Slaying Mithra: Self-help, Human Potential and the Luciferian Perversion of the West - Part I

By David Gosselin

Chiaro di Luna – Massimo Livadiotti

For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered — that of the mystics. 
—Aldous Huxley

The Western oligarchy’s tradition of importing eastern cults into Western culture has been a long-standing one. Indeed, much of Christianity’s early battle within both the political and spiritual arena was against the legacy of mystery cults dominating Babylon, Persia, Rome and Delphi. From peasants up to the elites and emperors, a pantheon of mystery cults was used to corral and manage the various segments of the population, keeping them mystified through a medley of rites, rituals, and superstitions. From the Egyptian cult of Horus and Isis-Osiris to the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter, or the Persian and Babylonian solar cults of Mithra and Marduk, the use of Eastern cults and mysticism to maintain top-down control over societies has been around since time immemorial.

Take the cult of Mithra. Once a Persian solar deity, the Mithraic cult would be imported into the Roman Empire and quickly become popular among the Imperial Roman army from the first to the fourth century CE. It would become one of the most powerful cults among the Roman legions, boasting among its initiates none other than the emperor Julian the Apostate. In fact, the emperor Julian would renounce Christianity in favor of the ancient mystery schools repackaged as Mithraism. By that time, the cult of Mithra had spread across the Western Roman empire, with its temples often curiously appearing beneath Christian churches.

As even Carl Jung wrote, Mithraism was seen as the main spiritual contender to Christianity, representing the imperial class’s preferred system of deification through exclusive mystery rites. Jung spoke of “the two great antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side and Mithraism on the other.” As journalist and researcher Mathew Ehret describes in his “Carl Jung’s Gnostic Revival, Abraxas, and the 20th Century Cult of Mithra (part 5)”:

“Situating his preference for Mithraism against Christianity, Jung stated that Mithra worship ‘is nature worship in the best sense of the word; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world.’”

For, Jung saw in the Mithraic and ancient mystery schools a divine rite of self-actualization, rebirth and “deification”:

“Awe surrounds the mysteries, particularly the mystery of deification. This was one of the most important of the mysteries- it gave certainty of immortality. One gets a peculiar feeling from being put through such an initiation. The important part that led up to the deification was the snake’s encoiling of me… The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous Deus Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s head, and the face of the man that of a lion. This statue has only been found in the mystery grottoes (the underchurches [Mithraeum], the last remnants of the catacombs).” [Jung, Analytical Psychology, p. 98]

Then there was the cult of Cybele-Attis, which specifically targeted the Roman aristocracy and involved, among other things, rites of self-castration. As Ehret writes in “The Ancient Occult Roots of the Fabian Society, Cybele and the Mysteries of Eleusis (Part 4)”

“Both sects (Mithra and Cybele) featured death and rebirth rituals, involving the shedding of old identities of initiates in favor of new constructs groomed by a higher priesthood.

“The priests- dubbed ‘Hierophants’ of the Cybele Cult (called ‘Galli’) were all castrated as part of their initiation which is why the conservative families of Rome ultimately demanded the cult be removed after too many of their sons were given over to ritual castrations. Wasson notes that “Followers of her cult would work themselves into an emotional frenzy and self-mutilate, symbolic of her lover’s self-castration.”

And then there was the magical cult of Eleusis. Dedicated to the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, participants would travel from across the Greco-Roman world to the cult site of Eleusis for over 2000 years. There, initiates would imbibe a magical elixir, which would reveal its hidden mysteries and wisdom (if one was lucky).

While not ostensibly dedicated to any archaic deity, careful observers will note that the hunger for mystery has made a remarkable comeback in recent years—as have the promises of a “New Age” for mankind. From a desire to re-acquaint oneself with the salvational mysteries of Mother Nature through various forms of collective self-sacrifice to psychedelic “self-actualization” using magical substances to dissolve one’s ego and remove all limiting beliefs, rather than something new, could the latest spiritual trends signal the revival of something very old?

New Wine in Old Skins

Deus Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries

As we’ve already outlined elsewhere, the conceptual frameworks necessary to re-integrate mystery religions into a re-imagined Western image of man was carefully elaborated in the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) “Changing Images of Man” document. There, the authors examine how very old and supposedly more “sustainable” ideas could be re-adapted to a twenty-first century technological and scientific context.

Making use of the latest psychoanalytic insights into man’s “self-image,” Systems Theory, Cybernetics, anthropology, psychedelics and drug-infused mysticism, the SRI authors dedicate key portions of their program to contrasting the Judeo-Christian and Classical Greek images of man with earlier “archaic” Greek, Zoroastrian and Babylonian varieties.

Perhaps most importantly the authors write:

“In contrast to the Greek notion of ‘man,’ the Judeo-Christian view holds that ‘man’ is essentially separate from the rightful master over nature. This view inspired a sharp rate of increase in technological advances in Western Europe throughout the Medieval period. On the other hand, the severe limitations of scholastic methodology, and the restrictive views of the Church, prevented the formulation of an adequate scientific paradigm. It was not until the Renaissance brought a new climate of individualism and free inquiry that the necessary conditions for a new paradigm were provided. 

“Interestingly, the Renaissance scholars turned to the Greeks to rediscover the empirical method. The Greeks possessed an objective science of things "out there," which D. Campbell (1959) terms the “epistemology of the other.” This was the basic notion that nature was governed by laws and principles which could be discovered, and it was this that the Renaissance scholars then developed into science as we have come to know it.”

A key statement that should stand out is: “And it was this that the Renaissance scholars then developed into science as we have come to know it.” For, the SRI notes that the “official” view “laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution to come.” The purpose of the “Changing Images of Man” program would be to create a new “self-image” for Western man, based on a revamped Gaia-centric “ecological ethic.”

The authors write:

“An ecological ethic is necessary if man is to avoid destroying the complex life-support system on which our continued existence on the planet depends. It must recognize that available resources, including space, are limited and must portray the human as an integral part of the natural world. It must reflect the ‘new scarcity’ in an ethic of fragility, of doing more with less. It must involve not only a sense of mutual self-interest between individuals, but also the interests of fellow men and the more extensive interests among fellow creatures (both near and far, both present and future).

“An ecological ethic would imply movement toward a homeostatic (yet dynamic) economic and ecological system, in which the human acts in partnership with nature to harmonize ecological relationships and in establishing satisfactory recycling mechanisms. Such an ethic is necessary to achieve a synergism of heterogeneous individual and organizational micro-decisions such that the resultant macro-decisions are satisfactory to those who made the component decisions, and to society.” (The Changing Images of Man p.114)

The SRI authors correctly observe that the Renaissance image of man allowed for a natural elaboration of the Classical Judeo-Christian and Greek image of man, such that each individual was understood to be distinct from all other living things by virtue of his creative powers of reason. This conscious notion of imago viva dei (a living image of God) and capax dei (having a god-like capacity) would unleash a flurry of investigations into the workings of the natural laws of the universe and the ability to the effectively increase his power over nature. The result was a natural qualitative and quantitative increase in human population growth.

While often obscured by various theological and philosophical narratives, this essential Promethean view of man, famously depicted in the work of Aeschylus as the fire-wielding Titan, epitomizes the qualities which the archaic, alchemical, and Gnostic schools have always sought to conceal or suppress using a medley of magical rites and superstitions. What were these earlier “archaic” schools?

The SRI authors write:

“The Gnostics, whose beliefs appear to have been a synthesis of Babylonian, Indian, and Egyptian, as well as Semitic and Zoroastrian thought, took another view. Agreeing with the Semitic belief in one Eternal and Supreme Being, and the Zoroastrian view of the World and its unredeemed citizens as savable, the Gnostics took as central ‘saving’ power of gnosis-extraordinary and experientially intimate knowledge of the mysteries of existence.”

The authors continue:

“The import of this view, as contrasted with the view which ultimately came to be the ‘official’ one, is portrayed by the Gospel according to Thomas: His disciples said to Him: When will the Kingdom come? Jesus said: It will not come by expectation; they will not say: "See there." But the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it. (Saying 113) This tension between the Gnostic understanding of apocalyptic symbolism and that of the Early Church which condemned it as heretical is the essence of what is sometimes called "the Judeo-Christian Problem." Is an apocalyptic Messiah to come (or come again) and thus grandly save the elect from evil, or is the "Kingdom of the Father" already here within us, within ourselves and our world-as is "Buddha-consciousness" and the "Mother Light"-only waiting to be recognized and fulfilled? The conundrum was inherited also by Islam, and supplied the whole sense of the contention bet. Because the Gnostic path was condemned as heretical, of necessity it went underground, and hence its influence on our culture is much less visible than are the effects of the orthodox views. It and views like it, however, have been kept alive by secret societies such as the Sufis, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians, whose influence on the founding of the United States is attested to by the symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States, on the back of the dollar bill. The Semitic/Zoroastrian/orthodox Christian image meanwhile came into dominance in Western Europe. This image of the ‘human as separate’ laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution to come.”

—The Changing Images of Man

Towards the goal of rehabilitating this “underground” current, seen as more amenable to an Earth-centric worldview, the SRI authors offer a new vision based on individual “self-actualization,” that is, progress not based on man’s mastery of natural laws, but on new mystical levels of “consciousness.”

The SRI authors write:

“The desirability of this characteristic of the new Image is based on the view that the proper end of all individual experience is the evolutionary and harmonious development of the emergent self (both as a person and as a part of wide collectivities), and that the appropriate function of social institutions is to create an environment which will foster that process. This is the ethic which must supersede the man-over-nature ethic and the material-growth-and-consumption ethic which have given rise to a large portion of man's problems as he became increasingly preoccupied with solely material aspects of exploiting and controlling nature for selfish ends on a fragile and finite planet where the pursuit of such goals can be suicidal.”

In a word: man should give up the Promethean fire and return the mystical bosom of “Mother Nature.” For, despite the will of the archaic gods and their magicians, the discovery of “fire” only gave hubristic and selfish man more power to destroy himself and Mother Earth, giving him the illusion of “progress” over pre-Renaissance ages, so we are told. But by returning to the mysteries old man could finally re-acquaint himself with the sacred “experiential gnosis” which had been the well-spring of “mystery” and “magic.”

In doing so, man would finally rediscover his true self.

The Search for the Self

T. H. Huxley with Julian in 1893

Much advance, both in biological evolution and in psychosocial evolution, including advance in science, is of course obtained by adding minute particulars, but at intervals something like crystallization from a supersaturated solution occurs, as when science arrives at an entirely new concept, which then unifies an enormous amount of factual data and ideas, as with Newton or Darwin. Major advances occur in a series of large steps, from one form of organization to another. In our psychosocial evolution I believe we are now in a position to make a new major advance.
—Sir Julian Huxley, first director of UNESCO (1968)

Fast-forward to the 1960s. We find a new burgeoning counterculture of disenchanted young generations and a new eco-system of “spiritual movements” sprouting across the sunny lands of California. “Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” are all the rave and “liberation” is the order of the day. The age of abundance, made possible by the legacy of European Continental Science, the Renaissance and the American Revolution, created an age of luxury never before seen in humankind. So, what came to be known as the Baby Boomer generation would experience an unprecedented age of abundance, creating the rare occasion to forget exactly what made the luxurious freedoms and abundance of the twentieth century possible in the first place.

So plentiful was the abundance that as famed eugenicist Julian Huxley remarked, mankind had reached a new evolutionary landmark: for the first time in his history man was defined not by the struggle for survival, but the struggle for fulfilment.

While having less of a public image, Sir Julian Huxley was by no means less prolific or influential than his famed predictive programming guru and dystopian novelist brother, Aldous Huxley. A committed eugenicist like his brother, Julian sought his fulfilment and continuation of his family legacy in the goal of synthesizing the Malthusian notion of Darwinian Natural Selection with a brand of spiritual development that would allow the earlier imperial theory of evolution to transcend the limitations of a strict materialism, thus allowing for a new spiritual “fulfilment.”

As Huxley scholar Alison Bashford writes, Julian would take great interest in the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy, which he considered “a symbol of the reconciliation between scientific humanism and Catholic orthodoxy”:

“Here was a vision that on the one hand satisfied and served Julian’s agnostic science and on the other offered a cosmology so expansive and profound as to be a kind of unification of all phenomena, a cosmic holism. It was an attempt to bring knowledge of the universe into one order; as Julian put it, ‘the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organization, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.’ Teilhard himself used the word ‘cosmogensis’ rather than cosmology, to denote a continual process of becoming. And like Julian, Teilhard looked to an almost post-human future. He spoke of ‘ultra-hominisation,’ a little like Julian’s ‘transhumanism,’ to capture the process ‘in which man will have so far transcended himself as to demand some new appellation.’ Like Nietzsche, Teilhard and Julian Huxley thought ‘man’ was unfinished.” (Bashford., 397-398)

To this end Julian would become the father of “Evolutionary Humanism” and “Transhumanism,” which could meet the demands of a human species no longer locked in the eternal struggle for survival, but now newly reborn and free to finally self-actualize, always within the bounds of Malthusian Darwinian Natural Selection, of course.

Julian would serve as the first director of the United Nations Educational and Social Organization (UNESCO), whose chief task was to oversee the education policies of the modern West. Today, UNESCO’S tentacles span across the entirety of Western public education, quietly but busily carrying out the vision of its first director. Such recent examples include the UN’s Inner Development Goals and Agenda 2030, along with the attempt to implement new education policies modeled on Behavioral Genetics and “polygenic scoring,” the latter two based on DNA differences. Thus, whether through scientific literature, UN agencies and NGOs, science “fiction,” or psychedelics, both Julian and his brother Aldous concerned themselves as much with the biological and physical dimensions of modern evolution as with its “spiritual” dimensions. Chief among the constraints for this new fulfilment would be the question of population control.

As outlined by the SRI “Changing Images of Man” project, the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” and countless Malthusian-inspired statistical models from Stanford, MIT and other brain trusts, modern scientific progress and industrial civilization would have to be curbed in one way or another if humanity were to survive the on-coming biblical floods and fires. But how to convince man to give up the Promethean fire willingly?

Today we can observe that a new religion of self-actualization, not unlike the one promised to man by the pantheon of ancient gods and mystery cults has proliferated under countless new isms and philosophical schools. From Secular Humanism to Deconstructionism, Dianetics, Psycho-cybernetics, Humanistic Psychology and the flurry of “life-coach” and “self-help” offshoots, modern Dialectical Materialism to Environmentalism to the Freudian Left, New Age spirituality, countless new narratives emerged which while ostensibly allowing for a wide variety of “free thought” and a rich dialectic, would all conveniently overlook man’s essential journey from the shadow-land of archaic man to the modern world—as correctly detailed by the SRI authors themselves.

And this is where our Mithraic saga takes an interesting turn.

Esalen: A New Panentheism

Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere. All those pointless cockfights between Man and Nature, between Nature and God, between the Flesh and the Spirit! Wisdom doesn’t make those insane separation… Darwin took the old [totemic Wisdom] and raised it to the level of biology… And now it’s up to us to take another half turn up the spiral… The new conscious Wisdom—the kind of Wisdom that was prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taosim and Tantra—is biological theory realized in living practice, is Darwinism raised to the level of compassion and spiritual insight.
—Aldous Huxley, Island

A key institution which served as a landmark for the advent of a Gnostic revival and New Age mysticism is the Esalen Institute. As we’ll see, getting ourselves acquainted with one of the key New Age pilgrimage sites and the many figures in its orbit opens a window into the story of how the once-lost ancient “Gnosis” of archaic man would begin to magically re-appear in all its “experiential” glory.

Named after the Native American Esalen Indians, the institute has like many other admirers of the archaic schools of sacred “Gnosis” appropriated Native American culture for its own wily purposes, leveraging the tragedies and historical evils committed against Native Americans as a clever tool to promote a return to the good old times of Magna Mater. For, this was an age in which man was still enchanted by mystery, leading from the heart, rather than the mind, the latter having made man cold and sick, with an insatiable desire to always have more, so we are told.

Not surprisingly, Carl Jung, whose Eranos Conferences served as inspiration for Esalen’s own therapeutic/intellectual forum, was also very moved by the lore of the Native Americans. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounted his encounter with the Native Americans he met in 1925. Apparently, though brief, the experience supposedly made him aware of his imprisonment “in the cultural consciousness of the White Man.”

Jung reflects on the transformative experience he had meeting with the Native American people of the Pueblo tribe:

“See,” Ochwiay Biano said, “how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad.” (Jung., 247-248)

Jung writes:

“I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. “They say that they think with their heads,” he replied. “Why of course. What do you think with? I asked him in surprise.

“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.

I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man.” (Jung., 248)

Finally, Jung reflected on the implications of this meeting for his overall worldview of modern man and his search for meaning:

“The Pueblo Indians are unusually closemouthed, and in matters of their religion absolutely inaccessible. They make it a policy to keep their religious practices a secret, and this secret is so strictly guarded that I abandoned as hopeless any attempt at direct questioning. Never before had I run into such an atmosphere of secrecy; the religions of civilized nations today are all accessible; their sacraments have long ago ceased to be mysteries. Here, however, the air was filled with a secret known to all the communicants, but to which whites could gain no access. This strange situation gave me an inkling of Eleusis, whose secret was known to one nation and yet never betrayed. I understood what Pausanias or Herodotus felt when he wrote: “I am not permitted to name the name of that god.” This was not, I felt, mystification, but a vital mystery whose betrayal might bring about the downfall of the community as well as of the individual. Preservation of the secret gives the Pueblo Indian pride and the power to resist the dominant whites. It gives him cohesion and unity; and I feel sure that the Pueblos as an individual community will continue to exist as long as their mysteries are not desecrated.” (Jung., 249)

Notably, Jung would point out that the Pueblo Indians literally believed that their rituals were what caused the sun to move and light the Earth, without which all things would die. This sense of cosmic “meaning making” would be seen by Jung as essential to any new modern mythology for man.

Interestingly, leading World Economic Forum (WEF) spokesman and reigning Monarch of the House of Windsor, King Charles III, voiced a similar affection for Native American culture. As a leading spokesman for the WEF and representative of the hereditary bloodlines of “Old Europe,” the “Green King” Charles spoke of how the wisdom of Canadian First Nations people might offer useful insights into how humankind might bring man back into balance with Mother Nature. Speaking on the BBC 4 in 2020, the then Prince Charles said:

“I’ve been talking to quite a lot of the First Nations leaders in Canada over the last year, and it’s high time we paid more attention to their wisdom, and the wisdom of indigenous communities and First Nations people all around the world.

“We can learn so much from them as to how we can re-right the balance and start to rediscover a sense of the sacred, because nature—Mother Nature—is our sustainer, we are part of nature. We are nature.”

Considering the fact that the same reigning House of Windsor presided over the atrocities committed against Native Americans in Canada for centuries, one might find the Damascus Road conversion of one of the oldest hereditary blue blood families of imperial Europe somewhat suspect. Might there be another reason for the recent interest in the mysteries of “Mother Nature,” Native Americans, myths and psychedelia?

As historian Jeffrey Kripal notes in his Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religions, one of the chief spiritual fathers the Esalen-inspired New Age Mecca in America was professor of comparative Eastern religions at Stanford University, Friedrich Spiegelberg. Both Esalen founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price found themselves transformed by Spiegelberg’s lectures on comparative Eastern religions at Stanford University. Spiegelberg would coin the term “religion of no religion,” which would serve as the clarion call for a new American mysticism.

The descendent of a Swiss aristocratic family, Spiegelberg would embody the nostalgic longing for the lost archaic spiritual traditions supplanted by modern Christianity in the Western world. The outlook is embodied in the following mystical experience Spiegelberg had, which Kripal recounts as follows:

“Spiegelberg’s phrase ‘the religion of no religion’ had deep existential roots. It was based on a mystical encounter with the natural world he experienced as a young theology student. He was walking in a wheat field on a bright day when, quite suddenly, his ego vanished and what he calls the Self appeared. Through this altered perspective, he began to see that God was shining through everything in the world, that everything was divine, that there was nothing but holiness. As he reveled in this revelation, he came around a corner and found himself confronting a gray church. He was horrified. How, he asked himself, could such a building claim to hold something more sacred, more divine, than what he had just experienced in the poppies, birds, and sky of the now divinized cosmos? It all seemed preposterous, utterly preposterous, to him. From the theological scandal of this initial altered state, Spiegelberg developed and theorized what was essentially (or non-essentially) an apophatic mystical theology that approaches religious language, symbol, and myth as non-literal projective expressions of some deeper metaphysical truth that, paradoxically, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent—a kind of dialectical or mystical humanism, if you will. It was just such a comparative mystical theology grounded in the natural world, and just such a critical but deep engagement with the religious traditions of the world, that inspired Murphy and his colleagues in their new venture.”

What were Spiegelberg’s main fields of interest in respect to comparative Eastern religions? Kripal writes:

“There are three historical traditions that Spiegelberg singles out as particularly suggestive of the religion of no religion: Zen Buddhism, which he always saw as a prototype of the religion of no religion; western alchemy, which recognizes that salvation is ultimately a matter of matter and body; and Indian yoga, which recognizes, particularly in its Tantric forms, that the final temple of the divine is, again, the human body.” (Kripal., 52)

Worth noting at this point is that the same Spiegelberg who inspired the vision for a new religion of no religion was a fellow native of Jung’s Switzerland and one his close collaborating visionaries. Esalen would serve as a new unifying force and spiritual Mecca which could bring together the best of modern psychoanalytic insights, research into Eastern religion and archetypal myth-making, weaving them into a new spiritual “religion of no religion” specifically tailored for a modern American democratic psyche.

As Kripal writes:

“Eranos and Esalen are related European and American countercultural weavings of radical religious experimentation, technical scholarship, and popular culture that provided the intellectual substance for broad cultural transformations: Eranos for the comparative study or religion that appeared in American universities and colleges in the 1960s and ‘70s; Esalen for the human potential movement that built on the intellectual foundations of this same comparative method to fashion a new American mysticism. Key bridge figures between Eranos and Esalen, moreover, such as Frederic Spiegelberg and Joseph Campbell render this historical narrative of the transformation of comparative religion from European academic method to practiced American mysticism particularly apt.” (Kripal., 6-7)

Kripal then continues:

“Psychology was one of the three central pillars of Esalen announced in the earliest brochures, along with psychical research and drug-induced mysticism. And indeed, Esalen has been a profoundly psychological culture from day one. The common assumption is that this psychological culture—with its emphases on personal myth-making, synchronicity, and archetypes—has been primarily Jungian in orientation and content. There is considerable truth in this assumption, particularly with such figures as Frederic Spiegelberg, who know Jung personally and traveled to Zurich with his family on a regular basis to lecture in Jung’s Institute there; Joseph Campbell, whose understanding of myth is partially indebted to Jung’s; and Stanislav Grof, who employs archetypal language in his writing.” (Kripal., 142)

However, despite the myth-making and archetypal traditions, Kripal notes that while Esalen was modeled on the earlier Jung co-founded Eranos Conferences, and had an affinity for its “synchronistic” world outlook, Esalen was not itself Jungian, but decidedly Freudian:

“But a Jungian framing of Esalen obscures more than it reveals. Campbell was not really a Jungian, as he himself repeatedly pointed out, and his writings are far more Freudian than is often realized.” (Kripal., 142)

Why was the Freudian lineage so important to Esalen? Kripal writes:

“As Murphy’s reference to an occult Freud and the foundation’s invocation of Neoplatonism make clear, this Freudian lineage at Esalen is definitely not an orthodox one. We are hardly on the East Coast with the American Psychoanalytic Association. We are rather on the West Coast with a kind of psychoanalytic mysticism of energy whose central move—a thorough embrace of instinctual powers as essentially good and wise, even divine—can be traced back most immediately to Wilhelm Reich and a developing school of psychanalytic thought that Paul Robinson has apply named the Freudian Left. The classicist turned poetic philosopher Norman O. Brown was probably the clearest and most widely read author of this Freudian Left in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Indeed, his Love’s Body (1966)—which begins with Freud and ends with Buddhist Tantra—functioned as something of intellectual Bible for the counterculture.” (Kripal., 143)

Kripal goes on to cite an exemplary passage from Love’s Body, which reads:

“Knowledge is carnal knowledge. A subterranean passage between mind and body underlies all analogy; no word is metaphysical with its first being physical; and the body that is the measure of all things is sexual. All metaphors are sexual; a penis in every convex object and vagina in every concave one. Symbolism is polymorphous perversity. Orthodox psychoanalysis warns against the resexualization of thought and speech; orthodox psychoanalysis bows down before the reality principle… Nothing wrong, except the refusal to play: when our eyes are opened to the symbolic meaning, our only refuge is loss of shame, polymorphous perversity, pansexualism; penis everywhere. As in Tantric Yoga, in which any sexual act may become a form of mystic medication, and any mystic state may be interpreted sexually.” (Kripal., 142-143)

Killing the Buddha

I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego has robbed us of life’s meaning and made us enemies of the planet, ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrong-headed assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style. It is time for change.
—Terrence McKenna, Food of the Gods

As Kripal notes, Arnold Toynbee, a preeminent historian of the day and leading voice within Anglo-American brain trust Chatham House, remarked that the introduction of Buddhism into the West would be seen as one of the pivotal points in Western man’s spiritual evolution in the twentieth century. For, via these Tantric traditions, practices in achieving “altered states” of consciousness would allow Western man to once again open his spiritual eyes to the “alternate realities” which had been suppressed under the supposed tyranny of the “official view.” In the eyes of Esalen, Toynbee and a nest of Theosophist intellectuals, meditation practices would serve as a key to reviving what Shamanist and psycho-chemical guru Terrence McKenna referred to as “archaic techniques in ecstasy.”

So, new figures among the Freudian Left emerged, including Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown, and other intellectuals advocating for a new enlightenment. Specifically, they would advocate for an “enlightenment of the body,” which would allow man to harness the hidden occult energies and “experiential gnosis” which the modern Christian and Classical Greek world had tyrannically repressed, so we are told. As Kripal notes, chief among this new age of psycho-spiritual gurus was theosophist and psychedelics guru Alan Watts:

“As for Watts’ Joyous Cosmology, the subtitle alone suggests that the enlightenment of the body was quickly entering the chemical, and even molecular and genetic, levels through a kind of micromysticism. With Leary, moreover (who co-wrote the foreword to The Joyous Cosmology with his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert), it would not be long before an entire genetic mysticism of DNA stands was set loose in the culture. A very small number of writers, artists, and intellectuals were transforming an entire generation, and they were doing it with what were essentially chemical-spiritual tracts infused, more often than not, with a kind of subtle reductionism of the sacred to the chemical.” (Kripal., 123)

As even a standard Wikipedia entry lays out, Watts was an early initiate of the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society:

“In 1924 in London Humphreys founded the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society. According to Humphreys, conceptually the Theosophy and Buddhism are identical: the single life after many incarnations returns to the Unmanifest; all the individual consciousness are unreal compared to the "Self", which is a reflection of the Absolute; karma and reincarnation are a basic laws. Path lays through self-fulfillment with Nirvana in the end. Thus, wrote Humphreys, the difference between the Theosophy and Buddhism is only in emphasis.

“Thanks to the missionary efforts of Dharmapala, in 1926 the British Buddhists established their branch Maha Bodhi Society. At the same time the Buddhist Lodge was transformed into the British Buddhist Society, whose president become Humphreys.^[34][35] Humphreys was a tireless lay Buddhist as a lecturer, journalist, writer and organizer. He was the author and/or the editor of The Buddhist Lodge Monthly Bulletin, Buddhism in England, The Middle Way, and The Theosophical Review.^[34]

“British philosopher and Buddhist author Alan Watts became a member of the Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society in London at the age of 15. His first book, The Spirit of Zen came out when he was 19 years old.”

Now, mankind would finally have the chance to reunite the material and immaterial, matter and spirit, body and mind in all its alchemical glory.

Of course, there was a twist: it wasn’t the real thing. The classical Eastern practices and their tradition of classical learning, which formed the bedrock of Chinese civilization or the Indian mystical tradition would be largely ignored. What would be selected and repurposed was a specific variety of the tantric East.

For instance, Kripal quotes Watts’ Psychotherapy East and West:

“In the stress upon the erotic and delightful character of this new feeling for the world, Westerners inclined to oriental mysticism will also demur out of the feeling that liberation is a purely “spiritual” condition. They join hands with Freud and the hard-boiled psychoanalysts in basic mistrust of the physical world, that is, in alienation from organism, forgetting that when India and Tibet looked for the supreme symbol of the reconciliation of opposites they chose shakta and shakti, the god and the goddess, the figure and the ground, the Yes and the No, in eternal intercourse—using the most erotic image imaginable.”

Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (p. 169)

Freud believed that civilization was ultimately a system organized around the control of man’s animal/unconscious drives and the suppression of the id in service of the “reality principle” i.e. one must repress his/her selfish urges and impulses in order to attain status and advance in a polite society, thus securing his self-interest. But the Freudian Left would be known to “out-Freud Freud.” They would argue that the traditional make-up of Western society based on sexual repression and the Super Ego had to be transcended by a new “spiritual Eros,” in which the “reality principle,” thanks to the advent of modern industrial civilization, could now be subordinated to the “pleasure principle.” This thesis would be famously articulated in Eros and Civilization by a leading Frankfurt School and Freudian Left thinker, Herbert Marcuse.

All these ideas could be found depicted in their own fantastical form in Aldous Huxley’s final utopian novel Island (1962). There we find the denizens of the fictional island of Pala controlled by a medley of tantric mediation and sex rituals, “free love” and psychedelic-infused “beatific glimpses”—all of which has led them to renounce so-called Western capitalism and industrialism. As a result, the citizens of “Pala” are liberated from their egos and selfish drives and attain their higher self-actualized “self.”

Kripal describes the influence of Huxley’s final masterpiece of predictive programming as follows:

“Even more relevant to the history of Esalen—indeed, prophetic of that future story—was Huxley’s very last novel, Island, which appeared in March of 1962, just one month after he had introduced a still unknown Timothy Leary to “the ultimate yoga” of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur. The novel’s pragmatic celebration of Tantric eroticism and its harsh criticism of ascetic forms of spirituality (which the novel links to sexual repression, a guilt-ridden homosexuality, and aggressive militarism) marks a significant shift in Huxley’s spiritual worldview, at least as he was expressing it in print. After all, if in 1942 he could write a carefully diplomatic forward to a book about a Hindu saint who considered all women to be aspects of the Mother Goddess and so would have sex with none of them (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), now he was suggesting openly in 1962 that “to think of Woman as essentially Holy” was an expression of a conflicted male homosexuality anxious to avoid any and all heterosexual contact. It is much better, the novel now suggests, to think of the erotic union of man and woman as holy, that is, to see the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred. Hence, “the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.” Late in life Huxley appears to have been moving away from his earlier ascetic Vedanta, so prominently featured in The Perennial Philosophy, toward a new psychologically inflected Tantra.” (Kripal., 89)

One can read Huxley’s Island and find passages like:

“Liberation,” Dr Robert began again, "the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it's like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this timelessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that the moksha-medicine will bring you in the years to come? Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be? Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you'll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that's for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird's advice: Attention! Pay attention and you'll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar.” (Huxley, 208.) 

Towards this end, the Freudian Left would emerge as a key intellectual driver for this new Eastern-infused Tantric occult transmutation and transmutation.

Kripal writes:

“It should hardly surprise us, then, when this same Freudian Left will later provide the broad intellectual context through the shakti (occult energy) of Asian Tantra will be transmitted and transmuted into American culture. When the Tantric guru Bhagwan Rajneesh observed that “Freud only got to the third chakra,” he was saying at least two things, namely, that Freud’s drive theory and Tantra kundalini yoga are comparable models of occult energy and sublimation, and that Freud missed the “deeper” or “higher” bliss of the id beyond the first three centers of the anal, genital, and digestive systems (that is, the first three chakras). Freud, in other words, was not wrong; he simply did not go far enough. The language is decidedly Indian here, but the basic point is remarkably similar to some of the voices of the Freudian Left who out-Freud Freud by turning to explicitly religious or poetic languages in order to embrace and celebrate the id as a mystical force of orgasmic bliss, social revolution, and, as we will see, even bodily transfiguration. What we have in the Freudian Left, in other words, is a kind of left-handed psychoanalysis that always begins with Freud but often ends with a re-visioned Western Tantra.” (Kirpal., 144)

But there were many New Age intellectuals in Esalen’s orbit, all of whom had a direct hand in shaping this new “enlightenment of the body” with mystical psycho-chemical tracks and clever adaptations of Eastern Tantra. From Theosophist circles in India bringing news of the meditation masters, to Zen and Toaist teachings aimed at realigning one’s conscious faculties with the present, a medley of tantric beliefs was brought by way of New Age gurus, beat poets, chemical shamans and psychedelic preachers, all of whom were giddy about introducing the ancient “yoga of love,” archaic ecstasies and “Beatific glimpses” to disenchanted Western audiences.

Books like Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, McKenna’s Food of the Gods, Alan Watt’s The Joyous Cosmology and Dr. Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead would quickly transform the budding anti-war movements into “free love” hippies who now had the novel luxury of “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” That virtually all these psychedelic gurus and proselytizers were operating as intelligence operatives for the Military Industrial Complex and its spy agencies running the very same military and spying programs being ostensibly opposed by the counter-cultural youth you need not notice. Suffice it to say that by reviving those lost “archaic techniques in ecstasy” which opened man’s eyes to a variety of alternate realities, modern man could be led from the tyranny of reason back to a new age of compassion, incarnate experiential gnosis and “intuition”—the coming “Age of Aquarius.”

As Dr. Timothy Leary reflected on the challenges of uprooting modern industrial civilization and its Judeo-Christian tradition in his book Flashback, an exchange with Aldous Huxley includes passages like:

“These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.”

Leary then reflects on the challenge:

“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

This article premiered on the following Canadian intelligence and history website:

Slaying Mithra: Self-help, Human Potential and the Luciferian Perversion of the West – the Canadian patriot

Stay tuned for part II

David Gosselin is a poet, researcher, and translator in Montreal, Canada. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Chain​ed Muse. His epic poem in iambic blank verse, Athena, appears in the latest issue of New Lyre Magazine.

Athena - An Epic Dream I