High Weirdness Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience
in the Seventies
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
0.0.0: Welcome to the Weird
Part One: Set and Setting
1.1.0: Spinning Out in the Seventies
Part Two: McKenna
2.2.0: Scientific Romance
2.3.0: Experiments
Part Three: RAW
3.4.0: Profane Illuminations
3.5.0: Cosmic Triggers
Part Four: PKD
4.6.0: Stigmata
4.7.0: 2–3–74
4.8.0: Exegete
Conclusion
0.0.0: The Netweird World
Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time coming. Some of the inspirations,
and a few notions, have been kicking around since the mid-eighties,
when I wrote my senior English thesis at Yale on “The Postmodern
Gnosis of Philip K. Dick.” Given such a length of time, a complete
reckoning of the individuals who have helped this project toward the
light of manifestation would not only be lengthy, but riddled with
gaps imposed by fallible memory and the nebulous and yet pervasive
way that our individual efforts are supported and realized through
our relationships with others. At the least, however, I must thank two
of my Yale professors, David Rodowick and Richard Halpern, who
not only watched over my initial foray into PKD criticism but helped
me find a path through critical theory that kept my freaky obsessions
intact. I also must pass a groovy high five to Charles Kronengold and
Anne-Lise Francois, who first got me thinking about the seventies in
a serious way.
I would like to thank my thesis committee at Rice University, who
oversaw the dissertation version of this book. Jeffrey Kripal, who co-
founded the GEM program (Gnosticism, Esotericism, Mysticism) in
the department of Religion there, encouraged me to find my own
weird path through graduate school even as he laid out an
exceptionally useful map of the comparative history of religions. Cary
Wolfe proved unremittingly encouraging of my work as both a
theorist and a writer, and his work on systems theory and
posthumanism provided a deeply influential, if mostly implicit,
inspiration for this project. William Parsons proved a superb model
for how to bring questions of mysticism into the study of religion in a
critical—but not exclusively deconstructive—fashion. He also reliably
beamed sunny Berkeley vibes in the direction of this Bay Area native,
uncomfortably transplanted into the hot swamps of Houston.
Within the wider community of Rice, I was helped and encouraged
by a number of faculty members as well as fellow graduate students.
Drs. Claire Fanger, April DeConick, John Stroup, and Philip Wood
all helped this project along in important ways, in part by convening
excellent seminars and workshops. Among my many friends and
conversation partners in the Religion, English, and Philosophy
departments, pride of place go to Dustin Atlas, Derek Woods,
Benjamin Kozicki, Mike Griffiths, and Jacob Mills, all of whom
challenged and inspired my thoughts and sharpened my critical
acumen. I would particularly like to thank Matthew Dillon, who
generously shared thoughts and references relevant to our mutual
fields of interest, and whose exacting scholarship and discipline
proved inspirational.
Scholarly colleagues beyond Texas also provided many words of
insight and encouragement over the years, especially Christian
Greer, Marcus Boon, Alexander van der Haven, James Burton,
Joshua Ramey, Michael Saler, John Modern, Christopher Partridge,
Heather Lukes, Molly McGarry, Brian Kelch, Joe Milutis, Robert
Wallis, and Mikita Brottman. Other waves of assistance came from
beyond the walls of academe. The sometimes fading fires for the
project were whipped up through (occasionally desperate)
conversations with Mark Pilkington, J.P. Harpignies, Jeremy Glick,
Miguel Conner, Victoria Nelson, Mark McCloud, Fernando
Castrillon, Nathaniel Ward, and Jeff Linson. Many others provided
precisely the fragmented reference or concept I needed at the time,
or gave me the opportunity to work out my ideas in conversation.
These include Jacques Vallee, Eddy Nix, David Pescovitz, Matt
Cardin, Adam Gorightly, Mike Jay, Mark McCloud, Earth and Fire
Erowid, Matthew Souzis, Juris Ahn, and Uel Aramchek.
A number of folks lent specific help on the Terence McKenna
portion of the project. Christopher Partridge bent over backwards to
get a portion of one of the La Chorrera chapters into a journal, while
Luis Eduardo Luna offered visionary feedback on my work on his old
friends. Dennis McKenna made himself available for the odd
question and clarification, while Kat Harrison and Klea McKenna
proved wonderfully helpful and generous with images. Thanks
especially to Finn McKenna for providing me a rare peek at his
father's unpublished writings, as well as an entertaining afternoon.
My studies of Robert Anton Wilson were similarly served by
conversations with R.U. Sirius, Eve Berni, the aforementioned
Gorightly, and Daisy Campbell. Thanks as well to John Thompson
for his visionary generosity, and to Richard Rasa and Christina
Pearson for inviting me to contribute to RAW DAY 2017, and for Egil
Asprem and Carl Abrahamsson for requesting short essays based on
my research.
This book would not have been possible had I not been granted the
extraordinary opportunity to provide editorial assistance to Pamela
Jackson and Jonathan Lethem after they took on the hell-chore of
wrangling eight thousand mostly hand-scrawled pages of Philip K.
Dick's Exegesis into a book, which was published by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt in 2011. Thanks to both of them for inviting me into
the engine room of VALIS. The intertwined worlds of Philip K. Dick
scholarship and fandom also gave me a number of opportunities to
present earlier versions of this material, along with providing an
ongoing conceptual and imaginal base of operations. Here I would
like to thank David Gill, David Hyde, and Alexander Dunst for
inviting me to participate in their respective PKD conferences, Fred
Dolan for inviting me to share my PKD work at the SLSA, and Craig
Baldwin for making the screens of ATA available. I would also like to
acknowledge as well conversations and vital data-swaps with Tessa
Dick, and the Dickheads Chris Mays, Richard Doyle, Patrick Clark,
John Fairchild, Lawrence Rickels, and Ted Hand.
I am extremely pleased with this book's publishing arrangement,
and I thank both Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe of Strange
Attractor Press and Matthew Browne of MIT Press for taking on joint
publication. Thanks especially to the SA team for producing such a
lovely book, to Peggy Nelson for photo restoration work, and to the
amazing Arik Roper for creating the cover, whose basic concept came
to me in the throes of an insomniac funk. Along these more spectral
lines, I would be remiss if I did not also thank all the unseen hands
that inspired my typing and scribbling, however ambiguous their
ontology. Lucky for me, my wife Jennifer Dumpert remains
wonderfully tangible, supporting, and lovable. Thanks for putting up
with it all.
Hadn't––from books, from living—
The profusion dawned on us, of “languages”
Any one of which, to who could read it,
Lit up the system it conceived?––bird-flight,
Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope:
Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided
Facet of the universal gem.
James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim
Something always escapes.
William James, The Pluralistic Universe
Introduction
0.0.0
Welcome to the Weird
This book is about high weirdness, a mode of culture and
consciousness that reached a definite peak in the early seventies,
when the writers and psychonauts whose stories I tell herein pushed
hard on the boundaries of reality—and got pushed around in return.
My project began as a study of Philip K. Dick and the series of
extraordinary experiences he underwent in early 1974, when a
delivery woman with a Christian fish necklace knocked on the door
of his apartment in Orange County. Peculiar things had been
happening in Dick's life and texts for decades, but the series of
anomalies, coincidences, oracular dreams, and close encounters that
characterized the period he later called “2-3-74” really take the cake.
Though it erupted with the force of revelation, 2-3-74 did not
deliver a coherent message or prophecy. As such, Dick spent the rest
of his eight years on this planet feverishly hashing through the
meaning of his experiences in his fiction, his letters, his published
essays, and his self-declared “Exegesis”—an immense and sometimes
tortured private journal that eventually clocked in at over 8,000,
largely hand-written pages.
The religious turn catalyzed by 2-3-74 puzzled or repelled a
number of Dick's earliest critics, some of whom feared he had gone
mad. Since then, his late work has been richly recuperated by the
horde of science-fiction critics and literary theorists now drawn to
his work. But I wanted to approach Dick's revelations from a
different angle.
As a historian of modern religion, I saw Dick less as a great writer
than as a revelator and exegete who also happened to be a great
writer. I wanted to read his writings, both fiction and nonfiction, in
light of contemporary debates about mystical experience,
hermeneutics, and the cultural history of American spirituality in the
postwar period, with special emphasis on the psychedelic
transformation of esotericism and the occult.
I will get to all that. But in the course of navigating 2-3-74 and the
matrix of rabbit holes that is the Exegesis, I realized that there was a
fundamental problem with my project. At the end of the day, it was
still a story about one guy—albeit a genius of sorts, a cracked
visionary who managed to be at once unmatchably singular and
disturbingly multiple. But if I wanted to place Dick in the context of
his times, and explore the possibility that his experiences
represented a broader mutation in the culture, I needed to cast a
wider net.
As I was poking around the countercultural milieu of the sixties
and seventies, I kept stumbling across accounts of extraordinary
experience that possessed some eerie resonances with 2-3-74. These
included narratives from the writer Robert Anton Wilson, who spent
most of 1974 in a “reality tunnel” in which the esoteric conspiracy
theories he had cranked out in his pulp fiction doorstop Illuminatus!
(co-written with Robert Shea) intruded into his life in the guise of
apparent communications from discarnate aliens linked to the star
system Sirius. No less weird were the earlier experiences of Terence
McKenna, a brilliant Berkeley student and psychedelic intellectual
who returned to California from the Amazon in 1971 with a tale about
the mother of all trips: a massive psilocybin mushroom journey,
taken with his brother Dennis, whose gnostic, paranormal, and
science-fictional dimensions McKenna would later compare
explicitly to 2-3-74.
And there were more stories as well—from John Lilly, Timothy
Leary, Andrija Puharich, J.J. Hurtak. Indeed, the more I dug into the
esoteric margins of the first half of the seventies, the more memoirs
and accounts I discovered that blended elements of religious
mysticism and esoteric gnosis with cybernetic media, alien
communications, genre fictions, and psychedelic metaphysics. The
fact that all of these stories unfolded over a few years’ time, and
largely in California, suggested to me that there were larger patterns
afoot.
This book focuses on close readings of what are to my mind the
most fascinating of these experiences—the McKennas’ “Experiment
at La Chorrera,” Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger experiences,
and the 2-3-74 complex of Philip K. Dick. Not only were these
episodes riveting and resonant with one another, but they all
catalyzed rich and diverse writings that illuminate the tricksy
dynamics between text, temperament, and extreme phenomenology.
While my close readings will take precedence over a comparative
synthesis, I have written this book in the indirect light of those
enigmatic Zeitgeist patterns that largely linger beyond my frame. So I
raise the flag of high weirdness here as both a standard (of the
unstandard) and a warning of sorts, like the indication “here be
dragons” that medieval chart-makers scrawled on the margins of the
mapped.
0.0.1 Highly Weird
I owe the phrase high weirdness to a long-ago encounter with one
revelatory text: Rev. Ivan Stang's 1988 catalog High Weirdness By
Mail: A Directory of the Fringe: Mad Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks &
True Visionaries. Stang divided his illustrated, large-format
directory of “crank literature” into categories like “Weird Science,”
“New Age Saps,” and “Cosmic Hippie Drug-Brother Stuff.” These
categories in turn organized capsule reviews and contact information
for a variety of niche organizations like Christian Technocracy, the
Warlords of Satan, Saucer Technology, and the Good Sex for Mutants
Dating League. All of the stuff Stang included was real, but so
unusual that it was sometimes hard to believe.
Stang's volume was part of a micro-trend of fringe catalogs that
helped map the labyrinth of the eighties underground, and which
also included the Loompanics Catalog, Amok Books’ Dispatch series,
and Mike Gunderloy's metazine Factsheet Five. These and other
compendia reflected an important mutation in the underground, as
the counterculture of the sixties splintered into a proliferation of
subcultures driven to announce themselves largely through alternate,
DIY media: self-published books, cassettes, videos, comix, and, most
importantly, zines. These circuits of marginal media were by no
means restricted to post-sixties rebellions, but also included a
rainbow array of American alternatives to mass culture, many of
them religious, mystical, and occult.
Stang's high weirdness was not something the groups Stang
cataloged were necessarily aiming for. Instead, high weirdness
described an ironic but strangely loving aesthetic cultivated by Stang
and his readers. It was a mode of enjoyment, amazed and sometimes
perverse, that was pursued through mail-order trawls of an
American culture haunted by conspiracy, delusion, and what he
memorably called “the freak show of faith.” Stang was perfectly
upfront about the role that snark played in his curation of American
fringe religion. “Appreciate unexpected glimpses of the strange
‘realities’ behind religions other than your own?” he asked in his
introduction. “Entranced by the thought process of the mentally ill?”1
But his Dada smirk was only one gesture in an array of attitudes that
included rationalist skepticism, irrationalist pranking, and a kind of
exuberant bemusement that can only be called wonder.
As a genre of culture and a mode of enjoyment, the high weirdness
I will unpack has elements of all these attitudes. But high weirdness
is an infectious project; it breaks down the distinction between
subject and object; it loops and stains. In this sense, the most
significant feature of Stang's project lay in the fact that neither he
nor his readers could really keep their distance from the material
that so compelled them. The proof of this is that, along with the
many earnest and unintentionally weird groups he archived, Stang's
catalog also included many zinesters, comics artists, authors, and
musicians who, like himself, were self-consciously mining,
recombining, and rebroadcasting the esoteric hijinks that Stang
himself was helping to articulate.
Such intentional weirdness also characterizes the organization for
which Stang still serves as Reverend: the Church of the SubGenius.
Often characterized in religious studies as a “parody religion,” the
Church was first developed by Stang and Philo Drummond at the end
of the seventies in a variety of zines. Its prophet was J.R. “Bob”
Dobbs, a clean-cut salesman whose grinning Ward Cleaver-like
visage was invariably pictured with a pipe. The CoS drew a great deal
of inspiration from Discordianism, an earlier parody religion—if that
is the right term—whose ironic mysteries, slapstick anarchism, and
terrible Zen puns were, as we will see later, transmitted into the
seventies counterculture principally through Wilson and Shea's
Illuminatus! trilogy.
But here is the key. For all the CoS’ bad puns and smug satire,
Stang and other leading SubGenii also insisted that their religion was
real. However you interpret this claim—as a paradoxical mode of
sincerity, a second-order irony, or a bid for tax breaks—it announces
a crucial feature of high weirdness. It may start out as a game, but it
ends up as a whole world. It is like some psychedelic trips—they
begin as a lark, a perceptual dérive, and end up with gods and devils
and the screaming abyss. Even if we think of religions or psychedelic
ideations as little more than fictions, fictions have a self-engendering
power to shape reality. The play of as if, which is very similar to the
science-fiction premise of what if, can produce remarkable reality-
warping effects. Indeed, the intertwining of reality and fantasy has
