High Weirdness, Erik Davis

Let's take, as an example, the attempted levitation of the Pentagon in 1967. A week or so before Halloween, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including New Left activists, pacifists, and hippies, massed in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war. After hearing speeches on the Mall by civil rights leaders and Dr. Benjamin Spock, around 50,000 people set off towards the Pentagon. Among the crowd was what the East Village Other enumerated as “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen.” The very diversity and excess of this sacral list already tells us something: not only were spiritual practitioners present in force, but they were manifesting what historian James Webb calls an “illuminated politics.” Allen Ginsberg led Buddhist chants, Hare Krishnas danced with their ringing chimes, the New York underground folk group the Fugs led a (partly?) tongue-in-cheek exorcism, while the West Coast experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger performed hidden magickal rites without the slightest bit of irony. On the one hand, the attempted levitation of the building — which somehow also involved turning it orange — fits in with what Todd Gitlin described as the Yippie “politics of display,” of ludic and media-savvy pranks. But the levitation was not just nightly news theater; for some participants at least, it was also mass ritual magic, however carnivalesque. As such, the event became an icon for heterodox politics of consciousness that was at once oppositional, playful, and enchanted.

[Robert Anton] Wilson and [Robert] Shea capture this ontological politics in one of the great set pieces in Illuminatus!: an extended scene, set at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, that takes up much of the first novel of the trilogy. During the convention, the future Confrontations editor Joe Malik — who, like Wilson, was an “ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic” — overcomes his skepticism and embraces the esoteric radicalism represented by a wild freak named Simon Moon. After his conversion, Malik “was game — for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.”

Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.