"Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation - as military and political experts know well. Even science, which claims its methods and theories are rationally developed, is really shaped by emotion and fancy, or by fear. And to control human imagination is to shape mankind's collective destiny, provided the source of this control is not identifiable by the public. And indeed it is one of the objectives of any government's policies to prepare the public for unavoidable changes or to stimulate its activity in some desirable direction." - Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Jacque Vallee

________________________________________________

With this feature, we are exploring how sophisticated governing forces have used an array of creative tools - most notably the tools and assets of popular culture - to influence societies and control the minds of men. Leveraging an innate human tendency to make demigods of cultural heroes with techniques learned in war time for manipulating human perceptions and motivations, powerful forces have used sensory stimulations of all kinds to steer the public in desired directions. Media companies, propaganda groups, and public relations groups create events to exploit the sheep-like behaviors of the public, knowing that people will naturally tend to do what they see others around them doing. It is primordial, an important survival instinct that you see in herd animals of all kinds. Flocks of birds fly in formation for a reason, and it is the same reason that farm animals cluster into groups.

Psychologists have learned that it is shockingly easy to create a cultural gestalt. It is as easy as singing a certain type of song.

The Music of the Spheres

If you doubt the existence of magic, or the ability to manipulate the world through charms and incantations, consider the power of music. It stimulates the human brain more than any other influence. It conveys powerful emotions, including love, fear, hate, nostalgia, empathy, excitement and more, and it always implies a rhythm structure that people feel as frequency vibrations that resonate throughout their entire beings. It excites the atoms within our watery beings. Music has the power to redirect human energy and for many people it feels like one of the indispensable assets in their lives. Many will confess that they couldn't get through a day without music. It lifts them up where they belong in their own psychological orientation to the world as they experience it.

For all those reasons, music can be weaponized, or otherwise used as a tool for cultural creation and social change. Short of fear and terror, it is hard to identify any other impulse creator anywhere near as compelling. Armies march to music. Religious people find ecstasy in its strains. Children learn the basics of almost everything they learn through simple songs designed to leverage the supernatural elements of sound to imprint basic ethical guidelines on their impressionable minds, creating behavior patterns that will remain with them their entire lives. Monks chant and achieve enlightened states. Drums and bells are used in many cultures to activate the spirits and to excite the senses.

The ancients believed in "the music of the spheres", suggesting that all heavenly bodies vibrate with a musical resonance. Modern scientists qualify that religious concept with actual audible signals, showing that the universe has its own natural frequencies and sounds. It is even suggested that the heavenly bodies are living entities that communicate with one another across the vastness of space through elemental signals, the language of which is known only to the gods.

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.

(William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, 1.1.1-7)

William Shakespeare, the English "Bard of Avon", is a hard guy to get a handle on - or even to get an image of. There are tons of depictions of the playwright and not many of them look anything the same, as no portraits of him were commissioned in his lifetime. It is hard to know if our sense of who he was is even based on reality. Some suspect that the plays attributed to him were actually written by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. His work was political, his language often filled with meanings that might only be discerned by those familiar with the subtexts of his day.

Whoever wrote the Shakespeare catalog, it was filled with music. The Bard included music, or snippets of music, or musical stage directions, in most of his works, and he was doing this for an audience that had completely incorporated singing into their every day personal lives. Shakespeare's England predated the development of formalized vocal instruction that took root in Italy and eventually replaced the everyday singer with the trained professional.

Here is what the author of Popular Melodies of the Olden Time wrote: "...singing was universal in England in Elizabethan times. The meadow, the street, the barber-shop, rang with popular melodies. It is also, of course, well known that the standard of vocal accomplishment in those days was not high. We have authentic records of the much later introduction into England of the Italian art of singing. With the advance of the art, singing has become more and more the business of specialists, who sing much better than anybody in Shakespeare's England, but who make ordinary people ashamed to sing for their own or others' pleasure in company."

Vox Populi

Vox populi is a Latin phrase that literally translates as "the voice of the people." It can be found in the longer maxim, "Vox populi, vox Dei," which means "The voice of the people is the voice of God." (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vox%20populi)

However much the Italians changed the relationship between music and the average person, the average person did not stop singing. They sang in the galleys of slave ships, and in the cotton fields, and in the quarries. They sang in unison with their brothers in arms, and they sang to their children, and to their fellow parishioners and to each other. Music moves people and the urge to express ourselves musically seems to be innate in human beings. We don't have to be good at singing for the act of vocalizing to resonate within us in satisfying ways.

In fact, while the Italians were cleaving the musical world into a rare form available only to a priest class of performer, and thus a second form for the howling dogs of the common man, popular music was relegating "classical" music to the past-time of the elite. The great opera halls of Europe would eventually stand as precious architectural havens for a pretentious moneyed class while pop music not only remained alive, but grew in its authority.

We would eventually reach something like a point of musical singularity, where the music of the common man, the music of the street, would come to be seen as the authentic voice of how people were really feeling. It became a barometer for societies everywhere, a true measure of contentment or lack thereof, while the classical form was relegated to being a historical relic. There are modern operas being composed yet today, but their importance is almost nil.

A commonly held feeling today is that truth is not delivered in an aria, but rather with a gritty, rhythmic urgency, wherein the voice of the singer is often not an object of art, but an artifact of real-life experience.

Our bohemians and our rascals became our truth tellers, our soothsayers, and our opinion leaders.

Strangers in a Strange Land

As referenced above, music - or more to the point, the lyrics of music - have always been larded with viewpoints and expressions of extreme emotion, and creative artists have been elevated to levels of special status in societies worldwide. That creation of this class of entertainment demigods was magnified in impact and importance with the development of technologies, from radio through television and the eventual development of the internet and digital delivery systems. Those have all served to sanctify the place of popular music in modern cultures.

The early radio age produced a raft of creative artists who were more-or-less homogenous in their personalities and their promotion of more-or-less "wholesome" fun. Early radio stars like Bing Crosby created a template for a reassuring brand of popular music that portrayed stability and patriotic brotherhood. That music has imprinted on the world and continues to this day to represent a message best recognized in our "traditional" Christmas music. The style is a message in itself, and for many people it resonates with comforting images from childhood.

That had begun to change during the 1930s, when Folk music, which sometimes served as a vehicle for expressing political viewpoints, created iconoclasts like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Then it really began to change in the 1950s, with the "McCarthy Era", when particular viewpoints and political associations got entertainers banned from the industry. What survived was another messaging not of a strident resisting type, but rather a neutered blandness broken only occasionally by some special character - a Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Elvis Presley - who would break out, like a shooting star in an otherwise frozen sky.

Throughout all of this, people were watching, listening, and learning.

Behavioral Engineering

There was a tremendous emphasis placed on research into human psychology and behavioral studies in the 1930s and thereafter. Though much of it was centered outside of the United States, much of it was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and much of the research was an extension of the work of Sigmund Freud and his disciples. World War II provided an extraordinary laboratory for studies of the human mind and for the development of techniques for taking minds apart and rebuilding them anew.

The experiences of captured GIs in WWII made U.S. intelligence people nervous. While research into behavioral engineering had been going on in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain for decades, the Korean War in particular told U.S. intelligence that our Asian adversaries had taken mind control techniques to a whole new level. A hysteria developed over the fear of "brainwashing" and from this grew popular treatments such as "The Manchurian Candidate", in which an American G.I. returns from the Korean War unconsciously programmed as an assassin.

While Americans were growing more and more fearful of such war craft, and the possibility that it could be executed without the public being aware it was happening, media messaging became more sophisticated, and it expanded its number of forms. In the 1950s, particularly with the growth in the number of television sets sold in the U.S., it became possible to gain maximum exposure for carefully crafted images and messages.

We saw the expanded use of commercial jingles to fix buy messages in our minds, and began to see personalities like Jackie Gleason become cultural icons for adult viewers, and the likes of teenaged Ricky Nelson become cultural icons to the young. Elvis Presley was a breakout artist by anybody's standards and he demonstrated, as Frank Sinatra had more than a decade earlier, that young people were especially vulnerable to celebrity culture. They identified with "stars" and they wanted to emulate them in everything they did.

MINDS OF MEN

Before going further, it would be useful to watch this (very) long documentary detailing the history of research into mind control that began in the 1930s and continues to this day. It is an old school documentary, consisting largely of grainy black & white footage from the days before color TV, but it is also a creepy and sobering experience that may leave lingering feelings of paranoia and will certainly put this article in perspective.

Exploiting Celebrity

Entertainers make great intelligence operatives, or spies. People tend to drop their guard around them, to invite them into their private places with open arms, and to hold them above suspicion. For that reason, the likes of William Shakespeare, Chistopher Marlowe, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Harry Houdini, Julia Childs and many other well-known people have been revealed to have acted as spies for their governments.

Most often these people are volunteers for the cause, but not always. The whole game changed with the development of the mind control techniques detailed in the above video "Minds of Men". Scientists found ways to create operatives who may not even realize that they are being used. Consider this excerpt from George Estabrook's Hypnotism, in which he explains how U.S. intelligence agencies create "the perfect spy":

"We start with an excellent subject... we need a man or woman who is highly intelligent and physically tough. Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith. He is a communist, or rather his PA is a communist and will behave as such. Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality, if you wish, although this is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. This personality is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage... My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and the PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge those memories."

What About Bob?

Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' In the Wind", killed Folk music, and introduced The Beatles to marijuana. He could have stopped right there and rightfully claimed to have had as much impact on popular music as anybody in the 20th Century, and maybe beyond.

Dylan is a mythical character, a wandering Jew who roamed away from his Minnesota roots in 1960 to go visit his music idol Woody Guthrie, who was dying in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New York. He was Bobby Zimmerman then, but he was going to become something new. He chose the name Dylan as a nod to the Irish poet Dylan Thomas.

His pilgrimage to Guthrie's bedside represented something like a ritual passing of the torch, a spirit transfer, though young Bob was hardly the heir apparent. There was an entire generation of worthy inheritors between Guthrie and Dylan, but somehow the light was to become his. Dylan, who sounded just like Woody Guthrie in his earliest incarnation, received a spirit he would carry within him the rest of his life. Dylan claimed to have also had a previous mystical experience with Buddy Holly, who he saw perform live in his hometown. "He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn't know what. And it gave me the chills." Holly died in an airplane crash three days later.

Bob was open to psychic experience, which can be heard in the music he has made throughout his career. (See "Isis" in the right panel.)

Dylan got his big business break in 1962 when he was signed to a management deal by Albert Grossman, who was a co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan became a star. Producer John Hammond then signed him to Columbia Records. Hammond reportedly didn't think much of Dylan's guitar or harmonica playing, or of his singing, but he responded to something about him that struck him as authentic. It is a story similar to that which you hear about George Martin's initial interest in The Beatles. These producers weren't looking for raw musical talent so much as they were looking for artists who could speak to the people in the streets. They were looking for artists who could connect.

And then for a short period, between 1963 and 1965, Bob Dylan seemed to become a conduit for a music unlike any he had ever written before, or would ever write again. As he told Ed Bradley in his "60 Minutes" interview: "Those early songs are almost magically written."

He went on to tell Bradley that whatever came over him in that period passed. “You can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But I can’t do that.”

Sometimes it seems like these spirit operatives have a shelf life, but what once their usefulness is done?

The Curious Case of Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs (1940-1976) was a star in the Folk craze that swept America, emanating out of Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s. A musical prodigy, Ochs dumped his classical training to learn the guitar and write "topical songs" of a political nature that would later be classified "Protest Songs". He was singing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, when The Beatles broke big in England, heralding the near end of the Folk period. He was at the 1965 Newport Festival when Bob Dylan famously created heresy by performing an electric set. That effectively drove a stake through the heart of Dylan's own beloved Folk, which the iconoclastic Phil Ochs reportedly found funny.

Ochs was a big deal, playing Carnegie Hall and other elite venues. His fortunes faded as the '60s wore on, but he became involved with politics in an operational way, working on Democrat presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign. With Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Stew Albert, and Paul Krassner, he helped to found the short-lived Youth International (Yippie) movement. They were political extremists with a Hippie ethos, known for painting their faces with American flags and presenting in other provocative ways. He performed at venues during the week of the infamous 1968 Democrat Convention, and he protested the Viet Nam war and was arrested. He testified on behalf of the Chicago 7 in the trial that followed the convention riots.

In 1969, Ochs moved to Los Angeles, leaving the Elektra label and going to A&M Records. He remained politically active but began releasing records with orchestrations nothing like his solo acoustic recordings, and during that period he had more success selling songs to other artists than selling records himself. He was subject to a violent assault while touring Africa, which damaged his vocal cords.

In 1971, Ochs took his political interests to Chile, where he joined activist Chilean Folk singer Victor Jara in support of popularly elected Marxist Salvador Allende. Jara was murdered in 1973 when the Allende government was overthrown by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Ochs had bounced around South America for a time before returning to the U.S. to work on the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat Senator George McGovern. He recorded more protest songs, working with Harry Belafonte, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Then, in 1975, Ochs began acting strangely. Drinking heavily, he began ranting about the FBI and CIA, and at one point he changed his name to John Butler Train. He told people that Train had murdered Phil Ochs and assumed his identity. Convinced that his life was in danger, he carried weapons, trusting no one, and for a time lived on the street. His brother, who had managed his career, tried to have him committed to an insane asylum, but Ochs' John Butler Train personality faded away and Phil Ochs returned. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and he retired to live with his sister, hanging himself in her home in 1976.

Och's biographer Michael Schumacher summed it up as follows:

"By Phil's thinking, he had died a long time ago: he had died politically in Chicago in 1968 in the violence of the Democratic National Convention; he had died professionally in Africa a few years later, when he had been strangled and felt that he could no longer sing; he had died spiritually when Chile had been overthrown and his friend Victor Jara had been brutally murdered; and, finally, he had died psychologically at the hands of John Train."

And then there was Owsley Stanley III - "Bear"

The Phil Ochs story is obviously a tale of personality disorder, on some level. It is intriguing that his paranoiac rants about the FBI and CIA, and his strange temporary re-identification with another personality, were all preceded by his relocation to L.A., and by his politically-sponsored trip to a U.S.-backed South American country still in the midst of political turmoil. Ochs received death threats while he was there and was fortunate to escape imprisonment, and it obviously frightened him to the extent that he was changed.

Ochs had a generational and cultural counterpart, who may or may not have been known to him. That was Owsley Stanley III (1935-2011), who is practically the single source for all of the LSD that was produced in the 1960s (when it was still legal, and then when it wasn't) and distributed widely and often free of charge. Stanley supplied LSD to Ken Kesey and "the Merry Pranksters" for their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He supplied The Beatles with LSD for the making of Magical Mystery Tour. He dosed the crowd at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and he did much of this extraordinary chemistry while operating as the sound man for The Grateful Dead, which is where he picked up the "Bear" nickname (he was diminutive). He designed their lightning bolt skull logo, and later their sound system.

Stanley had checked himself into a psychiatric ward (St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.) while still a teenager. The son of a prominent Kentucky family, and grandson of 1920s-era U.S. Senator A. Owsley Stanley, who had also served as Governor of Kentucky and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, young Owsley Stanley was well connected. Why he committed himself to St. Elizabeths is unclear, but there are stories that he voluntarily became a subject in the psychology experiments being performed there under the umbrella of the MK-ULTRA program.

Stanley graduated from the psychiatric ward, spent time studying engineering at the University of Virginia, and then did 18-months in the U.S. Air Force before being discharged. That is an odd enlistment time and it is unclear why he was discharged, but after leaving the Air Force he spent time studying ballet. He moved to L.A. and supported himself for a time as a professional dancer. Some stories have him working at Johnson Propulsion Labs (JPL), but at some point he moved north to Berkeley, enrolling at the University of California for a short semester before dropping out.

There, Stanley reportedly found the recipe for LSD in the university library. He set up a lab and started producing "acid", which prompted a police raid on his home. He beat the drug charge, because the police came expecting to find methamphetamine production, not the then-legally-produced LSD.

What exactly inspired Stanley to go into production of what was destined to become classified as a "controlled substance", assuming the inherent risk without any apparent profit motive, is difficult to comprehend. He seemed to want to get all the kids high, and he was doing it a couple years before the "Summer of Love".

Owsley Stanley's personal impact on the California music scene was extraordinary. It seems like everyone knew him. My wife reports that she, in her teen years, got LSD from Stanley himself, who apparently had an open door policy at his Berkeley home and his Point Richmond production facility, until 1966, when LSD was made illegal in California.

Stanley set up an operation in Colorado, across the street from the Denver Zoo, with his girlfriend-chemist Melissa Cargill*. In fact, there was a four-headed romantic relationship there involving Stanley, Cargill, a lady named Rhoney Gissen (mother of Stanley's son "Starfinder"), and Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Cassady.

Stanley had a lab in Orinda, California that was busted in 1967. Police found LSD and STP and Stanley went to prison. He would eventually return to work for the Dead and the Jefferson Starship. He grew marijuana for a time in Northern California but he fell out with the Dead, his contacts dried up, and he ended up becoming a naturalized Australian citizen. He died in Queensland in 2011 at age 76.

*Melissa Cargill was a chemistry student at Berkeley, which is how she met Owsley. Her last name leaps out at the reader because the corporation Cargill, established in 1865, is "the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue." (Wikipedia) It is a conglomerate involved in everything from agriculture to pharmaceuticals. Reads their website landing page - "We help people thrive. Cargill is working to nourish the world. We're bringing together people, ideas, and resources to deliver products, technology and ways of operating that build successful businesses and communities." I have never read anything to suggest that Melissa Cargill is related to that business empire, but she was certainly studying appropriately for what they do. That Cargill marketing line quoted above could probably have also worked as a mission statement for Owlsley's widespread distribution of LSD.

REVIEW:

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

(Headpress, 2014)

I don't like this writer, David McGowan, who with Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is more or less passing off a snarky tabloid exposé as a connect-the-dots piece of investigative journalism. That said, kudos to his accomplishment, because far from being a professional journalist he is a construction industry worker who wrote a book. (See the note below for a tip of the hat to the suspect author.)

McGowan suggests that the 1967 Summer of Love, and everything that happened leading up to and after that, was orchestrated by dark forces, including the CIA and Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, whose energies animated the lives of Laurel Canyon residents (according to McGowan). Those included many of the music and film stars of the era, who in McGowan's sampling had a statistically unlikely level of family connections to the military intelligence and defense communities.

That is intriguing, but the intrigue turns to confusion due to McGowan's failure to organize his story around a solid insight or point. He identifies connections, implies that they are weird, but never explains why any of that matters. He seems to want to tell us that malevolent forces created a cultural gestalt that grew out of Laurel Canyon as "the Hippie Movement", then spread to San Francisco and across the nation, but he never creates a nexus between why that was created and what it accomplished.

It doesn't help that McGowan, who positions himself as a disillusioned music fan, seems to detest the people he is writing about. Many of them are detestable, based on McGowan's descriptions of their activities, but once the reader recognizes his bias, any sense of objectivity evaporates.

McGowan holds special contempt for David Crosby, Frank Zappa, and a little known performance artist named Vito Paulekas, who he describes as the ringmasters of a freak show that ranged from phony to sinister.

McGowan spends a great deal of time on sensationalism, particularly body counts, but also sado-masochism, pedophilia, sex orgies and anything else you'd be likely to find in Hollywood Babylon. Had he the courage to make some kind of coherent statement or basic premise, and shown some cause-and-effect in linking the characters he describes with the evil plan he hints at, those stories of mayhem, murder and debauchery might have worked like a payoff, but instead he leads with these things, which automatically puts his whole implied thesis in the trash.

I do think McGowan has a legitimate story here, he is just awful at telling it, unless you like tabloid trash journalism. I do give him credit for identifying the players, making it possible for the CCJ to put together a feature story of this type, in which we hope to better dissect the operation that, according to McGowan, was at "the dark heart of the Hippie dream". - RAR

NOTE: There is an interview with Dave McGowan on YouTube that you can listen to and judge for yourself as to whether or not McGowan is a credible guy who makes a credible case. Credible or not, he must be credited with doing something no real journalist was doing, which was to spot a curious nexus among the characters in this story, that being their familial connections to military intelligence and defense communities, and ancestral elites with long histories of impacting human relations.

PROGRAM TOOLS?

Jim Morrison and The Byrds

In Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon, author David McGowan describes a Sunset Strip in L.A. that was moribund (an overstatement) until suddenly a rock scene was created there overnight centered around the Whiskey A-Go-Go and other nightclubs that sprung up virtually all at once.

He suspects that the entire thing was an orchestrated program, run by U.S. intelligence, for the purpose of undermining resistance to the Viet Nam War, and on a larger level, executing a Marxist plan to destroy the calm center of America - the American family.

McGowan identifies primary tools used to achieve this evil scheme, most notably among them being The Doors, led by the Dionysus of Rock - the Lizard King - Jim Morrison, and The Byrds, who got their early traction doing Bob Dylan songs, but were also important to the Psychedelic Era sound.

McGowan's suspicions about these bands has to do with their genesis, and their connections.

Rock god Jim Morrison was the son of the Admiral in charge of the fleet in the Gulf on Tonkin, and so with the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" was a catalyst for the expansion of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. His son Jim grew up a clean-cut kid who was photographed at his father's side, like a chip off the old block until he became a UCLA film student and began denying that he even had a family.

Morrison, by McGowan's account, showed up in L.A. as a fully-formed rock star. He had the look that would make him a rock icon forever, and he had a bunch of ready-made songs, good to go. All he needed was the band, which would be important as Morrison did not play an instrument and knew nothing about making music. He, reportedly, had only seen a couple rock concerts in his life, and wasn't big on listening to music, but somehow he had these songs.

That's McGowan's take, but he's no musician, which you can tell by the way he writes about them.

He has contempt for The Byrds, who he feels was another fake act designed to leverage Vito Paulekas and his freak dance group to attract attention. The Byrds used part of Paulekas' communal housing for their rehearsal space.

In McGowan's account, Jim/Roger McGuinn - James Joseph McGuinn legally changed his name to James Roger McGuinn in the '70s, and during his Byrds period he started calling himself Roger on the counseling of his Subbud guru - was the only real musician in the band.

Actually, mandolin-prodigy Chris Hillman was recruited into that band, providing more than sufficient muscle to hold down the electric bass (to McGowan's apparent disbelief).

I suspect Gene Clark could strum a guitar, though he often played tambourine, which made him suspect in McGowan's eyes.

David Crosby was apparently a washout as a bass player, which is why they recruited the mandolin-playing Hillman(?), but I happen to know that David Crosby considers himself a great rhythm guitarist. We have mutual friends and I've heard him go on about it on the phone.

And poor Michael Clarke! I knew Michael, a decade after his Hippie heyday, and it is true that while he was a mere bongo player when he joined The Byrds, he became a real pro drummer. A part of that L.A. music scene moved on to Colorado in the 1970s, and I happened to know him from my time in Boulder.

Michael was big and blustery when I knew him, too much in the grip of alcohol - we sometimes went for beer together - and he was a lot to handle, but he was a lot of fun and highly competent.

He was great in a lot of ways. I saw him run rehearsals that made it pretty clear that the band needed to follow his lead (and he was right). He became famous, during the time I knew him, for the rate at which he broke the heads of snare drums. Former Boulder drummer Chris Elliott talks about letting Michael play his drums and getting back a busted head, for which Michael was apologetic - he just hit so damned hard. Chris is a big guy - a construction kind of guy - and he told me once that he couldn't break a drum head if he tried, and yet "Bongo Mike", as McGowan seems to imagine him, broke them with regularity.

When I knew him, Michael Clarke played the drums like he was driving steel rails. I don't know if that's the best way to play drums, but it is a far cry from the shoddy treatment given him by the non-musician McGowan.

After the Byrds, Michael went on to play with Dillard and Clark, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Firefall, and Jerry Jeff Walker.

It should also be added that Michael Clarke, under his rough, worldly exterior, was a really sweet person. He died of liver failure in 1993, only 47 years of age.

Skeletons in Busy Closets

If there is anything to McGowan's assertion that the music scene that grew out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s was a CIA or related operation, there is a list of movers and shakers from that era who would know, should a serious journalist want to seek them out or otherwise investigate.

Elmer Valentine (1923-2008)

Valentine was a former Chicago police officer who opened high profile clubs on the Sunset Strip: the Whiskey A Go Go (which was something of a franchise operation he had discovered on a trip to Europe, 1964), The Trip (1965), The Rainbow Bar & Grill (1972), and The Roxy Theater (1973).

Lou Adler

Adler is one of the most successful record producers in music history, and his business interests include The Rainbow Bar & Grill and The Roxy Theater. The club business came after Adler, who was born in Chicago but grew up in L.A., had made his marks working with Herb Alpert and producing Jan & Dean, The Mamas and The Papas, Carole King, Johnny Rivers, The Grassroots and others. He was an executive producer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Adler produced many Cheech & Chong projects, and he produced Carole King's landmark Tapestry LP. He is probably best known as the producer of The Mamas and The Papas. That band, particularly in the personages of John Phillips and Cass Elliott, were hugely influential on the L.A. scene in the 1960s. Adler, along with Derek Taylor, Peter Asher, and with help from Paul McCartney, put together the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, which was a cultural game changer.

Adler is notoriously difficult. Several years back a friend of mine, a musical director in Cheech & Chong's world, took steps toward mounting a Mamas and Papas tribute act. The response from Adler was immediate. In the words of my friend, who must remain anonymous - "I've been waiting my whole life to get a phone call from this guy, and when the call finally comes he is screaming obscenities at me and threatening a lawsuit!"

David Geffen

Geffen, who with Elliot Roberts started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency, created or co-created Asylum Records in 1970, Geffen Records in 1980, DGC Records in 1990, and DreamWorks SKG in 1994. He worked his way up through William Morris before striking out on his own to manage Laura Nyro and Crosby, Stills & Nash. His Alsylum label became a magnet for the Laurel Canyon acts. He signed the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Judee Sill, and J.D. Souther. Asylum was later acquired by Atlantic's parent company, Warner Communications, and merged with Elektra Records in 1972 to become Elektra/Asylum Records. Elektra was the label of The Doors. Geffen Records produced John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy album.

Geffen was one of the original owners of The Roxy, along with Elmer Valentine, Lou Adler, Elliot Roberts, and Peter Asher.

Peter Asher

Peter Asher likely knows more than anyone about the subject of this feature, as well as the related feature Who Is Paul McCartney? The brother of legendary McCartney love interest Jane Asher, Peter Asher was the beneficiary of several McCartney-penned tunes that made his duo "Peter & Gordon" a major hit during the British Invasion period. McCartney lived with the Asher family in London through the early years of his Beatle fame. The father of the Asher clan was Dr. Richard Asher, who coined the phrase "Munchhausen Syndrome". He was a prominent researcher into human behavior, in charge of mental observations at Central Middlesex Hospital. When he was replaced in his position by a psychiatrist deemed more qualified than the M.D. Dr. Asher for the type of work he was doing, Asher quit medicine, grew despondent and eventually committed suicide in the family home. That downturn in his fortunes happened in 1964, about the time that Paul McCartney took up residence in the Asher family home.

Peter Asher was the first A&R manager for Apple Records, signing James Taylor. When Taylor's record flopped, Asher quit Apple, moved to the U.S., and became Taylor's manager. He went on to executive positions with Sony Music Entertainment and he has continued to manage and produce acts over the years, while also touring in a duo with Albert Lee.

Asher continues to be a principle keeper of The Beatles mythology, with a show on Sirius XM Channel 18 - The Beatles Channel - in which he reinforces the band's narrative with his first-person accounts.

Was There Ever a Hippie Dream?

Well, there probably was in somebody's mind, and trying to figure out whose mind that was is the subject of our inquiry. It didn't seem to be anything that grew organically out of the American mind, but rather seemed to be inspired by cultural histories likely little known to the young people who were the targets of "the dream".

Some ancient Greek's worshipped as "the Cult of Dionysus", called "Bacchus" in later incarnations, and that spirit seemed to be reborn in 1966.

From Wikipedia: "The Cult of Dionysus is strongly associated with satyrs, centaurs, and sileni, and its characteristic symbols are the bull, the serpent, tigers/leopards, the ivy, and the wine. The Dionysia and Lenaia festivals in Athens were dedicated to Dionysus, as well as the Phallic processions. Initiates worshipped him in the Dionysian Mysteries, which were comparable to and linked with the Orphic Mysteries, and may have influenced Gnosticism. Orpheus was said to have invented the Mysteries of Dionysus."

The Doors Jim Morrison (left) seemed like an incarnation of Dionysus, and he certainly inspired his own kind of cult worship, though it was strangely at odds with the peace and love message associated with the "Hippie Movement".

While the peace and love people were passing the dutche, the "Lizard King" Morrison was personifying a level of carnal energy that was of an entirely different stripe. His Hippie may do the whirling dervish thing and dance you into a state of ecstasy, but after that he was going to sneak into the bedroom of his parents, rape his mother and kill his father. One could say there were mixed messages at work, "Strange Days" indeed, to quote a Lennonism and offer a tip of the hat to The Doors second album. They were as original when they burst onto the scene as was Jimi Hendrix, the other later contemporary of The Beatles who really reset the stage for popular music. Together, they created the landscape for modern day "Dionysian Mysteries".

Enter Vito Paulekas and The Freaks

When people look back on the 1960s and consider the social-politics of the time, the image that pops to mind is that associated with the "Hippies of Haight Ashbury" in San Francisco. Before any of that Hippie ethos showed up in Golden Gate Park, it was showing up on the dance floors of the rock clubs that popped up along the Sunset Strip in L.A. in the mid-1960s.

There a former convict named Vito Paulekas was running a commune of street performers - wild dancers - who would show up at clubs where The Byrds and The Doors and Frank Zappa were playing and create a wild scene - so wild it was entertainment in itself, and it would attract other paying customers. Paulekas and his "Freaks", as he called them, got into the clubs free, which was great for them for they were a bunch of street kids, runaways and drug addicts who found refuge in Paulekas' commune in Laurel Canyon, which doubled as a rehearsal space for The Byrds. Below is a video of the Paulekas freaks doing their wild, liberated dancing at a Frank Zappa show.

Paulekas' wife Szou ran a clothing shop in L.A. that created the Hippie fashions that became iconic of the era.

Here is Wikipedia's description of Paulekas and crew, and their contributions to the Hippie scene: "By about 1963, Vito, Szou, and their friend Carl Franzoni... also known at the time as 'Captain Fuck', had begun going to clubs with a growing group of self-styled 'freaks', who reputedly 'lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could'. According to writer Johnny Rogan, Paulekas' 'free thinking lifestyle and artistic passion inspired beatniks, aspiring existentialists and Valley girls in need of rebellion.' In 1964, Paulekas offered rehearsal space to the Byrds, and the following year the troupe of free-form dancers, with Paulekas and Franzoni, accompanied the group on their nationwide tour. Later, Arthur Lee and Love also used his premises for rehearsals.

In some clubs, Paulekas and the dancers became as big an attraction as the onstage entertainment. The troupe - including several of the young women later to become known as The GTOs, and members of the Fraternity of Man - occupied the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon formerly occupied by Tom Mix and later by Frank Zappa. Credited as 'Vito and the Hands', Paulekas recorded a single, 'Where It's At', which featured some of the Mothers of Invention, with producer Kim Fowley in 1966. He has been credited with first using the terms 'freak' and 'freak-out' to describe the scene, and with Franzoni and other members of the troupe contributed to the first album by Zappa and the Mothers, Freak Out!. He appeared in several documentaries of the period, including Mondo Hollywood (1967) and You Are What You Eat (1968).

After Richard Nixon's election as US President in 1968, he moved to Haiti and later Jamaica, before returning to settle in Cotati, California. There, he and Franzoni established the Freestore street theatre and performance group, and built a bandstand for the town as well as contributing sculptures."

Otherwise put, Paulekas was finding ways to influence American culture right up to the time of his death in 1992.

C U L T   M O N S T E R S

In the 1960s, the Los Angeles music scene, centered in Laurel Canyon, was dominated by a handful of dominant personalities who shared numerous traits, most notably their capacity for attracting and controlling young followers, particularly female. These four below were notable for their cult leader personalities

FRANK ZAPPA

The son of a chemical weapons scientist, Zappa showed up in L.A. in the early '60s and established the Log Cabin commune in Laurel Canyon. It became a magnet for runaways and rock stars, an orgy that went on for years. A complicated character, Zappa was a right-wing zealot who seemed to hate the kids he nurtured into a freak lifestyle epitomized by his band, The Mothers of Invention. He created the jail-bait girl band the GTOs, who provided the template for Kim Fowley's exploitation, The Runaways. An inattentive father who famously gave his children eccentric names (Dweezil, Moon, Diva), Zappa pulled his kids out of school at 15 and refused to pay for any of them to go to college. He was a tyrannical band leader who exercised control over his players by belittling and criticizing them. He battled against censorship of pop music lyrics and died of prostate cancer at 52.

DAVID CROSBY

Crosby is of old European royalty, and in L.A. in the 1960s he was a rich kid who, like Zappa, ran a never-ending party scene out of his Laurel Canyon home. He was known to entertain in the nude. Crosby had a role in three key bands of the era: The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. He angered band mates from the first by espousing political opinion from the stage. Ostensibly a left-winger, Crosby is a gun toting narcissist who did nine months of prison time in Texas for heroine and cocaine possession. He has numerous arrests on weapons and drunk driving charges. Among his unusual resume credits: he is an in-demand sperm donor. Lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge had a child by artificial insemination using Crosby's seed.

VITO PAULEKAS

A convicted armed robber who did four years in prison, Paulekas created a dance troup in L.A. called "The Freaks". They were the original Hippies, creating the template for the look and lifestyle, and most especially their style of dance. They helped make The Byrds and Zappa big on the Sunset Strip, as club owners would let them in for free because they attracted curious others. The Freaks were runaways, dope fiends, and groupies, including super groupie Pamela DeBarres at one time.

NOTE: Paulekas was married to Szou Shaffer, who operated a clothing shop in L.A. that was the source of Hippie fashion. The two divorced in 1975 and at some point Paulekas moved to Cotati, in Northern California. He lived next door to my wife, for a time, and she became aware of a reputation he had in Cotati: if he moved next door to you, the grass in your yard died.

CHARLIE MANSON

Manson had spent most of his adult life behind bars, but in L.A. he was a respected musician and songwriter who kept company with all these cult monsters. Manson and his family of followers lived at Zappa's Log Cabin commune for a time, and Manson developed a relationship with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and producer Terry Melcher. The Beach Boys recorded one of his songs and declined to give him a writing credit, which was a motive behind Manson's eventual murder spree.

THE COPELAND CONSPIRACY

The McGowan book presents a long list of curious connections between luminaries of the late '60s Laurel Canyon music community and U.S. intelligence and defense industry personnel, and in the case of David Crosby, connections to blue blood families. There are some doozies, like the trio America, who are all sons of Air Force intelligence officers, one father being the superior to the other two. Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley met while their fathers were stationed in London, and that's where they began performing before relocating to Los Angeles, and Laurel Canyon.

None of these characters hold a candle to the Copeland family - Miles, Stuart and Ian.

The Copeland family name is of ancient Norse origin, though the Copeland's of interest here are Americans. Their father Miles was a principle actor in the establishment of the CIA. Their mother Lorraine Adie, interestingly enough, was an archaeologist, and the Copeland children grew up in Egypt and Lebanon, before eventually coming to live in the U.S.

Miles Copeland III, the eldest son, founded I.R.S. Records and released albums with R.E.M., The Go-Go's, Wall of Voodoo, and Fine Young Cannibals. Ian Copeland was a booking agent who founded Frontier Booking International (F.B.I.), and managed the band The Police, the drummer of which was Stuart Copeland. Gordon Sumner (Sting) of The Police has gone on to a successful solo career, and he has been active with human rights causes and with UNESCO, the UN's cultural and scientific agency, promoting their programs around the world.

What inspired the Copelands to name their enterprises after government institutions is not known to me, but it obviously calls out an association of some kind, if only tongue-in-cheek, and one wonders what would inspire that.

Whatever, the Copelands moved into L.A. in the 1970s and picked up the mantle, continuing the music scene that developed there in the '60s and ensuring that it would remain a force into the New Wave period of popular music.

So how many children of CIA operatives does it take to make a music scene?

Industrial Evil

So who are these people who use such devious, cold-blooded means, and why do they do it? To some researchers, like Alex Thomson in the video presentation below, designs to control the destiny of the common man - the chattel whose existence is at the whim of our feudal lords - are the interests of ancient bloodlines with descendancy dating back to the origin of human life on this planet. The idea, in short, is that they created us and can do with us what they will, and if we are consuming more than we are producing, we must be eliminated as a matter of sound business practice. The '60s began the process of dividing us up into manageable herd groups, neutralizing us by pairing tribal factions against one another.

CONCLUSION: Black Wins

If one wishes to think of the game of life as symbolic of the game of chess - how's that for ambiguation? - then the dark side is most certainly in the act of winning. They can't have won conclusively, because life goes on and we see occasional glimmers of light, confusing this reviewer because one hears a lot about Lucifer these days, always referenced in "a bad light", though his very name means "bearer of light".

So are we to conclude that all of us, unless you happen to be a reader of a very peculiar bloodline, are mere primitives, trapped "in the Devil's bargain", to borrow a phrase from Laurel Canyon luminary Joni Mitchell, or caught in the matrix, to reference another popular allusion (see David Icke and The Wachowskis)?

Yes, I would say we are and the record shows it quite clearly. Operatives in high places have developed sophisticated behavioral engineering and mind control techniques, which they have perfected through experimentation on individuals who often were often not aware that they were lab rats in an experiment. This was all revealed by the Church Committee over forty years ago.

Here is the Wikipedia description:

The Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. The committee investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the "Year of Intelligence", including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee's efforts led to the establishment of the permanent U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

We don't actually hear anything of what the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence learns in their investigations, and their championing of American freedoms obviously did nothing to prevent the abuses of the NSA as detailed in the Edward Snowden leaks.

Does the global intelligence community work together in some way to coordinate propaganda campaigns and special operations? Obviously, yes.

The question then goes to those powers that supersede the laws of our nations. What capacity do we, the "little people", have to control them and, therefore, our own destinies? Are we just talking about the concentrated wealth of a handful of old families? Or are we talking about mechanisms of societal control executed by non-human agents? That is a popular conspiracy theory that has gained adherents over the past twenty years with archaeological discoveries that indicate that the history of humankind on planet Earth might be far different from that which we are taught in schools and churches.

Is the planet run by a small group of families? Absolutely, and everybody acknowledges that and knows who these families are, including much about their long bloodlines, and yet there is no progress made toward ending their tyranny over us. Part of that is that most of us never see that top strata of society, making our resistance to their indulgences something akin to Don Quixote's battles against windmills.

Is part of the problem that our thoughts are not our own, or are otherwise so scattered that we are incapable of mounting any resistance? Or do we just know that we can't win, that resistance is futile?

In truth, we all grow up with a level of willing surrender. You can't fight City Hall. C'est la vie...what will be will be, the future's not ours to see, que será, será.

We don't know what to believe, particularly in our present awareness of "fake news", though news has always been fake and we seem now to be surprised by it. We all studied this in school decades ago, those of us who went to Journalism school, but somehow the public can't hold on to a thought. We can't remember what we once knew. Like NASA, who once had the technology to go to the Moon but doesn't anymore, we just can't seem to snap out of it, to clear our heads, figure out what the heck is happening, and take steps to take control of our lives. Is that the result of a complex operation executed by controlling forces?

Our cultural myths tell us we've never had control of our lives, but rather wandered out of a "Garden of Eden" with the knowledge that there are answers out there somewhere, and that's about as far as we've gotten with it. That's why we tend to ape the behaviors of others, because at least it gives us a group identity.

Is that planned? Are we being herded into groups, culled into special categories? Why can't we think for ourselves? Is it that we are stupid, or are capacities innate to us as human beings being suppressed through an array of means set to action by a controlling force that does not have our best interest at heart?

We are about to reach a point of singularity, where the natures of these questions will take on monumental importance, because the answers will most certainly determine the fate of much of mankind, to the extent that we will be able to control that at all.

For all of known human history, we slaves have served a purpose that is now coming to an end with the maturation of automation, of artificial intelligence, and machine learning. We humans have no value in that robot world and the vast majority of us will be phased out of existence soon.

There is, without a doubt, cultural and behavioral engineering at work. It seems to be built on disinformation and on triggering effects designed to elicit certain responses, and the main theme seems to be to divide and conquer. Social media and internet use has effectively isolated individuals, even while making them feel strong group associations, and it has brilliantly fragmented users into competing groups, all suspicious of the other.

Is it any wonder that superstition has made a big comeback? It is popular these days to feel that only belief in God will provide hope for salvation, though descriptions of that salvation leave so much to the imagination that it offers little comfort to other than the feverish zealot.

God or no God, we are all going to have to make plans for the coming turmoil. Our best survival strategy might be to carefully consider the messages we perceive and the impulses we feel, and think carefully about what is happening around. Lose the social media and cable news services and stop watching reality TV. Go walk around your neighborhood and meet people, re-humanize.

If it is possible to have no doubt in your mind, in an environment where mind-control is an issue, I would say there is no doubt in mine that messaging technologies and controls are being used on us constantly.

Maybe the best we can do is get together and not listen or watch. - RAR

Looking for something in the RARWRITER.com archives? Type the item you wish to find in the custom search field below, then click on the magnifying glass to see a list of previously published articles relevant to your query.

Shakespeare - All's Well that Ends Well

____________

CIA and Counterculture

Allen Dulles

Over much of the middle part of the 20th Century, Allen Dulles (1893-1969) seems to have been at the center of every intrigue.

He was from a long-line of American elite, and a key member of the Century Club, which begat the Bohemian Grove group. Other Century Club friends of Dulles were Gordon Wasson and Aldous Huxley. The business of the Dulles family seems to be running defense and intelligence operations, and everything that falls out of that. There were Dulles's in Secretary of State roles in the administrations of Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight Eisenhower. Allen Dulles was the first civilian director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He clashed with President John F. Kennedy, who fired him, and then led the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Among Dulles' many accomplishments was exposing that a document called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which detailed a Jewish plan for global domination, was a fabrication, a hoax.

This meant a great deal to Dulles, who unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to publicly denounce the document as a forgery.

They declined.

Robert Wasson

Robert Wasson was a researcher in organic compounds. He was an ethnomycologist and Vice President for Public Relations at J.P. Morgan & Co. and a friend and compatriot of PR guru Edward Bernays.

Wasson was funded under MK-ULTRA Project 58 to explore the jungles to find hallucinogenic organics that could be processed into mind altering drugs.

Here is how Wikipedia describes his work:

Together, Wasson and botanist Roger Heim collected and identified various species of family Strophariaceae and genus Psilocybe, while Albert Hofmann, using material grown by Heim from specimens collected by the Wassons, identified the chemical structure of the active compounds, psilocybin and psilocin. Hofmann and Wasson were also among the first Westerners to collect specimens of the Mazatec hallucinogen Salvia divinorum, though these specimens were later deemed not suitable for rigorous scientific study or taxonomic classification. Two species of mushroom, Psilocybe wassonii R.Heim and Psilocybe wassoniorum Guzman & S.H.Pollock, were named in honor of Wasson by Heim and Gastón Guzmán, the latter of whom Wasson met during an expedition to Huautla de Jiménez in 1957.

Wasson's next major contribution was a study of the ancient Vedic intoxicant soma, which he proposed was based on the psychoactive fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) mushroom. This hypothesis was published in 1967 under the title Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. His attention then turned to the Eleusinian Mysteries, the initiation ceremony of the ancient Greek cult of Demeter and Persephone. In The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978), co-authored with Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck, it was proposed that the special potion "kykeon", a pivotal component of the ceremony, contained psychoactive ergoline alkaloids from the fungus Ergot (Claviceps spp.).

His last completed work, The Wondrous Mushroom, was republished by City Lights Publishers in 2014.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was a British philosopher and author who came from a long line of noted intellectuals.

Here is the Wikipedia introduction: "The Huxley family is a British family of which several members have excelled in science, medicine, arts, and literature. The family also includes members who occupied senior positions in the public service of the United Kingdom.

"The patriarch of the family was the zoologist and comparative anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). His grandsons include Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World and Doors of Perception) and his brother Julian Huxley (an evolutionist, and the first director of UNESCO), and Nobel laureate physiologist Andrew Huxley."

Here is a description of Huxley's classic Brave New World as sold on Amazon:

"Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene."

Archaic Revival

If there is one person who epitomizes the ongoing impact of the counter-culture movement that was begun in the 1960s in L.A., it must be Terrence McKenna (1946-2000).

McKenna, who surfaced in the 1990s, was called "the intellectual voice of Rave Culture" (Wikipedia). He advocated for hallucinogenic drugs as key to greater consciousness, which in his formulation amounted to an "Archaic Revival".

McKenna, who promoted the Mayan calendar end-of-the-world-in-2012 hysteria, believed that the planet and everybody on it is sick from consumerism and materialism and so anti-bodies have developed within society so that it may be healed. His examples include interests in surrealism, abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, rock and roll, and catastrophe theory.

McKenna died of brain cancer.   

Carlos Castenada

Castenada is one of the publishing world's great mysterious success stories. One senses that he got lucky with a not-particularly-well-founded bit of fictive writing and so became a fiction in himself, a guru to young seekers hungry for insight into what, following the '60s psychedelic era, was an increasingly confusing world.

While he was an anthropology student at UCLA, Castenada wrote a series of books (The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge; A Separate Reality; and Journey to Ixtlan) in which he described, in first person, his tutelage in Yaqui culture and shamanism. The Yaqui are "an Uto-Aztecan speaking indigenous people of Mexico" and Castenada told a long story about how a shaman, don Juan Matus, instructed him in their mystical ways.

People bought this hook, line and sinker, even though academics familiar with the Yaqui found Castenada's book to be a fantasy, a fiction that bore little resemblance to anything real in the Yaqui culture that Castenada described.

After publishing the fourth and last book in the series (Tales of Power, 1974), Castenada bought a property in Los Angeles where he lived with "followers", and he disappeared from public view until the 1990s, when he re-emerged with a new shamanic property, called Tensegrity, which he hoped to promote through seminars and workshops.

It never took off and Castenada died in 1998 from hepatocellular cancer. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1957, his cremated remains were returned to Mexico, his native country. There was no public funeral ceremony.

Lucifer's Agenda

Researcher Robert Stanley has traveled the world for decades exploring for answers to man's wants and needs, and where these desires come from. He has come up with an interpretation of Zecharia Sitchin's interpretation of the Sumerian cuneiform tablets that bridges archaeological research and the teachings of modern religions. He is certain that Earth is under the control of "Lucifer", who in the Sumerian texts was called Enki, and who in ancient Egypt was known as Osiris (the first Pharoah), and who in Greek mythology was known as Prometheus.

Stanley's take on the story is that humankind on Earth was created by a royal family from the Orion star system. Sitchin tells the same story but has the family associated with the mystery planet Nibiru.

There were three ancient gods associated with Mesopotamia, where the Sumerians were located:  An/Anu (the father of the Gods), Enlil and Enki (half-brothers). A principle sacred city was Nippur.

At some point, Enlil cleaved the heavens from the Earth, so that An ruled thereafter only in the heavens, while Enlil had domain over Earth.

His domain was not uncontested. There was an ancient race of reptilians on Earth led by the dragon queen Tiamat. She was eventually overcome and Enlil cemented his role as the supreme ruler of the planet.

Enlil and the Annunaki were on Earth to mine its gold resources, which is a labor they grew tired of. Enlil hatched the idea of creating a hybrid race of slave laborers, combining Annunaki DNA with that of primitive species on Earth to create humans. Enlil's plans were anything but benevolent, and thus he is depicted in Sumerian mythology as an "oppressor".

Arriving on Earth later was Enki, Enlil's half-brother, and he arrived angry.

It was to be Enki's destiny to inherit the throne of Orion, but traveling through space with his crew they entered a "forbidden zone", the effect of which was to drive Enki and his crew insane.

When Enki returned to his home world to assume his throne, his parents saw that he had become insane and denied him what he felt to be his birthright.

Enraged, he determined that he would make his own kingdom and so he traveled to Earth to wage war on his half-brother and rest control of the planet. (One can see the "fallen angel" motif at work in this story.) At stake is the "Tablet of Destinies", ownership of which would convey power over Earth. Unfortunately, Enki arrived on planet Earth in the company of an array of parasitic entities created from his forbidden-zone-created insanity. These include the Archons, the Gin, and demons.

It is Enki who follows through on Enlil's designs for humans, and he fashions humankind (slave workers) from clay.

Unfortunately, these creator gods became enamored with their own creations, began procreating with human women, and created a race of giants, called Nephilim in the Bible. These giants are responsible for the monumental ancient architecture discovered around the world today, including the pyramids at Giza.

Viewed as an abomination, the supreme god Enlil created a global flood to wipe the planet clean of the Nephilim and the corruption of humankind.

Enki intervened, selecting a family to build an arc to survive the flood, along with the animals of the planet, so that life may be restarted on planet Earth once the waters receded.

After the flood, Enlil left the planet, but Enki and his group survived in subterranean environments, from which they control humankind to this day through a matrix designed to blind humans to any reality other than that which Enki - the giver of light who is also called Lucifer - projects.

In Stanley's account, Enki or Lucifer seeks control over every human on planet Earth, but being insane he doesn't even have control over himself. Having no control of himself, he seeks control over others, which in Stanley's account is classic behavior in psychotic minds.

And so you have the dynamics on planet Earth today, according to Robert Stanley.

_________________

Bob's Long Ride

Always one of the music industry's most enigmatic and influential figures, Bob Dylan turned the worlds of many listeners upside down when, in an interview on the CBS news show "60 Minutes", he told Ed Bradley that he continues to hold up his end of a bargain he made decades ago. It brought him fortune and fame - "where I am today", in his words.

When Bradley pressed Dylan to reveal who it was he made this deal with - you could see Bradley trying to tease "the Devil" response - he said, in typically cryptic Dylan speak, “With the chief commander. In this earth and in the world we can’t see.”

Did he mean to say "in this earth"?

If that is an illusion to the God of the underworld, it is a subject Dylan has written about, specifically in his song "Isis", which tells the story of Osiris, Egyptian Lord of the Underworld, who married his sister Isis. Consider these lyrics:

[Verse 1]
I married Isis on the fifth day of May
But I could not hold on to her very long
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong

[Verse 2]
I came to a high place of darkness and light
Dividing line ran through the center of town
I hitched up my pony to a post on the right
Went in to a laundry to wash my clothes down

[Verse 3]
A man in the corner approached me for a match
I knew right away, he was not ordinary
He said “Are you looking for something easy to catch?”
Said “I got no money”
He said “That ain't necessary”

[Verse 4]
We set out that night, for the cold in the North
I gave him my blanket, and he gave me his word
I said “Where are we going?” He said we’d be back by the fourth
I said “That’s the best news that I’ve ever heard”

[Verse 5]
I was thinking about turquoise, I was thinking about gold
I was thinking about diamonds and the world’s biggest necklace
As we rode through the canyons, through the devilish cold
I was thinking about Isis, how she thought I was so reckless

[Verse 6]
How she told me that one day we would meet up again
And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can’t remember all the best things she said

[Verse 7]
We came to the pyramids, all embedded in ice
He said “There’s a body I’m trying to find
If I carry it out it’ll bring a good price”
'Twas then that I knew what he had on his mind

[Verse 8]
The wind it was a-howlin' and the snow was outrageous
We chopped through the night
And we chopped through the dawn
When he died I was hoping that it wasn’t contagious
But I made up my mind that I had to go on

[Verse 9]
I broke into the tomb, but the casket was empty
There was no jewels, no nothing! I felt I’d been had
When I saw that my partner was just being friendly
When I took up his offer I must've been mad

[Verse 10]
I picked up his body and I dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole, and I put back the cover
I said a quick prayer, then I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis, just to tell her I love her

[Verse 11]
She was there in the meadow, where the creek used to rise
Blinded by sleep, and in need of a bed
I came in from the East, with the sun in my eyes
I cursed her one time, then I rode on ahead

[Verse 12]
She said “Where you been?” I said “No place special”
She said “You look different” I said “Well.. I guess”
She said “You been gone” I said “That’s only natural”
She said “You going to stay?” I said “If you want me to, yes"

[Verse 13]
Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain

In Dylan's tune, he as Osiris marries Isis on the fifth day of the fifth month.

The Egyptians held certain numbers to have powers, five being principle among them. Osiris and his sister-bride Isis are among five children born to their parents, Nut and Geb. Those five were born over a period of five days.

Osiris died and was resurrected long enough to marry his sister a second time, impregnating her with their son Horus before returning to his forever throne in the world of the dead.

The afterlife is represented as the pentagram, the five-pointed star.

Osiris, in this song, marries Isis and then immediately loses her. In Egyptian mythology, Osiris lost his life in a battle against his brother Seth. In the Dylan lyric, he is happy to learn that, leaving after his marriage on the 5th of May, it is promised that he will be returned by "the fourth". Otherwise, he returns a day before he leaves.

That is likely an occult allusion to the number 9 (5 + 4), which in our numbering system is the end of one cycle and the start of a new cycle.

Osiris will be back in time to start new again, or otherwise will be resurrected.

___________