(PDF) The San Francisco oracle: A brief history

The San Francisco Oracle: A Brief History

Allen Cohen

Cohen is the author of Childbirth Is Ecstacy, the first of the new wave of books on natural childbirth; and The Reagan Poems. He also was founder and edi tor of the San Francisco Oracle. The following history is f rom The San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition, a complete reprint ing of the entire run of the Oracle in book form that is soon to be published by Regent Press, Oakland, California.

It began as a dream and ended as a legend. One morning in the late spring of 1966 I dreamt that I was flying around the world. When I looked down, I saw people reading a newspaper with rain- bows printed on i t - - i n Paris at the Ei f fe l Tower, in Moscow at Red Square, on Broadway in New York, at the Grea t Wall of China, eve rywhere - - a rainbow newspaper.

I told my f r iend and lover, Laurie, about the dream and she went out early for a walk up the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to Haight Street telling everyone along the way--ar t is ts , writers, musicians, poets, dope dealers, merchants - -about the rainbow newspaper. When I went out later, people were exploding with rainbow newspaper consciousness.

I strolled into Ron and Jay Thelin's new Psy- chedelic Shop where the icons of the new emerging culture were gathered, displayed, and sold--books on Eastern religion and metaphysics and the Western occult, Indian records, posters, madrases, incense, bead necklaces, small pipes. Ron Thelin immediately o f fe red s tar t -up money for publishing a Haight -Ash- bury newspaper. Ron called his brother Jay, who had a weekend car parking business in Lake Tahoe to supplement the losses at the Psychedelic Shop, and Jay sent about $500. I was stunned to see how quickly a dream could begin to become reality.

THE H A I G H T - A S H B U R Y SEEDPOD

The Ha igh t -Ashbury was still unknown to the world. It was an artists' bohemia, and a seedpod that was destined to catch the wind and blossom throughout the world. Since World War II, the Haight

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had been an interracial, working class neighbor- hood bounded by Golden Gate Park, the upper middle class Victorians on Ashbury Heights, and the mostly black Fillmore District.

San Francisco State College's campus had been located on lower Haight Street before it moved to the southern outskirts of the city, so its students, teachers, dropouts, and alumni were still living in the Haight. Artists and poets who had escaped the police crackdown of the North Beach Renaissance several years before had also taken refuge in the Haight. Rents there were cheap--S120 for six rooms in elegant Victorian and Edwardian houses built after the earthquake. The houses and apartments were large enough to be shared, and cooperative living was common. Later, when the world descended upon the Haight, many flats would become crashpads to house the new multitudes.

It wasn't difficult at that time to work occasionally, and sell marijuana or LSD intermittent- ly, thereby maintaining oneself and others eco- nomically. One could devote most of one's time to art, writing, or music, experience the enhanced and ecstatic states of mind accessible through the use of marijuana and LSD, and interact with other artists, talking, talking until the sun's rays erased the night. In these years and in this way the particular styles of music, art, and the way of life that are identified with the Haight, the Sixties, and the hippies developed.

THE DIALECTICAL PENDULUM

The years 1963-67 were formative to the Haight-Ashbury hippie phenomenon. Swings of the dialectical pendulum of American history underlie the extraordinary changes that were about to occur in America. World War II had been an abyss of planetary violence ending with the development and use of the atomic bomb. The United States emerged from the war as the economic and military leader of the world. The generation that fought the war became the conservative builders and maintainers of an economic empire whose worldwide interests had to be defended, while in their off hours they engendered the largest generation of children in our history.

Women returning to traditional family life relinquished the workplace to the men, and a housing boom brought jobs and homes for the new post-war families. The faceless suburbs arose on the farmland surrounding cities. TV emerged and began to dominate human communications. Grey flannel suits defined the rising middle class, and the cold and sometimes hot war gave us the military-industrial complex. Protecting American capital interests around the world from the rise of social-

ism and communism became the obsession of our political, economic, and military policy.

But the Sixties would bring pivotal and generational change to America. The Fifties of the Cold War, the inquisitions of McCarthy, the Eisenhower uniformity, and America's rise to economic world dominance started to give way to a new social energy with the election of John Kennedy, racial crises, and the renewed idealism of the Civil Rights movement. The assassination of Kennedy and the buildup of colonial war in Vietnam were counterat- tacks intended to rein in the forces of cyclical and generational change that had begun to emerge. Though the seat of government was back in the fists of the military-industrial junta, the streets and the campuses were occupied by a new idealistic generation who thought they could taste and control the future.

DIONYSIUS RISING

In the late Fifties from the fringes of bohemia came the torrential Dionysian winds that would shake the tree of history. The American yearning for liberty and rebellion burst forth in the poetry and prose of the Beat Generation and the painting of the Abstract Expressionists. These creative energies erupted within a culture gone rigid with profits, conformity, weapons of destruction, and the politics of suppression of dissent.

These buried, unconscious energies could not be confined. They called forth the primacy of the individual and the sensual experience of the body as universe center. All forms and institutions seemed ready to fall away and dissolve before the soaring experience of the Whitmanesque Self and its sensual delight in the American earth. These rising vital energies found their correlatives in the occult philosophies of the West, the meditative philosophies of the East, the romanticized sensuality of the Afro-American ghetto culture, with its improvised jazz and marijuana high, and the ancient tribalism of the oppressed American Indian.

LSD - THE ROCKET ENGINE

The Rise of the Universal Self has had its ups and downs since the late Fifties, but its peak came with the discovery and use of LSD by American youth and intellectuals during the Sixties. The rebellion, insight, and visionary experiences of the artists of the late Fifties would come wholesale to those individuals who wanted or needed to get out on the edges of the only frontier left in America--their own minds and their own senses.

Harvard University, in its suppression of the psilocybin and LSD experiments of Drs. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, brought

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instant Universa l Self hood and Dionysian release f r o m social constraint to the awareness of anyone with the urge to step out of his or her grey f l an - nel world and jou rney to the front iers o f the mind.

LSD was the rocket engine of most of the social or creat ive tendencies that were emerging in the Sixties. It sped up change by giving the exper iencing self a direct contact with the creat ive and mystical insights that visionaries, artists, and saints have sought, exper ienced, and communica ted through the ages. But there were casualties o f the LSD voyages - - t hose who were too psychological ly wounded, or badly guided, or severe overusers, or vict ims of the CIA's i rresponsible exper iments with the psychedelic .

Millions of people took LSD, and for most of them it was a decisive ins t rument that ac- celerated change. It released energies that are still r everbera t ing both posi t ively and negat ively through our world. This brush with cosmic consciousness s t imulated the pagan and Dionysian energies, but it also resulted in the rise of au thor - i tarian religious cults and the social and political react ion of religious fundamenta l i sm. A vision of e terni ty and f r eedom was revealed to some while others in fear o f such a vision sought the p ro tec - tion of au thor i ty and the old dogmas.

P.O. F R I S C O - T H E P R E - O R A C L E

At this historic crossroads during the summer of 1966 in a small ne ighborhood called the H a i g h t - A s h b u r y , people began to a t tend a series of meet ings to discuss start ing a newspaper . Some of those who at tended wanted to do a polit ically radical but fo rmal ly tradit ional newspaper; others wanted the same revolut ionary rage but with a more innovat ive McLuhanesque punch. But there was a third group of poets and artists who felt the world changing in more ways than the con- f rontat ional polit ical dualisms of left and right, us and them, and capitalist and socialist.

A deeper revolut ion was being nur tured in the Haight based on the vis ionary and mind ex- panding exper iences with LSD, the cooperat ive living env i ronment , and the exuberance of youth. These poets and artists envisioned a revolut ion of love and peace start ing in the Haight and en- gulf ing the whole planet. The newspaper f o rma t was one of the vehicles of the oppressions and mater ia l ism of the past. They were searching for a f o r m that would annihilate the phony plutocrat ic "object ivi ty" of most reportage, and the lockstep mi l i t a ry- indus t r ia l r igidi ty of the column form. This vis ionary group d idn ' t know what would lie ahead but they knew it wouldn ' t look like a tradit ional newspaper .

The meetings were s ta lemated as a result of these clashing ideas. They wore on and on. Finally, the political group jo ined forces with the McLuhan group. They secured Ron Thel in 's capital without revealing their goals, opened an off ice in a Frederick Street s torefront , and began to work on what was to become the renegade P.O. Frisco. The title was an ironic slap at the unwie ldy name Psychedelphic Oracle (suggested by Bruce Conner , the moviemaker and artist) that the sense of the meetings had been leaning toward.

When P.O. Frisco came out in September, it created a shock. There was the same old parade of black and white columns, a cartoon of a naked woman with a Nazi a r m b a n d on the f ront page, an article on the concentra t ion camps that some mili tant groups wi th a strange mixture of se l f -es teem and guilt saw await ing them and all dissidents, and an article on mas turba t ion and its pleasures. It also had a decent r emembrance of Ron Boise, the metal sculptor who, a f ter f ight ing the blue noses and rednecks for m a n y years, had just died of an inf lamed heart . His erotic sculptures based on the K a m a Sutra had been busted by the San Francisco police at the Vorpal Gallery.

Ron and Jay Thel in and many others felt be- t rayed by the lack of vision in this renegade paper and wi thdrew suppor t f r o m the editors, Dan Elliot and Dick Sasoon. The Thelins insisted on a more open dec i s ion-making process and San Francisco Oracle was chosen as the symbol ic designation for the prophet ic ideals we wanted to express.

ORACLE #1 - LOVE P A G E A N T RALLY

The first two issues of the Oracle were edited by John Bronson and George Tsongas, but they were still working in a hierarchical and familiar tabloid style. Bronson knew the Chinese language well enough to have worked on a Chinatown newspaper. His priori t ies were political, but he also had leanings toward the non- l inea r McLuhanesque aesthetic, as did George Tsongas, who was a poet and novelist of Greek heritage. A more graphic tone came into the paper , and some of the artists who had been al ienated by P.O. Frisco began to contr ibute their work. Bruce Conner and Michael Bowen both had full page works in Oracle #1 and Oracle #2.

The paper p icked up some local advertising f rom the new Haigh t Street hippie boutiques and the Avalon Ballroom. But the tone of the paper was still hooked into the anxie ty of confrontat ion - - t h a t only bad news is wor th communicat ing; that there is only them and us, and them is the POLICE and US is always persecuted. During this period, however , the visionaries developing the Oracle and active in the Haigh t were seeking a fo rm of social

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development and a vehicle of expression that would make the seemingly endless class and culture clashes obsolete. They imagined the creation of a new transcendental humani ty in a society and world f reed f rom the scourges of war and racism.

There was cer ta inly enough persecution around to keep us in perpetual duality. Oracle #1 fea tured a defense of Michael McClure 's play "The Beard," which had been busted by the San Francis- co police. The play was a blunt and raucous dialogue between Billy The Kid and Jean Harlow as they meet and fall in love or lust in heaven, and at the fadeout appear to pe r fo rm oral sex. Even though it had won two Obies in New York, the San Francisco police threatened to remove Bill Graham's dance permi t when he produced it at the Fillmore. Graham moved it to the Commit tee Theatre on Broadway where it was summari ly busted. Letters of support and acclaim for "The Beard" and the First Amendment f rom Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Rober t Creely are printed here.

The f ron t page lead story was an account I wrote about a police communi ty relations of f icer giving a talk at the 1-Thou Coffee House during which he commented that the cigarette he was holding was probably more harmful than smoking marijuana. This comment caused an uproar down- town and the of f ice r was removed f rom public relations.

The backpage of Oracle #1 had the announcement for the first public outdoor rock concert. The concert , which was called the "Love Pageant Rally," was pe r fo rmed on October 6, 1966, a date chosen to suggest 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelations. It also turned out to be the day LSD became illegal in California. The idea for the event or iginated with a conversation I had with Michael Bowen, the visionary artist and Mage. We were sipping coffee and watching a group of angry, s ign-carrying hippies marching and storming the Park Police Station in protest of the busting of their commune. We saw the fut i l i ty of this endless confronta t ion with authori ty and decided that we needed to invent a new mode of celebration that would energize change more than anger and hate engender ing confrontat ions.

With a group of writers and musicians, and with support f rom the Oracle, we organized "The Love Pageant Rally" in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. We brought f lowers and mushrooms (symbolizing the now illegal LSD) to the mayor 's off ice, the police chief , and the U.S. a t torney general. People were asked to "bring flowers - - f l u t e s - - d r u m s - - t h e color go ld- -p ic tures of per - sonal saints and gurus and heroes of the under - ground...." Some of the new emerging bands played,

including Big Brother and The Holding Co. with Janis Joplin, and the Gra tefu l Dead.

Two or three thousand people came, danced, tu rned on, and gawked at each other. Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, "Further," was there, as were the HeWs Angels, whom Kesey had bef r iended and turned on to LSD af ter they had stormed a peace march in Berkeley. The police looked in vain for Kesey, who was rumored to have re turned f rom Mexico even though he was a very wanted man for having jumped bond following a mari juana bust earlier in the year.

The media loved the circus but were confused by it. The Oracle, considering it to be a second Boston Tea Party, published a new Declaration of Independence that read in part:

We hold these experiences to be self- evident. . . that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights that among them are: the f reedom of body, the pursuit of joy and the expansion of consciousness...

The event had the feel of a new communi ty ritual, and the idea for the "Human-Be-In ," a larger more inclusive event that would rock the world, was born.

ORACLE #2 - Y O U T H QUAKE

Oracle #2's headline story, "Youth Quake," covered the National Guard 's invasion of Hunter 's Point, the Fillmore, and the Haigh t -Ashbury on the occasion of September 's insurrectional ghetto burning that was caused by the police shooting of a Hunter 's Point youth. Red -cheeked boys of 18 with rifles occupied Haight Street, and were met by long-haired girls and boys with LSD, while Hunter ' s Point burned. Authorit ies were baff led by both a smoke and brimstone insurrection, and a Dionysian uprising.

The first public act of the Diggers occurred the first night of the martial law when Emmet t Grogan taped signs to lampposts urging hippies to "Disobey the Fascist Curfew." While putting these signs up, he was also tearing down signs put up by Michael Bowen. Bowen's signs urged hippies, who he thought might be oblivious to apparitions such as soldiers with rifles, to stay home and out of harm's way. Bowen, while putting up his signs, was tearing down Grogan's signs. They met at a telephone pole and began an angry dispute about style and purpose that would persist till they left the Haight.

A large detailed p e n - a n d - i n k drawing by Bruce Conner occupied the entire centerfold of Oracle

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#2. This is the first use of the whole centerfold for a work of art.

O R A C L E # 3 - K E N KESEY'S GRADUATION PARTY

In the interval between the second and third issue, I had met Gabe Katz, a dropped out advertising artist f rom New York. Gabe was an expert layout artist who agreed with me on the necessity for aesthetic redirect ion of the Oracle. Gabe had taken LSD and had seen the Light through New York's polluted skies. During his trips he had envisioned T imothy Leary as a being whose existence was on a plane somewhere between an idol and a guru. Gabe gave up his career and the desire for material success and headed for San Francisco.

When the print ing deadline for Oracle #3 ap- proached, there was a confronta t ion between Bron- son and Tsongas, and Gabe and me over style in general and the inclusion of my long descriptive piece on the Kesey graduation in particular. In a daring gesture, or perhaps in a state of f rus t ra- tion, Bronson and Tsongas walked out. With Gabe's expert layout designs and a shared sense of the necessity to ju j i t su the dreary newspaper format, we began our evolution toward the rainbow Oracle.

I wanted the content of the Oracle to cover two aspects of our new culture: to provide guidance and archetypes for the journey through the states of mind that the LSD experience had opened up; and to invent and examine the new social and cultural forms and institutions that we needed to make the world align with our vision. No small order!

The new design of Oracle #3 had a ful l -page picture of Ken Kesey on the cover. Inside, the paper repor ted and in terpre ted his re turn f rom Mexican exile. Af te r his San Francisco rooftop bust for smoking mar i juana in January 1966, Kesey had j umpe d bail, fe igned suicide, and escaped to Mexico with Neal Cassady.

But Amer ica beckoned and Kesey devised a plan for his return: he would have a gigantic dance hall par ty like the Acid Tests, but, instead of the part icipants imbibing LSD punch, he would tell everyone to graduate f rom using LSD. The idea was good enough to keep him out of jail while the wheels of injustice turned. He held a news conference announcing to the world that it was t ime to graduate f rom using LSD, though he never did say what to graduate to. Af te r much debate and chagrin, Bill Graham decided against letting him use ei ther Winterland or the Fillmore ballrooms. He thought that Kesey would dose the world again and in particular dose the state Demo- cratic Party, which was due to use Winterland the next week for a convention.

Kesey held the graduat ion on Halloween in a spontaneously decorated warehouse south of Market Street. Lots of acid was there, along with zany costumes, the first Moog synthesizer used in a rock and roll band, Neal Cassady rapping his am- biguous rhapsodies, and the ominous- looking Hell's Angels. Many people got graduation certificates, and I walked home about four miles to the Haight with a police car slowly following me. I wore bright red chinese pajamas with a dragon embroidered on them and chanted the new Hare Krishna chant, while the whole world turned into a crystalline paradise.

The centerfold of Oracle #3 was a collage by Michael Bowen surrounding an article by Gary Snyder. In his article, "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution," Snyder criticizes traditional Buddhism because it has no analysis of how suffering and ignorance are caused by social factors, and has ignored and accepted whatever political tyrannies it found itself under. Once a person has insight f rom meditat ion an d /o r faith, Snyder writes, that person must be led to a deep concern with the need for radical social change, through a variety of hopeful ly non-vio lent means. "The mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self-void. We need both."

During the martial law and curfew many hippies decided to hit the streets and denounce the curfew. Others were oblivious that anything unusual was happening and were caught up in the real world martial law. One of our s taff artists, Alan Williams, was one of the oblivious ones. He was busted by the police and beaten in the police station. In "Yogi and the Commissar," he describes his arrest; an accompanying photograph shows him demonstrating the yogic posture he used to withstand the police beating.

When the issue came out, I ran into the captain of the Park Police Station on the street and asked him how he liked the new Oracle. He said that it was f ine except for the article alleging police brutality. A week later I would be busted for selling The Love Book, a book of erotic poems with transcendental invocations, by Lenore Kandel.

ORACLE #4 - TIM LEARY COMES TO T H E H A I G H T

In December, Tim Leary came to San Francisco for the first time since the emergence of the Haight as psychedelic central. He had come to perform and promote his travelling, mul t i -media , psychedelic road show and ritual, "The Death of the Mind." Gabe Katz wanted desperately to draw Tim on the cover because of his almost worshipful admiration for him. Though the rest of the staff didn' t want

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to add to Tim's guru and leadership status, Gabe was very insistent and he was the art editor. His original drawing had multiple halos and rays but we prevailed upon Gabe to cut it down to just a p ronounced aura and a few rays.

Dr. Leary discussed his new religion the Lea- gue of Spiritual Discovery, which used LSD, marijuana, peyote, and other psychedelic substances as sacraments:

We urge our fel low Americans to consider forming their own religions...i think the social reali ty is that more young people are going to be using these drugs and the way to handle them is not to imprison them, but for the universities to run courses on the visionary experience, on the mystical experience, on the methods of using these microscopes of experience.

Applying the teachings of the Eastern religions in meditat ion, yoga, chanting, and so on to the ext raordinary transcendental experiences with LSD was an essential concern of the Oracle. Bob Simmons, a yoga teacher, painter , poet, and world traveller, wrote, under his penname Azul, our first article on yoga. In his article, he explores his ini- tial discovery of yoga and meditat ion for the expansion of consciousness.

He writes, "Yoga is based on the Hindu idea of the perfec t state of being, living in accord with the infini te wisdom of the universe. This wisdom is inherent in every molecule, rock, tree, leaf, f lower, insect, animal and person."

The "Gossiping Guru" was Carl Helbing, an artist and astrologer who lived in the Haight. He would provide gossip of the inner planes, announce f lying saucer landings, suggest astrologically sig- nif icant dates, and pinpoint the coming of the next avatar. When he repr in ted a letter that asked, "Who then can tell us fu r the r of Him who was born February 5, 1962, when 7 planets were in Aquarius?", he received a long answer f rom Ki t ty McNeil , who described a joint meditat ion on the inner planes with all the world's adepts providing the spiritual energy and will needed to bring about the bir th of the next avatar on. Of course, we made her a columnist and called her column "The Babbling Bodhisattva." K i t ty was a suburban house- wife, theosophist of the Alice Bailey variety, psychic, and lover of LSD and hippies.

The centerfold of Oracle #4 was Lawrence Ferlinghett i 's poem "After the Cries of the Birds Has Stopped" placed inside a stunning border collage by Michael Bowen. "I see the future of the world in a new visionary society," Ferl inghett i writes. The poem ends with the Chinese invading

Big Sur in junks: "Agape we are and Agape we'll be."

The Love Book

The police and City Hall were not pleased with the brashness of this very public bohemia arising in the Haight. They had attacked the Beat scene in North Beach in the late Fifties when it rose to national notoriety, and now they were trying to prevent another f lourishing of an unconventional culture. The Haight was the geographical center for a new physical bohemia with its own lifestyle, drugs, dance halls, newspaper, customs, flare for public relations, bel ief in f ree love, and tremendous appeal to the disillusioned and alienated youth of America.

Ron and Jay Thelin 's Psychedelic Shop was the psychic center and meeting place of the Haight, and the first of a mult i tude of shops and boutiques for the new culture. I was working there par t - t ime for rent money while editing the Oracle. The police, who didn ' t like the Oracle, part icularly the police brutal i ty story in Oracle #3, or the activity around the Psychedelic Shop, or free love, or poetry, con- t r ived a plan to bust us all at once.

On November 15, about a week after Oracle #3 came out and a week af ter the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California, San Francisco Vice came into the Psychedelic Shop on my shift, leisurely looked around, and with p re -de te rmined intent picked out Lenore Kandel ' s The Love Book f rom amidst the esoteric and occult books on the display table. They strolled to the counter , paid me for it, handcuf fed me, and ut tered Kafka ' s refrain so symbolic of our age, "You are under arrest!"

The Love Book was a long poem about the beauty and spiri tuality of the sexual act. It used the common names for our physical parts and an encyclopedia full of Tantr ic and Hindu symbolism. The poem had been read at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 before an audience of 1,500 people. Of course, the police and whoever had ordered this brilliant maneuver had handed us a sword of righteousness. We had a national first amendment issue, a giant press conference in an old firehouse t ransformed into an elegant hippie pad, a defiant public reading of The Love Book by universi ty professors, and a seminar with professors and poets at San Francisco State College. We published the seminar in full, and relished it down to the last syllable and the smallest print. The Love Book, of course, sold thousands of copies.

I wrote a lyrical article, "Notes of a Dirty Bookseller," about my arrest and arraignment. It was full of the ironies of being young, innocent, and unjust ly busted: On the day I was arraigned my first teenage love, now a pop singer on her

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way to minor stardom, had come coineidentally to San Francisco. I remembered the thrill of our hands touching, when I was 15 and she was 13, as we left synagogue after Yom Kippur services. Though I hadn't see.n her in ten years, she had changed her name to Tarot Delphi and I was editing the Oracle.

The Love Book trial held a few months later lasted five weeks, as a parade of scholars, priests, nuns, sociologists, public health officials, doctors, poets, and psychologists testified on the nature of love and poetry. I brought roses to the court- room from Jay Thelin's garden and gave them to judge, prosecutor, and jury. It was cosmic!

Ironically, despite San Francisco's reputation for liberalism, we were found guilty. Such was the tenor of the time. A higher court later reversed the decision on first amendment grounds.

Lenore Kandel wrote an article in which she describes The Love Book as being about: "...the invocation, recognition and acceptance of the di- vinity in man thru the medium of physical love ...Any form of censorship whether mental, moral, emotional or physical, whether from the inside out or from the outside in, is a barrier against self-awareness."

In another article, Lee Meyerzove discussed the atmosphere of censorship in San Francisco that was apparent in the busts of The Love Book and, the previous July, Michael McClure's play, "The Beard," during its performance at the Com- mittee Theater.

At the Handle of the Kettle: The Diggers

There were two visible handles on the symbolic kettle of the Haight as it boiled its way into history. They were held by the Diggers and by the Oracle. But the Diggers and the Oracle each represented a different philosophy and lifestyle. The Diggers were a loose association of non-members who were inspired by some former Mime Troupe actors, including Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Cohan, Kent Minnault, Billy Murcott, and a dynamic Hell's Angel poet, Bill Fritsch. They brought improvisation, dramatic confrontation, and ritual from their theatrical background into the everyday life of the Haight. They were anarchistic, original, and intellectually insightful in their criticism of society. They intended to act out and bring into existence a total transformation of economic and human relations in our society.

They were "psychedelic" but did not exclude harder drugs and alcohol from their pharmacology. They were passionately critical of the commer- cialization of the Haight and of the otherworldli- ness of the more transcendental school of psychedelic rangers. They wanted to abolish social au-

thority and class structure by eliminating the use of money. "Freedom means everything free," said Emmett Grogan to emphasize their radical common sense. Emmett was not adverse to refusing donations of money, or even burning it to make the point.

The Diggers began giving away free food daily at the Panhandle the week after the Love Pageant Rally. They opened a free store and continued putting on free events, rituals, and actions, including the Death of Money parade at which two Hell's Angels were busted and bailed out with a hippie bail money collection.

The Diggers had a tendency toward anarchy that bordered on violence. They once planned a street happening during which mirrors were to be shined from Haight Street rooftops into the eyes of drivers going up the street. The Hip Mer- chants, in defense against the Diggers' demand to share their profits with the community, accused the Diggers of threatening extortion and violence.

Though the Diggers' sense of altered reality conflicted with the Love and Nirvana Now view of many other hippies, the Oracle was receptive to their input, and they often sat in at our editorial meetings. At one junction when a Be-In was being planned on Hopi Indian land, Emmett Grogan con- vinced me of its colonialist connotations and its physical impracticality. I presented that view to the Oracle staff, and it prevailed. Our refusal to support the proposed Hopi Be-In cancelled the pro- ject. Generally, the atmosphere around the Diggers was desperate, dark and tense, while at the ordinary hippie pad it was light, meditative, and creative with a mixture of rock, oriental aesthetics, and vegetarian food.

Steve Lieper, in "At the Handle of the Kettle," described the Diggers providing free food at the Panhandle and for Thanksgiving at their Free Frame of Reference garage. Just before we got to press the Health Department closed down the Digger garage. Lieper reported the dark confusion and revolutionary anarchy that hovered around the Dig- gers.

THE ORACLE STAFF

By the time our fourth issue appeared, most of the artists and writers, secretaries, and business people who were to steer the Oracle on and off course in the year and a half to follow had gathered together: Stephen Levine, a New York poet who had moved to Santa Cruz and then to San Francisco; Travis Rivers, a Texan who brought Janis Joplin to San Francisco and managed Tracy Nelson, another blues singer; George Tsongas, a poet and novelist from Greece and San Francisco (though Tsongas had left after Oracle #2, he would return later

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and play a ma jo r role both artistically and edi- torially); Het t i McGee , one of our s taf f artists originally f r o m Liverpool , England; Ami McGill , another s t a f f artist and designer f r o m San Francis- co; Har ry Monroe , poet, world t raveler , and in- spirat ion to all who would sit through the night and listen to h im talk; Danger f ie ld Ashton, the best p e n - a n d - i n k artist South Carol ina ever gave to America; Gene G r i m m , a 6 - foo t , 6 - inch ex- mar ine who had become as gentle as a butterf ly; and Steve Lieper , a lanky Tennessee hillbilly who did a lot of everything.

Artists who designed and il lustrated many Oracle pages, o f ten anonymously , included Mark DeVries, Steve Schafer , Michael Ferar , Armando Busick, and G a r y Goldhill . Those who typed and organized our words, business, and circulation, many of whom were also artists and writers, in- c luded T i f f any , Lynn Ferar , Joan Alexander , Alan Russo, Ar thur G o f f , and Penny DeVries. There are many others too numerous to ment ion, some who were anonymous and others whom you will meet in the fol lowing pages. All their collective, selfless, and creat ive work built the Oracle into a unique monumen t of Amer ican arts and letters.

Our f irst off ices were the small upstairs spaces behind the Print Mint , a large poster shop on Haight Street that Travis Rivers managed. We conver ted even the t iny ba th room into an artists ' workroom. Danger f ie ld would stay in there all night working on his e laborate mandal ic designs.

OR AC LE E C O N O M I C S

Around this t ime we got some cash donations f r o m mar i juana dealers to help us expand f rom twelve pages to sixteen. Alex Geluardi , who was a benefac to r and comfor t e r to many San Francisco writers and artists, also donated money toward the Oracle's growth. Cashf low never did catch up to costs, so we occasionally had to bor row money to print. At one point Jay Thel in would get an unsecured $6,000 loan f r o m the local Haight Street bank. One of the bank execut ives was pleased to lend the Oracle money , because he had just won a f ree tr ip to Hawai i for opening more accounts than any other bank in the state. Even Bill G r a - ham, the rock impresar io , with his reputat ion for realism and grouchiness, lent the Oracle $1,000. But af ter the f irst f ew issues the only outr ight donat ion we got was $5,000 f rom Peter Tork , of the TV rock group, The Monkees. Unfor tuna te ly , that cont r ibut ion had a karmic retribution: my f r iend and lover, Laurie , fell in love with Tork 's business associate dur ing an LSD trip, and on Chris tmas day drove away with him to Los Angeles in his Mercedes.

But by Oracle #8 we would be mostly self-sustaining. The paper was able to pay the rent and food costs for most of the staff , who were living together in several small communes . We had started the paper pr int ing 3,000 copies and grew gradual ly to about 15,000 by Oracle #4. We jumped to 50,000 for #5, the B e - I n issue, and grew to almost 125,000 by about Oracle #7. We est imated that f ive or more people read each issue, l ift ing circulation to over 500,000. We sent Oracles as fa r west as New Zealand, India, and V i e t n a m - - w e would receive Vietnamese mar i juana f r o m soldiers in r e t u r n - - a n d as fa r east as Prague and Moscow, h idden in the bo t tom of boxes of secondhand clothing.

Oracles were sold in the streets of San Francis- co and Berkeley by hippies for whom it was often the sole means of support . We let anyone take a f ree ten copies to sell in order to get a stake, and then buy more. The Oracle was the largest employer on the scene. We had a large worldwide subscr ipt ion list, and backpackers and gypsies would buy as many as a hundred to take back to their hometowns.

T H E ORACLE A E S T H E T I C S

The Oracle would go f r o m hand to hand and mind to mind in the evocat ive states unvei led by mar i juana and LSD. It was a center ing ins t rument for that intense, aesthetic, and expanded perceptual universe. To this day I meet people who tell me how they had seen an Oracle in some small town in West Virginia, or thereabouts . They attr ibute to that sighting of the Oracle their recognit ion that they were not alone on a dark planet in an emp ty universe. F rom that momen t on they date the beginning of their j ou rney toward self-real izat i0n.

To achieve the oracular effects we wanted we would give the text, whether prose or poetry, to artists and ask them to design a page for it, not mere ly to illustrate it, but to make an organic uni ty of the word and the image. Most o f the artists would conceive and manifes t their designs in a state of expanded awareness. Thus, the Oracle pages correspond to the methodology of the Thanka art of T ibe t and Byzantine art in which the artist established a vis ionary state of mind, through medi ta - tion, chanting, and /o r prayer , and tr ied to convey that vision in his painting.

The perceivers of the art then could mount to that same elevation, and exper ience within their minds the same vis ionary state. So, looking at an Oracle could be a sort of occult trance experience communica ted across the dimensions of space and t ime, through the tabloid med ium, f rom one explorer of inner worlds to another. That was the magic, the f ire, that spread f rom mind to mind with the Oracle. Motifs and techniques were u n i v e r s a l - - f r o m

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ancient Chinese spirals to Sci F i - - a l l b rought together in mul t i -d imens iona l depth, pat tern, and flow; wings, rays, auras, arabesques, swirls, un i - corns and centaurs , mandalas, collages, f lying saucers and their inhabitants, op -a r t , f lowers and paisley, nudes, feathers , and ghosted images all in te rwoven into a dazzling cross-cul tural spectacle.

ORACLE #5 - H U M A N - B E - I N ISSUE

Issue #5 established the basic fo rma t that the Oracle was to develop for the next seven issues. The f ron t page announced the H u m a n - B e - I n with a purple , a sh -cove red saddhu with three eyes and mat ted hair staring at the reader. This was our f irst color exper iment with eight pages in two shades of purple. The color p a g e s - - t h e first four , the last four , and the c e n t e r s p r e a d - - w e r e our ra inbow brush. These p a g e s - - t h e head, feet , and spine of the Oracle--were used for major art work, a r - ticles, and poetry . They were never used to enhance advert is ing. The centerspread was used especially for a central theme or impor tan t poem, and always received a lavish design. Most of these principles of f o r m a t had appeared in the previous issues, but were now consciously solidified and enhanced. Our use of shaped text instead of straight columns appears here for the first time.

Another pract ice we had begun in Oracle #4, with the Leary press conference and the sympos ium of the "Six Professors in Search of the Obscene," was to pr int all interviews in full except for s tut - tering and repeti t ion. This pract ice would prevent such common newspaper terrors as quoting out of context , downr ight misquoting, and a repor ter ' s subjec t iv i ty or political leaning f r o m distort ing the actual spoken word. All Oracle interviews are pr in ted as they were spoken even if we had to cont inue them in small pr int to fit. In teres ted readers might have to squint, but what they read was every th ing that was said, warts and all.

By Oracle #5 we realized that, in order to publish with the artistic and vis ionary quali ty we intended, we could not be bound to the eve ryday - ness of the tabloid format . We would be lucky to publish every six weeks. Even to meet that sched- ule, we would have to lift our binoculars to the prophet ic horizon. F rom here on all resemblances to an ord inary newspaper were purely coincidental . We would not be co -op ted by commerc ia l interests and we would not add to the fear and anxiety in A m e r i c a - - T V , newspapers and movies did a f ine job on that end of the stick. The Oracle was now a journa l of arts and letters for the expanded con- sc iousness - -a t r ibal messenger f rom the inner to the outer world.

Though the Oracle s ta f f d idn ' t have a poli t i - cal p rogram, we did feel that we were part of a

worldwide process of t r a n s f o r m a t i o n - - p a r t revolution and part r ena i s sance- -o r ig ina ted by this new generat ion of youth. A myst ique of youth began with the concept ion that the world and the powers that ruled it were decadent , corrupt , and calcified. Therefore , the fu ture was perceived as youth 's responsibi l i ty to create and remold.

Staff members fel t a moral revulsion against modern technological civil ization for its failure to regenerate the world according to the principles of economic just ice and peace. Most of us wanted the conversion of the dying past to come about through a spiri tual t r ans format ion that fostered the values of love, peace, and compassion. The Oracle would be a vehicle for new and ancient models that were needed to guide these changes in consciousness and to reconstruct our world.

Some writers have seen an escapist gap between the Oracle's point o f v iew and the ant iwar movement , but the Oracle was as commi t t ed to the movement as anyone else. We emphasized the unity of political and t ranscendental ideals, and we had a preference for non-violence . The mass movemen t against the war had equal parts of LSD vision, mar i juana sensory delight, political ideology, and moral rage.

The purple saddhu cover of Oracle #5 was also used as one of the posters for the H u m a n - B e - I n . The Oracle sponsored, announced, and was given away free at the Be-In . We printed about 50,000 copies of this issue and the circulat ion would continue to build until it reached almost 125,000. The cover was designed by Michael Bowen, and included a pho tograph by Casey Sonnabend and a r twork by Stanley Mouse.

The H u m a n - B e - I n developed out of the success of the Love Pageant Rally, and the realization that the change in consciousness and culture we were exper iencing had to be communica ted throughout the world. We fel t that the ideals of Peace, Love, and Communi ty based on the transcendental vision could t ransform the world and end the war in Viet- nam. In short, we wanted to turn the world on and to do it we would need to attract the spotlight f rom centerstage Washington and Vie tnam to centerstage Ha igh t -Ashbury .

Michael Bowen centered much of the organizing energy for the B e - I n f r o m his pad at Haight and Masonic. In addit ion to his expressionist painting and drawing, he was f r iends with the Beat poets f rom the Nor th Beach era, and had spent t ime with T im Leary at Mil lbrook. He was a myst ic hustler whom Allen Ginsberg had called the most convincing man he had ever known. He could charm the press and turn on a square. And he did. He invited Leary and the Beat poets to the H u m a n - B e - I n , and arranged for it to be a wor ldwide media event.

Bowen and I had become concerned about the philosophical split that was developing in the

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youth movement . The ant iwar and free speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out, and that their in- f luence might draw the young away f rom resistance to the war. The hippies thought the movement was doomed to endless confrontat ions with the establishment that would recoil with violence and fascism. We decided that to strengthen the youth culture we had to bring the two poles together. In order to have a H u m a n - B e - I n we would have to have a powwow.

We met with Jerry Rubin , Max Scheer, and other Berkeley activists, and shared our ideas about directing magical and conscious energy to- wards the Pentagon as a way to overcome its im- pregnabil i ty as both the symbol and seat of evil. We had developed this magical concept to exorcise the Pentagon f rom the writings of Lewis Mumford and the visions of Charlie Brown, the peyote sha- man, We turned Rubin on to mari juana and then Bowen turned him on to LSD. The idea to exorcise the Pentagon would be realized in the March on Washington in October. Rubin and Jack Weinberg were invi ted to speak at the Be-In, and Max Scheer agreed to announce and support the Be-In in the Berkeley Barb.

The Gather ing of the Tribes in a "union of love and activism" was an overwhelming success. Over twenty thousand people came to the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. The psychedelic bands played: Jef ferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Poets Allen Gins- berg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferl inghett i , and Lenore Kandel read, chanted, and sang. Tim Leary told everyone to Turn on, Tune in, and Dropout . The Diggers gave out free food; the HelPs Angels guarded the generator cables that someone had cut; Owsley Stanley gave out f ree acid; a parachutist d ropped like an angel f rom the sky; and the whole world watched on the evening news. Soon there would be Be-Ins and Love-Ins f rom Texas to Paris, and the psychedelic and political aspects of the youth culture would continue to grow hand in hand everywhere .

Renaissance or Die

Other contr ibut ions to Oracle #5 included an interview with Richard Alpert , a centerfold speech by Allen Ginsberg, a poem by Michael Mc- Clure, and mandalas by Dangerf ie ld Ashton.

Alpert was a psychologist at Harvard who had part ic ipated with Tim Leary in the early research and exper imenta t ion with LSD at Harvard and Milbrook. The title of the article is "See Op- posites" spelled backwards. The mandalic art was drawn by Dangerf ie ld Ashton.

"The Ha igh t -Ashbury is...the purest reflection

of what is happening in consciousness at the leading edge of our society," Alpert says. "This is an interesting question: Whether we westerners can ever take on a master. . .master roles really don' t f i t into Western cul ture. . .Meher Baba says 'love me, turn your whole consciousness over to me and you'll get enlightened. ' But that's not going to work here and Tim doesn' t take on masters. I mean I can ' t do it, just consti tutionally at this point in my development , I can' t do it....A guide is a guy who's been there before and will help you but he's not somebody you turn over your spiritual development to."

Of course, Dr. Alpert would go to India, f ind a guru, change his name to Ram Dass, return, and educate thousands on the virtues of guru worship and the spiritual life.

The Ginsberg centerfold, "Renaissance or Die," was a repr int of a speech he gave in Boston in November 1966 to a convocat ion of Unitar ian ministers. The incredible drawing is by Rick Gri f f in . Ginsberg speaks of the poet 's role as prophet:

to trust my own fantasy and express my own private thought . . .How can we Americans change theme? I will make a first proposal: that everybody who hears my voice. . . try the chemical LSD at least once, every man, woman and child over 14 in good health.. . . then I prophecy we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our condi- t ioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful communi ty .... there should be within centers of learning facilities for wisdom search which the ancients proposed as the true funct ion of education. . . .There is a change of consciousness among the younger generation toward the most complete public f rank- ness possible.. . .Likely, an enlarged family will emerge for many citizens.. .with matr i - lineal descent. . .children held in common with the orgy an acceptable communi ty sacrament. America 's political need is orgies in the parks, on Boston Commons, with naked Bacchantes in the national forests....I am acknowledging what is already happening among the young in fact and fantasy ....

He speaks of ancient forms of Indian, African, and Eastern culture being pract iced by American youth, and continues:

.... I am in ef fec t setting up moral codes and standards which include drugs, orgy,

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music, and primit ive magic as worship r i tua ls - -educat ional tools which are sup- posedly contrary to our cultural mores and I am proposing these standards to you respectable ministers, once and for all, that you endorse publicly the private desire and knowledge of mankind in America, so to inspire the young.

Michael McClure 's poem, "The God I Worship Is a Lion," is an expression of two major themes in the developing philosophy of the period: a pan- theistic ident i f icat ion with nature perceived as an alive and conscious organism, and a totemistic empathy with the other creatures of our world revered as aware and admirable beings; and the second theme was the felt identi ty of the human body and the human spirit replacing the dualistic notion of the separateness of the spirit and its supposed superiori ty. McClure's poem captures these ideas. It is embraced by a collage by Michael Bowen:

The God I worship is a lion and I pray to him for Speed Power & Courage... In the meekness of May I'll sing all the day in the throne of my flesh f reed of the mesh and the gins and the traps that bind me!... There shall be a new image of God!...

The back cover was another mandala by Dan- gerfield Ashton. Dangerf ie ld was a young southern boy about 19 who was AWOL f rom the army. Even at that young age, he was a great p e n - a n d - i n k artist. Unfor tuna te ly , he was taking a lot of am- phetamines, which made him overwork some of his drawings. He lived in the Oracle off ice for awhile, and worked in a small ba throom that we conver ted into a studio for him. We had to keep an eye on his work, though, and grab it away f rom him before he turned it into a blot. One day the FBI came looking for him, but he had grown a beard since he had taken his enlistment pictures. They showed Dangerf ie ld his own picture, but fai l- ed to recognize him.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL RED CROSS

Before the product ion of the sixth Oracle, we moved our off ices to larger quarters in Michael Bowen's fo rmer flat on Haight Street just o f f Masonic. Bowen moved to Stinson Beach in West

Marin. The Be-In media blitz had brought the Haigh t -Ashbury to the center of America's consciousness. The disaffected, the disenchanted, the mafia, the mad, the CIA, the FBI, the sociologists, poets, artists, American Indian shamans, East In- dian gurus, TV and movie crews, magazine and newspaper reporters f rom all over the world, and tourists riding through and staring at it all descended on the t iny street called Haight. The result was a monumental t raf f ic jam on all levels.

The Oracle kept its new offices open 24 hours a day. We had a day crew who were mostly engaged in producing the Oracle, and a night crew who were a mul t i -purpose transcendental Red Cross. They fed the hungry out of a giant pot of rice and beans, eased down and straightened out the bad trippers, and gave impromptu seminars in cosmic consciousness for the heads, the FBI, and the under- cover cops who wandered through.

The night crew were chosen to be guides and nurses to the mind hurr icane that blew through our open door. Twen ty or thir ty people a night were fed by Jim Cook, a Big Sur mountain man and peyote eater. Alan Williams, a painter, sculptor, and yogi, painted an e igh t - foo t high mural of the new Adam and the new Eve, muscular and naked, on the kitchen wall. Alan and Jim and others would spread a non-s top rap of cosmic love and cosmic dust f rom dusk to dawn. They were healers and tricksters who could help people kick methedrine and heroin, turn bad trips into ecstasy, and give comfor t to the confused and lonely.

The presence, use, and abuse of methedrine and heroin soon became a problem in the Haight. Methedrine caused anxiety and paranoia and severe depression during the comedown. It was known to be a brain cell destroyer in whose wake violence of ten erupted. We looked upon heroin as an ant i -consciousness drug, because its addictive properties and expense would turn people away f rom their goodness for the sake of their habits, In the Haight a heroin addict might steal your h i - f i , forge your check, and most f requent ly take the drugs or the money in a mari juana or LSD deal.

Most of us fe l t that some drugs were positive, therapeutic, and physically harmless, while others were harmful to the human body and /or mind. Gen- erally, we thought, as shared victims of the legal prohibi t ion against drugs, that all drugs should be decriminalized, and addict ion treated as a medical problem.

At the Oracle, we decided that we had to get the worst cases of psychotic breaks and drug abuse out of the increasing pressure of urban life. In late spring of 1967, Amelia Newell donated the use of thir ty or fo r ty acres, and what was known as the Stone House near Gorda , a t iny town just south of Big Sur, for an Oracle retreat.

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J im Cook went there to keep the action f lowing and we sent people there every weekend in a t ruck along with a hundred pounds of b rown rice, beans, and vegetables. At t imes there were a hundred people at G o r d a recover ing and recu- perat ing, taking LSD and peyote , d rumming and dancing around nightf i res , medi ta t ing and hiking in the Big Sur wilderness. It was a f ree p re -Esa len exper ience for those who really needed it.

The retreat func t ioned well for about nine months until ear ly 1968, when a young man came through with a r if le, took LSD, and shot a ne igh- bor ' s cow that in his hal lucinat ion was turning into some unru ly beast. Then , the h ighway patrol with cars, motorcycles , and hel icopters descended on this H a i g h t - A s h b u r y extension, hostel, and dry dock, sending a hundred hippies scurrying into the hills in the nick of time. Amel ia Newell , who was innocent of every th ing but a chari table heart , went to court , and had to make resti tution for the cow.

THE R A I N B O W U N V E I L E D

In the meant ime , dur ing the day t ime and one hundred miles nor th in San Francisco, we were creat ing Oracle #6. We switched our pr inter f rom Waller Press to a 7 -web press at Howard Quinn Printers. Because of the size of the press we could expand our use of color. We would print the paper on Sundays and the pr inters would allow our s taf f artists to use the presses like a paint brush. Our f irst expe r imen t was to divide the ink founta in of a web into three compar tmen t s with metal dividers and wooden blocks, put a d i f fe ren t color ink into each compar tmen t , and run a ra inbow over eight pages of Oracle #6. Thus the dream I had in the spring of 1966, of a ra inbow newspaper being read all over the world, became a reality.

We soon discovered that, where two colors came together in the founta in , the inks would blend to make a third color. When we had blue and yellow in adjacent compar tments , they would seep beneath the dividers dur ing the run and p ro - duce a strip of green on the image. We devised ways of controll ing this for tu i tous accident that enabled us to br ing for th f ive colors on a page, but with the d rawback of having only stripes of color.

Al though the records have disappeared, I think we wanted to produce 60-75,000 copies of Oracle #6, but we d idn ' t have enough money for such a big print ing. We pr in ted as many as we could pay for , sold them, collected our advert is ing money, and then came back on subsequent Sundays to pr int more. In the in te r im we could make changes in colors, and even in content. So Oracle #6 has at least three d i f fe ren t print ings that I have

found, and the next six issues have two or more d i f fe ren t printings.

Because the press had so many webs, we could also separate parts of the image and run them in d i f fe ren t colors. There fo re one image could have both a split founta in and separated colors that were pr in ted in a specif ic part o f the image. This abil i ty gave us the potent ial for six or more colors on a page, and more control of where some of the colors would be placed. The manipula t ion of this palet te on a press that was usually used for supermarke t adver t i sem*nts was the unique signature of the Oracle. To top it o f f , as a special talisman, we would somet imes spray the papers wi th Jasmine pe r fume when they came o f f the press.

ORACLE #6 - T H E AQUARIAN AGE

Oracle #6 was our f irst theme issue. In our theme issues we would try to present various aspects of a theme but never all sides of a theme. We weren ' t interested in a pro or con presentation. We presented a theme because a consensus of interest existed in the c o m m u n i t y and on the editorial s taff . Actually the editorial meet ings included eve ryone - -ed i to r i a l and art s taff , secretaries, circulat ion and business people, invi ted guests, and anyone who happened in the door. We felt that, i f the f low brought a person there, that person was supposed to be there. Therefore , he or she was also allowed to vote on whatever issue was being decided. We thought of these guests and d rop- ins as representat ives of the rest o f the world.

The theme of Oracle #6 was an astrological speculat ion on the Aquar ian Age. Three astrologers presented their views on what the Aquar ian Age meant , and whether we were in it, or approaching it. A m e m b e r of our s t a f f qu ipped that the Aquarian Age had arr ived, lasted six months , and we were now in the Age of Capricorn. The f ron t cover was the symbol of the Aquar ian Age drawn by Rick Gr i f f i n (see f igure 1) and the back cover was the femin ine representat ion of the Aquar ian Age drawn by Ida Gr i f f in .

The three astrologers were Ambrose Hol- l ingsworth, Gayla, and Gav in Arthur . Ambrose Hol- l ingsworth was a young man in his thirties, who used a wheelchair due to paralysis caused by an auto accident. He had been a wri ter in Greenwich Village and Nor th Beach and had par t ic ipated in many artistic circles dur ing the Fift ies and Sixties. He c la imed to be an initiate in an occult group called The Brotherhood of Light and had begun an occult school in Mar in called the Six Day School. Ambrose had astrologically chosen the date of January 14, 1967, as the most propi t ious date for the H u - m a n - B e - I n .

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Gayla was the pen name of Rosalind Sharpe Wells, a medium and astrologer who had received the New Aquarian Tarot Deck through the Ouija board and automatic writing. Rosalind claimed to possess the psychic capabil i ty of distant viewing. During her adolescence in the Forties, she could envision the bombings of World War II as they occurred, and felt great consternation and pain seeing the destruct ion of life flash across her mind. She began to suppress her psychic abilities with alcohol and drugs until she met the occult teacher, John Cooke, who encouraged her abilities. Together they commenced their work on the "New Aquarian Tarot," which we in t roduced in Oracle #9.

Gavin Ar thur was a well known astrologer, philosopher, and raconteur. His flat above a Japa- nese restaurant on Buchanan S t ree t was a gathering place for artists, occultists, hippies, international vagabonds, politicians, and the upper crust of San Francisco. He was the great-grandson of Chester Arthur , the twen ty- f i r s t president of the Uni ted States. He had been in W.B. Yeats' circle in Ireland, and claimed to be a disciple of Walt Whitman through the English mystic, Edward Car- penter , a f r iend, student, and, perhaps, lover of Whitman's. In our interview Gavin says the Aqua- rian Age wouldn ' t come until 2660: "until science, religion and phi losophy are one, mankind will not have reached his coming of age, his maturity."

New Geology, Paul Krassner, Dr. Mota--and Meth- amphetamine

"New Geology," by Chester Anderson, is the classic ode to acid rock. Anderson, as founder and edi tor of the Communicat ions Company, wrote and printed mimeographed diatribes and newsflashes, and dis tr ibuted them instantaneously on Haight Street. The Communicat ions Company was also the Diggers' instant telegraph and some of its output is known as the Digger Papers. Chester writes in Oracle #6:

Rock is head music, psychedelic music. Rock is legitimate avant garde art form. Rock shares most of its formal structural principles with baroque music. Rock is evolving hom*o gestalt conf igura- t ions - - the groups themselves living together - - supe r fami l i e s - -p re - in i t i a t e tribal groups. Rock is part icipational and non- typographic art form. Rock is regenerat ive and revolut ionary art, not degenerat ive or decadent. Rock principles are not limited to music. Rock is an intensely synthesizing music able to absorb all of society into itself.

Rock has reinstated the ancient t ruth that art is fun. Rock is a way of l i fe - - in te rna t iona l and universal. Not even the deaf are completely immune. (IN T H E LA N D OF TH E D A R K / T H E SHIP OF TH E SUN/ IS D RIVEN BY TH E G R A T E F U L DEAD)

Paul Krassner also appeared on the pages of Oracle #6, and spoke not about acid rock but about acid, the street name for LSD. Krassner, the satirist and editor of The Realist magazine, was visiting San Francisco for the first time. He would later be one of the founders of the Yippies, raid Chicago, and move to San Francisco.

"I was never high before I took LSD," he confessed in an interview enti t led "LSD, Revolut ion & God." "I had all kinds of reverse paranoia on my first trip. I thought people were doing nice things for me....I called my wife and thanked her for it but she didn ' t know what I was talking about....I don ' t look upon youth as a panacea, because at every demonstrat ion I 've been in there's been a lot of youthful counterdemonstrators filled with hostility, filled with a kind of f ierce patriotism....Well, Alper t talks about a serenity on the West Coast; I get that feeling.. . .But I hear f rom people on the West Coast that they ' re imitating people on the East Coast, and I hear f rom people on the East Coast that they ' re imitating the West Coast...and I begin to think that it's really happening in Den- ver..."

At this moment two nuns walk into the Oracle off ice and Paul remarks, "It's hard for me to imagine two nuns walking into the off ice of the East Village Other."

One of the nuns was Sister Mary Norber t Kor te , a nun in the Dominican order. Sister Mary Norber t was a f ine poet as well as a rather unor- thodox nun. She would climb out of her nunnery window at night, and come to poets' houses to talk, read, and turn on. We would bake mari juana brownies and bring them to her in the nunnery. Though she came f rom a long line of priests and nuns, she did drop out to live a sectarian life as a poet.

The Oracle asked Krassner, "Did your atheism change after LSD in any quanti tat ive way?"

Paul answered, "No, no! How could it change? There was a d i f fe ren t God I didn ' t believe in."

Another call to higher consciousness in Oracle #6 was John Phillips' drawing of the broken down bus that resembles an old medicine show wagon with signs all over it saying, "Cannabis Cure All, Cactus Therapy, Peyote Practice, Nature 's Chemicals, etc." "Dr. Mota's Medicine Show Bus" was a representation of the general at t i tude toward drugs, part icularly natural drugs, but including LSD. These

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drugs were seen as medicines for the sick spirit of western civilization that was suffer ing f rom the disease of alienation and the dominat ion and destruct ion of nature. Our psyches also were sick with alienation, bound in the nutshell of the Ego, and cut o f f f rom the repressed, personal, and collective unconscious.

These medicines allowed us to experience the depths of the unconscious, intensif ied our sensory delight in nature, and aided the integration of the severed psyche. Visions of gods in all their forms and ecstasies were being exper ienced widely. An awareness that humani ty was able to reach a potential f u l f i l lmen t - - a world at peace, human relations based on love and brotherhood, and communities based on compass ion- -drove this whole generation to its mostly non-violent battle against the war in Vietnam.

One drug, however , was not glorif ied by Phil- lips' drawing, but was discussed in an article by Kent Chapman enti t led "Ecstatic Isolation & Incar- nation." Methamphetamine was the Crack of the Sixties. When injected it produces a flash high and a long stimulation ef fec t that gives the sense of a godlike mental acuity. It was invented by the Nazis in the Thirt ies, and used by Hit ler , his as- sociates, and the SS. It causes brain cell damage, depression, and an addictive need to use more. Often, the user will go for days without sleep. In Oracle #4 we had published an article by Dr. Joel Fort , "Methedrine Use and Abuse in San Fran- cisco," that discussed the possibility of a therapeutic cure for this addiction. Chapman's article, wri t ten originally as a letter to Michael Murphy of Esalen Institute, was a lyrical confession af ter three years of methamphetamine abuse.

Chapman writes: "I have been at a standstill in my flesh as a person incarnated. . .For me hell was the ecstasy that rots teeth and person. I didn ' t live in the seasons of the sun but in the changes of my metabolism."

Alan Watts' Bas ic Myth and Tom Weir's Photo Lovers

Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest, was America 's foremost authori ty on Zen Buddhism and Oriental mysticism. He lived in a houseboat in Sausalito, and was the resident philosopher for the hippies and the Beat poets. "The Basic M y t h - - According to the Tradi t ion of Ancient India" was the first of Watts' several contr ibutions to the Oracle.

He writes: "In the beginning...is the self.. .Be- cause of delight the Self is always at play, and its play, called LILA, is like singing or dancing which are made of sound and silence, motion and rest. Thus, the play of the Self is to lose itself

and to f ind itself in a game of hide and seek without beginning or end."

Many other spiritual paths were also being explored and invented in the Haight during this period, but the preponderant view favored an intense sensuality. Exper iences with both LSD and mari juana seemed to unveil a world of sensory splendor and spiritual depth that had been absent f rom most people's Judeo-Chr is t ian expectations. Our religions, philosophies, and social conditioning had not prepared us for such experiences as the whole planet being one living and breathing organism, with our own beings melting into it, or every atom of our bodies merging with our sexual partners' bodies so that their thoughts became ours, as if there weren ' t two d i f fe ren t beings, or seeing God or gods and talking to them, or realizing that you and everyone else were God. These kinds of visions inspired a search through the l i terature and religions of the world for guideposts and maps for these ancient journeys.

One of the most generally prefer red and admired spiritual paths was Mahayana Buddhism (from which Zen developed). Mahayana Buddhism teaches that the experience of the Void, or God, or the greatest Bliss, is a unif ied f ield identical with our everyday experience of the material world. When the veil of separateness lifts, and we experience reality without the in ter ference of egotism, desire, and its consequent suffer ing, and without the shadow of concepts, the blending of the material and spiritual will fill every instant with wonder. The Mahayana ideal of the Bodhisattva, who achieves enlightenment, but returns to the world to compassionately serve humanity, appealed to the spiritual seekers of the Haight.

Hinduism also has a sensual and sexual school of thought and practice called Tantra that influenced those who wanted to bring together the body and the soul, and the material and spiritual worlds. The word "LOVE" was a symbol or code for these ideas, mystical experiences, and practices. "Love" was the universal principle merging all and everything in an ecstatic unity. Thus the phrase of ten used by hippies, "It's all love," had a more precise meaning than was generally understood.

Tom Weir's fu l l -page photomontage of a couple making love with multiple sets of arms and legs in motion and, in issue #7, Paul Kagan's "Yab-Yum" (see f igure 2) epi tomized the Oracle's dedication to this ideal of the uni ty of body and soul.

ORACLE #7 - H O U S E B O A T SUMMIT MEETING

Our longest issue, 52 pages, was the Houseboat Summit Meeting with Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Tim Leary that was held, I must admit, in Top Secrecy aboard Alan Watts' houseboat

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in Sausalito (see f igure 3). The four mentors, poets, and philosophers were the most respected voices in the Beat -Hippie-Psychedel ic movement . We intended this issue to be the ultimate roundup of the hippie philosophy. It came out just before Easter week when a huge inf lux of the young, the curious, the pilgrims, and tourists were expected to descend upon the Haight.

The idea of bringing Leary, Watts, Snyder, and Ginsberg together originated with art edi tor Gabe Katz. Gabe had become dissatisfied, even a little paranoid, that others were seeking his posi- tion, part icularly Neff Rose, an abstract painter f rom Big Sur with a passion for the Tarot and the I Ching. This would be the last issue whose design was adminis tered by Gabe and he would resign with bitterness af ter its completion.

Most of the Houseboat discussion circled around the problem of whether we were going to drop out or take over.

Leary and Watts crit icized the moral violence and anger of the antiwar movement while Ginsberg and Snyder de fended the movement . Snyder said that political utopianism and mysticism have common historical roots.

Leary was questioned by Snyder and Ginsberg about what "drop out" really means. He prophesied small groups dropping out, like ten MIT scientists, and forming small tribal groups.

Watts cri t icized our educational system for not giving us any material competence: how to cook, make clothes, build houses, make love, or be a fa ther or mother. Meanwhile, he added, we are a rather small movement involved in the midst of a mult i tude of people who can only survive if automated industry feeds, clothes, houses, and transports them by means of the creation of ersatz materials. Snyder brought up the necessity of stop- ping populat ion growth because it destroys other species; and Leary suggested putt ing all technology underground.

Watts continues, "If we don' t have the political catastrophe of atomic war, we will develop a huge leisure society that pays people for the work that machines do for them."

Leary suggested that two or more species may be evo lv ing- -one an ant hill species with a technological king and queen, and the other tribal and basic.

Snyder answered that this is a negative view of human nature, and that all people want to be in touch with what is real in themselves and nature. "People will consume less, if what is exciting to them is not things but states of mind," he said.

Watts and Snyder spoke of organic original intelligence in so-called "primitive society"- -an intelligence based in experience and vision, not abstract thinking. Snyder rhapsodizes, "The Co-

manche or Sioux demand that everybody go out and have his vision and incorporate and ritualize it within the culture. Then a society like India, a step more civilized, permits some individuals to have these visions, but doesn' t demand it of everyone. And then later it becomes purely eccentric."

Snyder related what he was telling people who asked him how to drop out:

Get in touch with the Indian culture here. . . .Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get this out of a book. Then go and look at your local archaeolo- gical sites. Pay a reverent visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie or long grass prairie? Go and live on the land for a while; set up a tent and camp out, and watch the clouds, and watch the water, and watch the land, and get a sense of what the climate here is....Then decide how you want to make your living here.

They all talked about practical steps, like meditat ion centers in the city; Human-Be- Ins in all cities; groups, tribes, and clans forming out of these meditat ion centers; people living together, working together, sharing money, and becoming extended families.

Snyder summed it up with: "the extended family leads to matril ineal descent, and when we get matrilineal descent we'll have group marriage...with group marriage capitalism is doomed and civilization goes out."

The discussion cont inued with elaboration of these themes, Ginsberg 's conversations with Mario Savio, and who their grandfathers were.

It ended with Tim Leary saying, "The seed carrying soft body should not be embedded in steel...I have no intention of going to jail and I won' t go to jail. No one should go to jail." Of course, Tim went to jail but not until he announced that he was running for governor.

Bom Born Mahadev, Prajna Paramita Sutra, and Lucifer Rising

In addit ion to the Houseboat Summit Meeting, Oracle #7 contained a review, a preview, and a prayer. "Bom Born M a h a d e v - - A Mantra for Mari- juana" is the title of the review article. "Bom Bom Mahadev" was a mantra for mari juana intoned by Indian holy men who smoked ganja (strong Indian hemp). It meant "Hail, Hail great god." This article

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30 SERIALS REVIEW SPRING 1990

is an extended review of David Solomon's book The Marijuana Papers, a collection of most of the pertinent literary, historical, political, and scientific documents available at that time about marijuana use.

The review was written by Harry Monroe, a lyric poet who had been involved with Bohemian culture for 20 years and had inspired many young poets in the Haight. According to his review, "Mr. Solomon has collated a massive volume of absolute- ly convincing evidence that marijuana is good for you, good for your health, good for your mind and good for your world."

A full-page collage, "Lucifer Rising," was an announcement for Kenneth Anger's new film, "Lucifer Rising--A Love Vision," that was to be previewed at the Straight Theater on Haight Street. The artwork is by Rick Griff in using an old print by Gustave Dor6. Anger was involved with satanist cults, as well as being a leading underground film maker. Along with the film, he per- formed satanic rituals. After the showing, the film was stolen and didn't reappear for many years.

The centerfold of the Houseboat Summit was the "Prajna Paramita Sutra," the Buddhist prayer considered to embody the most profound insight of Buddhist thought: "...form not different from emptiness. Emptiness not different from form. Form is the emptiness. Emptiness is the form. Sensation, thought, active substance, consciousness also like this .... Gone, gone to the other shore. Reach, go enlightenment, accomplish...."

The artwork is by Ami McGill, one of our staff artists. Some of the conservative elements of the Buddhist community weren't too pleased with the naked butterfly lady standing in the middle of the highest perfect wisdom.

The back cover was Rick Griff in 's magical peyote Indian.

T H E U N D E R G R O U N D PRESS S Y N D I C A T E

Many major American cities now had underground papers. Most of them were political, or had originated as a political response to the war in Vietnam, but some, like the Seed in Chicago and East Village Other (EVO) in New York, had begun to introduce cultural and aesthetic innova- tions similar to the Oracle. The papers tended to bring communities in rebellion together using passionate advocacy and direct coverage of movement plans, debates, and demonstrations. Through these papers, the war against the war progressed and the new world that we felt would replace the old world of imperialism, materialism, and privilege was being envisioned and defined.

The growth of underground newspapers was mushrooming--every major city, most universities

or university towns, at least 500 in all, and about 500 high schools would have underground or alternative papers over the next five years. These papers were a training ground for the creative people in each community--writers , artists, cartoonists, and poets could publish their work in these open fields of opportunity, and communicate with their peers. By the spring of 1967, with about twenty underground papers, a shared vision of political and cultural rebellion began to focus.

A political movement that was radical with an extreme democratic openness, mistrustful and independent of political parties or dogmas, an- t i-authority and non-hierarchical, generally non- violent, and dedicated to the values of equality, justice, and peace had been forged in the Civil Rights struggle, the SDS Port Huron Statement, the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, and the beginning of the antiwar movement.

A cultural identity that was anti-materialist, idealistic, anarchistic, surreal, Dionysian, and transcendental had been birthed through the Beat literary explosion, the Leary LSD experiments at Harvard, rock n' roll music, the Haight-Ashbury Renaissance, and the Human-Be-In. This two-headed rebellion was now the greatest threat to the American status quo since the Depression.

The Oracle staff, motivated by Ron Thelin's vision of a nationwide "tribal messenger service," decided to host an underground press conference. We invited all the papers that were already loosely allied as the Underground Press Syndicate. We also wanted to show the editors how to adapt the innova- tions we were making in the Oracle, and expose them to the burgeoning Haight-Ashbury community that was then at its peak of creativity and spon- taneous interactive compassion.

The first UPS conference was held at Michael Bowen's house on Stinson Beach and the Oracle's offices, Easter 1967. Some of the participants included Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press, Allan Katzman and Walter Bowart of EVO, Max Scheer of Berkeley Barb, and representatives of Detroit's Fifth Estate, Chicago's Seed, Mendocino's Illustrated Paper, Austin's Rag, and a few other papers.

We had invited Rolling Thunder, a Cherokee medicine man, to talk about the plight of the Amer- ican Indian in the face of yet another legislative attack on Indian treaty rights. He also affirmed what had become the hippie creation myth-- that hippies were reincarnated Indians returned to bring the American land and peoples back to traditional tribal ways.

Some of the Diggers, including Peter and Judy Berg and Chester Anderson, barged uninvited into the conference with the intention of exposing our elitism and to make their case for the underground press to write about feeding and housing the hun-

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dreds of thousands of kids who were about to break loose f rom home and social expectat ion in order to adopt the life of rebellion, f ree love, and LSD visions.

Several important and practical decisions were made amidst the beach walks, t r ipping, hippie sightseeing, and vegetarian meals. The basic pr in- ciple of ar t ic le-sharing wi thout copyright infr inge- ment was adopted along with the sharing of sub- scription lists. It was also agreed that EVO in New York should explore the selling of national advertising, which then would be pr inted in all par- t icipating underground press papers. This was seen as a way of securing much needed advertising revenue for member papers. There was, of course, some argument about the potential of selling out by taking corporate ads, but it was reasoned that ads for products like rock records or books would fur ther undermine the corporate state. Fur ther - more, each paper would have a choice whether to run an ad or not. It eventual ly turned out that the advertisers were unreliable or late payers and little was gained f rom this f inancial gambit.

The major accomplishment of the conference was the re in forcement of the mission we all shared, whether our emphasis was psychedelic cultural, or political. We were creating, maintaining, and informing a new international communi ty that would ult imately replace the crumbling status quo. A UPS statement of purpose was agreed upon:

To warn the "civilized world" of its impending collapse, through "communications among aware communit ies outside the establishment" and by attracting the at tent ion of the mass media.

To note and chronicle events leading to the collapse.

To advise intell igently to prevent rapid collapse and make transition possible.

To prepare the American public for the wilderness.

To f ight a holding action in the dying cities.

This s tatement indicates clearly the apocalyptic feeling of the time. Even the war seemed to us to be a symptom or symbol of the general fall of the Amer ican civilization.

ORACLE #8 - INDIAN ISSUE

Not only did the hippies have a Creation Myth concerning the Amer ican Indian, but they also shared with the Indians a sense of cultural alienation f rom American society. There was a general percept ion that urban society was a cancer and a scourge upon the American earth, and that

the dest iny of the hippies was to begin a gentle reinhabitat ion of the land. A shared vision of the unity of earth and humani ty as a living harmonic organism began to develop. The American Indian tribal life before the Europeans came to this con- t inent appeared to be the ideal expression of that harmony. Many people were studying with, and learning about, the American Indian. To prepare for our Indian issue the Oracle sent a small group of artists and writers to the Hopi communi ty for inspiration and study.

Oracle #8 was dedicated to the American Indian Tradit ion. In the article, "Sun Bear Speaks," we prof i led Sun Bear, an Indian medicine man who had begun teaching white youth the way of the American Indian. At one point, Sun Bear discussed the traditional understanding of what a leader should be:

When a man went to become chief, he would fast and say "What can I do that will best serve my people?" The Indians fasted because, when you take no food or water, you are closest to the Great Spirit and your mind is not dwelling on things of the belly. A man was chief only so long as he did the will of the people. There were cases where a ch ief got too chiefy and arrogant. He would go to sleep at night, but while he slept, the band moved away, leaving him to be chief all to himself.

An anonymous artist designed the page so that the type would lay in arrowhead shapes.

Another non-f ic t iona l piece, "Tuwaqach i - -The Four th World," by Richard Grossinger, contrasts the life of native peoples with the rapaci ty of the white ruling class:

Do you not see that in mythic time a broken bargain with Hopi priests can be repaid by Vietcong warriors?. . .Myth kicks you in the ass, man; knocks you down f rom those high towers and missile sights. You think you can bury a tribe, reduce it to a rare language, quaint religion, a few dancing dolls, remove it thus f rom the earth?

The f ront and back covers of Oracle #8 are a continuous image that represents a vision of the ghost of Chief Joseph at Mount Shasta with flying saucers. Image designer Hett i McGee also contr ibuted "The Hopi Life Plan," a rubbing f rom a petroglyph on a rock at the Hopi village, Old Oraibe. The Hopi elders sent a verbal interpretat ion of the petroglyph to us via the Hopi messenger, Craig

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Carpenter . The pe t roglyph symbol ized the history of the intersect ion of the Hopi people with the white man. It p rophes ied a terr ible world des t ruc- t ion where in a gourd of ashes would fall f rom the sky, i f the whi te man d idn ' t respect the ways of nature , the ear th, and the Indian peoples.

Het t i was originally f r o m Liverpool and was a prol i f ic and f ine artist working on s ta f f for the Oracle. Dedica ted to the muse as Het t i was, and as m a n y of us were, she rarely signed her work. When the Oracle meteor f l amed out, she and her husband Angus MacLise, who was a poet and musician, went to K a t m a n d h u , Nepal. They lived inexpensively in the midst of the Buddhist cul ture they loved, and publ ished l imited edit ion books of poe t ry there. Angus died, though, leaving behind their newborn son. When he was a toddler, the boy was chosen by Buddhist priests to be the f irst western incarnat ion of a deceased high lama. To the Buddhist unders tanding this is the equivalent of a l iving god.

A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon and Other Poems

Three poems rounded out the themat ic e le- ment of Oracle #8. The most controvers ia l of these was "A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pen- tagon," which Gary Snyder sent us f r o m Japan. I knew that this was a well thought out, shamanis- tic poem in a long tradit ion of curse poems, chants, and incantations. But many people on the Oracle s ta f f d idn ' t want to violate their c o m m i t - ment to the ethic of love and non-violence . One of our s t a f f member s was the son of an A r m y captain who worked in the Pentagon, so the curse would have reverbera ted upon him. We had a f o r - mal s ta f f deba te and a vote. The poem won by one vote. The pho tographer whose fa ther was in the Pentagon left the Oracle along with several other people:

As I kilt the white man, the Amer ican in me And I dance out the Ghos t dance To bring back Amer ica , the grass and streams, To t rample your throat in your dreams. This magic I work, this loving I give Tha t m y chi ldren may flourish And yours won ' t live.

We went to press for the first pr int ing with the poem included. Thi r ty or for ty thousand copies were pr inted and sold in order to get the money necessary to pr int more. In the in ter im we received a te legram f r o m Gary asking us not to pr int the poem because of a copyr ight dispute with

a poster company. We took it out of the second edit ion and replaced it wi th a photograph of a naked Madonna with Child. When the rest of the editions came out wi thout the poem, it was falsely rumored that we had bent under some kind of political or spiri tual pressure. The Communicat ions Company mimeographed the poem and distr ibuted it on the street.

The centerfold of the Indian Issue was a poem, "Who Is an Indian?" by John Collier, Jr. The page was lavishly designed by A m i McGill . John Collier, Jr., was a teacher of an thropology at San Francisco State College. He was half Zuni Indian, the son of John Collier and his Zuni wife. John, St., was a scholar of Indian life, the first white man to be init iated into the Zuni Tr ibe , and Frankl in Delano Roosevel t ' s head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was the first bureau ch ie f who tr ied to bring the bureau out o f the nineteenth century Indian wars, and into the twent ie th century. John Collier, Jr., sings:

We were suspicious of your God, who never fai led you always loving, a Christ with no human faults. We knew there was a terrible truth you did not want us to hear. For there are no gods or people wi thout fault. The terrible t ruth was that your Christ carr ied Hell with him, and that each of you had a hell, a darkness.

"Sioux Songs" is the highly charged sung poetry of the Sioux Indians translated f rom the Sioux language by James Koller , a poet and editor of Coyote Magazine. The drawings, reminiscent of cave paintings, were done by an anonymous artist:

Here I am look at me I am the sun Here I am look at me I am the moon look at me.

I thought I saw buf fa lo and called out I thought I saw buf fa lo and called out "Let them be buffalo!"

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Dialogue with a Western Astronomer and an Eas- tern Philosopher

Three other poems, not direct ly related to the Indian theme, also appeared in Oracle #9. "Astromancy" is a poem wri t ten by Phillip L a m a n - tia, one of Amer ica ' s leading surrealist poets. He was in Europe dur ing the Sixties but is now living in San Francisco:

Another civil ization secret for six thousand years is creeping on the crest of fu ture , I can almost see the tip of its t r iangular star .... No mat ter , I ' m recover ing f r o m a decade of poisons. I renounce all narcot ic and pharmacopoe ic disciplines as too heavy 9 to 5 type sorrows ....

K i r b y Doyle is a poet who had been living in Big Sur tending his own garden but decided to come to the Haight to tend the bigger garden. His essay, "The First Sound," is his personal in- vocat ion to the natural order of things:

Well you had bet ter wise up, honey and for a start l isten w i t h i n - - i t ain ' t no group thing and as you listen you will f ind two tools o f yourse l f immedia te ly available for your use on y o u - - y o u r Focus and your Balance. . .To use them you must sit still, sit down, don ' t fake no lotus like you been doing, you bunch of basket - case buddhas. Just stop and l i s t en - -pay at tent ion to yourse l f and protec t your heart f r o m your head until you can fill that damned and noisy dome with the wa rmth and silence of the heart.

"Plea" is a poem by Bob K a u f m a n , the innovative, maver ick surrealist , s treet poet of the San Francisco poet ry renaissance who was of ten ar - rested and bea ten by the San Francisco police. At one point he was hospital ized and given shock therapy. His later years were haunted by illness and alcoholism. He died in 1986. A funera l proces- sion with over 100 poets accompanied by a jazz band marched around Nor th Beach recit ing poems at K a u f m a n ' s favor i te hangouts. His ashes were thrown in San Francisco Bay while K J A Z radio station p layed the Charlie Parker music he loved.

The art i l lustrating Bob's poem was drawn by Michael X, a young man who had walked into the Oracle off ice carry ing a large black notebook under his a rm and proc la iming himsel f to be a messenger f r o m Mars. His black book contained

elaborately intricate drawings that, he said, were designs of Mart ian technology. He had brought them f r o m Mars to help advance earth 's civil ization. Some of our people took LSD wi th him, and came back f r o m wherever they had travelled th ink- ing that Michael X was nuts, not Mart ian. Bob K a u f m a n ' s poem begins:

Voyager , wanderer of the heart o f f to a mill ion midnights , black, black Voyager , wandere r of starworlds, o f f to a mill ion tomorrows, black, black Seek and f ind Hi rosh ima ' s chi ldren Send them back, Send them back.

"Dialogue with a Western As t ronomer and an Eastern Philosopher" was wri t ten by Dr. Ralph Metzner , the Harva rd psychologist . This article is one of the first a t tempts at compar ing the findings of con tempora ry astrophysics wi th the metaphysics of Hindu i sm and Buddhism. In response to the astronomer describing the myster ies of the recently discovered quasars, in part icular , that they seem to possess a "definite, as yet unde te rmined plan of ar rangement ," the eastern phi losopher compares it to an ancient Hindu idea:

Af te r 100 Brahma nights and days, we reach the end of the kalpa (5 billion years) and all mat ter , all forms, are wi th- d rawn into a sort of super -condensed state, which the Buddhists call "the seed- rea lm of the dense ly-packed." All creat ion and destruct ion, evolut ion and involut ion come to an end; only pure energy consciousness is maintained. Vishnu, the preserving principle, sleeps at the bo t tom of the "Milk Ocean," until such t ime as at the beginning of a new Kalpa , the observable fo rms of the uni - verse mani fes t again, like dreams out o f his quiescent consciousness.

"1984" was Armando Busick's vision of a sensual, rural, natural , n eo -p r imi t i ve fu ture that we grasped for in the Seventies, but that seems to have disappeared in the Eighties.

Summer of Love Poster

The "Summer of Love Poster," by Bob Schnepp, showing St. Francis in the Sky, was par t of our a t tempt to deal with the expected inf lux of young people into San Francisco in the summer of '67. Despite our pleas for Amer ica ' s young and adven- turous to stay in their hometowns and begin the new world where they were, we were expecting an avalanche to fall upon the Haight. We asked

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the city to help by allowing the establishment of tent cities in Golden Gate Park, but their reaction was far from sympathetic. One supervisor said, and I closely paraphrase, "Would you let thousands of whor*s waiting on the other side of the Bay Bridge into San Francisco?"

The community had to band together--a "Council for the Summer of Love" was formed to coordinate activities and raise funds. An educational group called "Kiva" intended to build a geodesic dome in a vacant lot on Hayes Street that would be used primarily as a school for rural skills and communal living. Its dream was never realized. "Happening House" was a college in the street (later in a house) started in collaboration with San Francisco State College through the efforts and inspiration of Leonard Wolf, an English profes- sor, novelist, and Chaucer scholar.

Local churches and ministers started to feed and house people. An Episcopal priest, Father Leon Harris of All Saint's Church (acting like a saint), turned his whole church over to the effort. There were crashpads, free food, concerts in the park and every night at the dance halls--youth gone wild with the exuberance and risk of love and adventure.

Of course, the city tried to ban amplified music from the park, but they relented under pressure and demonstrations. The Oracle fed and crashed people, and sent those who had burnt out from drugs or the urban chaos to a piece of land in Big Sur donated to us for that purpose. The Diggers had occupied Morningstar Ranch in Sonoma to pick apples and grow vegetables. The ranch originally belonged to Lou Gottlieb, of the popular folk group, the Limelighters. Gottlieb was con- stantly defending his acceptance of hundreds of refugees and back-to-the-landers from the attacks of the Sonoma authorities. He eventually would deed his land to God, causing Sonoma to challenge in court the right of God to own land. The Haight-Ashbury was a gigantic media magnet, and now we would drown in the media flood. It would never be the same.

O R A C L E # 9 - P R O G R A M M I N G T H E P S Y C H E D E L I C E X P E R I E N C E

Oracle #9 was perhaps the most wide ranging Oracle in its content but, at the same time, the most carefully designed in its aesthetics. The cover, by Bruce Conner, was our only abstract cover, though I call it "infinity billiard balls." The content ranges from psychedelic to occult, and from analysis of happenings on Haight Street to a passionate poem against the war in Southeast Asia.

"On Programming the Psychedelic Experience," by Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner, sums up the re- suits of their earlier scientific research with LSD. Given the tremendous therapeutic and spiritual breakthroughs that LSD effected in the human psyche, and its easy availability and the occasional negative effects of its misuse, Dr. Leary did his utmost to consistently provide the best guidance from both a scientific and aesthetic point of view to those who would take LSD and other psychedelics.

In formal, double blind experiments at Har- vard with students, faculty, theological students, and even prisoners, they discovered that the most positive experiences- -ecstatic, joyful, religious, poetic--could be induced and predicted if the psychedelic was taken with the guidance of an experienced and trusted guide, and with the careful preparation of the "set and setting."

"Set" refers to a person's mood, expectations, and emotions. The voyager and/or guide would want to begin the inner journey with a calm state of mind, not an anxiety state caused by a negative circ*mstance like a death or illness in the family, or separation from a lover.

"Settipg" refers to the physical environment of the t r ip-- that it should be prepared for a relatively undisturbed eight hours of spiritual experience and be aesthetically designed to enhance that experience. A natural setting for part or all of the trip often seemed to enhance the experience.

Drs. Leary, Metzner, and Alpert wrote and spoke widely and often about "set and setting" and the need for an experienced guide. They published a professional journal, The Psychedelic Review, and psychedelic interpretations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tao Teh Ching, ancient texts that were symbolic versions of the psychedelic journey. The concepts of "set and setting," and their books guided hundreds of thousands of people on these voyages through the mind and the deep self. Despite the current view of many that Leary was the Pied Piper of the Sixties, the fool or chameleon of the Seventies, and irrelevant in the Eighties, literally multitudes know that they owe him the deepest gratitude for his fortitude in staying the course in those halcyon days, when paranoia sought to replace reason, and the gods of war did battle against the higher virtues.

There was also another view of "tripping" that was advanced especially by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the "Acid Test" period in 1965 and 1966. Kesey's view was that the visionary state and the randomness of everyday life should not be separated; that we should come to every moment, every surprise encounter, and every emotion with that state of ecstatic presentness fully turned on. Also, if someone was blocked from that transcendental experience by his or her own psychological

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preoccupat ion, fear of letting go, neurosis, or even psychosis, reality might cast up a surprise event or unexpected stimulus that would cause the person to break through into the expanded awareness of "cosmic consciousness."

Most people used both the controlled and uncontrol led methods of turning on. They would save the higher dosage trips (300 or more micro- grams) for a control led "set and setting," and a lesser dosage (100 or 150 mics) for tr ipping lightly around town. Many did use LSD indiscriminately and indiscreetly, even as a challenge or test of their mental powers or self-control . Generally, I would say that there were more bad trips and even psychotic snaps, when medical at tention was felt to be needed, with the uncontrol led method of tripping.

Many of the writers in the Oracle, including Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and William Burroughs, suggested that these psychedelic journeys are basic to psychological integrat ion and to human evolution. They felt that courses should be given in which psychedelics would be used within the university system and /o r private academies along with the teaching of various mental disciplines such as yoga and meditation.

Estimates of how many people took LSD in the Sixties and early Seventies vary f rom seven to twenty million people. A resurgence in the Eighties has added to that number. A poll in the early Eighties revealed that eight percent of college seniors were taking LSD and twen ty - f ive percent of those between the ages of 18 and 26 had taken some hallucinogenic drug. For such massive use with dramatic mind altering effects under the glaring spotlight of paranoid propaganda, LSD turns out to have been a relatively benign national trauma.

Psychologists had been working therapeutical- ly with LSD with great success in treating everything f rom alcoholism to schizophrenia, but un fo r - tunately almost all research ended when LSD became illegal. Therapeut ic aid and possibly even cures of addictions and severe mental illnesses might have been found i f this research had been allowed to continue.

The battle over LSD is another chapter in the age-old war of who controls what people think and experience. The Catholic Church during the Middle Ages resisted and oppressed the rise of heretic sects, because the protesting sects wanted to exper ience the dei ty themselves without the intercedence of the church and its priests, rituals, and dogmas. Similarly every establishment group was threatened by the t remendous release of spiritual, psychological, political, medical, creative, and intellectual au tonomy available to the individual through the use of LSD and other psy-

chedelic substances. Fortunately, though to a lesser extent, the search for authentic experience continues for those who want to f ind their own way.

Poisoned Wheat, Superspade, and the Buddha Mind

Many of us on the Oracle staff were dedicated poets and artists, so we fea tured certain poetry, of ten complemented by artwork, and sprin- kled other, smaller poems around the Oracle pages. In Oracle #9, two ut ter ly d i f fe ren t poems--"Park Songs for Two Kinds of Voices" by Pamela Milward and "Aaron M., April 1967" by Bill D o d d - - m e e t a design by John Thompson that incorporates the meaning of both poems. Aaron Mitchell was the first man executed in many years in California, and it was at the command of Governor Ronald Reagan. Bill Dodd writes prophetically:

Reagan himself killing Communists by the millions in his head, but who knows what awaits to slay him, of the living or Aaron, or any of 59 others, the dead in their graves.

A third poem was Michael McClure's antiwar poem, "Poisoned Wheat," which we spotlighted in the center fo ld along with the art and design skills of Billy Jahrmacht , an innovative artist with an addict ion to heroin. Billy, whose nickname was Batman, had opened an art gallery on Fillmore Street called "Batman Gallery." Around this time we asked him to be art editor, but his addiction made him too unreliable. Billy would die a few years later in Hawaii. McClure, in his passionate poem about America losing its soul in Vietnam, writes:

There is death in Vietnam! There is death in Vietnam! There is death in Vietnam! And our bodies are mad with the forgot ten memory that we are creatures[

Blue black skull rose lust boot! .... . . .Withdrawal f rom informat ion is Escapism Escape f rom the ears that hear the bombers pass? Evange l i sm--whe the r it be of art or re- l ig ion- - - i s Escapism

"Notes f rom the Genet ic Journal" was one of a series of columns by co-edi tor and poet Stephen Levine. Stephen has since become well known for his work with people with terminal illnesses and his writ ing on the psychological and spiritual dimen-

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sion of the transit ion between life and death. He writes:

Suspended between supernova and atomic dervish, I am Man, center of the universe, disproving Copernicus af ter all, cosmic acrobat trapezing on the tendency toward rebir th. Poised between whirr ing mass at ei ther end of infini ty.

"Flowers f rom the Street" is a lyric analysis of life on Haight Street by Richard Honigman:

The street can be a classroom, a zoo, a stage, an asphalt padded cell, a whor*- house, a folksong, or the traverse of Scorpio. They leave jobs, armies, schools to turn their lives and psyches inside out.

Two interpretat ions of the Tarot cards were "The Aquarian Tarot Cards" and "The Hanging Man." "The Aquarian Tarot Cards" was developed by Gayla, who channeled her imaging of the Tarot through the Ouija board while occultist John Cooke painted the cards and wrote the text f rom Gayla's descriptions. "The Hanging Man" was drawn by Bryden, a San Francisco artist. The philosophy of the deck emphasized the harmonizing of soul and body in a new non-hierarchica l age.

"In Memor iam for Superspade and John Car- ter" is an article I wrote on the occasion of the murders of these two dope dealers in early August 1967. The murders were a turning point, a signal that f lower power might be wilting, allowing old- fashioned power and greed to supplant it:

All energy and thought forms de- voted to commercial dope game and increasing fear and paranoid actions produce hell lives and bad trips... .Let's disengage our-selves f rom the commercial izat ion and the bottomless desire for more dope. That will devalue dope. Organized business and crime and government would murder for bat sh*t...if someone would convince them of its value, just as we have created the illusion of the value of Dope.

GIVE YOUR DOPE AWAY - DO NOT BUY OR SELL.

"The Buddha Mind," by Dane Rudhyar , the wel l -known philosopher and composer, is a detailed analysis of the essential meaning of Buddhism. Mr. Rudhya r writes:

I f Nirvana, which Buddhists say is the goal of everything, and which the Buddha had reached, is the supreme value, then why did the Buddha re turn? And if the Buddha re turned out of compassion or something, then that something is greater than Nirvana, or else he wouldn' t have re turned f rom it. If compassion.. .makes one sacrifice Nirvana, then that compassion is greater than Nirvana; it is the most supreme value.

The drawing used to illustrate "The Buddha Mind" was f rom the strange notebooks of Michael X, the se l f -procla imed Martian. This drawing was one of his Martian Machines that would save humanity.

"Alice in Wonderland" is a delicate drawing illustrating Alice in Wonderland as seen under the influence. A young man named Owen dropped into the off ice , told us he was working as a janitor, and gave us this drawing.

The back cover was a drawing called "Kali, the Hindu Goddess," by Bob Brannaman, one of the School of Backwoods Hermi t Big Sur Artists.

O R A C L E # 1 0 - T H E PENTAGON

Oracle #10 was another issue without a specific theme or focus but it contains some of our boldest artistic experiments , including our peak experiences in design, part icularly in the relationship of print to image. The two editions, which bridged the Pen- tagon Demonstrat ion and Exorcism on October 21, contained drastically d i f fe ren t images and colors. The cover of Oracle # 10 is an exploding expressionis- tic mandala by Bob Brannaman.

As you can see by now, the Oracle and many of the thousands of underground papers in cities, colleges, and even high schools across the country were centers for a renaissance of art, ideas, and poetry. Writers and artists contr ibuted their work mostly for free, though the Oracle toward the end was able to pay the rent and food costs for several communes of s taf f and artists. Many artists and some writers didn ' t sign their names to their works because they fel t that the works came through them f rom a higher consciousness, or Muse, and thus belonged not to them but to the world. Many of the writers and artists wanted to act out the human potential for selflessness. The styles were eclectic, drawing upon the whole history of human artistic express ion--real ism, art nouveau, surrealism, i l luminated manuscripts, expressionism, collage, photography, Indian and Tibetan art. All the archetypes hidden in the human mind were gathering in the Oracle and re -en te r ing the world.

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"Temporary Flight" and "Fuclock" are two poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that are accompanied by a startling drawing that is unsigned but is probably by Mark DeVries. In "Temporary Flight," Ferlinghetti re-creates a flight to Chicago while under the influence of LSD. In "Fuclock," he imagines a production at the Fillmore Ballroom where a man and a woman would be tied to the hands of a giant clock. At the hour of midnight, amidst crescendos of raga rock and flashing strobe and color lights, they would meet in an embrace. But it only happened, I believe, in Lawrence's ima- gination.

"Janus" is a lyrical poem by Pat Sweeny, whose sci-fi theme was prophetic of current strains of flying saucer tales. He tells of visitors to our planet taking our:

sperm and ova that unite on some congenial planet where our telescopes end....you steerers of our planet off into another part of the galaxy to replace the ailing sun. I can guess your joy in risking it ....

The centerfold of Oracle #10 was another lyric poem, simply called "Poem/Exhortation," by Janine Pommy Vega:

inherent blossoms emblazon the moment flown this silent portion of eternity Rising. How much I love your creation! How much I love it.

The design for "Poem/Exhortation" was done by Bryden, who also contributed "Ganesha as the Fool," another of the several full-page images in his Tarot series. "Ganesha as the Fool" symbolizes Ganesha, the Hindu elephant God, son of Shiva, remover of obstacles, god of letters, and supposed author of the epic Mahabarata, envisioned by Bry- den as the Fool in the Tarot.

"Abstract Mandala" is an intriguing work that was unsigned but was probably by Frank Berry. It is part of a two-page layout that is the height of the Oracle's design experiments in restructuring viewing space. The facing page has continuations of articles by Lew Welch and William Burroughs, but they are placed in circles around a bullseye with a lot of white space around them instead of the usual long columns surrounded by ads.

Greed, Deconditioning, Leary, and Chinmayananda

Lew Welch's article, "Greed," discusses the origins and pervasiveness of American greed. Lew was one of the most lyric of the Beat poets. He was a warm sensitive being who would cry if he saw or heard something sad or terrible and cry also when he saw or heard something beautiful. In 1971, after writing poems prophecying his death, Lew walked off into the Sierra Mountains and disappeared.

"When did America go wrong?" he asks. "Is a question easily answered. It was never right. Greed then and usury (the most pernicious form of greed, the selling of money) have always been the carbuncles on the neck of America. We have never been free....It is now time for America to give away its corporations."

William Burroughs' article, "Academy 23: A Deconditioning," was widely reprinted in the underground press. Burroughs analyzes the criminali- zation of drug use and concludes that "Any serious attempt to actually enforce this welter of state and federal laws would entail a computerized invasion of privacy, a total police terror...."

He criticizes the press for sensationalizing drug use and calls for a halt to the manufacturing of benzedrine and all variations of the formula. Cannabis, on the other hand, should be legalized, he says, and academies should be set up for use of psychedelics:

This is the space age. Time to look beyond this rundown, radioactive, cop rotten planet. Time to look beyond this animal body. Remember anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways....Students (in the academy) would receive a basic course of training in the non-chemical disciplines of yoga, karate, prolonged sense withdrawal, stroboscopic lights, the constant use of tape recorders to break down verbal association lines.

He talks about propaganda and opinion control and breaking its power through General Semantics study, then adds: "The program proposed is essentially a disintoxication from inner fear and inner control, a liberation of thought and energy to prepare a new generation for the adventure of space....Re- member junk keeps you right here in junky flesh on this earth where Boot's is open all night."

In "Another Session with Tim Leary," which took place in the Oracle office, Leary charges that the stories in the press about LSD and chromosome breaks are all lies, hoaxes, and manipulations by

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government agencies intent on fr ightening those who are using LSD. Nevertheless,

The old temptat ion to build a religion, a dogma around your way of getting high is the oldest cop-ou t in history.. . .The highest fo rm of psychedelic wisdom that man has developed in my opinion is the Sufi. The Sufis tell you it's all energy, it's all work. You don' t have to drop out at all, visibly. You can be a rug weaver; you can do the Oracle; or you can drive a cab in SF... The great masters are to be found in every walk of life - - j u s t doing their gig as an act of grace and grat i tude and beauty.

A second interview in Oracle #10 was with Chinmayananda, one of the first of the Indian teachers to come to Amer ica in this generation. Chinmayananda was a philosopher of the Vedanta non-dua l school of Indian thought and a prac- t i t ioner of Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge. He had a good command of the English language and was well known in India for giving long philosophical talks to audiences of thousands. During his interview, Chinmayananda said that he was very much against the use of LSD for init iat- ing spiritual experience, and thought it to be a shock to the nervous system and dangerously addictive. He admired the renewed interest in spiritual ideas but advised spiritual study instead of drugs.

Death of a Hippie, Bir th of a Freeman, and the Politics of Ecstasy

By the time Oracle #10 appeared on the streets of San Francisco, the Summer of Love had come and gone. Perhaps 100,000 people had come to the Haight on a pilgrimage to see where and what was happening. Just about every group or organization the Haight had developed to deal with the inf lux had dissolved, burnt out, or divided under the strain. Hard drugs had infi l t rated the area, and the veins of some of the best players. The FBI, the CIA, and the Intelligence divisions of the San Francisco police were rumored to be involved in the sudden availability of heroin and methamphetamine , and the rash of arrests and civil disturbances that had begun to plague the Haight.

One of the provocateurs ' favori te sports occurred regularly on weekends, when a handbill would myster iously appear on lampposts urging "the people" to take over the street at 12 noon. At the appointed hour the police and the crowd would dut i fu l ly appear. The Tac Squad, the police riot control unit , would surround the crowd with

one contingent of troops with motorcycles at the end of Haight Street near the entrance to Golden Gate Park, and another cont ingent at Haight and Masonic.

At 12 noon, hundreds of people would walk into the street and block the voluminous traffic. The police would then sing a few operatic warn- ings and charge up the street swinging their nightsticks while the motorcycle cops rode into and over people on the sidewalks. Then tear gas would be thrown into the crowds and stores. Once it was even thrown into the Straight Theater, where people had gathered to escape the onslaught.

Because no organized group took responsibility for these street takeovers, it was widely presumed that government provocateurs were causing this chaotic atmosphere of fear and intimidation in order to dissolve the delicate bloom of hope that had catapulted the Haight to international prominence. Unfor tunate ly , their tactics were succeeding- -by the fall many people were looking to move on, usually in small groups, to communes in rural areas. They wanted to advance their new tribalism outside the glare of the spotlight. Others were having apocalyptic visions and waiting for the world to end, or at least for an ear thquake to strike San Francisco down to the primeval sand and ashes.

The Diggers developed another approach. Ap- palled by the spotlight of the media on the Haight, and eager to attract it at the same time, they staged a "Death of the Hippie" ceremonial march down Haight Street with a cof f in filled with hippie para- phernalia and flowers signifying the death of the media-genera ted hippie, and his rebir th as a Freeman in a Free city with Free necessities provided to all.

At the march, I ran into one of the Diggers' anti- leaders, Peter Berg, and we exchanged symbols to commemorate the event. He gave me a yellow, wooden, s ix- inch square Free Frame of Reference that he was wearing on his belt, and I gave him a rough cut, Nepalese-made, soapstone Buddha Ring that I was wearing. Later at a Berkeley Metaphysical bookstore, where I was buying a rare book on Tibetan ritual called The Hevajra Tantra, I exchanged the Free Frame of Reference for the beads the salesgirl was wearing. She said the beads were blessed by Meher Baba. I then learned an ancient Tibetan purif icat ion mantra f rom the book. A few weeks later I went with a few of the Oracle staff to the Exorcism of the Pentagon, and, with Stephen Levine, chanted the mantra on the steps of the Pentagon just before any other demonstrators arrived.

The collage "Death of a Hipp ie - -Bi r th of a Freeman" was done by Mart in Lindhar t f rom photo- graphs taken by Stephen Walzer. It portrays the transition and is accompanied by my lyric essay, "Politics of Ecstasy":

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Secretly, behind all illusions of order, civilization, law, and tongue wipings of rhetoric, the anarchic, natural, wild condition of body exists....The body and being of man is all fountains of youth and heavenly apparitions.

Pentagon Rising

"Pentagon Rising," an article by Richard Honigman, is an announcement of the Exorcism of the Pentagon that appeared in the first edition of Oracle #10. The artwork, by Mark DeVries, en- visions the post-Exorcism Pentagon floating in the air. Jerry Rubin had taken the magical idea to exorcise the Pentagon that Michael Bowen and I had suggested during our meetings before the Human-Be-In and incorporated it into the official program for the March on the Pentagon on Oc- tober 21, 1967.

The Oracle, along with all other underground papers, supported and announced the March and the Exorcism. We had envisioned thousands of dancing and chanting hippies joining hands in a gigantic circle around the Pentagon invoking gods and spirits to exorcise the demons within the Pen- tagon, and make it rise. When the General Services Administration finally granted the permit for the March, the one action they refused to allow was the hippies' encirclement of the Pentagon.

Another Underground Press Conference con- vened the day before the March on the Pentagon. It was attended by what was now well over a hundred underground papers, whose combined reader- ships were estimated at anywhere between 330,000 (Wall Street Journal) and 15 million (Waiter Bo- wart, editor of East Village Other).

The conference was as raucous as the rage encircling it, but out of it came two important decisions: the extension of free reprint rights to college newspapers and the formation of Libera- tion News Service, based in Washington, DC LNS would reprint and distribute the best of the underground press, and originate material that could be reprinted by member papers.

At the demonstration every faction had a chance to act out its outrage at the ever growing horror of the war: the more moderate marched and listened to speeches; the more radical broke through the lines and into the hallowed halls of the Pentagon wherein they were beaten by soldiers; occultists and poets like Ed Sanders and Kenneth Anger chanted and did exorcism rites; the hippies threw flowers at the soldiers and marshalls, and placed the flowers delicately in the barrels of their rifles.

The flowers came to the Pentagon as a result of the FBI thwarting the attempt of Michael

Bowen and Bill Fortner, a large, loud, Texan ad- venturer and marijuana smuggler, to circumnavigate the Pentagon by plane, and bomb it with bushels of flowers that were to be dropped into the hole in the Pentagon's center. When the hired pilot didn't come to the airport (probably because he was an FBI agent or was stopped by the FBI), they had no alternative but to truck the flowers to the steps of the Pentagon, causing rifles and helmets to blossom. In the evening Mayan Indians in native dress gathering around dusk campfires on the Pen- tagon lawn watched eloquently and said "La genre es uno" (The people are one).

In the post-Exorcism edition, which we published after returning to San Francisco from Wash- ington, DC, Ralph Ackerman's photo of the Buddha in the Tea Garden of Golden Gate Park replaced the Pentagon Rising page.

Back Page Poster and Collage

The back page of Oracle #10's pre-Exorcism edition was the poster announcing the March on the Pentagon, by Peter Legeria. The text with it is the same text I read to Jerry Rubin at that first fateful meeting in Berkeley. It was from Lewis Mumford's City in History:

The Pentagon...an effete and worth- less baroque conceit resurrected in 1930s by US military engineers and magnified into an architectural catastrophe. Nuclear power has aggravated this error and turned its huge comic ineptitude into a tragic threat...The Bronze Age fantasies of absolute power, the Bronze Age practice of unlimited human extermination, the uncontrolled obsessions, hatreds and suspicions of Bronze Age gods and kings have here taken root again in a fashion that imitates and seeks to surpass the Kremlin of Ivan the Terrible and his latter day successors. With this relapse... has come one-way communication, the priestly monopoly of secret knowledge, the multiplication of secret agencies, the suppression of open discussion and even the insulation of error against public disclosure and criticism through a bi-par- tisan foreign policy...the dismantling of this regressive citadel will prove a far harder task than the demolition of the earlier Baroque fortifications. But on its performance, all more extensive plans for urban and human development must wait.

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In the pos t -Exorc i sm edit ion, the back cover was a photo collage of H a i g h t - A s h b u r y resident, Ganda l f , medi ta t ing in f ront of marshalls at the Pentagon.

ORACLE #11 - T H E CITY OF GOD

In the City of God Issue, beginning with a cover by Steve Schafer that was symbol ic of r e - newal and reb i r th (see f igure 4), we a t t empted to explore how individuals and society in this coming age of computer ized technology could t r ans form the mores, values, and insti tutions that are based on the paradigms of scarci ty and the survival of the fittest. How could we des t ructure ourselves and our societies to live more h a rmon- iously with each other and with the earth?

Articles by Bill Dodd and George Tsongas and poe t ry by Michael Hannon explore the spiri tual and political dimensions of these new potential relationships. G a r y Snyder tells of a Japanese c o m - mune on S u w a - n o - s e Island. Rober t Theobald re - flects on a surplus economy bringing on the necessity of a guaranteed annual wage to f ree people for spiri tual and intellectual deve lopment , and Neill Smith, an archi tect , invents "Environments for E x - panded Awareness."

"How Long, O Lord, How Long?" is a ful l - page original design by Het ty McGee , while "City of God," our centerfold , was the vis ionary city of Jerusalem f r o m the Book of Revelat ions as en- vis ioned by Bryden. "Abstract Kundal ine ," by A m i McGil l , could be a view of the Kunda l in i energy bathing the spinal column.

A four th piece of ar twork, an unsigned m a n - dala, was given to us by a lovely young woman who came into our of f ice one day while we were working on the issue. She was glowing and v ib ra t - ing and asked if she could do a drawing for us. She worked fo r a couple of hours, gave us the drawing, which was of herself in the midst o f a mandall ic universe, and left. She wrote beneath it:

Float Beyond Time: We are ageless, timeless We have been here always and will be here always in one f o r m or another. We created ourselves to be ourselves.

The back cover is a caut ionary vision of the earth engul fed in the fires of war. The artist is unknown.

Bucky Comes to the Haight

In N o v e m b e r , Buckmins ter Fuller came to the Haight , spoke at Hipp ie Hill, and did an interview with the Oracle staff . "Bucky" was the phi losopher

and vis ionary who best represented the western aspect of the ideals o f the Sixties. As an inventor of the geodesic dome and a philosopher of technological change, he opt imist ical ly envisioned a world where more could be done with less resources to feed and house everyone.

He was legendary for his e igh t -hour - long talks and his char ismatic joy and energy. When he came to our house for the in terview, he was already talking as he came in the door. When he noticed that the tape recorder wasn ' t tu rned on, he playfully scolded us because we hadn ' t recorded what he had already said. The air brush designs for these pages were done by Mike Ferrar:

I would suggest that all humani ty is about to be born in an ent irely new relat ionship with the universe.. . .We have gone in this century f r o m taking care of less than 1% of humani ty to taking care of 40% of humani ty . We have done more with less....What I want the young world to realize is that actually we ' re r ight in screaming that we ought not to have war. The way you ' re going to get it is by a design revolut ion where you do more with less.. .I 've discovered that it takes 22 years to go through the c y c l e - - t h r o u g h weaponry and to fall out into what we f inal ly call "livingry." We can save 22 years by s imply del ibera- tely setting out to redesign the use of the world 's resources to take care of 100% of the world 's populat ion.

The final two articles in Oracle #11 were by Ha r ry Monroe and Alan Watts. Monroe ' s "In- s t rument of the Womb" is an anthropological study of the Ear th Goddess and Matr iarchal Society":

She had many names as many as there are peoples over whom she reigned and who worsh ipped h e r - - G r e a t Goddess, Divine Goddess , White Goddess, Ear th Goddess , Moon Goddess , a triple goddess always. . .whose three aspects of maiden, mat ron and crone are the an th ropomor - phisms comprehens ib le as beauty, bir th and death. He r inf luence was absolute over peoples whose concerns remained the simple ones of agriculture, grazing and hunting. . .All the to tem societies of ancient Europe were under the aegis o f the Grea t Goddess.

Despite Ha r ry Monroe ' s effor ts here to realign the chairs in heaven and place women in their r ightful place among the gods, there was still much

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to be desired in the posit ion of women in hippie culture. Genera l ly speaking, women were respected more as a result of men and women exper iencing each other in their symbolical divine aspects during psychedel ic visions.

In fact , creat ive work overall was respected more as a result of those experiences regardless of which gender or iginated the work. Still, women all too of ten found themselves playing the role of hausfrau, while men just played. At the same t ime, many women , in the pervasive a tmosphere of sexual and psychological f reedom, also played in the open, deep, psychic spaces, and began to f ind their personal and social power. These factors, along with the poli t icization of women in the m o v e m e n t against the war, would lead to the women ' s l iberat ion m ovem en t that began to shake the status quo in the early Seventies.

Unl ike the more ascetic and even nihilistic varieties of Buddhism, Alan Watts' Zen Buddhism was a pract ical , l i fe - loving, and sensuous phi losophy. "Food Is God" catches Watts in his most in formal and p layfu l mood. "When people announce that they are intent on the spiritual l ife and are going to pract ice universal love," he writes, "I lock m y doors, bar m y windows and get hold of a gun... .When people do the most appall ing things people can do, it is always in the names of the highest ideals, like the purely unselfish ideological war in Vietnam.. . .This is why the US is such a danger to the rest of the world. . .Scratch an A m e r - ican and f ind a Christ ian Scientist because we have a national bel ief in the vir tue of being above mere material i ty."

Then Watts goes into an exposit ion of Chinese cooking for its taste and simplicity; puts down macrobiot ics as ending in malnutr i t ion; and continues:

Make your chopping board and stove your altar at which you celebrate divine myster ies wi th the u tmost devotion. But because you must kill to eat, always r e m e m b e r that to some extent you are an i r remediable rascal. This will season your holiness with a certain twinkle in the eye, a sauciness which will preserve you f r o m the abominable cruel ty and thoughtlessness of those who aspire to be 100% sweetness and light. Do not t ry to be saints; be content with being comple te ly human. For true sanct i ty is a divine gi f t which when imita ted is only a plastic flower.

ORACLE #12 - R E T U R N FROM MEXICO T O DARK V I S I O N S

Oracle #12 's f ron t cover photo by T o m Weir, of a sleeping woman on Mar in Headlands, symbol- ized, perhaps, the fragi l i ty and exhaust ion of the vision. The Haight and the countercul ture had been under severe a t tack f rom both local and national authorities. Issue #12, publ ished in February 1968, was to be the last Oracle. San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto ha ted the hippies. It was rumored that he had been p reven ted f r o m being vice president by the Democra t ic Party bosses, who had told him that i f he couldn ' t control his own city he couldn' t be entrusted with the nation. So he put the Tac squad on alert.

CoIntelPro, the FBI and CIA program (in association with local police agencies) to infiltrate, disrupt , and destroy the Civil Rights, Black l ibera- tion, and ant iwar movements , was also commit ted, I believe, to breaking up the Ha igh t -Ashbury . Ron- ald Reagan was creat ing Communis t conspiracies in Sacramento. The Black Panthers had made se l f -defense the pr ior i ty for revolut ion instead of non-violence . Ha rd drugs were rampant on Haight Street and were creat ing casualties.

The Haight had been a success nevertheless - - h u n d r e d s of thousands of young people had come through the Haight and had spread its message of peace, love, and c o m m u n i t y across the country and across oceans. But the visionaries and pioneers in the Haight were t i red and needed renewal. De- clining energies were being replaced by dark visions.

Many of the or iginators left San Francisco for new rebirths. Steve Levine and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks. We spoke at universities and were in terv iewed by newspapers and TV. We read poetry , general ly st irred up activity, and spread the word.

When we re turned, we discovered that a street guru with a fol lowing and a combat ive manner had moved himsel f into the Oracle offices, and was making it d i f f icul t for s ta f f members to work or even think. The Oracle s ta f f had exhausted its vision of the ' fu ture . Most o f us felt it was time to act out what we had a l ready dreamed. Oracle #12 reflects this mood.

In "Final City, Tap City," Lew Welch speaks of the vulnerabi l i ty of cities as polluted and depen- dent living environments: "And there will be signs... We will know when to slip away and let these mur - derous fools rip themselves to pieces. For there must be good men and women in the mountains, on the beaches, in all the neglected, beaut i ful places, who one day will come back to ghostly cities and set them right at last. . .And there must not be a plan. It has always been the plan that has done

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us in. Meanwhile--(1) Freak out (2) Come back (3) Bandage the wounded and feed however many you can (4) Never cheat."

In "Drop City," Bill Dodd describes his visit to Drop City, New Mexico, one of the first of the new rural communes. All the houses there were geodesic domes, a type of round house invented by Buckminster Fuller that combined advanced en- gineering and the spiritual simplicity of a primitive dwelling. They were also simple and inexpensive to build. The communards at Drop City had used abandoned car tops overlapped like wood shakes for the domes roof.

In Mexico, I had been impressed with the way all of human history is layered, visible, and touchable--a revelation in the transitory nature of human culture, but also in that feeling that everything exists at once in an eternal instant, all of history montaging, while no one watches and the universe breathes in and out.

I wrote "Return from Mexico" on the flight back from Mexico, The Flying Saucer drawing was by Steve Durkee, a New Mexican artist and occultist, who would later design Ram Dass' book, Be Here Now. When we crossed the border, champagne was served and I wrote:

I toast the sea, the desert below the air for our safe flight. I toast the happiness and bliss of all sentient beings. I toast the victory of the Viet Cong and the Johnson gang's graceful surrender. I toast the opening of the compassionate chakra of the heart before America fails into time's abyss for empires.

Esalen had just been started and some of the Oracle staff had been doing encounter group work with them. In an article entitled "Esalen," Esalen co-founders George Leonard and Michael Murphy write: "How can we speak of joy on this dark and suffering planet How can we speak of anything else?"

When Mark DeVries, who had done many designs for the Oracle, originally brought his drawing "Evolution?" to the office, the word on it was "Revolution" without a question mark. After wit- nessing all the police raids and tear gassing on Haight Street, Mark felt that the time and opportunity for peace and love had passed. The question of whether to print this piece initiated another big staff argument and a vote. Had we dreamed these ideals, tried to manifest a new hope for humanity, only to revert back to war, gas, and brut- ishness? With Mark's approval we changed the let- tering to a cautionary "Evolution?"

Other artwork also reflected the desperation we were all feeling. The centerfold of the last Oracle was "A Mandala for Those in Psychic Agony," by Red Dog Pieface. The center of the mandala says, "The meaning of life is the celebration of it." "Johnson's Universe," a collage by Martin Lind- hart, is the perfect example of a picture being worth a thousand words. It shows a picture of Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk on either side of a map of the United States. Reaching upward from the map to the stars is a pile of naked human bodies. "The Tree of Death," by R.J. Grabb, Jr., is another symbolic representation of the disin- tegrating vision.

"In Memoriam for David Sandberg" contains excerpts from letters David had sent me before he committed suicide. He was a dear friend, a poet, and an editor of several poetry magazines. His death, I believe, was caused by the speed plague that had descended upon the Haight, a broken love affair, and the general desperation. The portrait was by John Paul Stone:

I don't know what I'm saying half the time; don't know what it's all about and run screaming thru labyrinthine corridors of my cell body, holy ordering of things, grasping at flashes of light which are bloody fish, which disappear as I reach out for their lantern cave-like eyes.

In "Black Rose of Thunder," a short poem by Michael McClure, the desperate decline of the human spirit and the bottomless war in Southeast Asia are expressed with a purging directness. The art, by Azul, provides an almost perfect integration of art and word vision:

Jesus, I am sick of the spiritual warfare. Yes, here we are in the death of hell. O.K., Black rose of thunder! O.K., Black rose of thunder! O.K., Black rose of thunder! Your Bodies and kisses are my eternity Fleck! Boot! Mercury! Vapor!

Each issue had a letter page that we called the "Love Haight Ashbury Bush." The word-image in the center is a letter that says, "Virgo, 22 years. Dear Oracle. Are you still there or were you swal- lowed in last summer's plastic deluge? There is no life nowhere in Boise, Idaho. If Haight-Ashbury still lives, r m coming. Does anyone need a bass player, who's a chick, also sings, does artwork etc."

Another letter is from R.N. Rogue of West Covina, who announces that his friend, Dr. Matthew Reinhart, has invented a time machine:

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I t ' s a 9 foot capsule with $50,000 worth of equ ipment and it 's s tored in a barn. I was with h im on September 19, 1967, when he was t ranspor ted into the year 2000....He said that in the next f ew years, nations will fall but not by atomic war. The people who survive will evolve into superbeings. They will live a similar l ife to that of the Hippies in the Haigh t Ashbury but better. No one will have to work to survive, no f ight ing, no wars, and a complete anarchy. . .no boredom, no jealousy, but a large abun- dance of love and brotherhood. They won ' t need any drugs because they will be superconscious and won ' t need them .... As soon as the machine has been patented and app roved by the government , he will be able to have visitors to his secret barn. (the t ime machine) is called Nero.

AD 2000 - A Symposium: Watts, Rogers, and Kahn

Alan Watts, Carl Rogers, and H e r m a n K a h n had spoken at a sympos ium called "AD 2000" in Masonic Audi tor ium. Thei r purpose was to t ry to envision that millennial future . It was symptomat ic of our fai l ing energy and vision that we used such a canned feature . But we did present the t ranscr ipt of the entire sympos ium without cuts. The art and design for this section were done by Alton Kel ley and Stanley Mouse.

Carl Rogers was among the great innovators of modern psychology and was one of the originators of the encounter group method. He e m - phasized here that the most impor tan t p rob lem of our t ime was whether people would be able to accept and absorb change at the rate it 's occur - ring. He saw intensive group exper ience as the most s ignif icant social invent ion of the century:

Rel igion as we know it today will d isappear and be replaced by a c o m m u n i t y based not on a com m on creed nor an unchanging ritual but on the personalit ies of individuals who become deeply related to one another as they a t tempt to com- p rehend and to face as living men and woman the myster ies of existence.

Alan Watts said with some skept ic ism that we would survive the year 2000 only if:

.... we begin to think of the US not as an abst ract political nation but think of it instead as real physical people and a real physical env i ronment and the love of i t . . .Man is so embroi led in his

abstract ions that he represents the physical world in the same way as the menu represents dinner . . .He very easily confuses the symbols for what they represent and so has a tendency to eat the menu instead of dinner.

He speaks of money as a symbol that is mis- taken for wealth: "We have the capaci ty to wipe pover ty f rom the face of the earth. We are long past the age of scarci ty. . . .The money we have spent on war since 1914 could have given everyone on earth a comfor tab le independent income."

To the question "Where is the money going to come from?" he answers, "Money doesn ' t come f r o m anywhere . We invent it....It is a measure of wealth. Real weal th is energy, technical intelligence and natural resources."

He rman K a h n was the author of the notorious book On Thermonuclear War, wherein he sought to jus t i fy the use of nuclear weapons and the win- nabil i ty of nuclear war. He also founded the r ight- wing think tank, "Hudson Institute."

He idealized the Los Angelizat ion of the world as a desirable fu ture for all of us, and perceived human history as having two incidents of interest - - t h e agricultural revolut ion and the industrial revolution: "In Amer ica we all have fai th in the f u t u r e - - f r o m the middle class person who borrows right through next year ' s salary to the h ip p i e - - We all know the system's going to work."

He speaks about the compute r revolut ion and predicts that computers will improve by a factor of ten every two or three years:

Outside of divine revelation. . .we don ' t know if there are any characterist ics of a human being including the most int imate. . .which could not be duplicated, or in some reasonable sense of the te rm surpassed by computers . And when c o m - puters get bet ter , who needs humans? .... We know where the human pleasure centers are.. .get them wired to a compute r on your chest or a console. I 'm a prudish type, not f ree , so I won ' t let you play your own buttons. That ' s depraved. But get yoursel f an opposi te number , hope fu l - ly of the opposi te sex,. . .and play each other 's but tons .... I would bet you even money that there will be a new human being in the 21st century. But I really doubt that he'l l be a hedonist or a d rop- out.. .I ra ther suspect he'll be a little like me.

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Back Page - Cosmic Village

The last page of the last Oracle was Azul 's plan for a cosmically a t tuned village per fec t f o r re inhabi ta t ion wi th in a natural env i ronment along with some of the text o f the Oracle s taf f ' s last I Ching change. The I Ching is the ancient Chinese book of d ivinat ion that was widely used because it contained a p ro found v iew of humani ty woven into the cycles and processes of nature. Its use was based on a system o f pa t te rned randomness and chance:

43 K u a i - - B r e a k t h r o u g h , D a n g e r - - It is necessary to no t i fy one's own city. It does not fu r the r to resort to arms... There fore , it is impor tan t to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. In this way f inding no opponent the sharp edge of the weapons of evil become dulled. Finally, the best way to f ight evil is to make energet ic progress in the good.

C O N C L U S I O N

The Oracle and the H a i g h t - A s h b u r y were a manifes ta t ion of forces that are rare in human history. These forces carr ied vast undercurrents o f unfulf i l led need that caused new ideas and ideals to burst fo r th in the creat ive work of a r - tists, poets, musicians, and philosophers. The ener - gies and echoes are still reverbera t ing through t ime and cultures.

Few people realize the t remendous inf luence that the H a i g h t - A s h b u r y c o m m u n i t y and its voice, the San Francisco Oracle, had as both symbol and focal point for the social, artistic, psychological , and spiri tual changes in that chaotic period. The Sixties came close to br inging about a revolut ion, and, looking backward , perhaps the per iod 's fai lure was a consummat ion sorely missed; but the Sixties wi thout a doubt b rought fo r th a renaissance and a revi tal izat ion of Amer ican and world culture.

When I look a round and speculate what Amer ica would be like if we had somehow gone f r o m the grey f lannel E i senhower -McCar thy i t e F i f -

ties to the 3 -p i ece - su i t Reagan Eighties without the in tercedence of the Beat, hippie , Civil Rights, and ant iwar movements , I wonder i f the result of such a t ime warp would have been a direct line wi thout much resistance to fascism or even holocaust.

The Beat and hippie movements b rought the values and exper iences of an anarchist ic, artistic sub-cu l tu re , and a secret and ancient tradit ion of t ranscendental and esoteric knowledge and exper ience into the mains t ream of cultural awareness. It s t imulated break throughs in every field f rom compute r science to psychology, and gave us back a sense of being the originators of our lives and social fo rms instead of the hapless robot receptors of a dull and de te rmined conformi ty .

The sense of personal and social f r eedom mani fes ted in the Sixties has had its antithesis in the react ion of the Eighties t rying to block the road to personal and social evolution. But the f reedoms that have become real to us cannot be beaten back. The values of compassion, creativi ty, social equali ty, love, and peace will be victorious over war, fear , control, and injustice. In the Six- ties in all the d i f fe ren t m o v e m e n t s - - f r o m the sac- rif ices of life and l imb of the Civil Rights move - ment , and the solidarity and c o m m i t m e n t of the ant iwar movement , to the cultural warr iors and internal pi lgr ims called h i p p i e s - - w e showed that we must , each of us, work together to create a world that will survive and flourish.

REFERENCES

Harr ison, Hank. The Dead. Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts, 1980.

Lee, Mart in , and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dream, The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Peck, Abe. Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Roll ing Stone Press, 1984. 4] I)

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(PDF) The San Francisco oracle: A brief history - DOKUMEN.TIPS (2024)