are not imposed or inherited but are dynamically generated through interactions characterized by the gift rather than the commodity this approach Fosters a society where Synergy and mutual enhancement Prevail over the individualistic competitive ethos of capitalism values arising from such turbulence are inherent ly opposed to the static death oriented values of civilization because they are born of life itself everchanging ever evolving and deeply rooted in the chaotic energy of [Music] creation freedom in the landscape of ontological Anarchy is not a static state to be achieved but a continuous Act of Creation and becoming B challenges us to see Freedom as a psychokinetic skill a process process that is inherently Dynamic and intrinsically tied to the immediate experience of living this Vision disrupts traditional Notions of Freedom as a set of Rights or conditions granted by external authorities and instead celebrates it as an Ever evolving dance with chaos and desire it is here in the active engagement with life's uncertainties and the Embrace of spontaneous creation that true Freedom manifests not as an abstract ideal but as a lived visceral real ity nomadism represents not just a physical condition but a philosophical stance within ontological Anarchy Bay promotes a model of existence that rejects permanent structures in favor of a fluid everm moving life this is evident in his appreciation of the bedin or the commune as symbols of resistance against the static and oppressive nature of the state and its architectures in this View nomadism and the uprising are intertwined Concepts both advocate for a life of Celebration and risk of constant movement and flux which defy the conventional anchors of society this nomatic Spirit challenges the prism of work and the economy of lost time advocating instead for a life filled with spontaneous adventure and genuine encounters utopian Poetics play a crucial role in ontological Anarchy serving as a lens through which we can reimagine our desires and potentials B uses the concept of the utopian mirror not just to project a nopl place but to critique and reshape the present according to the possibilities of what could be this approach allows for a critical theory that is not confined to academic speculation but is deeply engaged with the material and imaginative elements of everyday life the utopian Vision thus becomes a practical tool for transformation enabling us to Envision and enact the kinds of social relations and experiences that conventional political and philosophical discourse deem [Music] impossible art in the world of ontological Anarchy is reimagined as a communal spontaneous act rather than a commodity to be consumed ba argues for form of creative expression that transcends traditional boundaries where art becomes a direct experience of Play gift exchange and communal participation this vision sees the withering away of art as it has been known replaced by an immediate gratifying practice of creativity that enhances life directly art in this context is not about reproduction for the sake of preservation or profit but about the joyful expression of living in the moment M thus reconnecting us with the Primal energies of creation and Community finally ontological Anarchy is not just a theoretical framework it is a call to action a beckoning towards active participation in the creation of life as an art form Ba's text is an invitation to embrace the insurrectionary nature of the festival where each moment is an opportunity for radical transformation and joyous Rebellion this conclusion challenges us to Step Beyond the pages of theory into the vibrant chaotic flow of lived experience where every individual act can contribute to a broader reimagining of society it's a call to wake up to play to create and to live authentically and freely within the immediate magic of our interactions and our passions through these discussions we've traversed the landscape of ontological Anarchy exploring its challenging inspiring and often bewildering terrain Bas philosophy offers not just a critique but a profound reconfiguration of how we might live interact and dream in the spirit of ontological Anarchy let us now carry forward these ideas not as mere Spectators but as active participants in the ceaseless flow of becoming thank you for joining me on this explor Journey may it ignite in you the desire to question to create and to transform"

• Visiting ‘Hakim Bey’ (Peter Lamborn Wilson) - This YouTube video documents a meeting with the renowned anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym Hakim Bey. The visit took place in June 2004 when Dammbeck and Sabine Schenk met Wilson to gather material for the website associated with Dammbeck’s film “The Net”. In their discussions, they explored topics like spirituality, technology, politics, art, and resistance—themes central to Wilson’s work, especially his influential book, “TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, which became a cult text among the first generation of hackers and cyberpunks. The video offers insights into Wilson’s philosophical perspectives and his reflections on the intersection of spirituality and anarchism, providing a rare glimpse into his thoughts beyond his written work.
  

  Wilson Critiques the Trajectory of Modernity

  Wilson explores the historical and philosophical underpinnings of resistance movements. Here’s a detailed breakdown of its depth and meaning:

  Personal History and Counterculture Experience

  Educational Background: Wilson’s choice to leave academia reflects his rejection of institutional frameworks, favoring experiential and spiritual learning.
  
  Influence of the 1960s: He credits the countercultural explosion, particularly psychedelics and Eastern spirituality, as central to his intellectual and personal growth. This era fostered his belief in alternative ways of living and thinking, outside traditional Western paradigms.
  
  Journey to the East: His travels to Morocco, India, and Iran represent a search for spiritual and cultural depth absent in Western modernity. His time in Iran, before and during the revolution, profoundly shaped his understanding of cultural resistance and tradition.
  
  Critique of Modernity and Technological Alienation
  
  Technology as Isolation: Wilson argues that technologies like the automobile, television, and later the internet, contribute to individual atomization and the breakdown of communal life.
  
  The Internet: Initially seen as a tool of liberation, the internet, for Wilson, has become an intensification of alienation. Corporate control and commodification have transformed it into a system that reinforces technocratic domination.
  
  Technocracy vs. Technology: Wilson distinguishes between technology as a tool and technocracy as a system that imposes control and alienates individuals.
  
  The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)
  
  Definition and Misinterpretation: TAZ is a sociological observation of how people naturally seek moments and spaces of freedom and intense communal living.
  
  Physical and Communal: TAZ exists in real time and space, requiring physical presence and collective action.
  
  Examples: Events like Burning Man serve as modern approximations of TAZ, though Wilson notes their commercialization dilutes their authenticity.
  
  Spirituality and Resistance
  
  Critique of Rationalism: Wilson critiques the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationalism, which he sees as alienating the spirit from the body.
  
  Spiritual Awakening: Resistance movements, for Wilson, require a spiritual push that combines intellect and heart.
  
  Romanticism and Psychedelics: He aligns with Romantic and psychedelic traditions as counterpoints to technocratic rationalism.
  
  Anarchism and Revolutionary Tactics
  
  Futility of Violence: Wilson critiques violent revolutionary tactics, arguing they fail to address systemic issues.
  
  Symbolic Resistance: Much of modern resistance is symbolic rather than transformative.
  
  Need for Unity: He mourns the fragmentation of countercultural movements that once worked together.
  
  Historical and Philosophical Analysis
  
  Cartesian Dualism: Wilson critiques the Cartesian split between mind and body, which he sees as foundational to the alienation of modernity.
  
  Missed Paradigms: He laments the historical defeat of hermetic and Romantic traditions by Cartesian and Newtonian paradigms.
  
  Islamic and Chinese Civilizations: Wilson explores why these civilizations did not follow the West’s path to modernity.
  
  Isolation and Symbolic Discourse Personal Isolation: Wilson’s rejection of machines and technocracy leaves him isolated.
  
  Frustration with Symbolism: As an artist and writer, Wilson expresses frustration with the limitations of symbolic discourse.
  
  

  Key Reflections

  On the Internet’s Evolution: Wilson critiques the early optimism about the internet, observing its corporatization.
  
  On Community and Action: The fragmentation of countercultural communities contrasts with the collective energy of the 1960s.
  
  On Spirituality: A recurring theme is the need for a spiritual dimension in resistance.
  
  

  Conclusion

  The transcript is a profound critique of modernity’s alienating effects, examining the interplay of technology, spirituality, and resistance. Wilson’s reflections blend nostalgia for the collective energy of past movements with a deep concern for the current trajectory of human society.

  Show Transcript

  "surely so um well um i didn't study i'm a college dropout i i grew up in the academic world and i thought i would be part of it but i changed my mind in in the 60s lsd helped and then in 1968 i along with a lot of other people i thought that we had tried to have a revolution and we had failed so i went to india i went to morocco india ended up in iran and i spent 10 years in the east and basically that was my education i uh as it turned out it was my education at the time i thought that i was never going back to america because i thought that america was uh too much of a problem that i couldn't deal with it but um so in um but after the iranian revolution you know i had to leave iran so um i spent a couple of years in england and europe and then finally drifted back to america what comes to mind is most characteristic is that i still think uh that um uh that we had a revolution and it failed in other words my reading back of the of the uh that period um is that that genuine social revolution was proposed in an incoherent way yes incoherent but but real and it was attempted in a lot of different ways socially politically even militantly if not militarily yes even militarily perhaps in some places uh actually you know italy in 1972 is almost a military situation yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all that and he had contact with uh germany no no me no no i was i was more of a hippie than a new left person i was sympathetic to the revolution but not very knowledgeable about it at the time and basically my part of it was you know the the hippie part not the yippy part or the you know the new left part there was also however this great tradition in america that started in 1913 among most mostly amongst black people uh of a moorish science specifically of course it means morocco but in general it could mean any muslim and in fact you know they called but the more morals of of in the philippines so like turk was also a word that didn't necessarily mean somebody from turkey it meant any kind of muslim so more in the same way but in some black people it was the sort of the beginnings of black islam in america in 1913 which leads to malcolm x that's the end on one direction yes but in another direction not so there's many split ups many different sects and so forth and one of these sects was much more friendly to uh to white people if they were willing to declare themselves to be celtic okay or persian in any case it was a very fascinating black american a lot of jazz musicians and that kind of people involved in it so the hippies and jazz musicians you know beatniks and black people and so forth mixed together in baltimore and brooklyn and new york and places like that it's gnostic based [Music] it's a it's uh what can i say it's a syncretistic sect which is partly islamic and partly other things and uh it's certainly from an islamic position point of view is pretty heretical certainly not orthodox but um some you know hippies got involved in this and then out of that uh came the moorish orthodox church which has you know been a small organization but it's existed ever since and there there are people now doing it you know i have nothing very little to do with them that's they they pick up the ball and play with it themselves you know it's a very loosely organized religious sentiment you know is this a real tuts no well no no no no no it's it's a it's a religion it's it's a cult a sect it's not a it's not a place or a time it's it's it and it's very similar to some of the psychedelic religions that were founded in the in the sixties we weren't specifically psychedelic but we were part of that movement very much so and that's you know uh when we went up to millbrook to be with leary that's who we identified ourselves all these different types in the 60s the political type and the hippie type and the drug type and the art type and so forth they all felt that they could work together now everyone is separated everyone all these groups are atomized split apart distracted separated why it's you know it's just the spirit of the times if i mean i could just say it's the spirit of the times or else machines are this machine based systems yes that has something to do with it that has something to do with it i was thinking the other day about television and the automobile and how they caught how they coexist correspond on different levels in history they're both machines to separate people yeah the car and the car the automobile starts to replace public transportation in around 1910 and by 1950 it succeeded so there's no more public public public transportation in america is ruined what is left is only for poor people so it's crappy uh the automobile separates each individual into an atom a moving atom it breaks up communities it creates this highway suburb system that further breaks up communities actually physically it breaks up communities economically and it actually breaks up things physically just by separating you can jump in your car and drive away at the same time you have radio and television coming in which which are instead of public entertainment you now have also separate atomized modes of entertainment the television and the the the triumph of the automobile in about 1950 corresponds with the appearance of the commercial appearance of television in about 1950. so it really works out very nicely and um you know i mean there's just so much the human spirit can do when it's uh wrapped up from birth from the moment of birth in a technocratic sphere uh where meaning is transferred to the uh to the inorganic on a regular you know basis in education and culture and the home in all aspects of what we used to call the social and in this sense the internet is not a change it's an intensification you know just as the internet and genetic manipulation you know bio the bio uh technology these are the this is the next pair the next matched pair yeah yeah yeah that actually commodified life the inner yeah the interior if you like or life itself uh to modify the imagination instead of just the uh i don't know what the attention commodified life itself or other you know the body itself rather than just the so-called needs of the of the body so each of these each of these technocratic movements you know plunges us deeper and deeper into into this state of uh alienation to i don't know to use an old marxist word uh as loosely as possible okay into uh separation might be a better term and um uh you know you can you can uh uh you can object to this as much as you like you can weep and moan about this as much as you like but it doesn't change the basic situation you can go online and complain about the fact that you have to be online you know what i mean i you know i know very few people there in in the 90s there were there were thousands of them now it's hard to find them people who are you know politically enthusiastic about the internet and uh who still think of it as a uh somehow force of liberation these people are getting fewer and fewer mostly i find when i talk to people they're saying oh i hate this [ __ ] but i have to do it i have to do it it's my job right most people most people are now working at this it's their job there's nothing liberating about that for [ __ ] sake you know it's over the liberating part is over and in 1995 i remember we all said this is the year of the internet this is it the last year of the internet is what we meant because the experiment was over and the the returns were in the corporate reality had taken over and um the fact that you can still use the internet to you know run an end game around the media like happened with the torture stuff from iraq it doesn't seem all that significant to me i mean ultimately some british journalist or some you know european journalist would have blown the story anyway whether there was an internet or not might have made a difference of a few days so i don't see this is people you know every time something like this happens on the internet oh it's a great triumph for electronic freedom very few people believe that anymore i think it's just it's just another gadget right now but you know the taz is also just a sociological observation whatever you know it's a you know it's a sociological observation about the way human beings behave it's not uh it's not a purely utopian concept okay uh people act that way because it's the logical way to act you know if you if a group if a large enough group of people it might only be two or it might be thousands uh but uh we're talking about a group from two to a couple thousand well not endless but you know because two bit too big would be impossible that would be something else again now we're in a different sociology this is a sociology of the natural impulse of people when they're in a high spirit and have positive energy to remove themselves perhaps even in not even in a militant way from authority uh and to live to live intensely yeah and this intensity is sometimes politically hard to define and in different ages it might have different manifestations but the basic sociology the free group uh so and and the the time and place you know the temper the the time and place aspect in other words that it's not going to last very long because it depends on high spirits you know no real place it is a real place it must be a real place yeah it has to happen what i'm talking about is a physical time and place not a mental not cybernetic not imaginary it has all those aspects possibly but if it doesn't have the physic physical space then i don't call it a zone it's not a zone okay and the people who misinterpreted what i was saying to think that it had something to do with the internet were wrong the ta-z is not on the internet time magazine said that actually because of course they didn't bother to read a word i said um no no no no no no the most i ever said about the internet was that it should be uh should should be a tool for maximizing the potential for the emergence of a taz i never said that it was the taz personally i don't get along with machines i never have i don't you know i'm not a gadget lover i don't drive and that's not entirely by choice [Laughter] it's partly by choice but it's not entirely by choice i don't have a television i managed to get rid of television about 10 or 15 years ago and i never missed it i don't have a computer and i never had a computer well i had a computer for a few weeks and then i got rid of it i realized this was not for me so you know physically and mentally i'm very bad with machines but on the other hand i think this gives me a certain instance this uh this personal problem gives me a certain insight into a larger political sociological situation where basically i decided that i would throw in my lot with the lost uh hopeless stupid people who would never be on the internet i thought i would stay with them as a gesture you know as a gesture of solidarity a futile stupid gesture but a gesture and um maybe uh eventually i would discover a new network of people who were you know also rejecting certain aspects of what i now consider to be technocracy rather than just technology that hasn't really happened that you know i mean i wish i could say yes and now there are you know a solidarity network of tens of thousands of people who you know refuse cars and refuse computers and you know but no i don't i'm completely isolated i'm completely isolated because the other people the other people who don't have computers are poor peasants you know i'm not in touch with any poor peasants but you are living also as a second part or a part of your personality is living on the internet it's a strange little accident of history as part of it when i brought out the book and i had a few things to say in the book about the internet very few really and i put the book under an anti-copyright you know remember the anti-copyright and somehow the book became a little mascot of the early hackers uh you know back in the bbs days of the internet the crude early pioneer days of the internet so for some reason my work it always was has always been there and i guess it always will be there because there's no way to erase it you know in fact the original message was this is anti-copyright but if you use anything please tell me well of course most people don't some people wrote fake material and put it on the internet under my name [Music] i can't stop them how am i supposed to stop them there's nothing i can there's nothing i can do about it so i never never never tried to do anything about it i hate this uh way in which the internet sucks you into these um uh corpse like you know like this corpse uh fight you know fight between two corpses you know i'm not interested in fighting with these cyber spirits you know um i'm really really sort of sick of symbolic discourse i hate i'm starting to hate it you know which is a very bad position for an artist and a writer to be in since that's what we do is symbolic discourse but this whole the whole idea of discourse has become poisonous you know it means this curse uh with the neo primitive is with like john satsang and others well guess even that i mean the fact is that within within the anarchist or anti-authoritarian or i don't know whatever this you know world is there's nothing going on except symbolic discourse you know nothing even if you want to talk about what the unabomber did basically it's just symbolism so you know yes he blew up a few computer shops and killed one or two pretty awful [ __ ] people but you know it wasn't real revolutionary action it was symbolic it was largely symbolic and the rest of it is just blah blah blah on the internet you know a real good t-a-z in america would be the burning man festival i wouldn't ask you for this yeah yeah it's a well actually i call it a periodic autonomous zone because it happens every year if it happened only once and lasted for like four weeks three weeks or four weeks something i'd say that was you know really great temporary autonomous zone now it happens every year so it's a periodic autonomous zone uh you get the idea but it has to be a place and it has to be a time but the question is could this room here be also a temporary autonomous zone that would entirely depend on what happened in the room i can't just say you know i now declare this you can't be alone in a room and it's a toxic no you see no no again again i look on this as a sociological fact that means more than one person more than one person yeah and so the universe couldn't be create a temporary autonomous zone in this cabin no no i mean he could create something else i don't know what it is but i mean to me we're talking about politics so politics means at least one other person uh and in fact you know there's no such thing as an isil as the isolated individual really you know we know that i mean without trying to talk i'm not being metaphysical here i'm just saying this is obviously so you know not even not even sterner believed in the completely isolated that individual right to be he tried but he even he had to talk about the union of egoists i'm not against the man i just think that what he did was futile and rather stupid i don't agree with zerzane and making him into a big hero i sympathize with him you know but uh um i don't agree it's a wrong tactic wrong tactic yeah what that you should do well that's a good question of course that's a very good question and the fact that i can't answer it doesn't negate my critique but it does weaken it i admit okay i wish i could say that i knew what to do you know i mean it's a horrible thing to say but if there was a hundred thousand una bombers maybe we would get somewhere you know it's uh the the difference between terrorism and and militant action you know we've seen we've seen that the terror is a very ambiguous double-edged sword uh ever since the 1890s and the failures of all the assassinations and attentats and so forth to bring on any kind of an anarchist revolution and over and over again you know people like emma goldman had to say well you know uh we love the sinner but we hate the sin you know you know yes we have great sympathy for leon colgosh but it's really too bad that he shot the president it was a stupid thing to do you know and this has been the anarchist position the sensible anarchist position ever since then that just you know it's like supposing you went and supposedly you found out who the ceo of the big evil corporation was and you went and killed that person would it make one bit of difference in the world no they just come with a new ceo i mean there's lots of talented people in this universe you know there's no shortage of smart people who are willing to sell themselves to the devil that's the traditional way by anarchism is to kill some some of the leaders yeah yeah and to create well we were wrong yeah we were wrong and i think that we should have realized how wrong we were right from about 1890 onwards uh but i without some kind of spiritual push i don't see how all of this resistance all these millions of people who are angry but don't know how to do anything about it how do they come together what could make them into a movement excuse me would have to be something along the lines of esprit you know of a kind of combination of intellect and heart head and heart you know because otherwise um you know otherwise it's just it's just sentimentality it's just a sentiment for something that we've lost some social some memory of the social that disappeared around 1995 finally um so i would say that uh if you want me if you want my anti-pessimistic point of view would have to be involved somehow with spirituality but that would mean a chump in consciousness well i think that as far as that goes we've been working on that at least since the 60s even longer at least as i say since the 60s if not since the beginning of romanticism it's always you can always push things back and back and back but if we want to talk about the modern moment i think it's the 60s when when with the psychedelic and the rediscovery at least for us you know because we weren't europeans so we had to suddenly we discovered surrealism you know just one thing what you were saying that enlightening enlightenment is part of the problem what do you mean by that well i mean that the 18th century alf clarence is part of the problem it's like what uh adorno i think it was who said about the uh the cruel instrumentality of reason that is also part of the problem well at least he knew it though apparently if he coined a phrase like that because that says it to me it's the cruel instrumentality of reason rationalism you know rationality rationalism rationality is fine the rationality is good rationality is so rare you might as well call it psychedelic i mean human beings are almost never rational but rationalistic all the time you know especially since the 18th century rationalism yes we've got way too much rationalism not enough rationality and you look at the who are the most rational people for example on the question of drugs are the drug users they're the ones who talk you know who see the complete irrationality of the of the the war on drugs for example that this is economically politically psychologically spiritual in every way irrational so it's the drug users who are rational but they're supposed to be or i should say we we are supposed to be the irrational ones or the irrational or this or the surrealist ones or something no one ever gives us credit for being rational that's because the elf clarum caused this split between rationality and rationalism yeah it's possible to be completely spiritual and romantic and still be rational be a rational human being not blue little frothing at the mouth crazy yeah so that's what i mean by the problem of enlightenment but uh the islamic societies they stopped the way which just leads to enlightenment or the outcome in the 18th century why do you think well they stopped even sooner than that if you want to be specific about it they they had as you pointed out before there's no islamic renaissance so we can't obviously talk about if there's an elf clearing it's only in the 19th century and it's in purely imitation of the west it's people like afghani and muhammad abdul and so forth but um there was never any renaissance either in islam and or china and joseph needham the great historian of chinese science already noticed this uh that at a certain point both china and islam were way ahead of the west technologically and scientifically and why didn't they make the transition why couldn't they make the transition to modern science and renaissance and reformation and so forth and so on but why did they stop they hadn't known well knowledge about what is coming a feeling there are two ways you could look at this one is to say that they stopped because their systems themselves were uh were flawed they were over developed hyper developed rather than developed that's more or less needham's position uh the other position is that they didn't that they didn't do that because that would have meant a break with spiritual tradition that they were not prepared to take that the renaissance and leading on to the industrial revolution is a radical break with human spirituality that was not possible for islamic civilization or chinese civilization this is an interesting position i wouldn't want to say that you know therefore islam is good and the west is evil or some stupid result you know some stupid uh reduc reduction of this idea but nevertheless there's some interesting aspects to that thought that that a culture which is rooted in some kind of a respect for the world as a divine manifestation cannot make the step to a science which is ascending which is essentially going to end up with an anti-human or an inhuman position and the problem as the muslim critic would see it is that in christianity in christian culture the split between the body and the spirit was too radical too radical almost dualist almost dualistic so that in the west this movement towards the industrial revolution could come because the body was completely unimportant and only the spirit was real whereas for china especially and for islam apparently to a certain extent at least this was not true that the body was somehow divine enough that it had its own inalienable sphere and uh that the both on the conscious and the unconscious level it would be impossible for an islamic scientist or a chinese scientist to make the step towards so denying the body as for example descartes denied the body all right the bodies oh they're all david they are all the cartesians they're all cartesians descartes focuses this for us with the body is dead meat and the mind is the only spark of the divine but the new machines and the systems they are not interested for the body and the spirit that's right they're all cartesian or whatever they have one and zero and it's a clear position that's right it's still dates till decart but then then can we not uh work with his machines then the machines are representations of the wrong system possibly wrong possibly you know just because the technology works doesn't mean that it's true i i have to maintain this in the face of uh of any any arguments about uh logical consistency here um you know just because the steam engine worked doesn't mean it's god the way freud thought it was you know apparently freud thought the steam engine was god because he constructed the entire unconscious on an analogy with the steam engine apparently we think the computer is god because all of our analogies about consciousness are now based on the computer the brain is a computer or if it isn't it soon will be a mere machine yeah that's right a meat machine long machine um you know so nothing very new about these ideas they go they go back to lametri and descartes if you look at cuzanus and bruno and pico de la mirindola and marcilio ficino and that whole crowd they were attempting to dignify the the body again contra the church okay um they they with kuzanas who said the earth that the earth was sacred you know actually he said the the earth was a star and worthy of uh worthy of dignity and and adulation in other words it was the gist of pico's ideas were there in kusanas now to me this is not the winning paradigm these are the losers okay the winners are the the whole line of thought that lead uh led to uh to descartes um those are and to newton and well leibniz is a funny figure right is he a hermeticist or is he the other one you know leibniz has these hermetic in fact they all had her medic hermeticist interests newton was a tremendous alchemist but of course he suppressed that uh so i it was in this quarrel between hermeticism newtonianism and cartesianism i think basically it was a three-way quarrel and hermeticism could have been modern science the way we would have liked to have seen it with the sacred earth theory you know a theory of sacred earth uh even newtonianism might have been that but unfortunately it wasn't and when it came down to it newtonian and cartesian ideas join together to defeat the hermeticists this is what romanticism is all about as soon as as soon as her mysticism is crushed it pops up again as romanticism but now it's not a scientific paradigm anymore it's crazy it's poetry it's pseudoscience it's natural philosophy photos were taken of the site immediately the dog's owner later dot com i used to know you"

• From the book Ec(o)logs by Peter Lamborn Wilson - This YouTube video, filmed by Raymond Foye in 2011, captures a reading from *Ec(o)logs* by Peter Lamborn Wilson (also known as Hakim Bey). The event took place at The Church of the Holy Transfiguration of Christ on the Mount in Woodstock, NY, and was published by Station Hill Press in the same year.
  

  Introduction

  The “Neo-Pastoralist Manifesto” from his book Ec(o)logs is a provocative and multilayered critique of industrial civilization and a call for a return to more harmonious relationships with nature, community, and spirituality. The manifesto is structured into thirteen points, each offering a distinct yet interconnected perspective on resisting modernity and re-enchanting the world.

  1. Endarkenment

  Deliberate Inculcation of Irrational Superstition:
  
  Wilson challenges the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality (“Enlightenment”) by proposing an “Endarkenment,” a re-embrace of mystery, myth, and the irrational aspects of human experience.
  
  This is a call to value intuition, folklore, and the mystical connections humans have with nature.
  
  Pagan Animist Fear of Nature:
  
  Advocates for rekindling ancient beliefs that see nature as alive with spirits and forces deserving respect and awe.
  
  Suggests that modern society’s detachment from these beliefs has led to ecological destruction.
  
  Victory for Fairies and Black Snails:
  
  Symbolizes a triumph of the marginalized, the overlooked, and the mythical entities of folklore.
  
  Represents a desire to re-center the natural world’s intrinsic value over human dominance.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is urging a paradigm shift away from anthropocentric and rationalist worldviews. By embracing the “Endarkenment,” humanity can reconnect with the spiritual and mystical dimensions of nature, fostering a deeper respect and perhaps averting ecological catastrophe.

  2. Secular Anabaptism

  Reverting to Amish Ways circa 1907:
  
  Suggests adopting the lifestyle of the Amish community from the early 20th century as a model for simplicity and sustainability.
  
  Emphasizes living without modern technologies like electricity, internal combustion engines, and telephones.
  
  Secular Approach:
  
  While the Amish live this way for religious reasons, Wilson proposes a secular adoption of their practices.
  
  ocuses on the practical benefits of reducing technological dependence.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson recognizes that a full return to pre-industrial times (“stone age”) isn’t feasible but suggests that adopting simpler, technology-free lifestyles can reduce the negative impacts of modernity. This is both a critique of technological overreach and a practical suggestion for ecological living.

  3. Escapism

  Emulating Anabaptists and Dropping Out:
  
  Encourages individuals to withdraw from mainstream society as a form of protest and self-preservation.
  
  “Strategic retreat” implies a calculated withdrawal to create alternative spaces.
  
  Claiming Religious Exemption:
  
  Suggests using legal frameworks that allow for religious freedom to opt out of certain societal obligations.
  
  This is a tactic to create autonomous zones where alternative ways of living can be practiced.
  
  Places of Authentic Sadness:
  
  Refers to spaces untouched by modernity’s superficial happiness, where genuine human emotions and connections to nature persist.
  
  Emphasizes the value of confronting and embracing authentic experiences, even if they are melancholic.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson proposes that disengaging from the structures of modern society can be a powerful act of resistance. By creating and inhabiting spaces outside mainstream culture, individuals can preserve and cultivate more authentic and sustainable ways of living.

  4. Impuritanism

  Rejecting Purist Theory:
  
  ismisses rigid ideologies and dogmatic approaches to change.
  
  Advocates for flexibility, pragmatism, and adaptability in seeking autonomy.
  
  Strategic Autonomy Through Empirical Freedoms:
  
  Suggests that freedom is achieved through practical, incremental actions rather than grand ideological shifts.
  
  Encourages experimenting with different practices to see what works in reality. Re-Paganization of Monotheism:
  
  Proposes blending monotheistic traditions with pagan practices to create a more inclusive and magical spirituality.
  
  “Impure Santeria or Hoodoo” refers to syncretic religions that combine elements from different belief systems.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is highlighting the limitations of purist approaches to social change. By embracing impurity and hybridity, individuals can create more dynamic and effective forms of resistance that are rooted in lived experience rather than abstract ideology.

  5. Green Hermeticism

  Against Hijacking of the Sacred Color Green:
  
  Critiques how ecological movements are co-opted by capitalist interests (“green capitalism”) and political parties, diluting their impact.
  
  Emphasizes that genuine ecological action cannot be commodified or institutionalized.
  
  Eco-Remediation as Alchemy:
  
  Frames environmental restoration as a transformative, almost magical process akin to alchemy.
  
  Invokes historical esoteric traditions (e.g., Sufism, Rosicrucianism) to deepen the spiritual connection to nature.
  
  Nature Elementals and Mystical Traditions:
  
  References to “Paracelsian nature elementals” and various mystical philosophies underscore the idea that nature is inhabited by spiritual forces.
  
  Suggests that engaging with these traditions can inspire more profound ecological consciousness.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is calling for a spiritual and mystical approach to ecology that resists commodification. By drawing on esoteric traditions, he seeks to reinvigorate environmentalism with depth, meaning, and a sense of sacredness.

  6. Radical Agrarian Populism

  Influence of Historical Figures:
  
  References to Kropotkin, Zapata, and Ignatius Donnelly connect to anarchist, revolutionary, and populist movements.
  
  Emphasizes grassroots resistance against oppressive economic structures like banks and monopolies.
  
  Defending Wild and Pastoral Remnants:
  
  Advocates for preserving rural ways of life and natural landscapes against industrialization.
  
  Supports direct action, including sabotage, to protect these spaces.
  
  Infiltration and Radicalization of Green Reformism:
  
  Suggests working within moderate environmental movements to push them toward more radical, anti-capitalist positions.
  
  Promotes strategies like neo-Luddism and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)-style sabotage as means of resistance.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is urging a militant defense of agrarian and pastoral lifestyles. By combining historical revolutionary tactics with contemporary ecological concerns, he envisions a movement that challenges both economic and environmental injustices.

  7. Hieroglyphic Terrorism

  Aesthetic Sabotage:
  
  Uses art and imagery as tools to disrupt and challenge dominant cultural narratives.
  
  “Hieroglyphic” implies symbolic and cryptic forms of communication that subvert conventional understanding.
  
  Situationist Tactics and Power of Imagination:
  
  Draws on Situationist International’s methods of disrupting societal norms to provoke critical thinking.
  
  Encourages imaginative acts that go beyond traditional notions of revolution.
  
  Defining a Possible Outside:
  
  Aims to carve out conceptual spaces that exist beyond the totalizing effects of modern society.
  
  Accepts that these efforts may fail but values the attempt as meaningful resistance.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson emphasizes the role of art and symbolism in challenging systemic power. By engaging in “poetic terrorism,” individuals can undermine prevailing ideologies and inspire alternative ways of seeing and being.

  8. Queer Pastoralism

  The Unnatural is Also Unnatural (Goethe):
  
  A paradox highlighting that what is deemed “unnatural” by society may, in fact, be a natural expression of human desire.
  
  Questions societal norms around nature and sexuality. Pastoral Uncanny and Flawed Relations with Nature:
  
  Recognizes that civilization has distorted humanity’s connection with nature, leading to an uncanny or unsettling relationship.
  
  Suggests that self-consciousness complicates our ability to harmonize with the natural world.
  
  Desire for Union with Nature:
  
  Explores the “queerness” or otherness of longing to merge with nature, which defies conventional norms.
  
  References to Orphic cults and tantric practices symbolize mystical and erotic connections with nature spirits (“nature elementals”).
  
  Perception of Normal Sexuality as Perverse:
  
  Critiques how technological societies (“technopathocracy”) view natural human sexuality and defense of nature as archaic or criminal.
  
  Highlights the alienation caused by modernity.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson delves into the complexities of human desires that transcend societal norms, particularly regarding nature and sexuality. By embracing the “queer” aspects of pastoralism, he advocates for a more profound and authentic connection with the natural world that challenges conventional boundaries.

  9. Saturn

  Saturnine Melancholia and Saturnalian Excess:
  
  Saturn symbolizes both introspective sadness and exuberant celebration.
  
  Embracing both aspects reflects a holistic acceptance of human experience.
  
  Return of the Golden Age: Saturn is often associated with a mythical time of abundance and peace.
  
  Neo-pastoralism seeks to revive this era’s values through a balance of reflection and joy.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson uses the dual nature of Saturn to illustrate the necessity of embracing contradictions. By acknowledging both the melancholy and the ecstatic, neo-pastoralism aims to create a richer, more nuanced approach to life and resistance.

  10. Thelemite Pantasocracy

  Influence of Coleridge, Southey, and Priestley:
  
  References early romantic and utopian thinkers who envisioned ideal societies based on communal living and harmony with nature.
  
  Political Romanticism and Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic Will:
  
  Combines romantic ideals with Crowley’s philosophy of “Do what thou wilt,” emphasizing individual will aligned with higher purpose.
  
  Integrates anarchist and mystical elements into a political vision.
  
  Anarchists, Arts and Crafts, and Life Reform Movements:
  
  Draws from various movements that sought to reform society by returning to simpler, more authentic ways of living.
  
  Includes influences from nudism, sun worship, and sexual liberation as forms of resistance against authoritarianism.
  
  American Communalism and Philosophical Anarchism:
  
  Cites figures like Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Lysander Spooner, who advocated for individual sovereignty and cooperative communities.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson envisions a society where individual freedom and communal living coexist harmoniously, guided by spiritual and philosophical principles. This pantasocracy (government by all) blends historical movements to propose a radical alternative to modern governance.

  11. Neo-Pastoralist Avant-Garde

  Reviving Romantic Tradition of Art as Revolt:
  
  Challenges the notion that postmodernism has rendered art ineffective as a means of rebellion.
  
  Seeks to reinstate art’s transformative power.
  
  Connections to Surrealism and Psychedelic Leftism:
  
  Acknowledges the influence of movements that merged art, politics, and mysticism.
  
  Emphasizes direct, mystical links to these traditions as a way to inspire change.
  
  Blake’s Everlasting Gospel and Religion of Nature:
  
  References William Blake’s work, which blends spirituality and radical ideas.
  
  Advocates for a spiritual reverence for nature as a foundation for artistic and social revolution.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is calling for an artistic movement that is both spiritually profound and politically radical. By tapping into the avant-garde traditions, neo-pastoralism can challenge the status quo and inspire new ways of thinking and living.

  12. Armed Nostalgia

  Cultural Zapatismo and Critical Ludism:
  
  Draws inspiration from the Zapatista movement, which combines indigenous traditions with revolutionary action.
  
  “Critical Ludism” refers to a thoughtful return to simpler technologies and ways of life, opposing the unchecked progression of modernity.
  
  Evading the Death of Theory Through Practice:
  
  Suggests that overemphasis on theory can stagnate movements.
  
  Advocates for direct, empirical actions that embody principles.
  
  Militant Beat Zen and Uprising Against Virtuality:
  
  Combines the spontaneity and rebellion of the Beat Generation with Zen philosophy.
  
  Opposes the increasing mediation of experiences through technology (“virtuality”).
  
  Violence at an Impossible Angle to Police Power:
  
  Proposes forms of resistance that are unconventional and difficult for authorities to counter.
  
  Acknowledges that these ideas are speculative (“well into the fantasy realm”) and may not have real-world examples.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson explores the concept of nostalgia as an active, even militant, force for change. By romanticizing and reviving past ways of life, individuals can resist modern systems of control. This section emphasizes creativity and imagination in envisioning new forms of resistance.

  13. Temporary Pastoral Zones (TPZ)

  Maximizing Virgilian Moments in Everyday Life:
  
  “Virgilian moments” refer to experiences of pastoral beauty and harmony with nature, inspired by the poet Virgil.
  
  Encourages creating opportunities for such moments as acts of resistance.
  
  Nature Will Not Be Dead Until the Body Disappears:
  
  As long as humans exist physically, there is potential to reconnect with nature.
  
  Suggests that even in a degraded world, the bucolic experience is possible.
  
  Temporary Pastoral Zones as Acts of Resistance:
  
  TPZs are spaces where people can temporarily live in harmony with nature, free from modern technologies and economic systems.
  
  These zones range from simple gatherings to more sustained communities.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  Wilson is advocating for the creation of physical spaces where people can experience and practice alternative ways of living, even if temporarily. These zones serve as both personal sanctuaries and political statements against the encroachment of modernity.

  Appendix: The Temporary Pastoral Zone

  Anti-Tech, Outdoor, Topographic Setup:
  
  Emphasizes the importance of physical location and environment in creating TPZs.
  
  Advocates for settings that facilitate deep connections with nature.
  
  Ecstatic Communion with Nature via Aesthetic Social Action:
  
  Encourages activities that blend art, community, and spirituality to foster profound experiences.
  
  Examples include picnics with music, campfires, and communal rituals.
  
  Eliminating Money and Modern Conveniences:
  
  Proposes a temporary gift economy to replace monetary transactions.
  
  Removing electricity and combustion engines allows for the “luxury of dark and silence.”
  
  Rituals and Excess:
  
  Suggests engaging in rituals that honor local spirits and embrace the “Bakhtinian grotesque,” a concept celebrating the body and bodily functions as a form of liberation.
  
  Encourages indulgence in festivities and “fantastica” to facilitate transformative experiences.
  
  Art as Resistance:
  
  Frames the TPZ itself as a work of art, a living expression of alternative values.
  
  Activities like readings, music, and theater are not just entertainment but acts of re-enchantment and defiance.
  
  

  Interpretation:

  The appendix provides practical guidance on how to implement the concepts outlined in the manifesto. By creating TPZs, individuals can enact the principles of neo-pastoralism, experiencing and demonstrating that alternative ways of living are possible.

  Conclusion

  Peter Lamborn Wilson’s “Neo-Pastoralist Manifesto” is a rich tapestry of ideas that intertwine ecological consciousness, mystical traditions, anarchist theory, and artistic expression. At its core, the manifesto critiques the alienation and destruction wrought by modern industrial society and offers a vision for re-establishing harmony with nature and reclaiming authentic human experiences.

  Wilson’s proposals are both practical and fantastical, blending actionable steps with imaginative visions. He challenges readers to rethink their relationship with technology, society, and the natural world, urging a return to practices that honor the sacredness of life and the environment.

  By advocating for the creation of Temporary Pastoral Zones and embracing concepts like “endarkenment” and “queer pastoralism,” Wilson invites individuals to participate in a form of resistance that is deeply personal, communal, and transformative. The manifesto serves as both a critique of the present and a blueprint for a more enchanted and sustainable future.

  Reflection

  Understanding Wilson’s manifesto requires an openness to exploring unconventional ideas and a willingness to question deeply ingrained societal norms. His work is a call to action that transcends mere environmentalism or political activism; it is an invitation to reimagine what it means to be human in relation to the world around us. By blending historical references with contemporary critiques, Wilson provides a multifaceted approach to resisting the dehumanizing aspects of modernity and fostering a renewed connection with the natural and spiritual realms.

  Show Transcript

  "neo-pastoralist manifesto one endarkenment deliberate inculcation of irrational superstition and pagan animist fear of nature end the war on nature with victory for fairies and black snails two secular anabaptism if you can't revert to the stone age at least you can join the amish in 1907 no electricity or infernal combustion or telephone 3 escapism emulate the anabaptists and drop out strategic retreat claim religious exemption from modern world flee to places of authentic sadness four impuritanism rejects all purist theory strategic autonomy is made up of tactical incremental empirical freedoms not ideology thus we do not advocate pure revived animism but rather the re-paganization of monotheism an impure santeria or hoodoo not moral but magical five green hermeticism against green capitalism green party green tourism green development and other attempts to hijack the sacred color echo remediation is alchemy paris elsin nature elementals egypto greco-roman caballo gnostic sufi rosicrucian german romantic nature vissenshaft six radical agrarian populism krapotkin zapata the grange and farmers alliance ignatius donnelly against banks and monopolies last ditch defense of all wild and pastoral remnants infiltration and radicalization of tepid green reformism to promote green anti-capitalism neo luddite machine smashing and iww style sabotage seven hieroglyphic terrorism aesthetic sabotage situationless tactics power to the imagination beyond all hope of actual revolution totality of the image must be attacked via image magic poetic terrorism not in expectation of destroying it but simply to define a possible outside even if that outside turns out to be failure itself eight queer pastoralism quote the unnatural is also unnatural goethe the pastoral uncanny our relation with nature is tragically flawed by civilization or perhaps even self-consciousness itself the queerness of our desire for union with nature is symbolized by the orphic cult of paris elsin tantra sex with nature elementals as attested by cornelius agrippa the comp to gabali etc from the pov of the technopathocracy even normal reproductive sexuality becomes perverse and archaic and the defense of nature a crime nine saturn rules both saturnine melancholia and saturnalian excess neo-pastoralism embraces both turn of the golden age 10. thelamite pantasocracy coleridge southeast joseph priestley and others returned to nature political romanticism realized in the spirit of robele and aleister crowley's thalemic will with influences from anarchists arts and crafts and german life reform movements von der vogel sun worshipers nordic pagans nudists nietzschean anti-authoritarians and sex liberationists in the tradition of swedenborgian four years american communalism and philosophical anarchism of josiah warren stephen pearl andrews lysander spooner 11 neo-pastoralist avant-garde can revive the romantic tradition of art as revolt which post-modernism is supposed to have killed thus renewing mystic and even direct links to surrealism especially in its late anarcho-hermetic period and psychedelic leftism blake's everlasting gospel the religion of nature 12 armed nostalgia cultural zapatismo critical bloodism evade the death of theory by oblique movements into empirical practice militant beat zen uprising against virtuality and mediation violence at an impossible angle to police power we know of no actual examples we're well into the fantasy realm here sword and sorcery 13. temporary pastoral zones maximize potential for emergence of virgilian moments in everyday life nature will not be dead until the body disappears the bucolic remains possible even if only as summer vacation appendix the temporary pastoral zone a version of the temporary autonomous zone or t-a-z as deliberately anti-tech outdoor actual topographic setup for ecstatic communion with nature via aesthetic social action ranging in scope from simple picnic in countryside with songs around campfire to complex semi-permanent quasi-liberated zones how long can you keep it going afternoon week season use rainbow tactic of eliminating money from the tpz restore economy of the gift if only for a day eliminate electricity and infernal combustion from the zone luxury of dark and silence leave some tobacco or spill some wine for local spirits cultivate the bhaktiniyan grotesque risk some ritual commit some excess consume some fantastica facilitate theophany will to power as art illusions value for life acoustic instruments the loot as hermes's turtle upright piano on the lodge house veranda kerosene lamps moths batting at the screens lemonade and flirtation leave the modern world behind if only for a month at some decrepit catskill camp viva voce readings from virgil sir walter scott some desultory fishing but define it as an act of resistance psycho geographic pilgrimages and drifts to holy rustic shrines and pastoral landscapes not as passive tourism but coherent actions for re-enchantment of the toposphere i have in mind the woodcut in the hypnarata makia politically showing the hyper-pastoral procession of vertumnus and pomona refigured as neo-pastoralist outdoor theater in motion the temporary pastoralist zone as work of art"

• Peter Lamborn Wilson on Poetry, Archaeology, and Anthropology - In this video, Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) discusses the poet's role in interpreting archaeology, anthropology, and human pre-history. He urges poets to engage with these disciplines and interpret evidence where scientists hesitate to draw conclusions. Wilson introduces the concept of "anti-categorization" and explores ideas about consciousness, Neanderthals, paleolithic writing, and myths like Marduk and Gilgamesh. The talk includes references to notable thinkers such as Marija Gimbutas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Terrence McKenna, and Georges Bataille. It also highlights Wilson's book *Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma*, where he investigates the entheogenic traditions of ancient Ireland, linking intoxication with poetic inspiration.
  
  

  Key Themes from the Lecture

  1. Interdisciplinary Thought and Ethnopoetics
  
  • Hypothesis as Art: Wilson describes his work as “air art,” emphasizing the imaginative and non-dogmatic nature of his hypotheses, which serve to provoke thought rather than assert definitive truths.
  • Ethnopoetics: He underscores the importance of investigative poetics, suggesting that poetry and cultural inquiry can enrich each other, drawing parallels between the study of ancient cultures and the creative act of poetry.

  2. The Role of Psychedelics and Entheogens
  
  • Wilson delves into the theory that consciousness may have been catalyzed by the ingestion of psychotropic plants, aligning with ideas from thinkers like Terence McKenna.
  • Psychedelics are framed as a “kickstart” to the human condition, providing a pathway to altered states of awareness that shaped early art, ritual, and cultural practices.

  3. The Origins of Consciousness and Art
  
  • Primordial Unity: Wilson references Georges Bataille’s idea of an “original order of intimacy,” where humans experienced a unified consciousness with nature, only later disrupted by the development of self-awareness.
  • Art as Ritual: The emergence of art is tied to the need to restore balance following the alienation brought about by self-consciousness. Art becomes a mediator between humanity and the world, reflecting the fractured but still connected state of being.

  4. The Question of Origins
  
  • Wilson critiques the abandonment of origin theories in academia, proposing a “palimpsest” model where multiple theories coexist and illuminate each other. He rejects linear, categorical imperatives in favor of overlapping and intersecting narratives.

  5. The Evolution of Society
  
  • Hunter-Gatherer Societies: Wilson challenges the narrative of pre-agricultural societies as “nasty, brutish, and short,” presenting them as leisure-rich and deeply connected to their environment.
  • Agriculture and the State: He questions why humans transitioned to agriculture and state-based societies, suggesting this shift introduced scarcity, hierarchy, and centralized power at the cost of egalitarian and surplus-based tribal cultures.

  6. Paleolithic and Neolithic Transitions
  
  • Paleolithic cave art as evidence of complex symbolic thought.
  • The Neolithic matriarchal period, characterized by goddess worship and egalitarianism, later supplanted by patriarchal, hierarchical societies.
  • The introduction of metallurgy as a key factor in societal transformation.

  7. The Role of Mythology
  
  • Wilson connects mythology to societal structures, particularly through the recurring motif of the dragon-slaying hero (e.g., Marduk and Tiamat, St. George and the Dragon) as a metaphor for the imposition of order over perceived chaos.

  Notable Concepts and Theories

  • “Palimpsest of Origins”: Multiple origin stories (e.g., self-consciousness from fear of death, desire, or psychedelic ingestion) are layered together to create a multidimensional understanding.
  • Art as Cognitive and Cultural Evolution: Early art, such as Paleolithic cave paintings, represents a way of “thinking with nature,” merging perception, ritual, and cultural expression.
  • Prehistory as a “Golden Age”: Contrasts between the leisure and richness of hunter-gatherer societies and the labor-intensive, hierarchical structure of agricultural societies.
  • State Formation as a Breakdown: Pierre Clastres’ theory of “society against the state” frames the rise of the state as a collapse of egalitarian social mechanisms rather than an inevitable progression.

  Critical Questions Raised

  • What caused the primordial unity of consciousness to fracture, giving rise to self-awareness and the sacred?
  • Why did humanity shift from egalitarian surplus economies to hierarchical, scarcity-driven systems?
  • Can the resurgence of interest in neo-shamanism, psychedelics, and ecological thought be seen as a “return of the Paleolithic”?

  Implications for Modern Thought

  • The loss and potential recovery of ancient ways of knowing and being.
  • The role of art, ritual, and altered states in bridging the gap between modernity and prehistory.
  • How interdisciplinary and “outsider” perspectives can challenge rigid academic boundaries to generate new insights.

  Show Transcript

  "the title of the series is plowing the clouds which is a phrase I got somewhere from Irish folklore now I no longer remember where and I believe it's it was a sort of metaphor for an impossibility or a futility in other words it's as hopeless as plowing the clouds so that describes my work in theory and and in practice but I think it also has another me has another meaning to me and that is you can plow the clouds you can you can shape you can shape the the luminous and ephemeral stuff of the imagination you can shape the air there's such a thing as air art like fire art and Earth art and water art and this then is an exercise in air art in the airiness of theory everything that I say is pure hypothesis and purely subjective I'm saying this because there are real anthropologists in the audience in them I don't want to I don't want to be embarrassingly put into the position of defending categorical statements which I don't even believe in but I'm simply throwing around in an experimental fashion to see if any sparks shoot out of those clouds so another aspect of this work is a sort of at a slant I believe that I'm doing something for for ethno poetics week with this with these lectures not but by the last lecture I hope to get around to the origins of poetry but that's going to take a long time and I may never get there but again everything that we are going to talk about it seems to me is strongly relevant to the subject of poetics and and ethno poetics if not in a direct sense than in the sense of what ed Sanders calls investigative poetics in other words if you I feel that if you're just writing poetry out of your own pure subjectivity unless you're Dylan Thomas it doesn't take you very far and to continue the Celtic comparisons it would be better if you were a sort of a Yeats you know someone who actually studied something be it in his case alchemy or Celtic folklore or in this case anthropology and archaeology and what's come to be known is ethno history and various other neologisms of dubious value but I think you know that that poetry wants to get its hands into something it wants to dig in the earth and if and and that may even be more than just a metaphor archaeology and related studies I think are extremely poetically exciting and in my second lecture I'll tell you about my own experiences last summer in Wisconsin which I hope to continue this summer in August where I got my hands on and hands in the dirt for really for the first time it was always book fantasies for me but last summer I got into a little amateur archeology and trespassing and being chased by various gothic six-toed farmers around the cow pastures of Wisconsin you know trying to see various mounds and petroglyphs and what-have-you and I was in a constant state of ecstasy the whole time I can't tell you the tiny little discoveries things that we discovered that we're not in any written source were like it was like pure flashes of LSD you know right straight to the cerebellum and when I when I try to imagine what the excitement involved in making a major discovery in archeology like that you know the tomb of Alexander's father or the the gold hoard of the a communion dynasty or you know some Mayan pyramid that no one ever noticed before of which I gather there are man I don't think I could stand it I think I'd expire on the spot so I strongly recommend every poet to get a sideline in something like this and really I'm just offering this as an example of the way in which once you get your hands in the dirt once you read a few books once you've looked at a few pictures and studied a few carbon-dating x' and so forth and so on you have as much right to your crackpot theory as any archaeologists and anthropologists as to theirs generally speaking archaeology is a science which is terrified of interpretation anthropology is much less guilty in this respect what archaeology has the idea of itself as a science and of course it isn't it's an art and with with scientific aspects just like any art and so but there's a kind of paranoid defensiveness on the part of archeology as an academic and professional science in which the wild interpretations that were given in the 19th century at which which pretty much all proved to be wrong about the past and especially about prehistory have been such as such a traumatic experience for archeology that archeologists nowadays refuse to interpret you know they'll tell you we found three arrowheads seven bones and they were in such in such a relationship and that's all you know and only only the most daring or the ones with tenure are the are the ones who dare to interpret who dare to actually try to imagine what the life of prehistory could have been like prehistory of course is already a loaded term it implies that somehow we've evolved from a pre historical state when everything was in Co hate and incomprehensible and nasty and brutish and short a stay a superior state of civilized awareness in which time unfolds for us in a measured and orderly way and in which everything becomes known or will become known and there's a an amnesiac gulf that this that these kind of attitudes open up between the present in the past which is not so alien and which which is after all just the past of human beings of our ancestors there haven't been as even more than a few hundred generations since the Paleolithic I mean it's really a fly speck of time in the eyes of the gods and it's not so hard to understand in my opinion a great deal of what was going on in prehistory of course I say that as a crackpot you know not as an academic in in approaching archaeology therefore I believe in in something which transcends what they now call interdisciplinary Anisa which means that communications are cautiously open between college departments I would I would like to see something that might perhaps be called anti categorization ISM take the place of this interdisciplinary timidity I would like to see all the barriers between these disciplines broken down or at least breached I'd like to see what the Russian critic Bakhtin called permeable boundaries divisions which are kept up for the purposes of discourse in a rational discourse but which are always known to be permeable so that not only anthropology can be allowed to seep into archaeology and ethno ethnography into ethno history and history into ethnography and all the various schools of history can be their findings and methodologies applied to archaeology and all the other so-called social sciences and this I don't think is going to happen in the academic world or not very soon I think it and and therefore I do truly believe even in the moment when I try to overcome my hostility to the whole idea of academic discipline that that we amateurs we outsiders do have some role to play even if it's only as annoying gadfly's the English writer John Michell who is certainly not a professional archaeologist has made great contributions I think just by being open to everything our astro archaeology in ley lines and any kind of madness as long as you keep a kind of agnostic approach to this and don't become a true believer in any of these crackpot theories but are able to drift creatively from theory to theory then I think that that the the enthusiastic amateur or obsessive amateur has has a real creative role to play in forcing various academic fortresses to open a little crack in the portcullis somewhere and let in some various breaths of fresh air from from other from other disciplines after all it's it's all just humanity you know it's all just us and there's no reason for these for these amazingly ridiculous borders which are erected walls fortresses fences fences might make good neighbors but I don't think it makes for good for good humanitarianism and in fact Robert Frost was a well-known son of a so I'm gonna deal with subjects which are pretty much taboo since the 19th century like the question of origins for example origins are something that no one wants to talk about anymore all the origin theories the origin of language the origin of art the origin of consciousness the origin of the indo-european people or the origin of the megaliths where did it where did these things where do these these things or these peoples come from what was their origin in the 19th century when these questions were asked origins were seen as as categorical imperatives which would exclude other origins in other words once you had decided for example that Hebrew was the origin of all languages because God obviously spoke Hebrew then you could take a wild child you know and Alphonse Silva would been who had been brought up by wolves in the wild and lock it lock him or her into a room and and record all the sounds that that the child made and say that this of course these are all Hebrew roots and therefore the origin of the origin of language is a divine origin and that's that categorically that's that I would like to return to the whole question of origins which is again been dumped out of a kind of paranoia or a disappointment and the failure of these theories to turn up hard scientific data but instead of viewing origins as categorical imperatives or Thor in other words absolutes in distinct places along a line of linear thinking I would like to see I would like to construct a palm obsessed of origins now palm obsessed if you don't know isn't as a word for an old kind of manuscript where when paper was expensive people used to write one way across the paper and then they turn the paper and write another way across the writing and then they'd turn the paper over and do it on the other side and sometimes there's even more than two scripts on on the same piece of paper so my palm obsessed is is I see it written on animation gels on on actual transparent sheaves of paper and I would like to take all these theories that interest me all these stories about origins and pile them up like a stack of animation gels and then I'd like to hold them up to the sunlight and see where the light comes through all those all those blobs of black and this is a kind of cabbalistic approach because the the ancient jewish the old jewish capitalists used to say that the spaces between the letters were as as significant or perhaps even more significant than the letters themselves because that's where the divine illumination was coming through so without making any categorical statements about without giving any origin theory a priority without making any dogmatic statements about origins or or developments I just like to keep adding one theory to another and hope at the end that's as we drift around the French philosopher Leo Tao has used the term drift work to describe his kind of philosophy and I find also find this term very congenial as we drift from theory to theory maybe at least for a moment some illuminations will come through the study of origins in this way becomes simply another epistemology simply another way of knowing things and that knowing in itself is not an absolute that knowing the knowing also drifts from point to point from like a wave actually rather than like a point and of all of all the origins that we're interested in of course it's the origin of consciousness which which is the most fascinating you know in other words when does the animal become the human when is it no longer instinct if that's what animal thought is and of course that's a deep question in itself and become self consciousness not even reason but simply awareness of self as self as separate from all that other and some prominent answers to that question would be in other words the origin of this what is the origin of this consciousness what is the origin of this self-consciousness some people would say for example it's fear of death that once the human brain gets big enough it begins to project thought into into the future it no longer lives for the moment and as soon as that thought is projected or even perception is projected a moment into the future then it is possible to become aware of one's own death and having become aware of one's own death and the obvious inevitability of it and the obvious meaninglessness of it or let's say the impossibility of its meaning then such thinkers of this school would say that from that moment on self-consciousness exists and therefore culture exists and therefore civilization exists and therefore the whole ball of wax but you could also instead of taking this this death view which by the way is somewhat related to Freudian thinking although not not precisely you could also take another leaf from Freud or from the Freudians in general and talk about sexuality as the origin of consciousness that once a sexuality is separated from instinctual behavior whatever the hell that might be and you know actually I was looking at there was a PBS special on the love life of the animals you know sort of and a beast animal porn you know from the PBS animal porn and the variety of you know the absolutely the stunning variety of ways of making love that exists in the animal world certainly puts a very big question mark next to the whole idea of instinct but anyway let's assume that the beasts have instinct and the humans have something more and that's something more is desire which again is a projection into the future even when the beloved object or the desired object is absent one desires the the the person the thing whatever it might be so that so that passion or sexuality or desire then becomes the the spark the spark that brings consciousness into being another theory which I which I like a lot the chief proponent of which at the moment is Terence Mckenna is that consciousness arose because of the ingestion of psychedelic plants that and this is this sounds funny you know but when the more I think about it the more I realized it's certainly a theory that deserves to be layered into that Palme obsessed along with the other theories to look on it as exclusively true the way Terence does I think gets you into various kinds of conceptual difficulties but to look on it as also true along with other theories that makes it to me very very interesting that suddenly restores its interest as a theory so you can imagine that an early hominid some australopithecine or or Peking man or woman or Java man or woman or Homo habilis or one of these very very pre human humans if you can think of them that way in in browsing over various plants not knowing whether it's good or bad so you know accidentally ingest some psilocybin or Amanita muscaria or fly agaric or air got or some other naturally-occurring psychotropic and of course in the new world there there are hundreds of such such plans to the old world in some ways seems strangely strangely poor in psychotropic plants but it's certainly not lacking in them and another point about psychotropic plants is that some of them are only activated by a process they have to be processed in some way like ayahuasca for example has to have other plants added to it before it becomes a viable psychotropic so so that in any case I think Tarrant Terrance's image is that a kickstart was needed for the to the for the human condition that something needed that the these hominids needed a boot in the ass to set them on the way of of being human whatever that was going to be and that some mushroom supplied this kick then there's the then then there's a theory which I'd like to bring in tangentially which is the theory of George bataille ba ta il le who in his book theory of religion and also to a certain extent in the accursed chair discusses the question of the origins of consciousness and of sexuality and so forth and he speaks of hypothetical original order of intimacy as what he calls it in other words hypothetically for him at the beginning of human consciousness there is no separation there's somehow consciousness without separation so that the human condition has already been reached but there is no self awareness in the sense of self alienation there's no potential cycloid a psychotic split or abyss yet that has yet opened up within human consciousness and this is the stage that's referred to in every body of myth or folklore as the time when the gods walked the earth when when the animals spoke like humans when all the orders of existence were on a single horizontal plane and in an indirect communication and as you might say ecological relation with each other and I think bataille as weak point is that he's unable to just unable to describe or explain why this order of intimacy should be broken what what would induce what would induce the doubling of consciousness in a situation like this this surely would be perfection this would be like a permanent psychedelic state in which one was one was always acting on the basis of a trend of what we might call a transcendent consciousness which is also imminent at the same time and involved in in things and within involved in the world in nature so what is it that causes then what bataille calls the violence of the sacred presumably in in the under the order of intimacy there is in fact no consciousness of the sacred just as in Bali there is no word for art but there's but everyone the the artist is not a special kind of person but but every person is a special kind of artist so also projecting backwards into the Paleolithic or into the to the origins of humanity wherever they may be or whenever they may be there is there's also that this also pertains so what possible shock or catastrophe could have occurred to break that or that original order of intimacy and make future generations view it as a hideous chaos instead of as the the Golden Age that's the question or that and many other questions about breaks and Abbas's and separations it's the question that I'm proposing and I'm not proposing to answer it with any one single simple minded answer but I want to create a complex web of references to various theories about this moment this tragic catastrophic moment which may of course have been extended over centuries or even millennia of time but which appears to us in retrospect obviously as a moment a crack out of which time and space as two different things emerge the question the whole quite this this also leads directly to the whole question of art and writing in the original in the hypothetical original order of intimacy when the animal spoke to man in the gods gods walked on the earth what would have been the point of art or writing obviously there would be no point just as all consciousness would be a kind of Perpetual psychedelic trip or hi so also all all art would be life itself it would be totally indistinguishable not only would there be no word for it that presumably would even be no words as yet at all but at some point in the development of the human techne you know the Greek word for technology techne comes into being and Tecna represents oddly obviously represents the interface between my consciousness and that world out there now my consciousness is going to manipulate that world it has taken that work that world for the object and no longer the subject of its thought formerly is lady Strauss says says you know animals and plants are good things to think with they're actually processed yule they're part of a process of thinking so if you look at ancient myth or if you look at the paintings on the caves of the paintings on the walls of the Paleolithic caves you see a process of thinking with the things of nature in other words nature is still the subject of the thought to a large extent afterwards as art and as as language become come into being the this the the split between the the medium the in-between stage of technique comes into being now there's something that's in between me when I grasp reality something interposes between me and that reality is no longer part of me it's a part of some other so this out of this of course obviously this is the origin of art at this point one one one wishes not only to manipulate the world but to create beauty in the world because before everything was beauty so there was no there was no concept of beauty now there's something which is unbeautiful it's inside its the cycloid split which has occurred this alienation of self from self and and therefore something needs to be rectified so a balance needs to be restored so art comes into being ritual comes into being the whole order of the sacred which includes art now comes into being and this is this is the point at which we get to let's say to Neanderthal man 40000 to 6062 forty thousand bc flourished before the last ice age still they're still arguing as to whether a Neanderthal was homo sapiens sapiens or wise wise man as we like to call ourselves or whether ananda thaw was some lost branch of evolution that didn't make it or whether in fact it was a evolutionary precursor to homo sapiens sapiens or what it's still a mystery oh Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do this is an interesting point that I talked about last year and if we're going to talk about evolution then we're going to have to ask why these primitive creatures had actually bigger brains bigger brains what did they need those extra brains for very curious my own my own poetic fancy is that they needed bigger brain because their perceptual world was so much bigger than ours that that they were still closer to this order of intimacy and therefore the myriad things the ten thousand things as the Chinese say were were we're much more perceivable much more perceived by them and if you for example if you visit a South American tribe now you'll find that you walk through a jungle with them I mean I haven't done this myself but I've read wonderful descriptions of it you walk through a jungle and they see everything that the the forest is a book for them it's a text they know what everything is they call forth everything they evoke everything they live with everything and you're seeing what you know a hellish a hellish green chaos of perception which out of which nothing appears to you is meaningful so assuming that that that old Neanderthal was closer to that world in a way which even our modern tribal people can no longer be there was there were many many many more things that Neanderthal had to think with this is a strange way of looking at things because we feel that civilization of course has created the many many many things and before that there was only a kind of brutal brutal simplicity you know what John Michell calls the word doom height theory of humanity that human beings were originally stupid and only recently became clever you know which is a very very unsatisfactory theory to me because when well you know this has to be said as stupid as it may sound because this is still to a large extent orthodoxy within within the archaeological world when I see the burial sites for example of the Neanderthal which is just about all we can recover of their culture I don't feel this this brutal stupidity I feel something very very profound there's a wonderful dig in in Iraq that I've read about called the Cave of the flowers which is a Neanderthal burial where a pollen analysis was made of the dust in the graves I forget the name of the woman who did this it was a brilliant thing and it was discovered that the burials had been made with with heaps and heaps of flowers and herv's had been piled into the grave on top of the bodies or underneath the bodies and that some of these plants she was all able to identify them all and many of them turned out to be plants which are still used in Iraq in that region today as medicinal or magical plants so here's a cultural continuity going back to what 40,000 BC which speaks directly to us because I've actually lived in that part of the world and used those herbal remedies so that was a direct contact between me and and and the brilliance of Neanderthals the use of red ochre in graves already begins with Neanderthal and continues right up to the present it ochre is the perhaps the original religious symbol red earth was put into the graves to perhaps to symbolize blood as the blood is the life perhaps to symbolize light as in the red the red sunlight but obviously having a whole complex of life like symbolism connected with it and indicating some people would say indicating already a belief in immortality or a belief in the continuance of some kind of life beyond the grave so religion in toto the whole ball game already there long before crow Manion long before modern man as a matter of fact just as a footnote somebody I guess it was Andrew was talking at the panel yesterday about writing and he dated it as beginning as we've all been taught to see writing as having begun in the in the late Neolithic in Mesopotamia which is already very very late in the story of prehistory in fact it's the end of the story because once writing comes along and succeeds then history begins but first of all the the scholar Maria gambit us has our the our who was a wonderful archaeologist I'll be referring to her work a lot has already discovered that the early Neolithic seventh millennium in the Balkan northern Greek and Balkan and western Anatolian regions that these mmm societies which she describes very very early Neolithic far far far earlier than Mesopotamia or Egypt already had developed some kind of a symbolic system of course we can't we can't decipher it at all although she made some very very interesting stabs at doing so but her arguments a bit basically lead to lead to the conclusion that writing writing itself is far far older than we believed and in fact is prehistoric and then Alexander Marshak another great archaeologist with a real vivid imagination traces notation at least if not writing way back into the Stone Age even into the Paleolithic on a number of objects which he identified which had never been studied before because they were so embarrassing and impossible to understand their objects which have scratches on them and they're obviously not decorative I mean they're not at all interesting to look at some of them are very worn as if they've been carried around in somebody's pocket or used over a long period of time and they have little Nick's or scratches or marks in them and no one had ever asked what these things meant until Marshak came along and suddenly saw them as a form of notation because of course according to the or doom height theory these people were too stupid to do something like that the so therefore ergo you know these these things were meaningless or perhaps decorative but basically meaningless Marshak asked if they might not be note note note ative and he started counting the scratch marks and adding them up and seeing where they were divided and over and over and over again he began finding numbers which related to the lunar cycle 30:28 numbers like that and sevens 28 numbers like that and so he hypothesized and wrote a wrote a great deal and extremely painstakingly careful work to propose his theory that that these were in fact the origins of calendrical mathematics and that for reasons unknown but perhaps understandable or recoverable through ethnography that these Paleolithic hunters were already interested in the calendar which was previously thought to be an eel with the convention dependent upon agriculture or perhaps giving rise to agriculture and having nothing to do with hunting with the hunting societies so every every every origin can be pushed back that's the only point I'm trying to make here all the origins can be pushed back pushed back pushed back and you begin with a as I as I did with a fascination with with early classical societies like Greece and Mesopotamia and then you push you start you start going back under under every fact a trapdoor opens and drops you down down down into an archeology of time you know and you discover that all those layers are still present none of none of this has vanished and I'm not talking just about archaeological stratigraphy although that's part of it within every consciousness there is and remains a hunter-gatherer consciousness or a peasant Neolithic peasant consciousness we are we are all still those people it's only been just the mirrors briefest time since we were not those people and in fact secretly we are still those people we have links strong links of consciousness which connect us to those people and which have been denied vigorously hysterically rigidly denied ever since the rise of civilization ever since the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent or whatever you want to call it actually was northern Anatolia well get that later you as soon as we have a mythology to look at its a mythology of denial of denial of this connection it's a mythology which tells us that those ancient people were chaotic and evil and bad and that we the agriculturalists with the priests and the Kings and the storehouses full of grain we're the good guys and those primitives those primitive tribes people those are the bad guys those are the avatars of chaos and we are the avatars of order and so history itself is founded on it on a on a total dualism on this dichotomy on this on a split which was perceived to have taken place in time between a primitive chaos and this this theory as I say as has been identified with the the line that the life of primitive man is nasty brutish and short as who was it Locke Hobbes said so this has been the point of view ever since Mesopotamia arose itself from the from the slime of prehistory and it remains the the ideology of today obviously otherwise we would we as a culture would not still be engaged in desperately trying to wipe out every last vestige of the Paleolithic on the on one on one level I mean we heard from all the we heard all the eek eeeek stories from the panel the other day about how this language is disappearing and that tribe is disappearing and this is not this is this is not a joke this is happening on the other hand we right now are living through what I would call a return of the Paleolithic and I'll get to that later but by that I mean that nothing disappears and finally now after all these centuries certain weights have been lifted from our consciousness civilization itself has failed so miserably in certain respects anyway that we we are we have regained our vision of this prehistoric past and we've reinterpreted it now we have a new interpretation of it and that's why we have neo shamanism and neo-paganism and green-green philosophies and guyun philosophies and ecological activism all those all those kinds of forces in modern society are coming out of what I read what I call not a return to the Paleolithic no one wants to bomb themselves back to the Stone Age but a return of the Paleolithic I'll get also hope I hope to return to that so anyway these dichotomies are set up order and chaos cultivated in wild st. George and the dragon that's a good example which which can be traced back to one of the very earliest Babylonian myths of Tiamat and Marduk Tiamat was the dragon or rather the dragon s she was the earth mother her progeny were monsters and she had to be removed from from heaven by Marduk who was the the male phallic patriarchal God by contrast anyway the warrior priests King God who slaughters the female Tiamat who's symbolic of water and chaos and shapelessness and cuts her up into little pieces and out of those pieces human beings are created and so human beings are the the carrion gobbets of carrion from the dead body of the of the matriarchal dragon and human beings are created for one purpose and one purpose only by by this act of Marduk and that is to work for the priests and kings to fill up the temples with grain so that there will be wealth for the priests and kings it says so go read it in the book you know I'm not making this up that's what the myth says and I've you know I take it quite literally st. George has pinned down dragons all over Europe if you go travel around Europe from church to church wherever there's a church dedicated to st. George there's a dragon underneath with a lance through it sticking it into the earth whereas st. George pinned it down and in this way the Marduk consciousness st. George is definitely Marduk the Marduk consciousness by pinning down these actually creates the landscape of culture before there was only chaos only wilderness only forests only with what the Cuban Cuban magicians call El Montay the forest and mountain combined into one concept the wildness the out there which is not us and by by slaying the representative of that other naswinger a snake and painting it down st. George actually creates the landscape of Europe this is called LAN na ma LAN de nama in some Scandinavian language I think Swedish I'm not sure Danish Icelandic thank you this is the actual emergence of cultured landscape out of nothingness out of supposed chaos now of course as I said before it's not chaos for the tribal hunter who lives who lives inside it the forest the rainforest is not chaos to the in bootie pygmies you know it's their it's their home it's their texts it's their it's their everything they have no concept of a cultivated space separated from this forest no concept of an other place or an other time they're still as it were not only living in dream time but in dream space but for for the modern consciousness which begins already with Babylon just like the just like the Bible implies for modern consciousness which begins with these Mesopotamian civilizations is a process precisely of created they look on it as actually creating the earth this is why if you read about if you read the mythologies of these people this is a process of creation Marduk creates human beings before that there were no human beings there were only wild monsters who inhabited the forests and in Gilgamesh you know the character of Enkidu who comes down this is the first epoch of the human race if you haven't read it I strongly recommend it Gilgamesh was the great king and the mardukan figure in the tale his best friend is Anki who comes from the mountains in other words from El Montay from the forests from the wilds wild place and he is an hairy man as the Bible says of some character or another he's he's a hairy fella he's a sort of a sasquatch character and he comes down out of the mountains because Gilgamesh tempts him with a woman desire tempts him to become civilized and then he and he and Gilgamesh fight a terrible battle and afterwards they become the best of friends so there's that so this eventually of course no culture could survive forever with the schizophrenic split going on all the time this intense rigid consciousness of fences and fencing off of space I mean it would just be too psychotic so there's always a reconciliation that occurs one you first a split into two first a separation a thesis and antithesis if you like and then using a galilean terminology a synthesis or as I would prefer to say a dialectical reconciliation between these terms and so the wild is absorbed into the civilized and the power of the wild is used and understood sometimes it involves a contract or a contact with the remnants of the wild people who live out in the woods sometimes their magic is more powerful than our magic and we if we civilized ones want to oh I don't know be cured of some dread disease or put a spell on our wife then we go to the old sorceress of the forest you know the one the witch who lives on the other side of the clearing if you read fairytales about witches they're always on the other side of the clearing and so the the remnants of the wild people remain remain necessary actually once the last indigenous tribe is erased from this earth if that's going to happen that will be the Millennium that will be the end because without that without that existent consciousness of the wild then the existent consciousness of cultivation and of culture will die it will lose its root and even if this root is is surrounded by images of violence it is it's still legitimately there so we're looking at a gradual process of separation I don't believe that we can take one moment in time and say oh that was it you know if we could only go back before that moment you know be it the 1960s or or you know the Paleolithic I think there's a spectrum of moments there's a continuity of moments there's a chaos of moments there's a moment that occurs over and over again and it's always a moment of separation and the separation is always new in its terminology new and it's in its terms but never new in its structure and that's why the same old dragon myth the same old myth of the Dragon Slayer same myth gets trotted out again and it's still going on if you just pick up a newspaper and see the way oh let's say the way the Arabs are depicted in in our or the Moslems in general or depicted in our society yeah I wouldn't be surprised if you found the term snake worshipers used at some point for you know they they at present are the wild other that were that we're dealing with in their own minds of course they're highly civilized people you know in fact more civilized than us but that's another matter so where let's say we want to identify some of these key points or ambiguous moments of separation when when some order of intimacy is broken and replaced by an order of separation we might for example go back to the Ice Age now it's an interesting fact that amongst hunter-gatherer societies which and I should point out by the way for those of you who may not know that for I would say 95% of its existence as a as an entity humanity has been involved in hunting and gathering as an economy it's only the last five percent which involves pastoralism and agriculture and industry so it's an interesting fact that amongst all the hunter-gatherer societies we can look at now gathering is much more important than hunting and gathering of course is the province of the women hunting is the province of the men this is almost universal but the hunting as it turns out and this is from a very nice collection of essays called man the hunter came out in 1968 I forget the editor but it was a whole it was interesting that it came out in 1968 because it I think that this whole idea of the hunter plays into the whole psychedelic movement in the rebellion of the 1960s but the finding was that gathering is much much much more important economically the hunting is prestigious the hunting is exciting it's adventurous secret societies are formed around it rituals are formed around it religions are formed around it as you can see if you look at the cave paintings in Europe which are 99% depictions of animals so the figures range of amongst modern tribes from 10% hunting to 90% gathering amongst some African tribes to a more even balance amongst the Eskimos of course the Eskimos are up in a you know in a part of the world where hunting would obviously be much more important than gathering and the large part of the Eskimo diet is meat because that's what there is to eat and only I think only about 30% of Eskimo diet it comes from gathering so we could project backwards here's a place where ethnology could throw light on archaeology we could project backwards to those Neanderthals as the ice age begins to creep up on them the verb glaciation the last big Ice Age and presumably they had some sort of gender egalitarianism our days that original human society original there's that word again original human society was a gender egalitarian society it may have been matriarchal in the strict sense of the word that is that descent was marked through the female line because before marriage is invented you don't know who the father is so clearly if you're going to have any idea of kinship at all it has to be based on the female but this doesn't necessarily mean that there was some kind of society of of huge strong women lording it over kind of you know supernumerary men it's much much easier to see for example that hunting arose in prestige precisely to Bali to rectify an imbalance that would have occurred because gathering was economically so much more important and because kinship was traced through the woman through the female that hunting would have been maybe the the prestige of hunting the cult of hunting may have been a response to that that imbalance but then comes along the Ice Age and the whole thing is thrown into a new imbalance now hunting which gave itself prestige has actually now become economically more important than gathering and so a terrible imbalance may have occurred in the and earth all society in fact that may be why they disappeared but the same imbalance would hold true for us too because we modern Homo sapiens emerge out of the Ice Age I mean that's where we first see ourselves is emerging out of the ice I think that's why that frozen fella in the Swiss Alps has been so fascinating to everybody everyone sees their origin and this frozen corpse so this theory would go on to explain that men therefore men in the Ice Age achieved an unfair balance of power in society and therefore once the ice went away women who still remembered how to gather began to really push it as a new a new economy and they began to say aha you know we're now where the power and and the gradually this pushing of gathering and the returning every year to sites where I say certain wild grasses or fruits were found and the discovery that you could recede those areas on purpose that this intense new activity of the women created the beginnings of Agriculture and that therefore another flip-flop now takes part in takes place in human society and once again and and once again women are on top and the matriarch the the famous Neolithic matriarchy the age of the goddess which we now switch we now know so much about although we may not know very much accurate data about comes into being and Gimbert us in her Maria Ginn butas GIM bu TAS in her book civilization of the God which is uh not only in print but remaindered so I advise you to rush out and get it it's got the the most beautiful photographs of just about any book on the neolithic i'ma she she photographs stuff that nobody else apparently dared to photograph because it would have screwed up their theories endless endless Neolithic goddesses of all kinds you know just overwhelming evidence it's like 95% of all the mobile art found in the Neolithic is statues of goddesses and only less than 5% is the little phallic consort deity of the goddess the the male as consort of the goddess and goes along with it and therefore so the could continue with this gender war theory of human development at the end of the Neolithic with with the introduction of a new techne metals which are which are apparently brought in from the east by the according to Jim butis by the by the proto-indo-europeans the the corgin people that is to say most of us the the indo-aryans whatever you want to call him brought in bronze and this made this made yet another this created yet another rebalancing effect on human society and of course since metallurgy was very very magical it involved digging into the body of Mother Earth and in a much more intrusive way even than agriculture and therefore has always been surrounded and is still surrounded with intense taboo and has been largely a province of men and so metallurgy then changes the balance once again and now we have the image of the great patriarchal 'lest societies of the early Classical period the Greeks the Mesopotamians the Marduk and Zeus worshipers the sky God people that big nobodaddy phallus lightning bolt in the sky and men take over and the king replaces the queen and now the goddess is the consort of the God not the other way around and the Neolithic goddess survives but gets smaller and smaller and more and more creepy until finally she becomes Hecate the witch goddess and a principle of evil which goes right back again to the idea of Tiamat as feminine principle as a principle of water being the evil chaotic principle while the male principle which is of light as opposed of day as opposed to night light as opposed to darkness strength as opposed to weakness all these all these mythic dichotomies come into play and we have a new propaganda in the world the propaganda of the fathers as opposed to the propaganda of the mothers well it's a very clever neat theory but I I certainly don't think it's a categorical imperative I'm not adopting it as dogma for one thing it's it's way oversimplified it's like a Punch and Judy show for another thing there's too much actual hard data in the way of it and for another thing I just don't like it you know even if it was true I would reject it however I don't think it's useless I don't think it's a useless theory by any means and if I were to take in Buddhists as the major representative of this theory I would you know I would actually bow down to this woman because why because even though she's a professional archaeologist she dares to have an interpretation she actually dared to have an opinion about what things were like in prehistory instead of just saying well we found 18 figurines of plump god of plump female figures not goddesses you know or at least we don't know for sure maybe it was primitive pornography and it can't be sure that's why I call the ark rum theory of the Neolithic goddess you know that at least at least she dared to construct a theory and we can bounce off it you know we can have a conversation now what a relief we're no longer being stiff-armed by these academics who said sorry you don't have any right to interpret that because we're experts and even we don't know what it means you know well I I know somebody who used to work with jim buddhist and he said that in the day time she would be on the dig behaving like just like a good scientific archeologist but at night she would take one of the plump female figures and go back and sit in the moonlight and listen to it you know so this is like this lovely this lovely attack from both sides that she gives us not only the scientific but the intuitive not only not only the the dry academic work in the dust which she makes very exciting by the way but also that nighttime intuition you know the realm of as he's odd said chaos eros gaia and old night so that's that's her theory but i don't want to oversimplify you should go read her stuff it's not this i'm not trying to make her into some kind of avatar of vulgar feminism here far from it there are people who have used her work in that way but that's not her fault so that's one theory now we could go we could talk about we could talk about other theories and i'm just gonna come come across them as i go along what we're looking for always is the again is the break the split the abyss that opens up in consciousness between the tribe the the old egalitarian tribal gender egalitarianism well surplus and scarcity you know it's a fact that the hunters may know hunger but hunters do not know scarcity a hunter can die of hunger but a hunter does not die of scarcity that scarcity in surplus that dichotomy comes into being with agriculture and here we come to one of my favorite books Stone Age economics by Marshall Sahlins sah Li NS salyanz' was particularly offended as an anthropologist by the nasty brutish and short theory of primitive man all those words in quotes please and he set out to do a statistical analysis of all the fieldwork he could get a could gather concerning work and food gathering amongst existent hunting gathering societies I think he found 14 or 15 of them and he pointed out that these are people like the Bushmen the pygmies the the Eskimos who have been pushed out to the margins to the bare bare margins of viability in this world I mean we powerful uh you know agricultural industrial types took all the good land and all that's left for these folks is the tundra or the steppe or the desert or what-have-you so right away you would think if anyone's leading a nasty brutish short life it must be these folks so he went and collected all the data that he could about the amount of time spent in food gathering by these people and then he compared it to another statistical analysis that he made of primitive agriculturalists societies slash-and-burn types and found out how many hours a day they had to work and I don't remember that I may get the may be getting the figures wrong but it was something like this the hunter-gatherers average 4.2 hours a day work and that means a lot of them work even less than that the primitive agriculturalists average 14 hours a day work the larder that is the number of foodstuffs No to primitive primitive hunters he found averaged out to about 200 200 different things to eat the larder of the agricultural society is averaged up to 20 things 1/10 of the menu for the for the agriculturalists so the idea that agriculture came into being because human beings were tired of eating bugs you know and it was kind of a queue liam culinary explanation of the rise of Agriculture doesn't hold true the diet of the hunter-gatherers was far more complex it was far much more of a cuisine than a mere cookery and in fact there's a wonderful myth which I think's alland a wonderful story about our about anthropology that Sahlins I believe this is where I got it he says that there was a tribe of Australian Aborigines who appear in the original literature is very nasty brutish and short and the reason is the the the clue to this is that every year they walk over a hundred miles through the desert to get to a place where there's some fallen trees and pry off the bark and eat these grubs so any any people that does that must really be desperate right so later on and other anthropologists went and actually deigned to ask the people themselves what they were doing and they said something like this well we have nothing better to do at this time of year and we love to do to go walkabout you know this phrase walkabout they just love to wander through that we love to wander through the desert and we get that to this place and boy wait'll you taste those witchetty grubs mmm hmm you know it's like it's like as if we would say and then I went to the Riviera and I lived on caviar for a week now this is this is this is this and so Salmons developed this kind of anecdotal and statistical material into a picture of primitive of Stone Age economy the title of the book which he was then able to coin the term the original leisure society to describe this actually I don't like the word leisure anymore it has too many negative connotations from TVland but let's think of it as the original the original society of excess of just having far more than anybody could ever want or need and and if you study let's say the Northwest Indians the people up around Washington and Oregon or the what you can recover of knowledge about the Indians who lived for example let's say around the Chesapeake Bay where you know they probably worked about on the average I would say about a half an hour a day on food work took up about a half an hour per day of the life of a people like that where do you think all that fantastic art came from amongst the Northwest Coast Indians they had time they had leisure they had time to devote themselves to a amazing explosion or excess of creativity and Bataille talks about this too by the way in the occur seed share he talks about how a society which experiences excess not scarcity but excess will have to blow it off in some dramatic way you know and for example the potlatch would be the way in which the Northwest Indians blew it off every once in a while some rich person would say I hereby challenge you know the whole society I'm gonna prove myself the most generous dude within you know 50 mile radius I'm gonna give away everything you know and hold a big party and I just saw a wonderful show on this at the Museum in Seattle the soup bowls the size of this twice the size of this table and spoons there weren't ladles they were spoons for each each person got one of these spoons to to dish up this candle fish oil which was a great delicacy for them I can't imagine what it was like but when you live in a cold climate you get into that greasy greasy food you know and they just spent all their time doing this until until we we quote we arrived and blew the whole scene and finally actually made the potlatch illegal you know up until a few years ago the potlatch was a crime and it had to be practiced underground and and so the whole the whole practice of potlatch got distorted by by contact with the Europeans but originally it was an expression of social excess and just a sort of bounteous exuberance of overdoing it and this is why so-called primitive peoples have these a blowout you know when something is in season they go where that thing is in season and they eat themselves sick and they you know dance themselves ragged and they make love and they have fun and it happens a lot you know happens quite frequently even in the Middle Ages there were still 111 official holidays in Europe a third of the year off and what is that now twelve down to down to twelve official holidays a year in this country I think so I'd like to I'd like to leave that as just a just a point that you should keep in mind as I continue to talk about the Stone Age that we are not talking about the nasty brutish and short we're talking about a great culture which is not yet a civilization and therefore is very hard for us to recognize as a culture but it's a great culture and it is a culture of permanent excess this is my interpretation the the reason why the folks in France spent all that time decorating caves was because they were so well fed and happy that they wanted to do art all the time I think it's an impulse that we could all recognize or at least dream about in I think it was 1876 or somewhere around that date anyway a French writer I don't know what I think he was actually an archaeologist stumbled by mistake into one of the painted caves in France this anecdote is recounted by Marshak but I've forgotten the details and he wrote later on in his diary there seemed to be some dobbs of colored something smeared on the wall he couldn't see it he could not understand that it was art what it appeared to him as was just rubbish on the wall and this is exactly like those famous so-called primitive tribes who can't recognize a photograph when they see it you may have heard about this I remember these stories from my childhood pictures of guys with bones and their noses holding a photograph upside down you know it's like oh they don't understand photographs how primitive well this French savant in the late 19th century could not understand that Lascaux is the greatest work of art in Europe you know or at least one of them he couldn't see it we couldn't see it until very very recently the entirety of prehistory as we now understand it is a very recent discovery and it began with a few discs sort of disgusted English and German and French gentlemen who really thought that that the primitive things were kind of disgusting but they didn't have anything better to do so they would mess around and look at these things people like James Fraser in folklore the Golden Bough you know who actually hated all the stuff he wrote it about or at least so he said thought it was evidence of dumb height you know the of how stupid people were before the British came along to correct them but nevertheless he dabbled in it for 12 huge volumes you know and so beginning with those kind of people who could sort of half see they could sort of half see by focusing through a binoculars made out of classical literature which of course Greek Greek the Greek classics contain innumerable clues about the so called pre historical period they could begin to reach back or back off and there's a wonderful example contemporary and friend of Nietzsche wrote the book on mother right invented the whole concept of matriarchy or rather reinvented it as far as I can make out thought that the matriarchal period was up was it was a scandal that it would involved a lot of men who were being dominated by women and spending all their time screwing around I mean literally you know orgies culture of orgy asta sysm it's the way he saw it and he thought that the real Helene's you know the real Greeks the real patriarchal people represented the this great step forward in social evolution to get rid of the female to get rid of the cough onic to get rid of the the Paleolithic the dragon them the mothers the water and replace it with this you know a wonderful image of the of Greece as the as the epitome of reason and bare white stones we forget that those temples were painted like Hindu temples you know and that the statues were painted like Hindu like the statues in Hindu temples and that even these great Helene's who were so patriarchal and masculine and platonic and everything themselves were far closer to what we would consider wild-ass paganism you know than we can ever imagine so back off and burrowing back through that wild-ass paganism recovered the matriarchy and he thought it was awful he was shocked actually I think he had mixed feelings sometimes he kind of liked it you know how how can you dislike the orgy after all but he couldn't admit it it would have been you know Paco me old foe in the Victorian era to actually admit to a nostalgia for the for this matriarchal orgy asta sysm and his work was taken up by by the has been taken up and reinterpreted by by some smart feminists students of prehistory including Jim Buddha's so it should now I would like to shift the focus of the question now and question the origin of the state and we've talked about how for millions and millions of years human beings live in a state of the Galit Aryan surplus economy hunting and gathering goes on for million millions after millions of years and no one ever thinks to change it this of course from the point of view of progress and evolution looks like degeneracy however from the from the point of view of from the sort of post-postmodern point of view which views civilization as a mixed blessing at best this Paleolithic past begins to look more and more like the Golden Age begins to look like a very good thing now politically the the kind of tribal structure that we're talking about is not and cannot be considered as the state and in fact archaeologists and archaeologists no longer consider that it was such that there was in those days such a thing as the state society yes of course there was society human society itself begins with that original moment of splitting apart which immediately then demands its its antithesis and it coming together so I think you if you want to ask the origins of human society it is also in that mythical moment of falling apart of of the split the primordial split of consciousness but the state is something that comes much much much much much much much much much much much later only a few minutes ago really and it arose in the as in the form that we know it now pretty much in the Neolithic I think in the late Neolithic and if you look at at a place like chattel hoyuk which is at a small this in fact the first city in the world as far as we know it's in Anatolia Turkey and it was dug up I think in the late 50s or early 60s and has still not been paid very close attention to and it turned out to be a town with streets laid out in a grid pattern like New York it's a sea with a cedilla sign underneath sea ial hu why UK and I think what's the name of the guy who worked on that Mellaart anybody know James Mellaart yeah Emmy ll a RT I think so this this alright now we're faced with another mystery first of all we had the mystery of gender then we had the mystery of agriculture why would anybody want to give up hunting and gathering for such a shitty deal as agriculture and now we have to ask ourselves about the state why would anybody give up egalitarian society which persisted well into the Neolithic according to Kim Buddhist and I'm perfectly willing to believer a society which moreover has revealed almost no signs of warfare or violence as we understand it there's no human sacrifice to be found in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic no evidence of cannibalism or some people think there is but I disagree I have a different interpretation of all of that material and warfare begins with the Bronze Age and eventually and seems to coincide with the invention of the state as a means of organizing society now what earthly reason could there been to give up at what I call a million years of anarchy in favor of this tight-assed form of order in which a few people of course are in a much better position than ever the kings and priests but most of us are beginning that long history of work consumed died y-you know what was in it for us for Christ's sake why should we have ever adopted agriculture why should we have ever adopted the state all the old evolutionist views that these were steps forward that agriculture would of course provide more food and better food and that the state would protect people against violence what violence you know but don't ask there's violence out there in the forest I can feel it why who where did this was this a scam are we gonna have like oh how about the conspiratorial theory of history you know an elite which bands together to enslave the rest of humanity and constructs out of nothingness a new religion based on on the idea that you are nothing but a piece of dead flesh cut off from the primordial dragon and that is your duty to do nothing but slave for the priests and the king and to fill up that storehouse with grain to make that surplus on one hand and that scarcity on the other you are in the scarcity king is in the surplus yeah what caused this what on earth could have caused this the French anthropologist Pierre class trace CLA stres has two books which are very germane to this question one is called society against the state and that one I don't know whether it's in print or not but you should certainly seek it out it's a masterpiece and the other one which just came out recently and I'm proud to say the publishing company that I'm associated with autonomy dia got to publish the English version of the book that class dress was working on when he unfortunately died and didn't finish called the archaeology of violence in these two books Colossus puts forward a theory that society itself is a structure which is meant to resist the emergence of the state it's not just that people were you know happily going along bumbling along through the whole Paleolithic and they never thought of it you know they never thought oh you know we could enslave all these people and make them work for the thought occurred countless times to countless sons of throughout the entire meet probably occurred to the the second australopithecines you know that he could enslave the first and make him work for him I mean it's a very old idea but it never worked and a class dress doesn't give this by the way this fantasy about the past he sticks strictly to his fieldwork amongst the granny granny Indians of South America but I'm extrapolating I'm making I'm making the extrapolation later on in his book work on primitive war he did begin to extrapolate back into the past and I'll get to that in a minute so class stress sees society itself as a defense against these sons of who come along from time to time and try to invent the state everybody knows this happens you can find stories about it in in the mythology and in in you can work in comparative mythology and separate this out as an actual motif in folklore we've always known that these potential kings and priests were around but we've resisted them apparently and class dress looks at the at the tribal societies he studies and he sees many of the social institutions in a new light because of this theory and so he rejects leve Strauss and all the earlier work which he's which he is in part based on and comes to a new theory about a primitive society that it is in fact a kind of freedom machine if I can put it that way that's my phrase not his it's an actual mechanism for the preservation of social freedoms and that these things are very well understood at least on the level of folklore or mythology by that by the society is in common and then in his second in the second book which as I say he unfortunately never finished called the archeology of violence he began to develop this theory he bent began to focus in on the question of war warfare now gimm Buddhist points out that there's very little evidence of warfare all the way up through the Neolithic there's no fortified settlements there are no huge caches of weapons there are very very few examples of skeletons you can find that seemed to have been victims of violence or murder just and if you look at so-called primitive tribes you find the same thing there's very little evidence for organized continual violence that we call warfare amongst so-called primitive people in fact the last surviving example of this I think might be the wonderful Yanomami money that the the wildest what the wildest tribe and wildest ass tribe in the world I think and they have just continually resisted the the onslaught of civilization and they do it because they're like if you took the Hells Angels and dropped them in the middle of the jungle and came back 5,000 laterz years later that would be that would be these people they're I mean they're really wonderful I really admire them and they're completely given over to violence it's their entire way of life revolves around violence they have these on the slightest excuse they take these clubs out and start bashing each other over the head there's a wonderful ethnographic film apparently Steven Taylor saw it I haven't seen it of some when Samantha Rose who were fortunate enough to be in the village on the day one of these fights broke out and and and and you know with their jaws hanging to their knees filmed this going on incredible violence and the the first anthropologist who really studied them Napoleon Chanyeol has had a one of the classic anecdotes of modern anthropology he went as a young anthropologist he went to study these people and they just gave him continually they just they they laughed at him they wouldn't answer his questions they stole his food right in front of his face they pushed him around they made fun of him constantly and he was the saddest little anthropologist in the world you know he just the whole he saw his whole career going up in in smoke from these sons of who won't pay attention you know and one day at the lowest point of his depression he's sitting in his Hut he has one can of sardines left and the lowest guy on the you know pecking order in the in the some who everybody else laughs at comes into his tent kicks him out of the way and steals his last can of sardines it's the last straw you know and he loses it and he rushes after this guy and in front of the whole tribe he starts pounding on it give me back my sardine juice I'm a and after that the elders of the tribe come up to him and and say gee you know sorry man we didn't know you were human now warfare amongst these people is clearly not a force for centra potala t you know for moving in towards the center and towards ever more severe forms of social order warfare amongst folks like this is centrifugal it just scatters every social force to the winds it dissipates it's again it's a form of excess it's a form of working off that excess of the stuff Stone Age economy this time in the form of violence and of course it involves the expenditure of great amounts of wealth to do this you have to raise up a troop of your friends and you go and you have this adventure and you have to leave your fields behind Jack you can't do any hunting I mean by their standards it's very expensive so it's a form of waste they waste the excess and this means through primitive warfare and right up until very recently the examples of the the pictures of war that we get from let's say even the Plains Indians of the 19th century is it still very much this way it's it's not a warfare which is aimed towards the creation of a state in other words towards the in the conquering and enslaving of an entire people it's a dissipative warfare it it spreads itself out in every direction and it's really actually not that violent one of the big problems that the Plains Indians tribes faced when they first came in contact with the Europeans was that counting coup was considered to be far groovier thing to do than killing somebody if you could take your coup stick which was a symbolic weapon that couldn't be used to hurt a fly really and get close to one of the enemy on poni and touch him and insight of everybody who touched him and then get away leave the guy alive but his face is completely gone he's been touched and counting coup was far more sophisticated in really cool way for the warrior to to to act than to actually kill somebody which is really messy and kind of crude you know so but unfortunately the Europeans didn't understand this and they even even after they were touched with the coup stick they would just go right on firing with that damn fire stick you know and wiping out the the Warriors who had done that the really brave thing who had counted coup so this this is primitive warfare it is not repeat underlined not war as civilization knows war according to class race if I read him correct because the the essay breaks off at the point that he died and he promised that he was going to go on and analyze what could cause these social structures to break down and give way to the state he was he was he was actually going to try to answer the question of the origin of the state and I think he was going to find that origin in a breakdown of the primitive warfare structure in that there would be there would come a point at which inadvertently almost primitive warfare would result in the conquest and enslavement of another tribe and therefore the creation of a class structure in that in order to manage that class structure the state would have to arise so that's actually again it's really not explanatory because why did that accident occur nevertheless it's it's very close to being an explanation and it's it's a very interesting concept so now we have the state we have social hierarchy we have property because also the ideas of personal problem I doing for time what time is it it's I have five minutes well so I will just arbitrarily break off here now because I want to leave some time for for questions I didn't realize it was so late someone has to get the hook out for me you know and okay so wait a minute let me just remember where we are here I own about got about two fifths done of my first lecture here no no okay but at this point let's let's leave it at that the mystery of the rising of the state and next time I actually hope to focus in on an example of a fascinating example which again has to do with my studies in Wisconsin last summer of a society which apparently moved backwards through this supposed developmental system who were at one time agriculturalists but who gave it up to go back into the woods and become hunters and gatherers again and what role psychedelics played in that story and what role economics played in that story what role art played and so forth and so on and I will have to rush through the rest of my introductory material in order to get into this fascinating example of a hunter-gatherer society which created some of the most beautiful art in America the effigy mounds of Wisconsin so if there are questions I will certainly be happy to entertain them yeah I was wondering if you thought the fall myth in the Bible that perhaps the forbidden fruit was really like psychedelic mushrooms yeah that's a very prominent theory of course the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which actually creates consciousness self consciousness as Genesis points out and they knew that they were naked in other words they knew that previously they had not been clothed with the construct which our rational thought which our self consciousness and so forth and so on so that many people including Gordon Wasson wasfo and very important thinker for everything I'm saying here especially on the psychedelic theory I think it was he who first proposed that the Apple was in fact a magic mushroom and that theory was taken up by John Allegro in his book the mushroom in the cross which has been completely trashed by everybody is and is totally insane but I happen to think it's a really great book in which he traces the mushroom lore amongst the Semitic Semitic peoples ending up with the Bible and identifies Jesus as a mushroom in the end I can't even hear your tone you don't have to how do you think the Sufi myth of the birds relates to all of this in what sense to the generation of culture and consciousness and people's and the way they're living or do you see that I'm sorry I I haven't thought about it and nothing springs to mind I'll talk I'll think about it and get back to you you know some of the stuff you were saying about the myth of the primitive people not being able to see photographs a lot of that has to do with you know Robert Flaherty's quote-unquote in Anoka the north's an ability to see motion pictures and it had nothing to do with this intellect it had to do with like his weight he did hadn't learned how to see that kind of light and his eyes were adjusted to a different kind of color spectrum you know living in the white north you know quote-unquote yeah yeah obviously there are always reasons for a failure for the failure of perception what's what's interesting to me is that these failures are universal and they cannot be imputed to primitive peoples in fact as I said I believe that the sensorium of prehistoric humanity was much much larger than that of at least early agriculture and even with all the explosion of information and endless endless information that we that we think of as a great complexity it may still be far simpler and more impoverished than the censorial world of say the Neanderthals and so all the only point that I was trying to make is not I wasn't trying to explain how these failures of perception occur that's an interesting study in perceptual brain processes what I was interested in was if to make an arbitrary separation between brain and mind and point out that the mind of modern Europe is also thoroughly riddled with such failures of perception Oliver Sacks just wrote a big gigantic essay about these people whose sight was restored at 50 years old for the first time in their life and their complete inability to process information and the way that people that have learned to see camped the whole development of the third dimension in art only occurs in the Renaissance and is in fact completely artificial and it relates to our natural our natural perceptions in only the most tangential ways but since the since the Renaissance we've been trained to see in three dimensions and we've been trained to think that art which does not include these three dimensions is primitive art and there are still art historians who will tell you that Islamic art never developed the third dimension and therefore it's just merely decorative art or the the the painters of the cave painters of the Paleolithic never developed the third dimension as if the perception of the third dimension was some proof of evolutionary superiority it is it's just a different way of doing art that's all"

• Uncut Dialogue with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) by George Quasha - This uncut dialogue with poet, writer, and anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) was conducted by George Quasha for *POETRY IS Vol. II* (2015). The edited version is available at art-is-international.org. POETRY IS is part of the larger project ART IS / POETRY IS / MUSIC IS, which began in 2002 and involved filming over 1000 artists, poets, and musicians across eleven countries. This video was released in October 2022 for the Brooklyn Rail memorial for Peter Lamborn Wilson (October 20, 1945 – May 22, 2022). The full dialogue is a profound exploration of the nature of poetry, its intersections with action, magic, and philosophy, and its broader implications for art, language, and society. Below are the key insights from this rare and detailed interview:
  
  Poetry as Action and Enactment: Wilson compares poetry to "showing" rather than "telling," emphasizing its performative and experiential dimensions. His concept of “vanishing art” integrates poetry with site-specific works that intertwine landscape, history, and communal engagement, making poetry a lived experience rather than a static text.
  
  Magic and Language: Alignment Over Ritual: Drawing on figures like Cornelius Agrippa and Marsilio Ficino, Wilson sees magic as the synchronization of speaking, writing, and doing. His focus is on natural magic, where creativity harmonizes with the broader forces of the world, rather than on ceremonial or ritualistic practices.
  
  The Romantic Dilemma: Failure as a Form of Resistance: Wilson critiques poetry’s diminished societal role in modernity but frames this "failure" as a form of resistance against commodification, preserving poetry’s authenticity and transformative potential.
  
  Anarchism and the Poetics of Language: Wilson embeds anarchist principles of freedom and decentralization into the fabric of his poetic practice, aiming to create a "possible reader" who might internalize these principles and embody a new way of being.
  
  Intersections of Tradition and Experimentation: Combining influences from Sufi mysticism, Romantic poetics, and modernist experimentation, Wilson constructs a hybrid approach to poetry that balances historical tradition with innovative expression.
  
  Temporal and Communal Power of Poetry: Wilson emphasizes poetry’s subtle, long-term impact on individuals and communities, fostering shifts in thought and perception that ripple through time.
  
  Postmodern Bardic Role: While acknowledging the dissolution of traditional bardic roles, Wilson reimagines the poet as a subtle influencer who inspires change through moments of connection and meaning.
  
  Humor, Transformation, and the Magic of Language: Wilson’s engagement with language reflects a blend of humor, alchemy, and mysticism, underscoring his belief in poetry’s transformative potential and its ability to reveal hidden truths.
  
  The Poet as Seed-Planter: Rejecting grandiose claims, Wilson sees the poet’s role as planting seeds of transformation, inspiring gradual shifts within individuals and communities over time.
  
  

  This dialogue captures Wilson’s commitment to re-enchanting the world through poetry, integrating action, magic, and anarchist philosophy. His reflections challenge us to see poetry as a living, evolving practice—a form of resistance and re-enchantment that holds the potential to transform art, society, and imagination.

  Show Transcript

  "well I thought that you would ask me that and so I thought about it a little bit and I came up with the idea that among many other things I could say poetry is more like action than prose it's like in elementary school when you used to do show and tell it seems to me that um that uh that that prose is like telling what poetry is like showing so it's more like action but it still isn't itself completely action it's still writing and therefore it still must be representation but and therefore for that reason I've pushed what I do farther towards the poll of activity or action uh leaving behind simply the simple paper written page I guess and I do these Vanishing art installations or routines or works or whatever you want to call them or I have been doing them as prolongations of poetry into a further level of action and the action in that case being then it takes on certain elements of art but it takes on certain elements of performance certain elements of magic conceptual art also historical art also writing remains a great part of it so most of these pieces are about some they're mostly they're all of that place they're all about landscape and they're all about the history of those places and Landscapes so they've risen out of my Research into local history here in the in the Hudson Valley mostly so that so that I can actually bring all of those elements together it's not that I want to be a regionalist in any you know I'm not going to start using New York dialect if there were such a thing anyway I'm not even I don't think there is any more Double Dutch or whatever no not in that sense but I have to be a regionalist because I have to be able to be in the place while I'm doing the work instead of with writing where you can get step step back from it in time and place yeah so to me it seems a little bit more ungae to use a term from fencing and um I don't know whether it's some I it's not an ideal uh and I don't think it's anything particularly new either I think a lot of other people have done similar things but maybe not so many people have come to it true written word into the art scene a lot of people look on this a lot of people do this kind of thing they look on it as on the form and they see it only as art but I see it also as a form of writing so that's my position at the moment like and I can't think of anything uh okay oh can I but if you can ask questions yes of course yeah okay um you mentioned magic um this is of course the hardest dimension to talk about in terms of Art and poetry but it's obviously Central to your view as it is to mine and um so my question would be the experience for you of the poem whether it would be a poem that you consider to be in the domain of the of the magical in some sense or or or your own work is that is the is it is it in the experience because if you say it's an action then the action would apply to the nature of the thing in which it speaks right well I like to I like to point out that what I'm doing is not ceremonial magic in the strict sense of the word I mean I use Cornelius Agrippa and other sources as inspiration but I could I couldn't do it as ceremonial magic for one thing then I would have to tie everything in with astrology so I'd be doing it only at the precise right moment and trying to get everything organized in a place and of course I don't drive so I need people to uh assist me in this and I I need people to assist me in other ways in these works too they're meant to be social events private social events is another way of looking at them and so I can't tell everybody they have to be there on the cusp of Neptune when it's entering into Sagittarius or whatever you know it's just not going to work and I can't be sacrificing the tongue of the Newt and the eye of the Frog it's just silly right we don't do that kind of thing but it's a very strong influence on what I do and in the sense that what I speak and what I do want to come closer and closer together and that's in that sense very much if that's magic then yes but if it means a specific kind of mumbo jumbo then no it's um it's influenced by that just like it's influenced by performance art but it's not a performance I don't perform I just do the thing that I'm going to do yeah and I don't make a theatrical big deal about doing it the way the way performance artists do right right um well you're you're focusing very much on the action aspect of it the art whatever you would think of that as whether you should be able to Art and you think as you said is writing um and the performative aspect of it in the sense of performance rather than performative in the sense that the poem is the event of which it speaks uh and then and the event doesn't exist separate from the the poem I'm I want to bring it a little bit back towards the act of writing yourself not not the action as writing but writing as its own action and is that a magical process uh you know that's been a big disappointment over the over the years over the centuries of the Romantic uh movement um so many people have have tried to write as if writing could be or is of course one immediately thinks that the case book the textbook cases you know Rambo's sonnet of the vowels but look what happened to Rambo you know he gave it up and discussed and so I've stopped writing and uh went to Africa to make money that's one view we don't know why he did it well uh I think if you read his last Works clearly he's renouncing magic he's saying it didn't work and it was stupid to think of it it's very dark his his last his last writing what about your mom and they've all went crazy and hanged himself well a lot of magicians have too yeah it's a dangerous a dangerous thing I mean I I worship the ground that never all walks on wish I could go to Paris and follow his every footstep uh even more than Rambo in a lot of ways uh and I because he was such a conscious hermeticist and some of his writing if anybody's writing ever does approach it and certainly his does it at points but it's always a big disappointment some something's lacking and that's what drove me to this further take this further step but believe me I'm not saying I've found a solution to the to the problem you know the Romantic problem or the problem of Romanticism because that's what we're talking about we'll have you abandoned it none of it's not at all no yeah but the rating the writing what it is for you is what is the writing for you because you made a distinction that it's not a representation only of something out there like landscape or history when I said when I made that difference between pros and poetry which was probably too facile and simple difference but I think it has some uh has some truth to it yeah at least for me you know I wanted to be a poet then I came to the realization in the early 80s that no one was reading poetry anymore that it was a very it was no longer a public act that the whole idea of The Bard was finished there was a beatnik thing and that was over so I took I actually took my poems and turned them into prose so that people would read them right and I I said these are look these are political manifestos I didn't and I stopped calling them poems and it kind of worked people did take much more notice of them then so then little by little however I started writing prose you know and for 20 years I was very wrapped up with pros and with the problems of History anthropology economics history of religions etc etc and it's desperate you know kind of desperate uh 20-year project to figure out what the hell is going on in in the world in reality and that was a very prosaic task if I can put it that way and then you know around the middle to the end of the 90s when I kind of figured out what was going on or at least wanted to move on to another stage it seemed to me that um I would go back to poetry knowing full well that it's a failure uh that it doesn't communicate that it's not taken seriously um and uh that I would just have to live with that I'd have to write out of that right in that position because if you try to think seriously of poets as an unacknowledged legislators it may have been true once but in the post-modern period it no longer seems to be so um poets don't set the the trends in a post-modern situation uh where there's no possibility of an avant-garde where where every every every movement comes back to haunt the world together you know and no no one movement is ahead of any other movement and no one no group of people saying look do it our way and then that'll be the Revolution and then everyone can be a poet that is the Romantic goal ultimately is that everyone should be an artist right I think if you could sum up the whole romantic revolution in one phrase that would be it and modern poetry is not in a position to make that happen so the best you can say is that failure is a kind of success in the modern world because if something is successful and almost kind of um indicates there's something wrong with it you know but there's something corrupt about it it's like a thing of some editing the things from the Robert Kelly event in New York and I'm here I'm listening to parts of it as I do it all those things about you know third of the way through and putting them online as I go yells opening remark in this what's his name novel Chaser was his name the novelist that he refers to right at the beginning of his talk and he says he says in in the novel like somebody says uh what you're doing I'm going to a poetry reading which one is I'm going to hear um what's his name uh you know who was uh professionally Dante who's the poet laureate um you know charity yes not charity but the more recent one uh yeah you know I'm talking about Raymond Robert Haas yeah not hot but Rob Roberts I'm going to hear Robert Penske the guy says I'm not going to say anything about that but uh I mean if if you're going to talk about the people who have been our pro at laureates over the past yeah and success is not what we're looking for no no exactly exactly but okay not to in any way disagree with anything that you've said um just to point out that you are in a curious kind of position here because your heart is in being a communitarian and the other part of your heart you have different chambers apparently of your heart because another part of your heart is obviously an esoterrist which by definition cannot be speak to the World At Large in any direct way that's why we use the word esoteric and I suppose that's there is an authentic Community you two people in this room are affected by your work as a magical Act of great power there's one of the definitions of magic that not necessarily ritual magic or ceremonial magic or um well let's say that magic is supposed to change the world well how do you know it's just another reason why I don't want to make it the claim that I'm actually doing it no I understand that I understand that I'm on your side here but a couple of us might say um However the fact that the world has not yet split apart is is because the magic is working yes of course and that that's what uh Native people always say that if they didn't say these prayers then the sun wouldn't come up and the world would stop going uh and that's a nice thought but we don't think that way uh we moderns don't think that way we're post-modern people don't who are you speaking about when you say that you don't think that way no in my heart of hearts I can't say that I do okay maybe maybe the hyperbole of making the sun come up is a little too extreme for us but there are other aspects of vital sustenance uh psychic Clarity and orientation no you're not going to get me to say that poetry is useless I wouldn't that's not what I that's not what I meant what I meant was that it was powerless that doesn't make sense to me if you if you're saying that if we're acknowledging that it does have a certain kind of power let me go back to one thing the distinction about what magic is I'm very aligned in my mind a lot of the time with the kind of ideas of natural magic um uh fuccini and people like that and um the the the the the the the the natural magic might be expressed as a recognition that magical operations are going on because mind is pervasive with everything and the magician is the one who knows to see that it kind of has the Taoist aspect in the lines himself on this okay that's certainly true however there is an operative aspect of magic especially when you start reading people like Cornelius Agrippa right of course uh and for that matter ficino who talks in his uh in his planetary uh rituals are meant for healing so they are meant to change the world yeah they're meant to change at least one body and that would be the first of all the body of the of the practitioner but I think for Chino also was slyly proposing at least a small community of people to be involved in this new religion he was from that he was inventing or Reinventing so um of course you know there's the I there there's a magic you do absolutely alone and which is like that natural magic which is being part of the part of the Dow in some way but then there's this operative idea it's a magic where it's going to change the world in some Mark you know in the way that Marx meant when he said philosophy hasn't changed the world yes it doesn't attend the Hollywood eyes the expectation of the effect that we're going to have uh uh what can I say I'm an unreconstructed person of the generation of 68. I haven't I haven't given up those ideas I haven't given them up yeah but we don't have to be attached to a particular image of how that would come about that's my point no but we did if uh if we want what we do to be working on that level that's something entirely different yeah well of course that's the bardic level that is the bardic level right the way not only the ancient Celtic bards saw it but also the Ginsburg the more effective bargs in our in our historical memory like Whitman didn't read Agrippa as far as we know um I mean he didn't read he wasn't he wasn't an esoterrist he wasn't he was something else he was something he perhaps invented by being who he was I'm not so sure didn't he uh wasn't he in touch with that guy Buckland who wrote the thing about the cosmos or perhaps but it doesn't mean I don't mean you didn't have sympathies in that direction I mean that his actual energy the way it it worked we like Ginsburg look at it I mean he he was a blanking him totally totally involved in Magic yeah black I agree totally I totally agree but he he accepted a role that was that had a certain modesty and one of the beautiful things about Ginsburg was his actual modesty his willingness to put himself on the line well naturally of course he thought it was funny also to be a part of the modern world he sure did putting his queer shoulders absolutely I thought that was amusing amusing even ironic but that didn't didn't stop him and his whole and that and that whole generation which uh had so much influence on me from thinking that there must be a connection between poetry and the changing of the world yeah that 68 was meant to have been and of course wasn't well Ginsburg was as far as I'm concerned in Rocky a Flats protest I mean they I I actually think they've saved the world from destruction I think that if that plutonium had not been stopped at that point that there's no minimal dose of of plutonium any of it in the atmosphere is deadly I mean he they've saved a lot but they actually were very effective and there are a certain number of instances and you might be seeing one right now with the Wall Street uh occupation protest why is that being run by Poets I hadn't heard no but it's got some of this there's some there are there yeah I don't even mean by Poets but I just mean the possibility for the generation of people who would listen to a Ginsburg are running that um and it's incredible to me that to see that Awakening in that way it's enough yes it could happen but it hasn't uh in my view it hasn't um it hasn't happened yet we're going to agree on that but I I want to say that I'm really interested in what happens inside Lane your poetry is powerful for me I mean it's obviously I feel a kinship with it with great knowledge when I give you some of Poetics to read that there is some kind of root sympathy there and it's not at the level necessarily of of that we're talk we've just been talking about but at some other level and I feel in in those poems something that is has got a humorous quality it's in in the serious laughter of sense of of alchemy it's got a um um an unexpectedness of a transformative and something there's something in the process of the language which is magical to my mind that's one of you experience that yourself or you've attached it gosh you know how am I supposed to say no yeah it's like when this is a great Tibetan teacher was talking at Yale uh and uh somebody a very funny guy too he's very smart somebody asked him he said he says we're here in New Haven and the the the the scriptures say that every place is a little hitesh for a manifestation you feel that way about about New Haven he says okay they say no one would be tempted New Haven if anywhere uh no obviously not and uh I can't I can't deny that the that that aspect is always uh Forefront in what in my mind in what I do tell me what you how you see that aspect but that is for you I mean my complete development as a as a writer owes for example as much to Persian Sufism as it does to the Western poetic tradition already when I was a teenager I was already involved in reading a Sufi literature poems in Translation and rewriting them in order to make them sound better in English so that I could read them with pleasure and I've been doing stuff like that all my life and I lived in lived in in Iran for seven years I lived in India for three years so there's that whole side of things of my work and I've been a historian of religions and I'm a historian of the religions of those countries where I lived as well as others so um I write out of and that's in that sense I'm writing I have not just not a tradition but uh maybe many traditions um including modern poetry which of course I was also brought up on um so all of that is absolutely Inseparable from the themes of magic and mysticism all the way from you know from Sufism to um to the all the fantasy uh poets and artists that I liked so much when I was 12 or 13 years old and which you know the Art Nouveau and the the fantasy Echo period which had so so much influence on on hippie aesthetic that's that's because we were all looking at um Dover reprints of Aubry beersley stuff when we were you know in elementary school or at least I was and I think a lot of other people were too to judge by what happened to Art in the 60s so which was entirely to do with magic and and even specifically to do with evoking that late 19th early 20th century fascination with her medicism that was still producing you know I've just been reading a biography of Alfred Gary exactly and he was completely wrapped up in all that not that the biographer is very sensitive to it because most modern Scholars are not right but I could see reading between the lines what what Japanese must have been reading in terms of her medicism and uh and the European magical tradition it's very very important for that entire aesthetic World absolutely and and Ergo yeah and then Duchamp although it's only recently that people talk about Duchamp as a hermeticist because his connection with Shari is is also part of it though in that very sense yeah absolutely and those people in turn were you know came out of the world of of De nirval and baudelaire and Rambo and Charles Fourier the the utopian socialist philosopher who was very important for all of them in resurrecting hermeticism in in French poetry but there's the other connection like in the language itself like there's this mother may okay and he was another one another one yeah symbolists I call them oh that's interesting yeah well mother may would be mine probably my other than Blake my deepest model of something that keeps calling me to The View that magic happens in the intricacies of language itself now that was his belief yeah and I of course I love him and [Music] I always think when I hear about it was it Tuesday afternoons that you know Tuesday evenings that he used to get together yeah I I always think of myself being there I people study photographs of of him and his in his in his rooms and um a little leave for that book the book yeah and he of course little known fact he himself was a lifelong Anarchist activist he subscribed to all the anarchist magazines he supported all the causes he gave to you know signed all the petitions he wasn't a fighter he was a poet but his beliefs were completely anarchistic as I think were Jerry and and all all those people yeah and it also it puts it it it it actually adds something to the theory or in practice of anarchistic uh mind an existing way of being orientation when you consider that fact that they are because there's a way in which I mean you could say yeah it's inside language itself the principles of anarchism are inside the Poetics somehow that's what I want to find that's what I want to hear something I mean I I know that you practice it and I just want to hear if you think that you practice it when you think about it I mean I read you that way let me let's let's just put it this way yeah um I wish I I wish I had a big overblown ego and I could just say yeah that's what I do but instead since I like to be modest I will say that's what I wish that I could be seeing myself as doing well how about this idea if the poet is the only the sense in which the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world might be that the poet creates the possible reader that is to say the I don't see your poems for the ecologues would be my current best model in your work is this um as as drawing the Mind into it's a possible way with language a possible way of action in the sense that you mean it precisely but but happening in at the level of language so that its effect is on the mind of the person and you couldn't you wouldn't be able to tell maybe for a generation what whether that to exceed I mean just in terms of how long it takes for people to sometimes process radically new things well you know I'll just say again that was finishing that book then that's what impelled me to go into this next step uh because um although I'm probably more satisfied with that book than any of any of my other books it still wasn't but I had to I had to to push out into this slightly more ceremonial slightly more of the uh performative slightly more artistic uh physical object related uh action related right well you've just made me realize something that one of the senses in which poetic action actually does influence history which is anything that happens from it in the world and maybe a minute little bit of history but it's history and who knows where what the seed will produce because everything starts small and gets big right um the way that that you just said that making those poems then kind of spills forward into action is it is the very proof of the Poetics that you've been talking about for you you did it I mean okay inshallah God willing well yeah they must be willing I wouldn't be happy with it because if that's what you can that's what I can't say it would be a jinx if I said that uh-huh okay well um I I I I'm I don't know if we're there at all but I I think we've run out of time anyway well possibly yeah we're at 30 minutes and 14 seconds so oh okay but was that is that satisfying news that did listen these things are usually not more than a few minutes are they well I I that's not following me after I'm going to do longer versions by the way of individuals about poetry is Flash well sometimes when we have an open end so that we're not looking I don't like to do a part two sure we could because actually I have to say that I'm exploiting this occasion with you because these are questions I wanted to talk to you about in some sort of intensely focused way that kind of puts you on the spot so that you have to kind of come up with something even though you may be reluctant to it you know because they're difficult questions these are hard questions but I because of my passionate interest in your work I want to well let's cut this one with you at inshallah okay and I'd be happy to do another one with you sometime"

• Peter Lamborn Wilson on Hermeticism and Spiritual Anarchism - In this lecture, Peter Lamborn Wilson (pen name "Hakim Bey") continues his series on Hermeticism, focusing on the trends of spiritual anarchism in 19th-century United States. Wilson explores the intersection of mysticism, radical politics, and cultural movements, offering a unique perspective on the philosophical undercurrents of the time.
  Context: Spiritual Anarchism and Hermeticism

  • Wilson builds on his previous lectures about Hermeticism, a tradition of mystical, philosophical, and alchemical thought, which influenced American history from the colonial period onward.

  • He traces how Hermetic ideas—emphasizing hidden wisdom, esotericism, and a spiritual quest—reemerge in the 19th century through radical religious and social movements.

  • He situates the rise of spiritual anarchism within broader historical and social trends, particularly post-Revolutionary America, where capitalism, industrialism, and national identity clashed with liberatory spiritual movements.

  19th Century as a Transformational Period

  • Industrial and Capitalist Expansion:

  • America transitioned from an agrarian society to an industrial power.

  • The romanticized idea of an “endless frontier” began to erode, raising ecological and existential questions about the role of wilderness and nature.

  • Radical Spiritual Movements:

  • Emerged as a response to materialism and political rigidity, particularly in the “Burnt-Over District” of New York.

  Key Radical Movements and Figures

  • Perfectionism:
  • Belief in achieving sinless perfection.
  • Exemplified by the Millerites and John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community.

  • Spiritualism:
  • Popularized by the Fox Sisters; emphasized spirit communication.
  • Tied to feminism through women’s roles as mediums.

  • Transcendentalism:
  • Emerson and Thoreau bridged individualism, nature mysticism, and reform.
  • Inspired utopian communes like Brook Farm.

  • Fourierism:
  • Advocated attractive labor and sexual liberation.
  • Influenced American communes like the Wisconsin Phalanx.

  • Free Love:
  • Critiqued monogamy, advocating for egalitarian relationships.
  • Figures like Victoria Woodhull challenged Victorian norms.

  Civil War as a Turning Point

  • Reform movements were co-opted by political forces, narrowing abolitionism and suppressing broader critiques of capitalism.

  • Feminism shifted focus to suffrage, abandoning critiques of marriage and sexuality.

  • Industrialization eroded the connection to wilderness and spiritual frontiers.

  Thematic Connections

  • Nature Mysticism: Public parks like Central Park reflected Fourierist ideas of reconnecting with nature.

  • Recurrent Cycles: Radical ideas resurface in movements like the 1960s counterculture.

  Philosophical Implications

  • Wilson critiques the marginalization of 19th-century movements, emphasizing their experimentalism and relevance to modern challenges.

  Key Takeaways

  • Continuity of Radical Thought: Modern movements owe their origins to 19th-century experiments.

  • Critique of Centralization: The Civil War suppressed pluralism and spiritual anarchism.

  • Enduring Relevance: Spiritual anarchism critiques materialism and authoritarianism.

  Conclusion

  • Peter Lamborn Wilson’s lecture reveals the pivotal role of 19th-century spiritual anarchism in American history.
  • Through detailed analysis, he highlights the legacy of figures and movements that sought harmony between spiritual and material existence.

  Show Transcript

  "in order for uh what and um I publish books with autonom media semi text and what else do I do I don't know I'm that sort of thing all right and um last time we talked about uh hermeticism uh the Occult Philosophy of U of um the helenistic period and of the Renaissance and then I tried to bring that into the uh into new world history into American history and show that from the very beginning there were um people in in the new world interested in occultism and hermeticism and that it plays a deep role in our hidden history and uh uh today tonight I want to leave uh leave the 17th and 18th century behind again uh and move on to the 19th century which actually is uh we're leaving a gap um because I think we probably left off uh the story in around the time of the American Revolution and now suddenly we have to jump to about 1820 or 1830 and it's a question as to exactly what was happening in between those dates um and it's a question in my mind in terms of occultism and hermeticism and the spiritual quest in America it seems like a kind of Dead period for a lot of these subjects uh this wouldn't wouldn't be unusual there have been other more abund periods uh the post Civil War era as we'll as we'll hear as I'll I'll try to get to uh in this lecture was certainly one of them it was a time when uh when America was too involved in um I guess the sort of economic Adventure the front that that aspect of the frontier from the from the time of the Revolution uh I think that in many respects the the American Revolution and certainly the Constitution which the Constitutional movement which came after it was uh um not particularly good for the subject for the for the trends that we're discussing um before the re before the Revolution paradoxically there was the possibility for as you know chairman Mau would have said a thousand flowers to bloom whereas After the Revolution there was then an American ideology and people were being whipped into shape to uh to conform to that ideology and the the Constitution I have always seen as a uh completely reactionary document in that even even what was left of the radical project of the American Revolution by 1789 the uh ruling class uh the people who were setting themselves up as the ruling class in the wake of the Revolution the the winners the people came out on top in that particular uh Topsy Turvy situation used the Constitution basically to in some ways to put the kbash on the uh uh diversity and and um and sort of splend wackiness of the period that went before the Revolution when when uh there was a lot in my opinion a lot more freedom of thought I think if you want to look for for one influence which causes this inter intervening period to become dull it would probably be the con the Constitution and the kind of political reaction that went with it and I'll get back to that in the next lecture when I talk about the Dark Side of of hermeticism in American history because the U uh there was also an occult aspect to uh to that as well but what we're primarily interested in here is the more radical um liberatory um even Proto eological movements uh although of course ecology and the preservation of the Wilderness is something that uh that just simply is is not an idea in the 18th century there was just too much of it and there was to to worry about preserving it there were people who were already into a kind of nature mysticism as we talked about last time uh but even that was not as highly developed as what we're going to see in the 19th century by about 1820 or 1830 and the Jacksonian thing and the whole you know takeoff of big-time American uh this self-identity um Americans now beginning to think of themselves as the hot noon nation in the world uh emergent capitalism emergent industrialism etc etc etc um this uh this very success this very industrial success uh for the first time began to give people a certain twinge of thought that uh the Wilderness was not Eternal and that nature was not inviable um and in fact most of the if you if you read the L most the literature from the period people were in favor of that uh even even some of the most radical thinkers right up to the end of the 19th century and I include marks in this uh category took no interest whatsoever INE in the preservation of wilderness what they were interested in was the extension and rationalization of the industrial system um it's only it was only uh around about the middle of the 19th century that anyone at all PA began to think in terms of saving uh some remnant from what had previously been thought to be just the state of nature I mean we were in this new world there was always a sort of infinite Frontier there was always more Forest to cut down there were always more Indians to eliminate you know it just went on forever no one thought of it's having an end but suddenly when you become conscious of the end of something Ah that's when you begin to think about uh preserving it about in institutionalizing it about in fact worshiping it so um in the 1820s uh and 30s a curious um development began to occur in the North Eastern parts of the country which led to an explosion of interest in uh radical politics and spirit and radical spirituality and many sociologists and ethnographers and historians and anthropologists and savants of various sorts have uh have given a good deal of uh puzzlement and heads scratching over why this development took place one theory is that a lot of um people who had to escape from New England because the soil was was literally being um worn out and job possibilities were being taken up and and the you know the factories were being built but not fast enough to provide job so there was this major migration out to Western New York State uh along the recently opened eie Canal or the canal that was being opened up into what had been Wilderness and this general area sort of extends as far as Ohio and it sort of goes back as into New England as far as the burkers which uh in the 18th century the burkers in that region had been the frontier so that was the old Frontier and Ohio was the New Frontier let's say more or less L and in between was this vast region of Upstate New York um and parts of other states parts of Vermont and whatnot which we now think of is uh totally depressed but uh at the time was was was a hot new U hot new area actually much more heavily populated than they now oddly enough and these people being new englanders had mostly I get you know this is this is my hypothesis having been new englanders they had and mostly oh lower than middle class down to down to working class um had been in a inferior position Visa the old New England Gentry and the Puritan um authorities and when they got physically geographically out from under those those uh those forces somehow they were able to Blossom and the Heritage the hidden Heritage of radical protestantism uh began to reemerge uh with uh scintillating and exciting results and this area of the country uh for some reason which I really have no explanation of whatsoever centers around Rochester New York and uh yeah a pretty unlikely place for it one would think um I've I've I've never been to Rochester and I greatly look forward to going up there and trying to uh trace the remains of what one historian called The Burnt Over District H by which he meant that one wave of enthusiasm after another swept over this area with Rochester as the hot epicenter and U it's excellent book I've the name of the author has escaped me and I've just today come back from Dublin and I hadn't didn't have a chance to go home and look a few things up so you have to Pardon a few gaps in my memory tonight there's anything anything that I can't give you in the way of a date or a name that annoys you uh let me make a note of it and I'll try to rectify it next time um so uh the first the first wave the first prairie fire or whatever you want to call it that swept over this District was um revivalism holy you know uh what we would now think of is Holy Roller kind of Tent Revival revivalism which had uh been a factor in the New England revivals uh in the earlier earlier uh or let's say in the late 18th and early 19th century but now took on a new and somewhat hysterical tinge I mean there are um there are accounts of the revivals from this period of uh uh for the really for the first time in American history I think it's kind of Holy Roller type of phenomena appearing the frothing at the mouth the kind of pseudo epilepsy the um the the extreme ecstatic feelings of uh uh you know far more far more dramatic IC than anything that even Jonathan Edwards could have dreamed of and um this wave of Revival swept up and down the eastern coast in general but it was very very intense in the burnt over district and every couple of years there would be some new hero some new popular uh you know Billy Graham type Billy Sunday Type character of the of the era and and these these people whom we have around us now Billy Graham for example is a direct heir of this one particular uh development in American religious history but he is as it were just stuck stuck in that period I mean there hasn't been any development in that thinking since the 1830s it's still the basically this the same theology the same kind of watered down puritanism with a with a message a more optimistic message about salvation added on to it and but at the time in the 1820s that little optimistic message about salvation was exceedingly radical so puritanism as we know basically Calvinism uh uh stuck in the idea of of um of uh fate you know um um predetermination uh as opposed to free will uh everyone is um sort of assumed to be damned until proven otherwise by being a good Puritan uh there's there's a real Gloom to calvinist puritanism and a real uh you know was as Nathaniel Hawthorne noted in his story about uh Morton of marry Mount that there was this uh uh and in a lot of his other writings about that period I think captured that that um that uh sour Gloom of the Puritans so just as the these people farmers and U and Artisans mostly had escaped that the the Theology of Gloom or the gloomy Theology of New England or or rather had escaped the economic oppression they had also escaped the theological oppression and um I suppose what you might call arminianism uh the the idea that U man does have free will that God does love humanity and want to save it and that it's enough to repent of one's sins to be saved I mean these are all ideas which now sound corny to us we hear them coming out of very some cable station or another in an attempt to raise money you know and it also sounds exceedingly reactionary but you should be very clear on this point just as I told you the Baptists at one point were the thin edge of the wedge of protestant radicalism these were mostly Baptists who were still doing this there were some Quakers involved and other smaller Protestant sects but um this idea of of of Free Will and um salvation free salvation I think is the key to everything that happened subsequently this new a new theology which had always been in inherent in radical protestantism and in the antinomian sects and so forth that we talked about last time but had had been submerged and was now going to reemerge in bright and interesting new colors and uh for for example um an extreme version of this theology was called perfectionism and it stated and this this began to develop right away in in in out of these Rev movements if if God loves us and it's enough to repent to be saved well then it's all the next logical step is that um it is possible to become perfect even in this human life to be completely at one with with with the Divine principle um to to be able to act in a perfect way uh or at least to be freed from the burden of sin and to move onward to a real perfectionism this was tied up with a kind of millenarian feeling of the uh on the more literal level with a feeling of some sort of perhaps approaching end of the world um and the establishment of uh of U the reign of the Messiah so for example one of the groups that that uh that uh swept over the burnt over District was the millerites uh who um were the ancestors of of the seventh day Adventists and who predicted the end of the world for some somewhere in the early 40s I 1840s I think and then of course it didn't happen uh they were they were hundreds of thousands of them apparently up on mountain tops all over the Northeast on the on the appointed night and then you know then they fudged that one and then there was another appointed night a year later or something finally it was clear that the world was not coming to an end in that sense but um the millerites then transmuted into a uh what we know them what we know them today and the more radical elements of that sect then went on to something more more new and exciting uh so perfectionism could take all kinds of forms all the way from extremely intellectual High futin uh kind of transcendentalist version of it Emerson was really in a lot of ways a perfectionist in his theology for example but it could also go to The Other Extreme of this kind of millerite uh uh frenzy or rev ralist frenzy and it had a whole Spectrum in between it and out of that Spectrum arose a whole fascinating conjures or family of Reform move reformed sects and movements uh the word they used was reform which again has been watered down for us doesn't sound so exciting but uh for them in the 19th century it meant something much much more hot the word had connotations it would be much more like what we would uh use the word radical uh radicalism or or even Revolution or even revolutionary thought uh reform they were literally thinking about reforming shaping reshaping the whole of society all of these reform movements uh in retrospect look as if they dealt with single issues but in the eyes of the people who were involved in them they were not mostly they were not single-issue things yes there was a you know an anti-liquor movement and there were people who obsessed out on on that and never did anything but do Temperance lectures and sort of Proto AA type of societies that was also part of it and yes there were people who were so obsessed with the evil of slavery that they could only think of abolitionism and they put everything else uh behind that but gener generally speaking most people embraced a wide range of Reform ideas so even a totally obsessive type like Garrison the famous abolitionist uh who is is Remembered in most most histories as precisely just that as the radical wing of abolitionism was in fact interested in a much wider range of of the so-called reform movements in the century he was uh he was interested in anarchism and free love and uh uh labor reform and uh um perfectionism there another perfectionist Theologian Garrison so uh the U what we generally get from the post Civil War point of view is people looking back and talking about certain aspects which seem to them to have succeeded so abolitionism seems to have succeeded the civil war came along and the slaves were freed so that looks like a success so someone like a Garrison is remembered but his Garrison is then squashed down into a very one-dimensional kind of figure compared to what the real Garrison was really like a very uh uh in intense uh brilliant rather humorless actually a lot of these guys lacked a sense of humor I I don't know why that is but uh there was not very many of them were very funny this was a very sincere and Earnest period of American history as you can easily understand by reading any transcendentalist literature which uh um with the possible exception of a few Cracks by thorough is you know uh really one of the most serous of all schools of American literature but it was it was serious and a kind of uplifting way it was no longer the gloomy seriousness of of the Puritans it was uh optimistic seriousness there was everything by comparison with the post Civil War era everything looked very un unsettled I mean undecided in American society and there really really I don't think it was sheer naive to believe that uh uh an ideology or a theology could uh transform American society American society still had a sense of itself as full of potential full of possibility uh possessing many possible directions that it could go off in and uh on on the vulgar level this was expressed in what we you know what's called Jacksonian Democracy the U Cult of the common common man and woman um with all its populist and even racist overtones um and on the higher on the on the highest intellectual level it was to be expressed in figures like Emerson and then once again there was the big Spectrum in between so uh what we're what we're particularly I want to you know I could talk about the totality of the reform movement uh for a whole series of lectures it's got so many different fascinating aspects but what I want to do is um is is is keep the focus as much as possible on the spirituality of Reform um first of all you're going to you're going to ask me is there a continuity between the hermeticist of the 1690s and early 1700s that we talked about and the spirituality of the mid 19th century and that's a uh that's a difficult question I think the continuity is is more in terms of images and myths than in actual transmission of doctrines so once again we have uh what would look to a historian like a a spontaneous recrudescence of certain ideas or images which in my opinion were lurking beneath the surface always right from the start in American history and are always there still there American culture American Spirit whatever you want to call it which are still there and always ready to be dipped back into so um when you by the end of the transcendentalist movement when you have a Hawthorne um looking back on early Puritan history and meditating on it you'll see that that the intellectuals who were somewhat aware of History were in fact picking up on those hermetic and occultist strains in American history and were weaving them along with the little that they had learned so far of Oriental philosophy and of uh European medieval mysticism again the earts and the buas were becoming uh meister eart and yaku buma were becoming popular again um every it seems almost as if every other generation or sometimes even every generation has to ReDiscover all this so you get uh places like the open Center where you can come and be told ooh ooh ooh We've Just rediscovered hermeticism you know and in effect maybe maybe that's so uh because there's a a weird kind of um uh uh forgetting and remembering line that goes through uh goes through human history and now now in the 1830s uh we're in a time of of of remembering and rediscovering that Heritage and making it new in Ezra pound's uh famous phrase um it's not just going to be a a a retreading of of uh of the uh Colonial uh hermeticist with their telescopes Up on the Roof U studying the stars for signs of the coming end or for the wisdom of the ages or the obsession with hieroglyphics or with the Corpus hermeticum a lot of those things will be not so a lot of those references will not be so easy to find now but it is definitely as as I said this begins with a Revival Christian Revival but there are many other things that will be revived as well and there will be new elements uh being added in for example one very important figure and one whom I think a lot of you would find very interesting is Emanuel swedenborg the uh Scandinavian occult philosopher actually began as a scientist sometime in the 18th century again uh sorry for the vagueness of B dates uh but you can look him up in the encyclopedia branica I me he's a famous well-known how many people have heard of swedenborg before oh right okay well I don't have to babble on too much about him uh there's a swedenborgian society to this day there's a church that was founded by his followers called the new church has uh branches in New York as far as I know it's easy to find swedenborg's writing and um basically it's a he was a kind of Rudolph Steiner Steiner like uh visionary who had uh immense um out ding Dante kind of visionary Journeys into the Angelic and I presumed demonic worlds um he talked to Angels uh uh you know on a daily basis and um was in fact quite educated and poetic uh uh thinker and his books uh although you know a lot of modern readers may find them terribly long and and turgid um at the time time were were were considered to be really exciting he he was a sort of Carlos castina of his day I guess uh controversial claimed to be a scientist in fact had been a scientist uh and now you know discovering amazing Visionary new truths and these his books were immediately translated out of Swedish did he write originally in Swedish I'm not sure anyway whatever he into every European language including English and were available early on and very influential for a lot of these American uh uh uh reformists reformers and lent a kind of angelic or spiritual um occult hermetic tone to a great a great deal of of these uh of these movements the swed swedenborgianism was often lurking in the background even even in some of the more rash seemingly rational uh movements the transcendentalists again who who read you know who read everything were certainly very much into swedenborg and uh then finally in the later 19th century you get get all the way up to wonder wonderful figures like uh U Andrew Jackson Davis the sear of pipy as he was known who uh I think the only only famous Mystic from pyy until Timothy liry settled there in the um who combined swedenborg with Communism and started Comm where uh where in theory they were all to be chased on the material Level but to have Visionary uh spouses from Fairyland uh a really truly delightful eccentric this guy who uh uh was chased out of New York State finally for uh allegations of sexual uh carryings on I mean apparently not all of his wives were purely in the spiritual plane uh and ended up in California he was one of the first nutcases is to go to California and start a uh a commune there which lasted until right the end of the century and was one of the pioneers of growing varietal grapes in California so you see it's not all bad um some of the other movements that swept through rodchester why rodchester I just don't know um one of the most interesting one of the most thoroughly written about was spiritualism capital S spiritualism uh in other words um you know table table turning table wrapping getting in touch with the souls of the dead and this happened again it was about 1841 when two uh Farmers daughters the fox sisters who lived in a a small village right outside Rochester began hearing Ghostly rappings and uh uh ascertained that there were Communications from the a soldier who had been murdered and buried in their cellar in the Revolutionary War who began uh telling them all kinds of interesting things about the world of the spirits now the fox sisters were later later on revealed to be complete frauds they apparently had tricked toes and they could make these sort of sepulcral sounding wraps by clicking their toes under the table so was a really very crude trick compared to some of the amazingly complex uh uh to horse that that later spiritualists uh develop veled uh and which eventually Led Led people like Houdini the famous stage magician to uh lifelong I mean he was the Martin Garder of his period um to lifelong uh Crusades against all spiritualist as all being completely phony well that that attitude took a long time to develop and as a matter of fact it really still hasn't uh uh U triumphed there are great many people who still practice this brand of 19 19th century spiritualism at least in London I'm not so sure about New York I used to live right down the street from the spiritualist church where uh where people still go and and communicate with the souls of the Dead in these in these Charming 19th century uh Style seances with the tables and the you know trumpets appearing in midair and sort of fluffy things floating as what do they call it um ectoplasm so e ectoplasmic BLS coming out of the bodies of the medium and uh the society for psychical research still thrives in London and I think there's an American branch of that they take the whole thing extremely seriously uh at best with a kind of Charles fortian agnosticism at worst with total gullibility but um in investigating these these apports as they were called or these Spirit phenomena and um from the time of the fox sisters on Ward this thing this this movement swept uh out of America directly over into England and from there I presume you know all around the world and finally ended up for example coming all the way back again through France uh through a writer who's very little known here Alan Card de into South America and to this day they tell me that that countries like um uh Brazil and Argentina are just full of Disciples of Alan cardak who uh combine 19th century spiritualism with various other occult and African Trends to produce the candomblé and these kind of uh ecstatic religions of South America so spiritualism is something which has had a completely worldwide influence it's very important movement in human history and is almost never treated as such because I frankly it is kind of funny you know um but uh the the number of smart people including for example Arthur Conan Doyle you know who's usually thought of as the progenitor of sheer rationality in English literature through his creation of Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allen Poe who created the detective tradition in America were also both of them completely obsessed with spiritualism and took it very very seriously and thought it was literally true one extremely interesting aspect of spiritualism which has only recently begun to be studied is the relationship with feminism now um there are those who would say that feminism as we understand it is an offshoot of the spiritualist movement which is I'm pretty sure unless you've been reading this literature yourselves an idea that you won't have come across I'd certainly shocked me um the it goes like this the mediums tended to be women and this was really the first way in in American society that women had some kind kind of a position of power they weren't allowed to preach in churches for the most part it was very rare to hear a woman speak in church generally only the Quakers would have allowed it and even they wouldn't have gone in for it in a big way and the some of the first uh uh women of of generally with no education because where were they going to get an education other than to give it to themselves through Reading who and generally of uh of lower middle class to lower class social Origins who would suddenly take to the uh to The Talk The Talk circuit you know the sort of Proto chalko or open Center type of circuit of the day uh and would go around and and do lectures but they would become possessed by great spirits of the past like there was one who regularly did Aristotle for example and so she would she would become Aristotle and then you could question Aristotle you know you could ask Aristotle whatever you wanted and but but first she first she would give a a speech and apparently some of these speeches were were were pretty good they were certainly good entertainment they that goes without saying because this was a very very successful movement later on in the movement as the table turning and the ectoplasm and the floating trumpets and whatnot began to get really more and more popular and that was even more entertaining clearly so you know uh people who were channeling Aristotle sort of went out of fashion uh and and uh instead were replaced by people like the famous English medium uh uh home spelled hu M uh who who um did totally amazing things which still to this day even the stage magicians can't re reproduce some of the things that that he is that he did or is alleged to have done such as you know there were some extremely sober people who claimed to have seen him uh levitate himself out a window and and and back in again through another window and things like that so who knows what he was doing who knows what any of them were doing but one thing that was quite clear from the sociological point of view was that the spiritualist movement gave women a platform for the first time to speak from and to and and to have uh and the freedom to have ideas and to be um at first by channeling these spirits who are usually men uh male spirits but uh it was nevertheless it was a woman up on the speakers platform people paying you know good 25 cents or more to hear hear these uh lectures which was pretty fair money in those days and out of that ferment and out of the excitement of a lot of women who the the typical story as I read it there's a wonderful book called radical Spirits by Anne brow b r a u d uh about this subject which I've most of my info is coming from right now um most of these women would come from extremely unhappy marriages uh maybe with an abusive spouse uh alcoholic husband whatever you know sad stories and they would escape from their family sometimes even leaving children behind doing very very upto-date you know 90s 1990s type of thing uh in in in those in in in that in the term that we understand it now you know it's it's uh perhaps remarkable for some of us to learn uh that actions that we now consider to be the ultimate in radical feminism were being carried out already in the 1840s uh 30s and 40s by spiritualist women and out of that ferment uh to a very large extent appeared a woman's rights movement or what we would Now call a feminist movement I don't want to say that feminism had all of the played the the the whole role here but tonight we're looking at spiritual aspects of 19th century radical reform and this is certainly one of them um to Jump Ahead a little in the story Victoria Wood hole who was the first woman to run for president in America uh before it was legal for a woman to run for president so it was really a kind of U um symbolic act but uh caused a great deal of Stir It was in the immediate more or less immediate post Civil War era I think that she did that anybody know the date when Victor Iran for president is it 1880 something or it wasn't it was postwar yeah um she had previously before the Civil War what had she been up to she had risen to the position of president of the American spiritualist Association and had presided over some of the most exciting and controversial uh councils of the American spiritual spiritualist movement she'd also been involved in many many many other reform and in fact in the entire she was one of those great people who embraced every single Reform movement that was going and we'll get back to her later she's very interesting figure um I can't spend too much time on any one of these uh uh there's so many of them I should talk about abolitionism to a little extent at least if of course it was uh uh if you remember my uh lecture on radical um spir radical spiritual sect in colonial America there were some of them were the first people in America or actually the first people in the world to propose the abolition of slavery and uh so abolitionism is one of America's first and oldest radical movements but it really once again it really began to get off the ground in in in the 1810s 20s and 30s and of course reached a u a clima a paroxystic climax uh in in the 1860s with the Civil War although we mustn't uh we mustn't be allowed to be ourselves to be duped into believing that the Civil War was about abolition it wasn't and I'll explain my theories on that a little bit later but uh once again uh there is absolutely no doubt that most of the abolitionists were far from being a rationalist uh uh that nobody was an atheist at this time everyone was a believer of some sort or another and indeed the abolitionists uh tended to be exceedingly serious uh mystical Christians uh many many of them were perfectionists and if they weren't perfectionists they were um uh you know Hellfire and brimstone types of the John Brown variety John Brown was uh was a very U mystical Christian in a lot of ways and culmination of that of the sort of um puritanical uh take Onan the Puritans to give them credit where credit is due had always been against slavery uh and now the radical offshoots of of protestantism that I've been talking about we going to carry that anti-slavery position uh to much more extreme ends however once again it's only with hindsight that we see this as the big issue of the middle 19th century for the people who were involved in it most of the people who were involved in it was only one of a spectrum of issues and in fact it was said many many many many many times by many many many smart people up until the time of the Civil War that the slavery of the northern workers Factory workers which was just beginning to become apparent the rise of you know the Industrial Revolution beginning to hit America in a big way and that this this degradation was in its own way as disgusting or even more disgusting in certain ways than the plight of the black slaves of the South who at least had a kind of social welfare system based on the fact that it was their bodies that were the valuable you know that the you wanted to preserve a slave for a full working life whereas Factory workers right right from the beginning it was clear you could just you know chew them up and spit them out there was an endless supply of them and and wage slavery was seen by all of these people to be just as bad uh I mean they argued about it Garrison thought that black slavery was the the primary thing to get rid of and that then that the attack on wage slavery would follow and other people like Lysander Spooner the great uh one of the first great anarchists in in americ and American uh uh history um went so far as to refuse to support the North in the Civil War uh because first of all because he believed in the right of anybody's right to secede from anything uh uh literally anything uh and second because he thought that um putting um chattle slavery over above all the other forms of slavery that he perceived slavery of women slavery of the workers uh was uh was wrong it was intellectually wrong to separate that issue out he believed and therefore he although he certainly didn't support the Confederacy except in as much as he said they had a right to seced uh he uh didn't support the north either but he was one of the the daring few at that point not to have caved in to um to government propaganda on these issues I'll say a bit more about that um I've already I've already briefly discussed transcendentalism as the sort of high most high futin intellectual um aspect of this but if you want to get a if you want to get a slightly ironic but still not inaccurate picture of what was going on you you could you could you could do worse than read Emerson's essay on New England reform uh I don't know which one of the of the books it's in it's probably in the portable Emerson and uh he's a little bit beused and amused by some of the crankier aspects of reformism but nevertheless he was perfectly well aware that his calls for individualism and and um uh intellectual maturity in the American cultural mure were part of that movement so um although he um you know he was a standoffish uh a dry kind of person and he uh he didn't understand Brook Farm you know he didn't understand the the happiness of of communal uh the communal aspect the happy communal aspects of transcendentalism perhaps but he was certainly a major influence on on uh on on many of the minor players in in transcendentalism and in related reform movements uh uh and in a way more important for what we're talking about even than thoro whom I personally happen to prefer as a thinker and a writer but Emerson was more Central to uh to what we're talking about here let me just briefly run through some of the or U maybe I don't know not so briefly but uh whatever let me get on to some some other of the of the many many movements that swept through the burnt over District uh Mormonism was one of them Mormonism uh was started not too far from Rochester When U when Joseph Smith supposedly dug up the uh uh Golden Plates and the Angelic spectacles that he needed to read the Golden Plates on which was the Book of Mormon uh and uh this in itself is interesting because um Smith came out of a movement a very still little studied movement that was one of the many that swept through the region uh which had to do with magic treasure finding there was all kinds of people running around the countryside with dowsing rods and various other strange devices uh finding uh supposedly finding treasure I think a lot of them were out andout conmen and uh some historians think that Smith was an out andout con man but I'm not going to get into that um he certainly fit an archetype which has been almost forgotten of the the country the the country B occultist uh sort of popular figure in Upstate New York at the time he was only the most successful of them just as you could say the prophet Muhammad was only the most successful of many competing prophets in Arabia in the 7th Century uh and again um another very interesting U uh uh and very recently uh only work has been done on Mason on U masonry as an origin of Mormonism uh uh a lot of the a lot of the earliest Mormon writings have been found to be extremely closely related to some of the more obscure uh late 18th and early 19th century uh Masonic uh tracts and catechisms and uh masonry was not coincidentally was another one of the movements that swept through the area uh one year you know in one year there were all these Masonic lodges and then a few years later came the famous anti-as movement well famous I don't know maybe how many people have heard of anti-masonry there was once as you as you may know there was even an anti-masonic political party in America that ran a c candidates for go governors in many of the northeastern states and uh and and for at least in one election brokered some real power one presidential election uh and this this all blew up because there was there was a mysterious murder case in the Rochester area again again uh involving masonry and uh some local journalists and U um conspiracy Buffs uh formed this anti-masonic movement and got into the all you know uh uh the Masons as a uh secret Sinister Society who were out to subvert American democracy blah blah blah blah uh really it was the party the party quickly became a catchall for all kinds of uh uh politically disenfranchised and disappointed uh uh people who really didn't give a about masonry and uh were just using it as as an excuse as a kind of a rabble rousing uh thing to talk about and uh in fact the anti-masonic party only lasted a few years and this whole thing disappear but it did produce some wonderfully amusing literature of uh the you know Revelations of the evil Masonic doings um and endless endless uh talk about this murder case the Mas that's the famous Mason Mason murder case uh so um uh I don't know then and then we have all the the secular movements so-called the ones which are not specifically religious uh like owenism this was um named after the great English reformer Robert Owen who uh founded uh one of the first um industrial par s at new lanarch and his big Mills in in um Scotland or the north of England or can't remember exactly where anyway he was he was British and he was he was very very very rich he was an extremely successful industrialist and he poured his entire Fortune into the um um his his own brand of socialism they came over to America and bought an entire ready-made commune from a religious group The Rapides who had decided to move out and go somewhere else uh and and needed a bank roll so they sold the entire town of Harmony to uh Owen and he renamed it New Harmony and uh moved all his followers out there and as some as one historian said did absolutely everything wrong it was possible to do in trying in trying to start a Utopian community it was a complete mess and um even though o Owen has a had a lot of interesting he's an interesting thinker in a lot of ways and one of the interesting things about him is he was one of the first of the of the radical reformers to dare to openly Proclaim himself an atheist which which of course endeared him to Marx and Engles and so he's remembered as one of the founders of dialectical materialism uh interestingly enough however despite this militant atheism Owen Ended as a very enthusiastic spiritualist which just shows you how all these how how all these things floated around and interpenetrated each other um we get into some of the offshoots of owenism later then there was the French uh uh philosopher Simon who was one of the one of the uh uh progenitors of positivism which was later attributed to comp August compt of course but Sanson was very important in that in that development he was another so-called utopian socialist of of some interest to Marks and Engles and remembered mostly for that reason but uh uh interestingly enough U despite his extremely rationalistic communistic and in fact I would say rationalistic communistic and authoritarian were probably the things that that uh characterized his thinking but towards the end of his life he got religion and uh but but decided to found his own religion which was called I believe I believe they called it the Church of humanity which uh make has interesting resonances back to the um French Revolution when there were temples to reason and uh um you know uh holidays devoted to rationality and uh U and and and and and sobriety and things like really it's a very interesting subject some some books have been coming out on it which I haven't been able to afford yet but uh I definitely want to educate myself on the religion of rationality in in in the French Revolution because I think it had a lot of influence on many many you know all these hidden hidden strands of influence and one of them was this emergence of this religion of humanity Simon and Simon died in the 40s at some point and his chief disciple whose name was anant uh proclaimed himself pope of the religion of humanity and they designed religious costumes which are extremely amusing to our eyes you should I wish I should have been able to bring in a picture of Pope anant in his in his robes it would you get a kick out of it didn't last very long but you know all of these all these attempts to start off new and perfect or perfectionistic religions making use of the morality or let's say of the ethics of Christianity without its without the authority of of the church and and certainly without predestination and the calvinist Gloom of of the Orthodox Protestants they all all all these were attempts to to take what each of these various prophets and and and uh and mistair took to be the the essence of what was happening in most the um the the the the essential aspect of this of this spiritual Revival that was going on in which they saw as being at the root of all the reform movement um to me the most interesting of them all is Charles forier uh probably some of you have heard me talk about if you've been to any of my lectures before you probably heard me talk about forier I'm completely obsessed with him um I find him to be the most sympathetic and the most interesting of all the mid 19th century utopian socialists again he's mostly remembered only because uh marks and Engles at one point had a few uh positive words for him and then later on they denounced him as uh uh uh in fact Marx even used the phrase I believe stench of the brothel in connection with forier yeah you know Marx was a right old Puritan himself in a lot of ways forier had his big Revelation he was born well back in in the 18th century he was really a very 18th century kind of man but he had a long life he survived into the 1840s again and in 1799 just on the brink of the 19th century he had his big Revelation which uh had to do mostly with or he's mostly remembered for his theory of attractive labor by which he meant that if uh that if everyone did exactly what they want to do what they're most attracted to do that this would solve all the miseries of industrial capitalism as it was then emerging and although this may seem like a a simple-minded idea the more you think about it the more I think about it the more it unfolds into one of the most brilliant insights that that any human being has ever had uh what it what it really means it's a it's a a terrific wonderful Anarchist idea that if you do what you what you truly desire if everyone does what they truly desire Society will automatically start to fall into a state of Harmony because if you're doing what you desire why would you want to hurt anybody else why would you want to take anything away from anybody else uh why would there why would there be undue competition why would there be uh classism racism sexism whatever whatever whatever forier was far in advance of the other reformers on every one of these subjects uh he was the first uh sexual reformer uh he in apparently invented the word feminism or so some French feminist theorists say to to this day the French feminist theorists are great admirers of forier because he said that you could judge the state of a society by the way women were treated in it and and uh he thought that mon monogamous marriage was uh the worst trick that Civilization had played on Humanity that it limited people to um to um narrow uh contentious little monatic households where everything was moralism and misery uh and that the the what people really wanted was orgies and if they could have orgies then everyone would be happy and therefore society would fall into a state of harmonious Bliss uh he also and and this is what interests us particularly tonight I I wish I you know again if we had infinite number of lectures I could could say quite a lot about forier and I will by the way be giving a lecture on forier and surrealism uh in December if you uh I'm not exactly sure when it is part of the anarchist Forum lecture series not here no I'll U I'll announce it on the radio I'm not sure of the exact date but fora as you probably sorry oh uh my program is every other Monday at 11:45 p.m. on WBAI 99.5 Fm and I'm going to be on again on the 7th October October 7th Monday October 7th I don't know when I'll know know the date of this lecture it should it'll be either the uh 3rd or fifth Thursday in in uh December um I talk about forier every chance I get he's an he wrote a unbelievable amount of huge amount of stuff he never uh he never had any success it wasn't until he was an embittered old man that he had a that he got a few disciples clustered around him and he couldn't stand them uh they were a constant disappointment to him uh because by this time I have to say even as a I I bow to no one in my admiration for forier uh a real crank a real I mean why not say it he was mad uh but with a kind of Madness that you know in my mind is tantamount to beautiful poetic Revelation and he had a very very extremely original spiritual aspect to his teaching um he was recognized as a Messiah by uh almost literally as a Messiah by large uh contingents of the French what was left of the French hermetic movement he was seen to by them to be some kind of a a new prophetic voice Reviving ancient wisdom he himself had never read as far as I can make out a single word of any hermetic text uh he had uh no respect for any of these people uh he uh was only interested in his own ideas and he thought that his own ideas were completely new and original he didn't uh he didn't admit uh to influence from anybody except a tiny tiny bit from rouso and even him he trashed um and he certainly wasn't going to admit that he had been influenced by paracelis or uh or or or Claude enry Martin of the famous founder of the martinist movement or and he or swedenborg a lot of people immediately compared him to swedenborg and he had never heard of swedenborg and no interest in being compared to swedenborg but he was recognized by all these people as a wonderfully fresh new and original voice that sounded to them like hermeticism and uh this of course is something that marks and angles and that whole crowd in their talk about forier completely covered up and in doing that they were only part of a very Grand forist tradition because most of for's disciples covered it up too it was very embarrassing to them um they took his theories of Labor of attractive labor which I said really was his perhaps his most brilliant single insight and they made that into a movement uh which which I'll describe in some detail but uh his sexual ideas and his cosmological ideas his spiritual religious ideas they they didn't want anybody to know about so for example when his Works were translated from French into English a lot of the most interesting stuff was dropped uh and has only been rediscovered since the 1960s when some people began to delve into the unpublished manuscript um including a whole huge book called the new world of love in which he uh he devoted the entire book to his thoughts about sexuality which has not been translated into English it's a project that I have in mind uh who knows um a few there is nothing in print by forier in English it's it's really an awful shame and no complete work there is a an anthology which you might be able to find that was published in the 70s but it still turns up there's obviously stock somewhere and it still turns up in some bookstores from time to time it's called the utopian vision of Charles forier and it's edited by Jonathan beer B we c h e I can't remember the publisher beer also has a biography of Charles forier which is just called Charles forier uh which is out in paper back from University of California if I'm not mistaken um that's around that's in print it's an excellent book f o u r i e r no relation to the mathematician of the same name forier um so his his ideas about COs ology I just just to give you a very brief uh example uh or a brief description he thought that planets were living beings I'm going to have a lot more to say about this in the last lecture so I don't want to go into it in great detail now um he thought that the Earth and all the other planets were living beings that they communicated uh through space via Aroma smell rays of what he called aromal Rays uh now Earth has been so screwed up by the horrors of civilization that our aromal Ray is no longer functioning and if you want to see it in its present state it is in fact the Northern Lights it's uh it should be shooting out from the poles in almost laser like from the descriptions it almost sounds as if he had visualized laser light um uh but because of because of our own stupidity in allowing civilization to take over the world World um we have actually influenced the ecology porier was one of the first philosophers to actually think about ecology uh about why the weather and nature and so forth and so on the relationship between industry and nature it was one of the very first to even imagine that there could be such a relationship and as usual with him he went way too far and uh cooked up these amazing ideas about you know aromal rays and the northern lights and so forth but the basic Insight was a fascinating one and that is that uh and one for which Marx I believe did give him credit which was that U industry could have an influence that that that industry in the broad sense of the word human work human activity could actually have an influence on the environment in fact he predicted that uh Factory growth of population in factories would cause the climate to become warmer which is you know something that a lot of people are talking about now so uh every once in a while when you're reading you waiting through this amazing surrealist barrage of ideas you come across something which is like you know just an out andout prediction of the future he has a lot of he's constantly doing it like I say you know he invented uh the word feminism and uh uh he I don't know what he uh what else did he uh foretell all kinds of all kinds of things I I'll have more to say about him uh even within this lecture series um one important thing that I should just note however is that he was not an atheist he thought that that Owen was a was um uh uh a devil uh he hated Owen actually he hated everybody who didn't agree with him 100% and no one could ever agree with him 100% uh he was a pretty testy individual I think although I certainly think I could have gotten along with him um he he did believe in God uh the question is what kind of a God was it that he believed in he called he what basically what he said was there must be a God for the following logical reasons um if there were no such thing as Divine Providence then Harmony which is what he called his ideal utopian state would never come into being in other words uh for harmony to be realized every individual must at least potentially have access to an infinite Bounty of uh of good things both in the material and the spiritual sense and if uh this were not the case then God would be unjust which you know as the old school men used to say quo absor absor absor aest which is absurd it's you the you either have no God or you have a just God there's no such thing as an unjust God in this so in effect forier himself proposed uh a kind of religion uh based on on his view of God and and he did he did give a lot of thought he was totally obsessive in imagining how the details of his world as it would come into existence um and one of the things that he imagined was the cultic aspect of of that world the interesting thing about forier and one and and something an interesting point about forier which some people have not understood is that although his world is exceedingly structured it is not authoritarian it has a structure but it does not have a hierarchy and this was such a diffic this was such a new idea that a lot of people totally missed it and they saw forier as some kind of insane control freak who wanted everybody to be doing I mean uh he had schedule worked out you know he believed that in in the future everyone would want at least 30 different jobs uh and that we would only be sleeping two or three hours a night so because of our improved Health from his um diet special diet called which he called the gastrosoph uh diet the the wisdom of the stomach uh which uh for that word for the invention of that word alone he deserves to be remembered and revered gastrosoph uh in in fact his cousin he he he he was actually related to briat savaran who um who was who's who is known as as the most brilliant writer on food of that period who wrote a book called The physiognomy of taste anybody ever read that physiognomy of taste wonderful book isn't it I mean it's just gorgeous book it was buat savaran who brought forier to Paris and introduced him to good food and uh later on forier did him the honor of dismissing him and saying saying that briat saaran didn't understand anything but he mentioned his name which he almost never did with anybody else uh he in all of his Works he mentions rouso briefly uh with I mean with some some kind of positive nod even if it's a combined with a slap the composer Gluk because he believed that Opera was the ultimate art form he oh that's another thing that he foresaw was the whole vagian theory of the Opera as the complete art form and Gluk was as close as at God in those days so he was an admirer of Gluk and um uh and so so on and so forth I just find him a totally magical figure as incidentally did Andre Breton who I'll talk about that the the founder of surrealism was a big forier fan I'll I'll talk about that particular aspect of it more in in uh in December anyway he did have this idea of a religion it was sort of a religion of Labor in in the in the shrine rooms there would be busts and portraits of people who had done great heroic deeds in labor now this sounds very much like you know Marxist stavit you know with the hero of Labor with the you know the sledgehammer you know and but that's not the way for saw it um he didn't like heavy industry Al he he really thought that Arbor culture was where was what human work should really be like in other words the cultivation of fruit trees uh which again is is fascinating in in the light the a lot of uh that certain contemporary anthropologists or paleoanthropologists have hypothesized an arboricultural period between the Stone Age and the age of Agriculture um so that if for forier forier also understood he was one of the first people to understand that uh this the so-called Savages like the tahitians who had just recently been written about and and the works of Captain Cook had been translated into French uh when he was a young man uh were so much better off than the people of the Civilized world that in that sense he was a rousan and um uh he believed somewhat in the noble savage although he said that even if the if the in fact he said that if the tahitians were given the option to lead the way into harmony that they would of course go they would do it even more more quickly than civilized men because they were less corrupt uh he so he uh he had this he had an idea once again just as he was a sort of Pioneer in thinking about ecology he was also very much a Pioneer and thinking positively about uh people who were being oppressed by Colonial imperialism and he thought that was terrible that these people should be um forced to go through the period of civilization when as he put it they could leap in one magnificent bound from savagery to Harmony uh so it wasn't wasn't exactly the same idea that we now hold let's say of Native American wi shamanistic wisdom but was on the road to that just as he was on the road to feminism and on the road to sexual Liberation interesting he was the the first and for a long time the only social reformer to defend homosexuality I mean this was totally unheard of until Emma Goldman U said a few Brave words about it in the 1920s uh before that forier was the only one to and but of course he also supported every kind of sexual Mania as he called it um it was all it was all good in harmony it was all good uh when he analyzed the marqu Assad and Nero for example he said that in harmony these would be the most brilliant and uh of of of all the harmoni because they clearly were people who had so many passions and if they weren't if they if their passions were not perverted and soured by civilization they would turn out to be heroes of Harmony so uh I which I think actually is one of the most interesting critiques anyone's ever made of the Marquee dad and he was the first again the first author to to criticize the Marquee dad to to take Dad seriously uh in a way doad is a kind of gloomy version I mean a kind of hideous you know nasty version of Foria you have the the living together in a in a in you know in the castle you know the image of the The Libertines Gather in the castle forier also believed that we would live together in what he called fanies uh uh which he modeled on versil the Palace of versil because he thought that uh in his estimation that was the most beautiful and luxurious building he had ever seen and he thought that was the minimum that every human being deserved uh so his and also because of a certain cosmological aspect to the shape sort of you know a ma a main building that was arranged like that and then out buildings that would be arranged like that and the whole when you when you read his cosmological um ideas about the solar he believed that when Harmony is achieved on Earth the solar the planets would move closer to Earth everything would get more cozy and um he he didn't like the moon he thought that our present moon was dead and uh was a disgrace and it should be gotten rid of and replaced by five new moons and so the sky the night sky that he visualizes is just amazing it's it's full of planets that would look about that big you know instead of that big and you'd see Saturn with all its rings just you know and you'd see the five moons each one a different color uh Violet umber blue you know um and and so all so his the Filan was like the microcosm of which the solar system was the macrocosm and in uh in Harmony human beings would move closer together and become Cozier very cozy indeed and uh and uh so so that the the very shape of the house that we would live in would be symbolic of the shape of the solar system which would be symbolic of the shape of the universe which was symbolic of the shape of the Multiverse which was I he had a truly Hindu scale in his cosmological thinking that that uh uh very few of his contemporaries could match so um again I could I could rattle on about for8 for quite a while but what time is it getting to be okay all right let me let me uh get to uh some specific examples now of what I've been talking about and we hopefully get through those in time for uh whatever questions or discussion might uh develop um forier forer for for arism was yet another one of the waves of enthusiasm that swept across the burnover district uh at at a certain time there were three or four fanies in Rochester alone however there were also there was probably about somewhere between 30 and 40 forist uh phanies in America in between oh 18 1843 and 1855 it had a brief run for its money uh didn't work uh for reasons that 4A had predicted by the way but I won't go into that um it was a was a failure but it was a certainly a glorious failure and some of the fanies actually did Thrive for quite some time one of the best known was the North American faank which was right over the water in New Jersey was mostly started by New Yorkers and that lasted the whole length of the movement from about 43 to 55 I can't give you the exact dates now but it was it was quite successful uh was in um the town the town is now known as red Red Hook Red Red Bank thank you um I I still haven't managed to get over there so I'm not exactly sure whether there's anything to be seen I think that there's not uh the County Historical Society preserves a few momentos but the building the the main building burned down in as late as 1975 and a lot of the people who when the when the thing was dissolved in 1855 a lot of the people settled down in that region because they liked their life there and they didn't want to leave it something very common in the history of American Utopias is that when the when the strictly utopian period of a community ends um you know the people don't leave they settle down and try to hang on to a few shreds of of the Community uh spirit that they had and that happened at the North American um Haywood Brown uh a now largely forgotten writer prominent 1940s and 50s actually grew up in Red Bank and his parents had been uh North American uh fail lanks members and there was a couple of other well-known people who came out of that as well uh probably however the the most famous forier Community was Brook Farm and this is something which people forget they they Brook Farm is called the transcendentalist commune but at a certain point they switched over from transcendentalism which in any case was never an organized movement in the sense of some of these other movements but it was more of a feeling and they specifically adopted forist uh ideology and uh um I think Brook Farm is probably the most attractive of all the uh faanes and the one in which you can get an idea of what life should have been sort of developing towards if you read uh any of the Memoirs of Brook Farm except for that awful bdale Romance by Hawthorne which is uh really a terrible U uh liel on Brook Farm in my opinion um and unfortunately probably the most famous account but there are plenty of firstperson narratives that that came out of Brook Farm there was a very high degree of literacy there they tended to be Boston intellectuals uh and there the whole thing was that they were getting out into the country and you know working on the farm was good for intellectuals to get out in the country and work on the farm uh not in any kind of nasty Mau you know cultural revolution way but out of a kind of joy and nature mysticism out of a rediscovery of the joys of working with green things and you know getting your hands dirty and so forth and so on there was enough of them there so that even though they worked pretty hard they didn't have to overdo it you know they didn't have to spend all their time like some poor New England farmer with a nuclear family who has to take care of the you know the the wife and husband are the only ones there to plow the fields and take care of the cows and that's a pretty miserable existence but the brook farmers were able to share out those duties and uh have plenty of time it would seem judging from the Diaries and and firsters narratives for picnics and walks in the the woods and love affairs and uh U of course again forer's more U radical thinking didn't get translated into America and most of the brook farmers were even completely unaware of the orgiastic aspects of of forier thinking so you mustn't get the idea that there was a you know a hot bed of free love although uh that came a little later Brook Farm was not like that Brook Farm was settled by by very serious mostly Christian perfectionist Boston um people who had escaped from their puran Heritage either into Unitarianism or one of those transitional kind of churches univers universalists were another one and then eventually like Emerson following along his path he had he had uh come from congregationalist family and then he himself had been a Unitarian Minister and finally he had to quit Unitarianism because even that was too organized and Doctrine for him and a lot of the uh yes the the ceiling's leaking the music is playing a total Madness but never mind um so uh Brook Farm only failed really because they had a terrible fire there or I mean that was you know what what apparently did did them in uh if it if it hadn't been for that I think Brook Farm would have probably carried on for quite a while because even though the the farm wasn't doing that brilliantly they had founded a school again on forist principles forier was again an amazing Pioneer in Educational Theory uh and uh that school had proven to be very very successful and uh was drawing in uh kids from all over the Boston area whose parents wanted some you know wanted them to have a more joyful education than was available at let's say Boston Latin you know or whatever the Alternatives would have been and uh if it hadn't been for the fire I think that that school alone would have probably carried Brook Farm along and it was the school was uh was imitated by other utopians uh yeah where was Brook Farm Brook Farm was in in a suburb of Boston and there are there is a bit a bit to see there there's a few few buildings survived well it's not far from Lennox um what is the name of the town that it was in let just escaped me look it up in the in the britanica you'll find an entry there I'm sure uh it's undoubtedly worth worth a visit even now and the uh that's great uh thank you and a little obligato there um the farthest reach the farthest reach of the forer movement was that it was Wisconsin where I was this summer I didn't get to the site there but I understand there's something to see there and I hope to get to it next year um the Wisconsin fail lank was also very successful and one of the more successful ones in this case because it was founded by very sober-minded Wisconsin Dairy Farmers who knew exactly what they were doing they' been swept away by forist enthusiasm uh but they still remained very practical uh uh gents and they they knew had a farm already they weren't just thumbless intellectuals from the city you know they so uh they were hard and they made they made quite a success of the Wisconsin and when they dissolved it for per reasons of I think personal animosities that had Arisen uh actually they they they all withdrew with a profit uh they actually made a profit on it and a lot of them settled down and that was in near Greenbank uh uh Wisconsin Green Bay Green Bay Wisconsin where the foot the football team comes from right um so uh uh and generally speaking the four aists uh were hospitable to the whole idea of religious toleration um they allowed uh people with with with a wide range of of religious INSP spiritual interests to settle with them and indeed many of them were also involved in spiritualism and other uh um um you know religious or quasi religious uh movements of to day probably the most fascinating of all the spiritualist communes was Onida uh which again still could still be said to exist as a silverware company yep Onida silverware from upstate New York um it's my am my ambition to get a complete set uh so I can have you utopian silverware um Onida was founded by uh just a really fascinating character named John Humphrey noise who had been through this entire Burnt Over experience he had started out started out being uh started out being deeply involved in the revivalist movement as as a young Christian uh Enthusiast and then he had moved on from there to become a perfectionist and in fact to become the leading uh uh Theologian SL ideologist of the perfectionist movement in as much as that was a movement and not just a a trend or tendency and um he also as it turned out had a genius for organization and he he he founded Onida in well actually he started with with an abortive version in in ver Vermont and sort of got chased out of town by the usual torch wielding you know uh Puritans in this case uh was still too close to Old New England so he moved to what was really the new New England few miles north of Rochester and uh and founded Onida where uh he decided to go the whole hog and declare that the U the age of of uh of monagas marriage was over and that his followers would practice what he called complex marriage which meant that everybody at Onida was at least potentially married to everybody else at Onida and uh in in effect uh as far as this has been studied and of course it has this this particular story has been studied because you know it's got a little spicy aspect to it which has attracted historians so you'll you'll actually find more bibliography on on Onida than a lot of the other also it lasted longer was tremendously successful uh it was one of the wackiest in terms of its actual practice and one of the most successful in terms of its economic history so you know that throws a monkey wrench in a lot of the critiques that were made of the communal communalist movement because U the idea that the communes failed because the of these rigid cranky ideologies just doesn't wash in the case of Onida they had one of the most rigid and most cranky of all the ideologies and they were also one of the most successful communes um anyway the way it worked was this um it was not an anarchist setup um uh John Humphrey noes did have uh executive power there but if you didn't agree with it agree with him you could leave and you know no more than two or three people left in the whole history of the commune so uh clearly he was a charismatic uh oddly enough levelheaded you know even one would almost say rational uh thinker if it weren't for the fact that he had these totally bizarre thoughts um so he would you know uh he or one of the older members would help you find a temporary uh mate for sexual purposes and exclusive relationships were frowned on and it was thought to be better for everyone to love everyone else so uh it was an attack on romantic love a very interesting you know in view of the the critiques of romantic love that have happened in the 20th century I think this was very much a precursor of that critique of romantic love and exclusive love of the sort that leads to monogamous marriage and um a feminist's critique a feminist would at this point immediately say aha yes but this is like sexual freedom for the for for men but women get pregnant and so therefore you know it's not sexual freedom for women right noise figured that out almost immediately he was very smart uh and and in fact in his own sexual relations he realized this with with extreme poignant and so he developed what he called male continents uh which essentially historians are still a little vague about exactly what this was because they couldn't really describe it in graphic detail in their Publications um there you know it was just you couldn't talk about penises and vaginas that openly in Publications in the 19 in 19th century America although things were not nearly as uptight and Victorian as you might imagine but as far as as far as we can we you know enthusiasts for nid of History can make out what it meant really was uh uh cus interruptus um but would the Intercourse would be carried on for very long periods of time and noise thought that the female orgasm was very important and uh in this he was again uh very much a Pioneer I mean forier would have would have agreed and I think even does discuss it in some place in his writings but noise in terms of in in Americans certainly amongst Christians and he never he never denied you know he never gave up being a Christian he was always and he and his followers were always extremely enthusiastic mystical perfectionist Christians uh so the um and apparently this was you know this apparently provided uh the men claimed that this provided even greater pleasure than they were used to and I think that might have something to do with the sort of you know lack of understanding of interesting foreplay and stuff like that you know that this was sort of the invention of foreplay in America uh recently I met and I'm not allowed to say who this is but because he's he's a he doesn't want word to get out that he's saying these things but he's someone who worked for the modern day Onida Corporation whom I met recently who uh uh is also an amateur historian and and interviewed a lot of the uh surviving uh uh descendants of the original uh uh colonists and he said that the real secret of Onida was oral sex but uh I don't know that's oral sex right um so that nothing of that appears in the literature believe that I can say I was totally shocked when I heard this I had no idea um so anyway uh these ideas also rediscovered through Oriental you know um the DST uh yoga sexual yoga techniques tantric sexual yoga techniques the movement back in the 6s called careta some of you might might remember k a r e z Za a uh again there's this idea of male continence or sort of extended Kus interruptus or whatever you want to call it is uh turns out to be uh much more widespread than noise knew noise thought he this had come to him in a revelation direct from on high and he as far as he knew he had invented this uh anyway this this this uh this technique bizarre as it may be made a lot of people and we're talking about hundreds of people now this got to be a very large and successful Community very happy for for decades and and again it was uh it was torch wielding Puritans you know who who put the kabash on it and uh scared poor John Humphrey so badly that he fled the country and uh uh died in Canada um but uh the his son uh whose name I forget well noise you know he had many sons actually um and daughters one of them oh Pier Pont noise Pier Pont noise turned out to be a brilliant businessman and although they uh they stopped with the with the the complex marri marriage they kept the community together to to make the silverware and other stuff and uh pure Pont noise survived into the 20th century and turned the whole thing into a very successful rather unusual because community-based um Factory and as such survives to this day even with still a few remnants of communal idealism apparently so my informant uh told me um so that was probably the apotheosis of perfectionism and of social reform of free love which was by the way I forgot to mention free love which was another one of the big movements uh and that which gets me back to Victoria Woodhull who was uh an um a a promulgator of the free love movement this did not mean what it meant in the 60 1960s or what it means today know it just it didn't mean promiscuity and it didn't mean uh um sexual Liberation in the sense that we might understand it it really meant a reform in the in the in the structure of romantic love and mon monogamous marriage again which were the social forms that came under the most profound criticism and um really by modern standards the free love movement was pretty conservative in a lot of ways I mean some of the more extreme uh I suppose you could say the right-wing of the free love movie was more concerned with for example the evils of masturbation or of lesbianism or something I mean uh uh they thought that uh perversion could be wiped out if only blah blah blah blah you know healthy heterosexual it's kind of I don't know German sunlight and you know Purity kind of movement you know um but there were more more daring uh versions of free love John Humphrey noise was one Angela uh and Ezra Haywood were another another famous free love couple uh published journals had experimental communities and so forth and so on were eventually destroyed by famous Anthony comto uh who was the self-appointed censor of American literature for for many many years and who comto literally drove Ezra Haywood to his grave had him arrested over and over and over again for obscenity which at that time meant pamphlets on birth control that he would send through the mail to anyone who asked for them and that happened to be illegal and so comto was able to get it was still illegal when Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger were doing it in the early 20th century uh and comto was responsible for some of those laws made use of other existing laws and literally drove Ezra Haywood to an early grave he died in prison um horrible horrible story but Victoria Wood hole had had um I guess she was a stronger character Than Ezra Haywood she didn't let herself be pushed around by any man that's for sure um not only did she run for president and run the American spiritualist movement she was also the first female stock broker on Wall Street uh and um uh one of the founders of the last commune that I'll mention to you modern times which was out in Brentwood Long Island and there's still a couple of buildings to be seen there incidentally um they were very fond of of so-called octagon houses which were really hexagons you've probably all seen some of these houses at one time and wondered how anybody could come up with such a a wacky design well they they were the geodesic domes of the mid 19th century hippie movement uh the Octagon houses were uh the the building of choice for all these reform cranks uh they thought there was something I don't know I fig forget I could I'll look it I'll look it up again there was some supposedly practical reasons why octagon houses were you know the architecture of the future and there's a couple of them out in Brentwood which uh we could go see sometime uh so um modern times was founded by uh uh one of Victoria Wood Hall's dearest friends and someone who actually wrote wrote some of her presidentials uh campaign speeches and so forth a man named Steven Pearl Andrews uh there is a book about Pearl Andrews which I know for a fact there are some copies of in the Strand it's called the pantar and um if my brain doesn't give out completely I might even remember the author's name anyway uh I'll get that reference for anyone who's interested Steven Pearl Andreas was a wonderful eccentric he he um there was no Reform movement of the mid 19th century that Steven Pearl Andrews did not not only make his own but become a leader in including phenology uh you know the reading of bumps on the head to determine character which was very very important movement at the time hydropathy which was the water cure uh which was an attack on on um early Industrial Medicine actually made a lot of sense because alpath medicine at that time was really scary and uh you know even if lying in in a bath of cold water didn't cure you of anything at least it didn't kill you the way some of the official men yeah okay so there is a book on V on Victoria I didn't know that um not surprised though because she was such a great and important figure um and she was embroiled in a in a terrible free love Scandal um in Byzantine complex lexity that uh uh thrilled the newspaper readers of New York City for for quite a number of years and um it involved a um a member of the beeer famous Beacher family who was a preacher in New York and uh who uh who she accused of having an adulterous Affair even though he had condemned her for being a free lover so there that was the gist of it and then it went on it got really complicated and people like Henry James senior were and uh um uh go west Go West Young man um gy Harris gley got involved in it gley by the way was a very enthusiastic supporter of forier and and many other reform movements until he uh uh got involved in politics and lost his youthful idealism um what else oh Ashley Pearl Andrews was was also leading abolitionist he he done all kinds of exciting he had exciting adventures in Texas and been chased out of Texas by the by the pro-slavery contingent there and uh oh he was involved in alphabet reform he introduced Pitman Shand to America uh shorthand was began as a as a supposedly crank uh reform idealistic idea now we take it completely for granted um he also invented a universal language long before U espiranto uh which was called alwat don't ask me why and um all of these this incredible circus of ideas that Steven Pearl Andrews stood for he mixed them all together in a cauldron and poured it out in this immense indigestible book called uh the science of society and he called it panarchy and him he himself was the pantar and once again like forier and in fact I think based on forier um the titles were all kind of um good natured uh jokes you appointed yourself to all the you know there was no uh author authoritarian hierarchy involved here uh Pearl Andrews was an anarchist he was a great admirer of Josiah Warren who's usually labeled as the first Anarchist in America although that's not true but Pearl Andrew and and Warren were very close Warren had been a disciple of Owen and had seen what a miserable failure communism was at New Harmony so he flip-flopped to The Other Extreme and became interested in individualist anarchism and uh uh he converted to Pearl Andre but Pearl Andrew also very influenced by forier there are passages in Pearl Andrew that I've found that are almost word for word lifted from Foria even um Pearl Andrew was really a a a New York beatnick he was one of the you know first of New York Bohemians uh he hung out downtown he had a uh uh another Utopia called The Brownstone Utopia which was on East 14 Street somewhere I'm not exactly sure where I haven't tracked that down yet he was uh he was one of the first Bohemians to hang around the sort of grenwich Village area uh I've been trying to trace exactly when Greenwich Village became of bohemia and I think Pearl Andrew might have had something to do with it and um so he survived into the post Civil War period in fact modern times was one of the last great mid 19th century experiments uh that actually survived past the Civil War uh oh and uh the point also being the panarchy again is a kind of spiritual movement and one of the many things that uh Pearl Andrews did was to found something he called the universal Catholic Church Church which was to be uh an amalgamation of all world religions and it was in fact as far as I can make out one of the very earliest uh syncretistic religions that that took in Buddhism and Confucianism and things like that which are really only words to Steven Pearl Andrews he didn't really I don't think he knew much about them but he had heard about Oriental religions from transcendentalist uh thinkers like Emerson who did actually read a few books and uh so he he you know mixed them in with with his religion which unfortunately never really got off the ground apparently they had uh uh they had meetings in New York City for a while but it was not one of his more successful ventures in fact none of his Ventures were really successful except modern times uh which was um totally fascinating completely Anarchist uh commune one of the very few pure Anarchist communes where literally anything anything anything at all was allowed uh there was a a a a system of Labor exchange based on Josiah Warren's ideas uh which was completely voluntary it was the only structure that modern times really had and all every possible kind of crank and reformist came to Modern Times uh there were free love people there were hydropathy people um there was a represent representative of the Church of humanity which by this time had become heavily influenced by comped uh there were um you know German heelan idealists uh there uh anarchists abolitionists uh every every conceivable kind of eccentric and Bohemian uh moved out to Modern Times And um much to Josiah Warren's disgust because he was a kind of Durer Yankee inventor type and not at all interested in in in in orgism and uh he didn't he thought that the whole free love thing was giving the commune a bad name and he was right and so the usual torch wielders you know came and closed it down and uh uh but but again the people who had had had such a wonderful time there tended to try to stay on and apparently there there are still descendants of the settlers living out in Brentwood to this day and and pearl Andrews died there uh in the uh in the home of one of his loyal dis IPL Les and with the death of pearl Andrew and the by the way defalcation of Victoria Woodhall who uh went over to England and married an aristocrat and became something of a reactionary and gave up most of her radical ideas although she was still interested in being a powerful woman um came to an end really the Glorious period of of 19th century uh reform and and spiritual experimentation and uh it's very interesting for me to come now to the history of the Civil War from the other end I mean we've always looked at the Civil War from our end around and we've seen it as the um uh end of slavery and the uh uh Triumph of Union and you know Union makes you strong and the slaves are freed and Lincoln is this great humanitarian hero coming at it from the other end coming at it from the point of view of of of somebody like a Steven Pearl Andrews who uh culminated and synthesized the whole spiritual and radical reform movement of the 19th century the Civil War looks like a horrible betrayal of all of this it looks like it was specifically cooked up on purpose to ruin this impending social Revolution uh in a number of ways first of all by uh by amalgam by uh co-opting all reform energy into uh a campaign that would be run by politicians and the military to emancipate black slaves in the South now you know this is obviously an extremely good cause one can have no quarrel with the cause of emancipation but it is uh interesting to note that uh Lincoln himself was a blatant racist he thought that the blacks were were animals that should be sent back to Africa uh he he there are quotes that you can get from Lincoln's uh presidential addresses which would um sound ex disgusting even in the mouth of a David Duke believe me he was uh he was a rabid racist he was by no means a humanitarian hero he was a skunk like all Republicans come on you know he was a politician he was interested in power and um he came to power in a country that was threatened with dissolution was threatened with secession with breakup not just from the south and the reactionary slaveholders of the South but from all of these people as well I mean any one of these communal movements could have become the germ of a a quote unquote secessionist movement that would have broken up a unity in America that many people were still completely unconvinced uh of its value um there were people who at that time saw the Constitution as a betrayal of the truly Democratic and egalitarian ideas of the Revolution there were people who uh very much thought that a gigantic America spanning from coast to coast would be a a horrible mistake because any government that big would be bound to be oppressive there were people who uh for various reasons be it anything from free love to Communism to individualist anarchism or whatever were had interested in breaking off from that Union uh uh either privately secretly to be just let us alone we want to be out here in the woods doing our own thing or else like Victoria Woodhall wanted to seize power so um the like all wars especially in American history and you know the more I study it the more clear it becomes to me the Civil War was a control mechanism it was brought into it was full forced into uh the the point was was forced not only by the south as we're always taught to to label them the villains but by the north as well maybe even especially by the north let's get this out in the open let's smash all resistance to the mega State let's get capitalism really on the road the industrial capitalism was impossible to get on the road as long as there was a RI whole rival economy in the South and a million minor rival econom economies in the reform movement uh you know let's strip abolitionism of all its subtlety of all its humanitarian real humanitarianism and reduce it only to a a crude moral code which will free the black slaves and then do nothing for them as human beings because essentially this whole uh thing was carried out by racists who hated blacks uh and and you know you think Reconstruction was you know and and you think that segregation you think these things were historical accidents this was part of the plan come on give me a break uh that the Civil War was the uh plot of the emergent Republican party which is still the Republican party of today don't don't let anybody tell you different to completely control Manifest Destiny to conquer the entire Western Hemisphere and to impose a regime of authoritarian uh industrial capitalism on on uh uh to destroy nature uh to uh to you know to improve nature I.E to destroy it um the uh then the Civil War looks like a real total disaster from this point of view it does not look like the great Triumph of of goodness and light that it's presented even on PBS and the recent TV that you may have seen um and I just think you know okay maybe I'm maybe I'm exaggerating for effect here and because this may be an idea that you haven't come across before but I really think we should balance this view of the civil war against the uh um uh you know uh official official historical version of it as the great watermark in American freedom and democracy it was anything but and if you want an example of how reform was destroyed um the emphasis on politics and Military solutions to social problems which the Civil War prop pounded was taken up by the feminists after the war who gave up entirely their critique of marriage and of sexuality and put all their efforts into what suffrage voting you know which we now know and we can now see as a total Croc of and a waste of time you know it it set the feminist movement back a hundred years uh in my humble opinion you know I mean I'll be perfectly willing to accept arguments from the audience on this one uh you know it's an arguable point but it's one that that I've come to feel very strongly and I think if we go through the reform the reform movements one by one and see what their their pre antibellum and postbellum faces are like we'll see this happening again and again in every field I just picked feminism and and women's suffrage as one of the most poignant examples uh but to uh to sum it up I would say I read I read somewhere I wish I could remember who came up with this cute quote there is no new age um what we now think of is the new age was already completely there in every single one of its aspects in the middle of the 19th century we had hippie communes Allah everything from Onida to free times uh modern times we had um uh sexual Liberation movements we had a fascination with the occult and the Orient with you know there there it was let's say it was swedenborg and and uh uh um um Perfection Christian perfectionism and now it's I don't know you know Buddhism and uh um Crystal gazing but uh the the principles are the same and the range of everything from silly uh from silliness to the sublime is also the same um to just to give you one example um in the field of nature mysticism which sometimes if you listen to a lot of our green prophets you know would you'd think was an invention of the 60s at the at the earliest 1960s uh one of forer's enthusiastic disciples uh for a time later went on to become Frederick Law Olstead the designer of Central Park a couple of you some of you might have heard the paper that I read on the radio about Olstead and his forist background and forier rather Olstead was uh not only founded the first urban park in America um in order to bring the beauties of nature into the sad life of early Capital industrial capitalism very specifically this was his specific purpose he was also instrumental in founding one of the first national parks in California when he had um a brief Adventure as the manager of a gold mine in California and visited um um uh I can't remember the uh the name of the park um y i I guess it's Yos yeah he fell in love was his the place where he's working was very near yuse no John well M was M was part of this too mure was on the committee Redwood San Francisco no well I think it's your but I'm not sure again I should have you know I just I'm really I apologize for my bad control over details tonight but I haven't been able to get a chance to go through my books um but uh so Olstead took his early experience with foyer ISM and the its thinking about environment and even what we now call ecology and for him with his obsession with landscape he was a great artist of landscape in my opinion uh turned that into a brilliant new idea which was the uh I mean not entirely new but it was certainly new In America which was the idea of the public park that uh and in a sense it you can see it as a response to The Disappearance of the frontier and the The Assault on nature that was being carried out by industrial capitalism and for the first time I mean Olstead himself made it all the way to California uh that it was it was the end the frontier had come to an end um uh this the cities really were beginning to spread like some kind of hideous blight over what had once been Pleasant Farmland of the Northeast um our our neck of the woods and so Olstead was was a Pioneer in in responding to this disappearance of nature really you could you could criticize him for for commod for for making nature into a commodity you know for making nature into yet something else that the emergent capitalist Nation could buy you got enough money you can buy a bit of Nature and plop it down in the middle of New York City uh all right that's the negative side if we're want to look at it you know get a dialectics of Central Park going here that would be the negative side of it but after all we live here we know what the positive side is if it wasn't for Central Park probably half of us would be insane by now am I right uh I mean that's the way I've always felt I've always felt deeply grateful about Central Park and as soon as I realized that it was designed by a forist the whole thing fell into place I mean the um you know I now feel that I understand the whole Landscaping that went into it it is in fact meant to be the grounds of a faank of an ideal faank um The Farms would be lying even farther out on another belt uh but the the Central Park is like the lawn of a faank which isn't there but which has been replaced instead by the whole population of New York so um the the idealism and the Beautiful idealism that went into into Central Park uh really uh should be attributed to this whole spiritual uh Reform movement that that I've that I've tried to uh to describe and I think you know we could do no better than to to repeat again that there is no new age uh that it's all happened before that we all have many many ancestors uh in in the um uh work that we undertake in a place like this and the more we know about them and the what where they went wrong and what failures they had and what success as they had the better it is for us in in in the work that we try to carry out so um this lecture makes a link hopefully between America's mythological hermetic uh beginnings and what we'll get to in the last lecture which will be a pical attempt to bring this all back to life in a in a way that has some chance of success and so we'll I'll leave I'll leave the 19th century now and uh uh questions anybody I was just going to make another observation about Central Park and the work that to know that every single tree ined by the oh yes and it was it was it was it was previously even yeah yes well interestingly enough the uh the the nasty side of it is that a um a tri-racial squatter's Village was kicked out of the way to make Central Park it was called senica Village and it was inhabited by uh Native Americans and blacks and poor whites Irish probably and um they were they were pushed out to make room for Central Park but yes uh uh Olstead and vo VA his partner and another really fascinating character who's totally forgotten now named Ray mold uh who had been in Spain studying Islamic architecture and brought a lot of Mor influence into Central Park which you can still see around the central Fountain uh all all three of them I think brilliant and uh except for Alstead who's finally getting some do U you know underrated Geniuses of the period yeah well he designed that too yeah uh Central Park has been screwed around with a lot most recently by Moses Robert Moses really screwed around with Central Park and destroyed destroyed a lot more than go Prospect Park I believe I'm right in saying is more is actually closer to the elstead vau design yeah right right right meow is the longest expansive space in any part of day un and I remember once going before I knew going to the top of the a PE kind of in the middle of it IMM and can see this was designed for for for my ability to be able to come absolutely yeah yeah the same thing was done in Central Park though it's just uh the the buildings around Central Park were meant to be totally blocked so you could walk down in the middle of it and you would be in Pure Country and there's still there's still Vistas where where that's possible despite the newer larger buildings that have sprung up blah blah blah what's the what's the best book uh well there's a very nice biography of Olstead called FL by a woman author whose Name Escapes me but I found it in the strand for like 15 bucks it's a huge book uh and um the uh book where I first caught on to to olmstead's uh forier background was in uh a book called The utopian alternative by Carl gueri Gua n r i and he used the F he used that book Flo as his main source along with the papers of Frederick lad which have some interesting for fistic writings in them yeah you know you know talking about America the Civil War destroying all these movements indictive you know yeah absolutely running that's another key to the absolutely that was very very uh uh harmonious with forier ideas and I think probably comes directly yeah yeah yeah uh yeah I wanted to ask you that somebody always feel person who a Sweden ber or something uh John Chapman who ran all all around the country uh planting app oh Johnny app yes I've heard that he was a Sweden borgan I don't know again if there is a monograph or book on him I haven't uh you know a definitive books about but I don't know if anything like totally like says what he what he agreed with about swedenberg I don't know his parents were swedenberg de you swedenborgians or whatever and he supposedly was like you know took the philosophy a step further and something that he was obsessed with apples I guess and another thing well forier forier was obsessed with apples too so it's it's conceivable that uh like many people like Andrew like Andrew Jackson Davis for example that I mentioned before that his thinking might have been uh a mix of swedenborg and forier forier claimed that his original Insight came to him when he was comparing the price of prices of apples in Paris and the and the the country side so he said there there have been three great apples in history ad Adam's Apple uh um who was it you know gravity Newton's Apple and and his Apple so uh in the in the book uh in the anthology of his writing utopian vision of of of Charles forier there's a picture of of apples on the cover for this reason yeah um you know a connection with William Blake and any of these mov uh Blake um I I frequently had occasion to compare forier and Blake I I think that forier is deserving of Interest as a as a Visionary thinker as much as Blake and I find them to be very similar characters and uh I even had a a vision once of forier and Blake playing miniature golf together and uh uh it seemed somehow to really work I don't know why and uh uh but Blake Blake's interest is is interesting among many other reasons because he came before all this I mean he really was a prophetic figure and a real link as U uh some British historian a British historian named Morton has pointed out about Blake that he was a real link between the uh radical Protestant sects of the 17th century and the uh romantic you know romantic uh reformists of the 19th century he stood in a pivotal position at least in the English tradition so that he brought a lot of very typical Ranter Digger you know mugal tonian fifth monarchy type of material out of the 17th century at least Morton says so and uh uh transmogrified it in his own system and then passed it on through the romantics right to the extreme radicals of the early 19th century and especially to the revolutionaries of 48 and of course Blake was a good friend of Thomas Payne as you probably know when Payne left America he stayed with Blake when he had to escape from England Blake helped him Escape uh Blake was was extreme radical revolutionary so he ties together this you know Protestant mysticism uh Proto revolutionary thinking and uh um you know Visionary utopian U uh mystique and and creativity artistic creativity all these themes are are are met in Blake as a kind of Nexus or pivotal figure and his his period of activity was earlier than forier by half a generation but as far as I know there was no connection no no no no connection for for one thing forier could not read any other language but French and I don't think Blake could read anything except English although he might have known a little Latin I guess it's getting late do you want to any well okay okay two more questions you guys yes start invol civil war do that that wasn't the program but as it became the program dolence think maybe maybe again I was exaggerating for effect I just I would like to uh you know deconstruct a little bit Lincoln's uh image is the great emancipator what yes yes absolutely if you if you really if you want really want to challenge me on this I'll track down this you know yeah I mean you're not going to get this from the Carl Sandberg version you know uh oh right okay and one last Justman connection with Emon transcendal was he involved with anything absolutely U just this summer I got the key from Alan Ginsburg who pointed out that Whitman adopted the butterfly as his symbol butterfly yeah right and the Butterfly was also an extremely important symbol for for Foria and it's gin Ginsburg Ginsburg has done as as as you probably know real work on Whitman and it's his opinion that Whitman was influenced by Foria uh uh so you know I'll take his word for it so uh see you in a week when we'll do the Illuminati""

• Hakim Bey: Capitalism, the State, and the Spectacle. An A to Z of Theory

  This article from Ceasefire Magazine analyzes Hakim Bey’s critique of capitalism and state power, reflecting his thoughts on the abstraction of capital and modern malaise.

  
  

  Detailed Breakdown and Summary

  Core Themes

  Capitalism as Manipulation of Desire

  Scarcity and Utopian Promises: Capitalism exacerbates desire by creating false scarcity and unattainable promises, fueling consumerism without fulfillment.

  Alienation and Vampirism: Capitalism exploits creativity, alienates individuals from their bodies, and commodifies art and meaning.

  Capitalism as Spectacle

  Images Without Substance: Life is reduced to flat, commodified representations through capitalism’s reliance on images detached from reality.

  Tourism and Soul Loss: The commodification of experiences perpetuates sameness, likened to the indigenous concept of “soul loss.”

  Key Discussions

  Capitalism as a Machine of Alienation

  Capitalism thrives on creating scarcity and alienating individuals from direct experience, perpetuating demand and emptiness.

  Placebo Effect of Commodities: Most commodities offer symbolic validation rather than real utility.

  Spectacle and Imaginal Control

  Images mediate life and preclude genuine interaction or resistance, creating a “crisis of stasis.”

  Loss of Communicativeness: Media-controlled images lose their ability to convey meaningful messages.

  Philosophical Insights

  Capitalism’s False Transcendence:

  Bey critiques capitalism’s abstraction and detachment from material reality, creating illusions of freedom.

  Resistance and Autonomy:

  Genuine resistance lies in fostering direct, horizontal communication and reciprocity-based economies.

  The Spectacle’s Limits:

  Capitalism’s over-reliance on images creates stasis, presenting opportunities for alternative narratives.

  Conclusion

  Hakim Bey critiques capitalism, the state, and the Spectacle, analyzing their roles in perpetuating alienation, commodification, and global hegemony. While emphasizing imaginal resistance and autonomy, Bey acknowledges the need to balance these with material strategies. His insights remain essential for understanding and resisting the psychological and cultural effects of capitalism, envisioning futures grounded in reciprocity, creativity, and radical difference.

• Interview with Hakim Bey (The Anarchist Library)

  This detailed interview covers various topics, including the paradox of using media to spread anti-media messages, humor as a revolutionary tool, and Bey’s reflections on improvisation and mythology.

  
  

  Detailed Breakdown and Summary

  Core Themes

  Immediatism and Everyday Resistance

  Bey emphasizes the revolutionary potential of daily creative action and the reclamation of private, clandestine spaces free from commodification.

  Artists are agents of change, with creativity providing political resistance even outside traditional art markets.

  Media and Visibility

  Bey critiques media’s focus on commodifiable content, favoring invisibility as a form of resistance.

  He contrasts the intellectual traditions of Europe with the marginalization of radical creativity in American media.

  Key Discussions

  Immediatism and Creativity

  Bey champions small, immediate acts of creativity to resist commodification and affirm artistic autonomy.

  Art in private, secret spaces escapes market-driven influences and reclaims personal agency.

  Media and Commodification

  The media’s focus on commodifiable content stifles radical ideas and excludes non-commercial creativity.

  Bey contrasts Europe’s visible intellectual traditions with America’s marginalized radicalism.

  Philosophical Insights

  Immediatism and the Everyday:

  Small creative acts offer resistance to commodification and reaffirm autonomy.

  The One World and Its Opposition:

  Revolutionary action must counter capitalism’s homogenization by emphasizing cultural difference and solidarity.

  Anti-Pessimism and Healing:

  Laughter and solutions-focused thinking combat despair and passivity.

  Historical and Cultural Context

  Post-Cold War Era:

  The fall of Communism marked the rise of global capitalism and a monocultural world.

  Zapatistas as a Revolutionary Model:

  The Zapatistas defend cultural identity while aligning with global justice movements.

  Eastern Europe’s Role:

  Bey sees potential in Eastern Europe for resistance against global capitalism, despite the region’s conservative revivalism.

  Notable Anecdotes and Concepts

  Psychic Martial Art:

  A bodily resistance technique rooted in Zen and everyday creativity.

  Palimpsest Thinking:

  Encourages layering ideas and origins to foster revolutionary thinking.

  Zapatistas and Revolutionary Difference:

  A model of defending cultural uniqueness while supporting global justice.

  Eastern Europe and Freshness:

  Identified as a source of intellectual and cultural creativity in opposition to capitalism.

  Conclusion

  This interview highlights Hakim Bey’s reflections on immediatism, revolutionary action, and resisting global capitalism in a post-Cold War world. By exploring concepts like “psychic martial art,” revolutionary difference, and anti-pessimism, Bey provides a framework for reclaiming creativity and autonomy. His critique of capitalism’s homogenizing forces and his call for cultural particularity remain essential for revolutionary thought today.

• Hakim Bey vs. Enzo23: An Interview

  This interview explores Hakim Bey’s thoughts on media, the role of the Internet, and how each new medium stirs social dynamics and resistance.

  
  

  Detailed Breakdown and Summary

  Core Themes

  Mediation and Assimilation of Ideas

  Bey critiques how his ideas are often co-opted or “gentrified” by academic and societal institutions.

  He laments being viewed as an authority figure, which contradicts his call for individual autonomy.

  Technology and Social Control

  The Internet, like earlier media, begins with freedom but becomes a tool of control.

  Bey critiques the state’s use of terror and corporate greed to regulate online behavior, drawing historical parallels to censorship in previous media.

  Freedom and Resistance

  Resistance online often lacks substance; Bey calls for integrating digital and physical worlds to foster meaningful autonomy.

  Alternative economies and bartering systems could bypass traditional mediating forces like money and taxation.

  Escapism vs. Reality

  Digital culture encourages disengagement from bodily and material realities.

  Bey describes media as bridges that connect but also separate people from the real world.

  Key Discussions

  On Assimilation of Ideas

  Bey critiques the paradox of using media to critique media, risking the institutionalization of his ideas.

  He emphasizes fostering personal autonomy rather than relying on him as a “guru.”

  Historical Parallels in Media Control

  Each medium, from telegraphs to TV and the Internet, initially sparks freedom but is later co-opted by power structures.

  Examples include Anthony Comstock’s censorship of mail and government control of TV during wars.

  Internet’s Role in Social Control

  The Internet, originally decentralized, is increasingly controlled by corporate and state interests.

  Bey predicts shrinking spaces for freedom as fear-based controls tighten.

  Optimism for Resistance

  Linking the Internet with real-world systems like bartering can foster tangible autonomy.

  Digital tools should supplement, not replace, economic and creative freedoms.

  Philosophical Insights

  The Paradox of Media:

  Media both connects and alienates, a duality seen across history.

  State and Corporate Terror:

  The Internet is increasingly shaped by state and corporate forces using fear and greed to control behavior.

  Virtual vs. Real Resistance:

  Online symbolic gestures fail to create substantive change; autonomy requires physical integration.

  Historical Context

  Media and Freedom:

  The Internet follows earlier media, inspiring freedom before being controlled.

  The Protestant Reformation:

  An example of media disrupting power through the printing press.

  Repression through Censorship:

  Historical examples like Comstock’s censorship and TV propaganda illustrate recurring patterns.

  Optimistic Vision

  Bey envisions using the Internet for real-world activities like bartering and alternative economies.

  He imagines digital tools enabling more time for creativity and autonomous pursuits.

  Conclusion

  In this interview, Hakim Bey explores the paradox of media, the Internet’s potential, and the limitations of virtual resistance. He emphasizes bridging the digital and physical worlds to foster true autonomy and warns against purely digital escapism. Bey’s insights challenge control systems and provide a framework for reclaiming freedom and creativity in an increasingly mediated world.

• Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) on Islam and Heresy

  This telephone interview with Bey delves into heretical Islam, Irish mythology, and the deeper meanings behind historical and cultural elements. It offers a rich exploration of cultural commentary, technology, and alternative perspectives.

  
  

  Key Themes and Insights

  Imagination and Media

  Bey critiques modern media for commodifying imagination, transforming creativity into a consumable product.

  He highlights how technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) have shifted from democratic potential to tools of control.

  Technology and Autonomy

  The Internet's potential for decentralization is undermined by corporate and state control.

  Bey advocates for encryption and cypher-punk activism to preserve freedom online.

  Politics and Power Structures

  He condemns the Clinton administration for betraying progressive ideals and serving elite interests.

  Bey critiques global power structures, including figures like Clinton and Gore, tied to organizations like the CFR and Bilderbergs.

  Cultural History and Folklore

  Explores connections between Irish and Atlantean folklore, pirates, and ancient psychedelic rituals.

  Dreamland at Coney Island is analyzed as a surrealist precursor and cultural touchstone.

  Anti-Copyright and Intellectual Freedom

  Bey promotes anti-copyright, demonstrating how it paradoxically increases dissemination and sales.

  He critiques intellectual property laws as relics incompatible with decentralized networks like the Internet.

  Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.)

  Bey emphasizes the need for physical, grounded spaces to achieve true autonomy.

  The Internet, while useful, cannot fully embody autonomy without material presence.

  Media Critique

  Bey critiques the sensationalism of modern media, exemplified by the O.J. Simpson case, as a reduction of public discourse.

  Notable Anecdotes and References

  Dreamland at Coney Island:

  A surrealist precursor, reflecting imagination’s transformative power.

  Irish and Atlantean Myths:

  Connections between folklore, psychedelic rituals, and North African cultural practices.

  Cypher-Punks and Encryption:

  Encryption as a key tool for maintaining autonomy online.

  Political Critiques:

  Clinton and Gore are criticized as agents of elite interests.

  O.J. Simpson Case:

  Examined as an example of media sensationalism and societal obsession with spectacle.

  Conclusion

  Hakim Bey’s interview provides a deep critique of media, technology, and political structures, offering a roadmap for autonomy and resistance. His insights emphasize balancing digital tools with material realities, preserving creativity, and challenging systems of control. By connecting historical patterns, folklore, and modern issues, Bey offers a vision that is both cautionary and inspiring for those seeking meaningful change in a mediated world.

Bibliography

• Bey, Hakim.
  • Temporary Autonomous Zone. Autonomedia, 1991.
  • Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. Autonomedia, 1995.
  • Immediatism. AK Press, 1994.
• Sahlins, Marshall.
  • Stone Age Economics. Aldine-Atherton, 1972.
• Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker.
  • The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press, 2000.
• Graeber, David.
  • Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.
  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.
• Scott, James C.
  • The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, 2009.
  • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
• Kropotkin, Peter.
  • Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Heinemann, 1902.
• Bookchin, Murray.
  • The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936. AK Press, 1998.
• Sitrin, Marina.
  • Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. AK Press, 2006.

Further Reading

• Wilson, Peter Lamborn.
  • Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam. City Lights Publishers, 1993.
• Day, Richard J.F.
  • Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Pluto Press, 2005.
• Notas From Nowhere (Collective).
  • We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism. Verso, 2003.