Demon Muse

NOTE: It’s tempting to begin with an exclamation like “And we’re back!” For the past several months, Demon Muse has been on hiatus as I’ve done some necessary clarifying and recharging in communion with my creative source. If you’re a long-time reader, I thank you sincerely for your patience, and for the expressions of ongoing interest that some of you have sent me. If you’re new to Demon Muse, then I hope you’ll enjoy and profit from this ongoing exploration of the theory and practice of inspired creativity, and will add your voice to the conversation in each post’s comment section. In particular, you may find it worth your while to explore the Course in Demonic Creativity, which organizes this blog’s “backbone posts” into a coherent course of self-study in the art of creativity as a muse-driven or daimon-driven pursuit. (For an even more easily accessible and portable presentation, look for an ebook version later this year.)

Be advised that the present post inaugurates a new format that will include 1) occasionally longer articles with endnotes and 2) a drastic reduction in the number of in-text links. For a rationale concerning the second part, see “Experiments in delinkification” by Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and its book-length expansion, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Also see “To link or not to link? That is the question” at The Economist and “The Hyperlink War” at the Barnes & Noble Review. Or do a Google search for hyperlinks + distraction. For a rationale concerning the first part: Endnotes keep a reader engaged in the same text instead of leading attention away.

* * *

To review, in the opening post of this series I raised the question of whether the personification of the creative force that we’ve been pursuing here at Demon Muse is “really real.” Is the muse, the daimon, the personal genius — that gravitational center of our creative energy and identity — truly a separate being/force/entity with an independent, autonomous existence? Or are such words and the experience to which they refer simply convenient metaphors for the unconscious mind? The first thing we discover when we truly begin to consider the issue in depth is that arriving at a viable answer will not be, and cannot be, as straightforward a matter as it might first appear. All of our attempts run us into immediate difficulties, because whichever side we try to choose, we find we’re automatically skirting important issues and begging crucial questions. Hence, the value of reviewing some of the various ways in which intelligent individuals have understood the experience of guidance and communication from a muse-like source.

Of all the myriad strands in the cultural conversation about this issue, it would be hard to identify a more pertinent — or fascinating (and entertaining) — one than the line of influence connecting 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary to counterculture novelist-philosopher and “guerilla ontologist” Robert Anton Wilson. The dividing line between objective and subjective interpretations of the experience of external-seeming communication from an invisible source is highlighted not only in their individual stories but in the plotline that connects them. In particular, Wilson’s final “resting point” in terms of a belief system to encompass the whole thing is helpful and instructive in our search for the muse’s ontological status, and can prove a helpful tonic for dogmatism, because what he ended up with was more of an anti-belief system that highlights and hinges on the irreducible indeterminacy of any possible answer.

By way of a warning: Prepare for high weirdness! What follows is a strange story.

The Great Beast and his Holy Guardian Angel

Aleister Crowley in his middle years

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was arguably the most influential occultist of the 20th century. Not only did his ideas fundamentally impact, and in many cases essentially define, the outlook and practices of virtually all subsequent participants in Europe’s and America’s thriving subculture of ceremonial magicians and mystical occultists, but his outrageously colorful, theatrical, and transgressive life — some of which he hyped in the retelling of it, but much of which was truly bizarre and depraved by conventional standards — ensured him an enduring place in popular culture. For decades his name, memory, and iconic visual image — bald head, broad face, fiery eyes — have stalked through pop music (e.g., the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, legions of heavy metal albums), literature (especially the horror genre), graphic novels, movies, television shows, and video games. One of his favorite self-titles, drawn from the biblical Book of Revelation, was “The Great Beast.” Most would say he did a fine job of living up to it. (Example: Mussolini expelled Crowley from Sicily in 1923 when Crowley’s reputation as “the wickedest man in the world” — which was inflamed by sensationalized media reports — began to precede him.)

Crowley’s relevance to the muse-based or daimon-based approach to writing and creativity is found in his lifelong engagement with the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel — a topic or idea that I mentioned in passing in a previous Demon Muse post (“A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius”), and that, as noted there, is a specific iteration of the fundamental concept of the muse, daimon, or genius. By the time Crowley came along, the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel had already been around for several centuries in Western occult and mystical circles, or even longer if you factor in its long prehistory in Neoplatonism and various sister schools of philosophical mysticism. Crowley himself borrowed the term from an English translation of a medieval occult text. So there was nothing particular original in his use of it, or even in his fundamental philosophical framing of it. But it was he who made it central and definitive for subsequent generations when he founded the new religion of Thelema and devoted the remainder of his life to explicating and promoting its principles.

The founding event itself, which Thelemites still celebrate every year on the spring equinox as the Feast of the Equinox of the Gods, was the writing of Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. As the story goes, in April 1904, while Crowley was on honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt with his new wife Rose, the book was dictated to him over a span of three days by a voice that identified itself as Aiwass (or Aiwaz), messenger of the Egyptian god Horus. The book became Thelema’s central scripture, and Crowley identified Aiwass as his own Holy Guardian Angel. He also identified the event as a dividing point in history that signaled the end of the former “Aeon of Osiris,” a period characterized by belief in patriarchal monotheism and all that goes with it, and the new “Aeon of Horus,” whose guiding ethos would be individual liberty and the discovery of each person’s “True Will” in communion with his or her own Holy Guardian Angel.

Interestingly and importantly, his championing of Thelema and Liber AL didn’t happen right away in the immediate wake of his Cairo experience. In fact, he was initially not all that enamored of the book, and spoke more than once of the way its ideas were distasteful and contrary to his own thoughts. Wilson and co-author Miriam Joe Hill elaborate on this briefly in their encyclopedia Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups, and their comments again underscore the question of what Crowley’s experience with Aiwass “really was”:

At first, Crowley did not like the experience or the book, and managed to largely ignore them for ten years. After 1914, however, he felt increasingly under their spell, and eventually he devoted the rest of his life to the “mission” the book imposed on him. After 1919, he spoke of the Cairo experience as an encounter with a superhuman intelligence; one of his disciples, Kenneth Grant, has claimed the communicating entity emanated from the system of the double star, Sirius, while another student, Israel Regardie, prefers to say Crowley reached the depths of the human evolutionary unconscious unknown to either Freud or Jung.[1]

This can all sound outlandish to those who are unfamiliar with the subcultural stream it represents, but it’s important to recognize that Crowley’s experience with Aiwass falls right in the mainstream of a significant tradition in Western history, the very tradition, in fact, of the muse/daimon/genius that has also come down to us in the more familiar idea of the creative muse, and in the even more familiar Christian idea of the personal guardian angel. Thelema is erected entirely upon and around the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel. Its central organizing concept is the necessity for each adherent to achieve the “knowledge and conversation” of his or her own Angel, and thereby to discover the aforementioned True Will, a term that is basically coeval with the idea of a life mission or divine purpose. The most famous statement from Liber AL — the oft-quoted “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” — was borrowed and modified from Rabelais, but in Thelema it assumes the radically specific and transformative meaning of discovering one’s guiding daimon and thereby accessing, activating, and actualizing one’s cosmic/divine destiny. The classical daimon or genius, we will recall, encapsulated the idea of an invisible spirit that accompanies a person through life and exerts a kind of existential gravity or magnetism that evokes experiences in accordance with the divinely ordained life plan. This idea, paired with that of the muse, forms the heart of the inspiration-based approach to creativity we’re pursuing here. When Crowley spoke and wrote about the Holy Guardian Angel, and also, significantly, when similar-minded people and organizations in his time did the same — as with the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose founder was in fact the translator of the book that provided Crowley with the term “Holy Guardian Angel” — he was pursuing the very same thing from a different angle.

His experience is also relevant because his interpretation of it, which continued to evolve throughout his lifetime, underscored the tension or confusion between objective and subjective views. Until the end of his life he kept issuing what seemed to be contradictory statements about the matter. Sometimes he even planted them side-by-side in the same writing, as in The Equinox of the Gods (1936), the book where he tells the story of how The Book of the Law came to be written. At one point he describes the Holy Guardian Angel as “our Secret Self — our Subconscious Ego,” clearly favoring an interpretation of the Angel as a layer or presence within the psyche. But in the same chapter he says that even though the words of The Book of the Law were physically written by him as “ink on paper, in the material sense,” still they

are not My words, unless Aiwaz be taken to be no more than my subconscious self, or some part of it: in that case, my conscious self being ignorant of the Truth in the Book and hostile to most of the ethics and philosophy of the Book, Aiwaz is a severely suppressed part of me. Such a theory would further imply that I am, unknown to myself, possessed of all sorts of praeternatural knowledge and power.[2]

In other words, Crowley says here that the simplest and therefore the best explanation is to consider the Holy Guardian Angel an independent intelligence, since the subconscious explanation strains credulity even more.

Four decades after Crowley wrote these words, in June 1973, Robert Anton Wilson took “a programmed trip on something an underground Alchemist told [me] was LSD,” where part of the “program” involved listening to a taped reading of Crowley’s Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel. As Wilson recounted in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, he achieved, among other experiences, “a rush of Jungian archetypes, strongly influenced by the imagery of Crowley’s Invocation, but nonetheless having that peculiar quality of external reality and alien intelligence emphasized by Jung in his discussion of the archetypes.”[3] He also “laughed merrily at Crowley’s joking seriousness in telling one disciple, Frank Bennett, that the Holy Guardian Angel invoked in this ritual is merely ‘our own unconsciousness’ and meanwhile telling another disciple, Jane Wolf, that the Holy Guardian Angel is ‘a separate being of superhuman intelligence.’[4] Again, the paradox or contradiction is deliberate and central.

Title page of a published edition of Crowley's THE BOOK OF THE LAW

The reference to Frank Bennett, not incidentally, comes from a conversation that he and Crowley both recorded separately, Crowley in his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography and Bennett in his diary of the time he spent with Crowley in 1921. Bennett was a British-born Australian who became one of Crowley’s chief disciples, and Crowley wrote in his Confessions that he once revealed something to Bennett that shocked him into an initiatory experience of his Holy Guardian Angel. Editors John Symonds and Kenneth Grant filled in the other half of this story in a footnote to their edition of the book: “We know from Frank Bennett’s diary what Crowley said to him on this occasion. . . . Crowley told him that it was all a matter of getting the subconscious mind to work; and when this subconscious mind was allowed full sway, without interference from the conscious mind, then illumination could be said to have begun; for the subconscious mind was our Holy Guardian Angel.”[5]

For our present purposes, perhaps the most helpful expression of the interpretive tension we’re seeing here — a tension that can, I think, generate its own creative fire to fuel artistic work — comes from Israel Regardie, who served as Leary’s personal secretary from 1928 to 1932 and went on to become one of the most influential figures in modern Western occultism. In his introduction to The Law Is for All, a collection of Crowley’s commentary on The Book of the Law, Regardie wrote, “It really makes little difference in the long run whether The Book of the Law was dictated to him by a preterhuman intelligence named Aiwass or whether it stemmed from the creative deeps of Aleister Crowley. The book was written. And he became the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, accurately expressing the intrinsic nature of our time as no one else has done to date.”[6] One is free to disagree with Regardie regarding Crowley’s prophetic value and insight, but his basic point — that it doesn’t matter whether one opts for the supernatural or psychological explanation, because the end result is the same — is worth pondering at length and in depth by those who are seeking to navigate a relationship with their own deep creative selves.

The strange case of Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary flashes his famous smile on the cover of INFO-PSYCHOLOGY (a revision of his EXO-PSYCHOLOGY)

The leap from Crowley to Leary and Wilson is, culturally speaking, a drastic one. It’s a leap from Edwardian and post-Edwardian England to the America of Woodstock and rock and roll; from World Wars I and II to the Vietnam era; from black-and-white movies and the age of radio to the shimmering visual-electronic culture of McLuhan’s global village. But even so, the basic theme of perceived guidance and communication from an invisible, alien presence remains constant. Moreover, the fact that the early 21^st century saw a surge of fresh interest in Leary’s life and legacy, and also in the general history of the psychedelic movement and the possible therapeutic and spiritual uses of psychedelic drugs, [7] only reinforces the pertinence of our attempt to understand the nature of this internal guidance and its emergence as an alien-seeming force — something that is characteristic of many psychedelic experiences.[8]

The basic outline of Leary’s life is more than just well-known, it’s legendary. His “first career,” as it were, was as a mainstream psychologist and professor. In the 1950s he taught psychology at Berkeley and performed research for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most famously, he taught at Harvard from 1959 to 1963. Some of his early work has had a lasting influence; while serving as head of psychological research for the Kaiser Family Foundation he came up with a system of analyzing human personality along two axes, love-hate and dominance-submission, that produced eight possible personality types with two subdivisions each. It was a brilliant idea (with roots in the work of earlier psychologists) that ended up expressed in a diagram that has come to be known as the “interpersonal circle” or the “Leary circumplex.” Leary’s insights helped to lay the foundation for what would become the standard personality tests that are still in use today, e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (which is mostly extrapolated from Jung — who had deeply influenced Leary).[9]

Leary’s progressive fall (or ascent, depending on your perspective) from formal respectability was initiated in 1960 when, encouraged by the cultural tenor of the time and the specific incitements of friends and colleagues from both academia and the emerging counterculture, he traveled to Mexico and ingested psilocybin mushrooms. Some years later he said, “I learned more about my brain and its possibilities, and I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than I had in the preceding 15 years of studying, human research and psychology.”[10] When he returned to Harvard, he enlisted the aid of his colleague Richard Alpert, who would later achieve fame as writer and spiritual teacher Ram Dass, to launch a formal study of the psychological effects and possible therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs.

The story of how the whole thing spun out of control is long and fascinating, but the short version is that after achieving some interesting and promising initial results — such as an indication that the integration of psychedelics into the counseling programs offered to criminal offenders might drastically reduce recidivism rates — Leary, who was naturally antiauthoritarian and free-wheeling, grew fed up with the constraints of conventional research, reputation, and respectability, and ended up getting fired from Harvard in 1963, along with Alpert. The university shut the research program down, and within a few years the U.S. government had banned the use of all psychedelic drugs for any purposes, scientific or otherwise.

The provocation for the government ban was traceable most directly to Leary himself, who upon his departure from Harvard rapidly transformed himself into the colorful prophet of psychedelic liberation that he’s best remembered as today. Naturally, this incurred the wrath of civil authority, and so began a trend that was eventually epitomized by Richard Nixon’s televised proclamation circa 1970 that Leary was “the most dangerous man in America.”

Agents Howard Safir and Don Strange of the BDDA (predecessor to the DEA) arrest Leary in 1972

Irrepressible to the core, Leary refused to back down, and his life path rapidly mutated into something like a thriller novel with a plot involving imprisonment, escape, flight from the U.S., entanglement with prominent anti-government groups (e.g., the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground), kidnapping, flight from country to country, and eventual return to the U.S. in 1973, at which point he was thrown back in prison, first at Folsom and then at the Vacaville California Medical Facility. At Folsom he was kept in solitary confinement, and also, for a time, in a cell next to Charles Manson.

It was in those prisons that his story dovetailed with our overarching theme of guidance by the muse/daimon/genius, for it was there that he began to experiment consciously with opening himself to thoughts and ideas that, as it seemed, “wanted” to be expressed through him — in other words, with channeling. Viewing the operation as a form of telepathy, and setting as his goal the contacting of “Higher Intelligence” (his specific term) of an expressly extraterrestrial sort, he recruited his wife Joanna, a fellow prisoner named Wayne Benner, and Benner’s girlfriend, a journalist, to participate. The resulting writings — Starseed (1973), Neurologic (1973), and Terra II: A Way Out (1974) — introduced his famous 8-circuit model of consciousness and advanced the idea that life originally came to earth from outer space, and that humanity is destined by DNA coding and evolutionary impulse to colonize space and return to the stars for transcendence and fulfillment via reunion with the galactic source of our being, which is none other than the Higher Intelligence he and his team were in contact with.

To back up a bit and draw a crucial connection: by this point in his life Leary had come to see himself as deeply connected to Aleister Crowley. He had long felt an interest in Crowley’s life and ideas, but by the time he arrived at Vacaville in 1974 he was convinced that he was, in his very person, a “continuation” (as distinct from a reincarnation, since his and Crowley’s lives overlapped) of Crowley and his work. In the words of John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, in the early 1970s Leary came to believe “that his role in life was to continue Crowley’s ‘Great Work’, that of bringing about a fundamental shift in human consciousness.”[11] This was the result of several mind-blowing events that seemed to indicate a profound connection to Crowley. Most dramatically, in 1971 Leary and English beatnik artist and writer Brian Barritt tripped together on LSD in the Sahara desert at Bou Saada, “City of Happiness,” reputedly a site of magical influence. It was the night of Easter Saturday and Sunday, and Leary and Barrett witnessed massive celestial imagery and visionary symbolism. A year later they discovered that some of the things they had seen and experienced paralleled in eerie fashion a series of visions reported by Crowley in his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Unknown to them at the time of their Sahara experience, Crowley had engaged in a weeks-long magical ritual in 1909 with the poet Victor Neuberg on the very same site in the very same riverbed at Bou Saada. Barritt later wrote that he and Tim were “pretty freaked out” when they discovered this, and he speculated about a “mysterious force” in the form of an “unconscious directive” that had dictated in parallel fashions the motivations and even the life events and circumstances of Crowley-Neuberg and Leary-Barritt across a span of decades.[12]

Augmenting the Crowleyan vibe, in 1972 Leary asked a deck of Crowley-designed tarot cards, “Who am I and what is my destiny?” and then randomly cut the deck to the Ace of Discs — the very card that Crowley had identified as his own representation. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Hope Fiend (a title he chose as a deliberate blending of Crowley’s Confessions with his Diary of a Dope Fiend), Leary wrote, “The eerie synchronicities between our lives [i.e., his own and Barritt’s] and that of Crowley, which were later to preoccupy us, were still unfolding with such precision as to make us wonder if one can escape the programmed imprinting with which we are born.”[13]

“It is a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far outstrips the human mind and energies which are very ancient.” – Timothy Leary, describing the LSD experience

It was in the wake of all these Crowleyan synchronicities that the incarcerated Leary began his channeling experiments. He approached them in the full sway of his sense of carrying on Crowley’s planetary consciousness-altering mission, and in full view of the fact that Crowley had attempted similar contact with a higher intelligence. And although Leary made no mention of the Holy Guardian Angel, his emerging extraterrestrial hypothesis or viewpoint corresponded with that of the subset of Thelemites, mentioned earlier, who thought contact with one’s Holy Guardian Angel was actually a form of contact with a literal extraterrestrial intelligence. (Others, by contrast, vehemently insisted and still insist today that such a view is false, ridiculous, and detrimental.)

Wilson began exchanging letters with Leary a few month after the commencement of Leary’s telepathic “transmissions,” and later offered a succinct description of the concrete nature of the experiments: “The Starseed Transmissions — ‘hallucinations’ or whatever — were received in 19 bursts, seldom in recognizable English sentences, requiring considerable meditation and discussion between the four Receivers before they could be summarized.”[14] What’s of prime interest to us here is that even though the resulting writings clearly advanced and proceeded from the extraterrestrial view of higher intelligence rather than the unconscious or daimonic/muse-based one per se — in Terra II, for example, Leary asserts the truth behind humanity’s long history of belief in higher intelligences (as in religious beliefs) but modifies it in a science fictional direction: “The goal of the evolutionary process is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with the galactic network. Contacting the Higher Intelligence.”[15] — other things said by other people about the Learyan view of communicating with perceived higher or external intelligences, and even things said by Leary himself, clearly link his experiences to a more traditionally muse-ish view.

For instance, in a bit of archival footage featured in the “Summer of Love” episode of PBS’s American Experience series, Leary describes the LSD experience by saying, “It is a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far outstrips the human mind and energies which are very ancient.”[16] There’s no indication of the context or time period in which he said this, but it resonates interestingly with something he told Wilson when the latter came to visit him at the Vacaville prison:

[Leary said] Interstellar ESP may have been going on for all our history. . . but we just haven’t understood. Our nervous systems have translated their messages in terms we could understand. The “angels” who spoke to Dr. Dee, the Elizabethan scientist-magician [who had figured in both Crowley-Neuberg’s and Leary-Barritt’s visionary experiences in the Sahara], were extraterrestrials, but Dee couldn’t comprehend them in those terms and considered them “messengers from God.” The same is true of many other shamans and mystics.[17]

Note that despite the outrageous-sounding nature of such speculations to the modern secular-materialist ear, Leary was not insane. Or at least that was the medical-psychological opinion of the mental health professionals who evaluated him, according to Wilson:

It should be remembered, in evaluating the Starseed signals, that, a few months before this experiment, three government psychiatrists testified (at the escape trial) that Dr. Leary was perfectly sane and possessed of a high I.Q. Since so many extremists of Left and Right have impugned Leary’s sanity, it should also be entered in the record that Dr. Wesley Hiler, a staff psychologist at Vacaville who spoke to Dr. Leary every day (often to ask Tim’s advice), emphatically agrees with that verdict. “Timothy Leary is totally, radiantly sane,” he told me in a 1973 interview.[18]

Nor was Hiler’s judgment made in ignorance of the telepathy/channeling experiments that Leary was engaged in. In fact, Wilson says Hiler regarded Leary’s project from an informed long-historical/psychological view, and Hiler’s actual words resonate wonderfully with the vibe of ontological uncertainty that we’re chiefly concerned with exploring:

I asked Hiler what he really thought of Dr. Leary’s extraterrestrial contacts. Specifically, since he didn’t regard Leary as crazy or hallucinating, what was happening when Leary thought he was receiving extraterrestrial communications? “Every man and woman who reaches the higher levels of spiritual and intellectual development,” Dr. Hiler said calmly, “feels the presence of a Higher Intelligence. Our theories are all unproven. Socrates called it his daemon. Others call it gods or angels. Leary calls it extraterrestrial. Maybe it’s just another part of our brain, a part we usually don’t use. Who knows?”[19]

Bob Wilson’s excellent adventure

Robert Anton Wilson at the National Theatre, London, in 1977 for the 10-hour stage version of ILLUMINATUS!

And so, having journeyed through the wild worlds of Crowley and Leary, we arrive at Robert Anton Wilson, known affectionately to friends and fans simply as “Bob,” in whose person and work these themes all continued to thrive, interbreed, and effloresce until his death in 2007. It’s fairly impossible to do him justice by assigning a single term for his role, e.g., by calling him a science fiction author or philosopher. Although he’s most famous for co-writing, with Robert Shea, the legendary Illuminatus! trilogy and (by himself) its semi-sequel, the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy — the first a satirical head trip of a science fiction/occult conspiracy novel that became an instant counterculture classic when it appeared in 1975, the second a more quantum weirdness-oriented take on the same general ideas — he also wrote a huge number of additional books, both fiction and non-fiction, and some of them falling in the fuzzy-fertile area between, that dealt with consciousness, evolution, mysticism, occultism, linguistics, semiotics, self-programming, intelligence increase, life extension, quantum physics, the philosophy of science, space migration, human idiocy, religion, meditation, money, and more. Richard Metzger’s description of Wilson and Illuminatus! is hard to top for its pinpoint accuracy in identifying the crux of the man’s appeal:

To outsider teenagers in the 1970s, Illuminatus! became an intellectual touchstone, a way of figuring out a world they’d been born into that seemed increasingly surreal. Once you read it, you were changed forever. There was no way you could look at the world around you in the same way once you digested its subversive message. The Illuminatus! trilogy was a nifty way of imprinting a skeptical worldview on an impressionable mind. A magical initiation in book form, you might say, on sale at shopping malls across America. And our parents were never the wiser![20]

(Note that outsider teens from the 1980s were also deeply impacted, a case in point being me. I discovered Illuminatus! in late high school, circa 1987, and was affected in ways that I’m still hashing out two and a half decades later.)

As already indicated in the above discussions of Crowley and Leary, Wilson resonated with the ideas of both men, and was in direct contact with Leary during the Starseed period. He even helped Leary in the crystallization and promulgation of his 8-circuit model of consciousness; although the model was first laid out by Leary in Neurologic (1973) and Exo-Psychology (1977), Wilson gave it an energetic and entertaining publicity boost, and also provided a work of genuine substance, in his 1983 book Prometheus Rising, which featured an introduction by former Crowley secretary Israel Regardie. So it’s no surprise that in addition to being aware of and interested in Crowley’s and Leary’s experiences in communicating with angels and aliens, Bob had his own encounters with “higher intelligence.”

The primary account of it is found in his Cosmic Trigger (1977; later retitled Cosmic Trigger I when Wilson wrote two sequels). Again, Metzger zeroes in on the emotional heart of the matter when he writes that, notwithstanding the trippy and subversive delights of Illuminatus!, “Cosmic Trigger was different. This time the mask came off. In this book, Wilson came clean, in the most intellectually honest way that anyone ever has, on the subject of ‘What happens when you start fooling around with occult things? What happens when you do psychedelic drugs and try to contact higher dimensional entities through ritual magick?’”[21]

Wilson, who had a Ph.D. in psychology, contextualized the book’s content in a valuable introduction that he wrote for a new edition published in 1986: “Cosmic Trigger, he explained, “deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-76. This process is called ‘initiation’ or ‘vision quest’ in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology.”[22] In the course of this “initiation” he came into perceived contact with a number of external-seeming intelligences and was thrust into the same surreal world that Leary and Crowley had likewise explored.

Cover of an early edition of Wilson's COSMIC TRIGGER

The high point emerged from his commencing a new “course of neuropsychological experiments” in 1971, in response to the feeling that he had deciphered a hidden message in Crowley’s The Book of Lies. “The outstanding result,” he wrote, “was that I entered a belief system, from 1973 until around October 1974, in which I was receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a planet of the double star Sirius.” [23] Although he never describes anything like Crowley’s experience of supernatural dictation that resulted in The Book of the Law or Leary’s experience of extraterrestrial telepathy that resulted in the Starseed books, the question of his supposed Sirius contact, and of the general idea of psychic contact with alien-seeming forces or entities, dominates the bulk of Cosmic Trigger and forms the guiding thread of Wilson’s journey through “Chapel Perilous,” his term, borrowed from Arthurian legend, for the frightening state of psychological uncertainty in which the walls of a person’s belief system have been broached and he can’t tell what’s real or unreal. Wikipedia defines Chapel Perilous in this sense as “an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain if he has been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or if what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of his own imagination.” (Wikipedia also attributes the original use of the term for this purpose to Wilson himself.)[24]

In describing the various synchronicities and paranormal events that began to unfold in his life, Wilson forcefully foregrounds the questions of ontology and epistemology, of what’s really real and how or whether we’re even capable of making that determination, and he describes various reversals and mutations in his own viewpoint. For example, he explains how it was a meeting in October 1974 with Dr. Jacques Vallee, the internationally renowned astronomer and UFOlogist, that led him away from the belief that he (Wilson) was literally receiving telepathic transmissions from Sirius. Wilson says Vallee told him this type of other-worldly communication is a centuries-old phenomenon “and will probably not turn out to be extraterrestrial,” since the extraterrestrial slant can be chalked up to the influence of modern cultural beliefs. In former eras, Vallee said, “The phenomenon took other and spookier forms.”[25] Bear in mind that this is the same Dr. Jacques Vallee whose combination of solid, mainstream scientific credibility and long-running UFOlogical involvement has brought some respectability to the sometimes loopy UFO field. It’s also the same Vallee who served as the real-life model for the French head of the covert, government-sponsored UFO contact team in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Wilson says Vallee’s viewpoint “made perfect sense to me, since I had originally gotten in touch with ‘the entity’ by means of Crowleyan occultism. The extraterrestrial explanation was not the real explanation, as I had thought; it was just the latest model for the Experience, as angels had been a model for it in the Middle Ages, or dead relatives speaking through mediums had been a model in the 19^th century.”[26] This framing of all belief systems in relativistic and provisional terms — an attitude that, as we might do well to notice, is implicit in the very concept of a “belief system” itself, since to recognize belief systems as such automatically subverts the unreflective and wholesale adoption of any of them — became for Wilson the touchstone of his entire outlook. He began that new preface to Cosmic Trigger, written ten years after the book’s first publication, by proclaiming in all capital letters, “I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING.”[27] In explaining this position over several pages, he quotes approvingly Alan Watts’ characterization of the universe as “a giant Rorshach [sic] ink-blot” and describes his own position as “neurological model agnosticism — the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself.” [28]

Most significant for us are his specific thoughts in this vein about the status of all those invisible entities/intelligences encountered in psychic space:

Personally, I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here — the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius — are necessary working tools at certain stages in the metaprogramming process [i.e., the process of accessing and altering one’s unconscious “programming”].

That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these “keys” to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion.[29]

With this, we’re back once again to Crowley and his continual dance on the edge of mutually exclusive interpretations. “I don’t believe anything,” Wilson insisted, and also Crowley and Leary in spirit. The question for us is: Can we learn anything from this?

Angels, daemons, and haunted artists

It doesn’t necessarily mean audible voices and telepathic transmissions, but it definitely means a sense of something impinging on or communicating with our conscious self “from the outside,” or perhaps from the deep inside, which experientially amounts to the same thing.

For our specific purpose here — the purpose being, again, to divine the meaning and reality status of the muse, the better to invite the experience of creative inspiration — what’s valuable in the stories of Crowley, Leary, and Wilson is the vivid picture they show us of people dealing with a real force or forces in the psyche. As already mentioned, the Holy Guardian Angel and its supernatural and extraterrestrial kin are explicitly connected in historical-cultural-conceptual-psychological terms to the ancient muse, daimon, and genius, and a Wilsonian attitude of thoroughgoing “neurological model agnosticism” toward them serves only to remove any categorical interpretations of what’s really happening in the perceived experience of inner communication, not — not — the fact of the experience itself. Regardless of what we think or how we feel about this experience, it really did happen to these three men. It really has happened to people throughout history. And it really can happen to you and me. It doesn’t necessarily mean audible voices and telepathic transmissions, but it definitely means a sense of something impinging on or communicating with our conscious self “from the outside,” or perhaps from the deep inside, which experientially amounts to the same thing. The really electrifying jolt comes when we realize, as our three present case subjects did, that such impinging and communicating is always happening whether or not we’re consciously aware of it, as a constant psychic undercurrent. If we’re skilled and sensitive enough to tune in and hear it, the rewards in terms of creative vibrancy can be exquisite.

Needless to say, none of this is intended to recommend that everybody ought to stop reading right now and immediately take up the practice of magick and the use of psychedelic drugs. I don’t do either of those things myself. The Crowley-Leary-Wilson connection is simply instructive and engaging, in the way a great cross-genre fantasy/SF/horror story is engaging.

Alan Moore

What’s more, it can be actively inspirational, in the sense of inspiring creativity in others. For two very visible illustrations of this, consider the forceful pop culture presences of comic book writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Both are living legends in the field of comics and graphic novels, and Moore has achieved a vast exposure beyond that already vastly visible creative realm via the popular movie adaptations of his work, the two most prominent probably being V for Vendetta (2006) and Watchmen (2009). Both men are actively interested and involved in the Crowleyan/Learyan/Wilsonian view of the human psyche as a realm of strange contacts, and both are creatively driven by these very ideas and experiences.

Moore, for example, famously announced in a 2001 interview with the Guardian that his creativity had become utterly bound up with his experiences of felt contact with other intelligences while practicing ceremonial magic. This largely arose, he said, out of an unexpected utterance from the mouth of one of his own characters:

One word balloon in From Hell [Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, adapted into a 2001 movie starring Johnny Depp] completely hijacked my life. A character says something like, ‘The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind’. After I wrote that, I realised I’d accidentally made a true statement, and now I’d have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician. . . . I’m dependent on writing for a living, so really it’s to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you’re going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

– Alan Moore being interviewed by Steve Rose, “Moore’s murderer,” Guardian, February 2, 2002

In other interviews and writings, Moore has spoken at length about the deep influence that the related ideas of Crowley, Leary, and Wilson have exerted on his life and work in this vein. In March 2007, two months after Wilson’s death, he even spoke at a tribute event for Wilson at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

As for Morrison, his legendary 1990s comic book series The Invisibles, with its epic-trippy story of superpowered anarchists standing off against a race of alien gods that dominate humanity, bears the clear imprint of the Crowley-Leary-Wilson thought world. Morrison has spoken candidly of his own experience of contacting his Holy Guardian Angel and finding it a source of both life guidance and creative energy, and in doing so has explicitly referred to the names and work of our three presiding figures. Perhaps most famously, in a talk he delivered at the 2000 DisinfoCon — a convention organized by Richard Metzger in support of his BBC television show Disinformation and its publishing wing, The Disinformation Company — Morrison said the following:

I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson’s books when I was 20 years old, which is 20 years ago now. And I figured, is this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens, we can talk to people from Sirius. Is he talking crap? He said Aleister Crowley’s got methods for contacting alien intelligence and for changing the world. Is he talking crap? So I did it. And no, he’s not talking crap. And we can all do it. . . . Suddenly, I found out that if you do these things that you’re told by Aleister Crowley, by Wilson, by all these people we read and these people we’ve been consuming, but we don’t do it — if you actually do what they say, things happen. Things occur exactly as it’s described. And we can all do it. So I decided to put this to use in the comic book that I was doing, this thing called The Invisibles. And the idea was to kind of get all this down on paper, to somehow look at it. Not to accept it as reality, but to accept it as purely, “This is part of human experience.” It’s a part of human experience that has been described to us for thousands and thousands of years, but for the last 200 has been hidden and made occult, for some reason that I don’t understand, but that seems to have something to do with the industrial revolution and corporate culture. So these things happen. Magic works. And when I started doing the comic, I found that you could actually make magic happen by writing things and changing the operating system of the universe. It works, and I’m here to tell you to try it when you go home today, because it fucking works.

[You can listen to Morrison saying all of this himself in the video recording of his speech. In this YouTube video, the portions I've transcribed start at 1:10 and 9:40.]

In closing, and in case the main point needs driving home, consider this: entirely aside from all of the far-out details of his (possibly) paranormal experiences, at least twice in his life Robert Anton Wilson directly equated the autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that drives artistic creativity with the ontologically indeterminate Higher Intelligence that communicated (or “communicated”) with him, Leary, and Crowley. One of these instances appears in an essay he wrote (under the pseudonym of one of his own fictional creations, book critic Epicene Wildeblood) about Raymond Chandler and his work. In describing Chandler’s decade-and-a-half hiatus from the literary life, Wilson wrote, “Chandler spent 15 years, the prime years of a man’s life, in the oil-executive game before the Daemon or Holy Guardian Angel that haunts artists got its teeth into him again.”[30]

The other instance is found in an interview Wilson gave to the late, great genre magazine Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction. The interviewer asked, “Is a book fully organized in your mind before you start writing or does it take shape as it unfolds?” Wilson responded:

Sometimes I have a clearer idea of where I’m going than other times, but it always surprises me. In the course of writing, I’m always drawing on my unconscious creativity, and I find things creeping into my writing that I wasn’t aware of at the time. That’s part of the pleasure of writing. After you’ve written something, you say to yourself, “Where in the hell did that come from?” Faulkner called it the “demon” that directs the writer. The Kabalists call it the “holy guardian angel.” Every writer experiences this sensation. Robert E. Howard said he felt there was somebody dictating the Conan stories to him. There’s some deep level of the unconscious that knows a lot more than the conscious mind of the writer knows.[31]

The unconscious mind? The demon? The Holy Guardian Angel? All and none of the above? For purposes of accessing and aligning with the experience of creative inspiration, does it really matter?

NEXT UP:

A consideration of the neurological aspects of creativity and what these can tell us about the experience of the muse, as found especially in the work of Harvard professor and neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, and Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.

NOTES:

[1] Robert Anton Wilson and Miriam Joan Hill, Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 134.

[2] Tim Maroney, “Six Voices on Crowley,” in Richard Metzger, Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2003), 168-9.

[3] Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, [1977] 1991), 83.

[4] Ibid., 84.

[5] Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (New York, Penguin Arkana: 1989), 936, n. 4.

[6] Quoted in Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 133.

[7] See for example Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (2010), Peter Conners’ The White Hand Club: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (2010), Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner’s Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (2010), Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006), John Higgs’ I Have America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary (2006), and more. Regarding the (very mainstream) rebirth of scientific research into the uses of psychedelics, see, for example, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development (2010) by Neil M. Goldsmith, Ph.D. In a more “news of the moment” vein, see “LSD finds new respectability” (ScienceDaily, September 1, 2005), which reports that although “In the 1960s, as the media increasingly associated the drug with love-ins, anti-war demonstrations and the counterculture, governments intervened to criminalize LSD, restricting and then terminating medical research into its potential therapeutic effects,” today the “therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs are resurfacing.” Similarly, see “‘Party on’ for psychedelic drug research?” (September 1, 2010) from Nature News Blog, the online news service of venerable Nature magazine, as well as Nature’s four-part blog series from August 2010, “Hallucinogenic Drugs in Modern and Mental Health.” Conceived and edited by Nature’s neuroscience editor Noah Gray, the series starts with the provocatively titled “The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry” by molecular and developmental neurobiologist Moheb Costandi and ends with the equally provocatively titled “Visions of a Psychedelic Future” by clinical and research psychologist Vaughan Bell. Also see Steve Kotler’s blog entry at Psychology Today titled “The Psychedelic Renaissance: The Drugs Are Back, And They Mean Business This Time!” (January 5, 2011). The American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology reported in 2010 that “Forty years after federal laws criminalized the use of psychedelics for non-medical purposes in FDA-regulated psychological and drug research, the study of these drugs is picking up again, and their use in treating certain patients shows promise” (“Research on psychedelics makes a comeback,” Monitor on Psychology 41, no. 10 [November 2010]: 10). Reuters reported in 2010 that Swiss scientists had found evidence that “Mind-altering drugs like LSD, ketamine or magic mushrooms could be combined with psychotherapy to treat people suffering from depression, compulsive disorders or chronic pain” (“Scientists suggest fresh look at psychedelic drugs,” Reuters, August 18, 2010). In “Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs” (Miller-McCune, May 5, 2011), journalist Sam Kornell reported that in the first decade of the 21^st century “research into the effects of psychedelic drugs on consciousness has become a growing field of study in American academia,” and has been conducted under the auspices of prestigious mainstream institutions such as UCLA, John Hopkins Medical School, and NYU.

[8] In this regard, the work of medical doctor Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000), is of enormous interest. Subtitled “A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences,” the book grew out of Strassman’s research in the 1990s — sanctioned and funded by the U.S. government and conducted at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine at Albuquerque — into the effects of the psychedelic substance DMT on human consciousness. Points of note include the following: 1) Many of Strassman’s  research subjects reported “convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences,” including aliens, angels, and spirits. 2) Strassman was inspired in his work by the late Willis Harman, with whom he was personally acquainted. Harman was widely renowned as a futurist and a visionary researcher into the nonordinary reaches of human consciousness and potentials, and he co-wrote the first-ever study of the effects of psychedelics on creativity: “Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training” (written with James Fadiman, published in Bernard Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond, Eds., Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Psychedelic Drugs, 1970). He also co-wrote, with Howard Rheingold, Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights (1984), which presented a rich vision of the unconscious mind as an independent or independent-seeming source of guidance and inspiration in creative work and life as a whole. 3) Strassman’s psychedelic research was the first to be conducted in the U.S. since the federal government instated a ban on all such research in the 1960s. In other words, adding up the preceding points produces the realization that the “family history” of the modern revival in psychedelic research can be traced, at least in part, through Strassman back to the inspirational influence of Harman and his muse/daimon-esque theories about the role of the unconscious in creativity and culture. Significantly, Strassman’s findings and ideas were given a far wider audience when his book was adapted and released in 2010 as a documentary film titled The Spirit Molecule.

[9] On a personal note, when I was an undergraduate communication major at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s, I was shocked when I took a class in interpersonal communication and found the Leary circumplex reprinted and offered as a useful psychological tool in the course’s required textbook. At the time I had already become intensely interested in the cultural legacy of the 1960s, so I found this subversive-feeling evidence of Leary’s enduring influence in the “official” academic-intellectual world to be rather delightful.

[10] Ram Dass: Fierce Grace, directed by Mickey Lemle (2001), Netflix.

[11] John Higgs, “The High Priest and the Great Beast,” Sub Rosa 4 (March 2006, pdf): 15.

[12] Brian Barritt, The Road of Excess: A Psychedelic Autobiography (1998), excerpted in Book of Lies, 155, 152.

[13] Ibid., 153.

[14] Cosmic Trigger, 105.

[15] Timothy Leary, “Starseed: A Way Out,” excerpted from Terra II: A Way Out (Starseed, A Partnership: 1974), reprinted in Brad Steiger and John White, eds., Other Worlds, Other Universes (Pomeroy, WA: Health Research Books, [1975] 1986), 15.

[16] “Summer of Love,” American Experience, PBS, transcript.

[17] Cosmic Trigger, 118.

[18] Ibid., 104-5.

[19] Ibid., 163.

[20] Richard Metzger, Disinformation: The Interviews (New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2002), 14.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Cosmic Trigger, ii (Wilson’s emphasis).

[23] Ibid., 8.

[24] “Chapel perilous,” Wikipedia, accessed May 19, 2011.

[25] Cosmic Trigger, 9.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., i.

[28] Ibid., iv. The Copenhagen Interpretation is the most popular interpretation of what the paradoxical findings of quantum physics, which violate or transcend both the laws of classical physics and the very basis of normal human conceptual categories, may mean for reality as a whole. In holds that quantum particles exist in all possible states at once until the act of someone’s observing them forces them to “choose” a specific state. Applied to life at large and reality as a whole, the analogy would be that reality for each of us exists in a fuzzy, indeterminate, “all at once” state of multiple potentials until we observe and interpret it, at which point it obligingly assumes the face or form we’ve projected — but a face or form in which the essential otherness and transcendence of the unknowable reality in itself may well result in bizarre and impossible-seeming manifestations.

[29] Ibid., v.

[30] Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1980), 127, emphasis added.

[31] Jeffrey Elliot, “Robert Anton Wilson: Searching for Cosmic Intelligence,” Starship: The Magazine About Science Fiction, Spring 1981, reprinted at Robert Anton Wilson Fans, accessed May 19, 2011. 

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

PHOTO CREDITS:

• “Consciousness”: By uzorita via Multimedia-Stock
• Aleister Crowley: By Sólyom Csaba (http://www.crowley.tar.hu/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
• Front pages from Crowley’s Liber AL: By Aleister Crowley / Aiwass, publ. Ordo Templi Orientis (Ordo Templi Orientis) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
• Leary smile: Cover of Info-Psychology
• Leary arrest: By DEA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
• Robert Anton Wilson: By Wingspeed at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons
• Cosmic Trigger: Cover image of an early edition
• Alan Moore: By Nikki Tysoe from London, UK (Alan Moore) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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1. Theology, Psychology, Neurology: Is the Muse Real? (Part One)
2. Third Eyes and Unknown Entities: Mysteries of the Pineal Gland (Theology, Psychology, Neurology – Part 3.1)
3. You and Your Inner Neanderthal, or The Muse in the Cerebellum (Theology, Psychology, Neurology – Part 3.2)