Sex, Drugs & Magick: Beethoven Himself Turning Into A Gigantic Female Bull

Fossil Angel- Cameron

Sex, Drugs & Magick: Prelude, Ice Maiden: The Story of Jane 

or, You Know She's A Drag By The Jive Things She's Done

I'm not sure I feel comfortable writing about frigidity. I am familiar with the concept, but I am unsure that it is or was anything more than a result of the psychological war our society wages against female sexuality. It is significant to me that "Jane's" story closes with her writing for magazines aligned with the nascent Women's Liberation movement. 

...I think it has been almost two weeks since I wrote the previous paragraph. I apologize. My profession has a the delightful (irritating) proviso that one must continue their education (waste time you don't have) to keep you license. I just finished a gauntlet of "streamlined" classes that left little time left for anything aside from light reading and being with my family in the evenings. I am now able to breathe a bit and I am back. In class, we just finished our Higgs-centric unit and I suggest checking out his latest newsletter that seemed like a fitting coda for my qualms, this time around. 

Two weeks does give one time to think, even when there isn't much time to think and I thought to ask my lovely wife, who is conveniently female, a historian and a therapist, about her ideas about so-called "frigidity." This is an approximation of our conversation: 

Frigidity surprisingly does exist as a diagnosis anymore, but under a different name in the DSM-V; it is now deemed "female sexual interest/desire disorder." Hilariously, this and its male counterpart "male hypoactive sexual desire disorder" (interesting that terms are different, no?) include what we would today call asexuality and cheating on a partner. I wondered if frigidity could have been caused by underdiagnoses of endometriosis, pelvic inflammation or other conditions that cause sex to be painful. That ended with a "maybe" and a discussion of vaginismus. I have been under the impression that vaginismus mostly occurs in religious communities and it seems that the data would back that impression up. Therefore I'd wage a lot of "frigid" women were merely warped by their repressive, nigh-criminal upbringings. 

I wanted to ask about anorgasmia which I was interested in for two reasons: one) I had a hunch that it didn't truly exist and two) I share Wilson's impression of parties who haven't had an orgasm as having been unlucky in the lover lottery. (Can you imagine the amount of men that were knowledgeable about women's pleasure in the fifties/sixties?) It seems that, cases of nerve damage and medication excepted, anorgasmia is almost entirely due to what are, in my opinion, easily identifiable psychological traumas. I'm not saying that periods of decreased sexual interest or decreased orgasms are a reason to rush to the doctor, but if they should persist (for more than four hours) one should probably consider checking in with a professional. 

But Jane didn't have that option, given that she was a woman in the mid-twentieth century. How many competent doctors could there have been at the time; one should remember this was shortly after the fad of living room lobotomies for depressed housewives. 

One of the greatest charms of these semi-fictionalized mini-biographies is that we get glimpses into a younger Wilson's life and thoughts. As I have contemplated Wilson's life in relation to my own many times, however drastically dissimilar they were/are, I can't help but see some reflections in the story. When I was younger, I met a waitress where I worked who was addicted to heroin. Because I was visibly hippieish at the time, she believed I had access to LSD. I didn't and hadn't tried "Leary's panacea" at that point. She desperately wanted to try acid as she believed it would be the trigger to cure her addiction. I don't remember ever hearing if she ever found LSD, so I don't know the results of her experience. I've known a few people whose lives were revolutionize the first time they tried Hoffman's problem child, but it never seemed to last. It would wear off surprisingly quickly after a couple weeks of elation and revelation...a few times I can remember it led to much more bitter worldviews than that of the pre-trip personality. I also don't think the profound physiological addiction of heroin works that way. I do hope she found some safety and peace. 

The first couple time I read this book, I took these anecdotes as solemn warnings where almost every character seemed like a pathetic nut who ends up worse than they were before. I'm not sure I see Jane's story as something like that now; instead, it seems to be an account of a human dealing with life in the way that many humans do that has a happy-enough ending. Jane was born into a world that was hostile towards her in many ways and rose to prominence in a field so misogynistic, they made an award-winning show about it. No wonder she was all bothered without being able to get hot. Good for her for jumping in on the future, even if she didn't get paid. Perhaps the sixties were the last time money truly didn't have to matter. I will say this, my wife got the final word on the tale: "maybe don't fuck a teenager, though." 

Sex, Drugs & Magick: That Paleolithic Sentiment

As an attempt at apology for my absence, I'm going to cover both the Preface to the 1987 Edition as well as the original introduction to keep the group moving ahead apace.

The possibly suppressed first edition.

Sex, Drugs and Magick: Preface to the 1987 Edition

While not as humorous as the Preface to the 2000 Edition, Wilson's 1987 Preface is a valuable addition to the text. As it seems that the New Falcon edition of the text was the first that would be widely available, Wilson adds some much needed context to the book and reveals the secrets of its composition that he was unable to in 1972 when it was published under the title Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits.

The anecdote about what Hefner supposedly said about Wilson's original title for the book, Sex, Drugs & the Occult, has always managed to elicit a chuckle and is one of the main things I think about when I think about Hefner. That and the scene from The Sex Magicians where the Hugh Hefner stand-in receives a blowjob while conferencing with one of his editors about how much he hates Spiro Agnew. As Wilson notes, the real Hugh Hefner was hard to pin down, as he was hidden behind an aura of the sophisticated lothario who shielded himself at the heart of his media empire. Over the years Hefner became a figure who reaped laughing accolades for maintaining his libidinous lifestyle until the end of his nonagenarian life. In the information-rich dissipative structure of the year 2022 E.V., a new docuseries supposedly reveals more salacious details about the publisher, including allegations of rape and bestiality. The myth continues to spawn questions, and now that the man is five years dead, it is unlikely we'll ever get to know much about the "real" Hugh Hefner. He is now firmly in the company of the imaginary rabbits listed by Wilson, although he casts a distinctly more sinister shadow.

Wilson's Greater Feast proceeded his former employer's by a decade and Wilson seems to have never met with Hef in the flesh, so less can be revealed about the potential suppression of Sex and Drugs during the Seventies. Wilson points out how rare the original edition of the book was, even for those who were seeking the title, and links its scarcity with the cessation of much of the underground press and a possible conspiracy on the part of the counter-revolution of that chaotic decade. I didn't live through the counter-revolution, but Wilson's books have made me fear a perhaps-imaginary period of American life where the vestiges of the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties were savaged by Nixon's dogs. My own hunch is the book was extremely niche and was most likely forgotten about; perhaps a few cases of the title were never distributed and pulped, but I'd imagine the original print of the book wasn't that expansive. If anything, the perhaps-imagined quote from Hefner would indicate that the title was simply published by the wrong company. If Hefner truly said that, well, that indicates that was how he was feeling on that particular day, but a mythical quote still indicates a general ethos in the Playboy realm against such unsophisticated shit as occultism. I could see the title having sold better under the auspices of Llewellyn, which contemporaneously released Louis T. Culling's A Manual of Sex Magick and The Complete Magickal Curriculum of the G.'.B.'.G.'., each of which will be mentioned in the forthcoming pages.

On a personal note, I do think Wilson's quick addendum about cocaine usage is why I never got into that drug and I thank him for that. Having seen a relationship and a friendship dissipate due to the increased usage of what are today called "party drugs," I deplore the effect that powders white and deadly can have on the course of life. I consider coke particularly pernicious because of the effect it has on Latin American countries who are terrorized by cartels and would bring up the karmic debt of a drug whose granules are disproportionately small compared to the blood each it is weighed against. This blood is obviously also on the hands of the United States government which fucked around with these countries and the drug's supply in a seeming bid to be as terrible as absolutely possible. Today, like Wilson says about sex in the era of AIDS, I would also urge any users, causal or habitual, to consider that using any powder without a testing kit in the era of fentanyl is like playing Russian roulette.

Wilson's entire oeuvre has a charming consistency, but his early work has an even clearer overlap of sources, favored anecdotes/examples and quotes. The original Introduction is prefaced with a quote form the Firesign Theater, albeit from a different album than the quote which prefaces Cosmic Trigger, and the 1987 introduction repeats Crowley's stunning introduction to Liber O which was used as an epigraph for Cosmic Trigger. Wilson's reasoning for considering cocaine "particularly pernicious" is the drug's linkages to the CIA/Vatican Bank conspiracy that fascinated Bob during the latter half of the eighties and early nineties and appears in his books, interviews and lectures.

After his rote, if apropos, discussion of American puritanism and pharmaceutical hypocrisy, Wilson spends a few pages defending the new title of the work, Sex, Drugs and Magick. Wilson's apologia for his interest in occultism is all too familiar to me as Wilson, I believe, is one of the greatest defenders of the non-faith's worthiness of study and has become the basis of my own arguments. I am even known to happily trot out that beaten horse from Hamlet, beloved of occultists from the 19th Century onward, that Wilson closes his original Introduction with. Wilson's preference for the usage of "magick" as opposed to "occultism" is salient, as is Moore's preference for "magic" as opposed to "magick" which influenced my own naming preference. If this point seems tedious to you, remember magic is a disease of language and naming things is very important in our symbol-language-viral load. The remainder of Wilson's preface is concerned with a discussion of Illya Prigogine's dissipative structures and his evangelism of optimism. While I typically would group such words as "evangelism" and "proselytize" in a distinctly different bubble than "Robert Anton Wilson," I do believe it is inarguable that our author was an irascible optimist, determined to spread the glad news until he shed his mortal coil.

My "fashionable pessimism" does want to scream out when Wilson inserts "(intelligent?)" between "information-rich" and "forms [of society]." To bring out my favorite whipping boy, I believe that we are living in an objectively information-rich world which is demonstrably unable to cope and is quite stupid. However, I agree with Wilson that the results are not in yet and there is still time for that damned horse to learn to fly. Amidst the farcical pageant of politics and cultural discourse, there are bastions of momentum that are trying to propel humanity forward towards a more courageous, creative and intelligent world.

Sex, Drugs and Magick: Introduction

After reading the thoughts of 1987 and 2000 Wilson, 1972 Bob doesn't seem as revolutionary as he should. It is unfair he has to appear on stage following those two warm up acts as he seems to be repeating their words. Yet, if one begins here, we return to the burgeoning, romantic figure of the Seventies Wilson who was much more radical than he gives himself credit for. There was a radicalism in maintaining an unusual but cohesive family structure while exposing himself to the furthest realms of thought he could project himself into. And there is the basic radicalism of the insidious nature of the thoughts that Wilson is feeding to his reader, subtly reprogramming their mind to question more and more of their basic precepts about society and reality.

Wilson also deplores radicals during one part of his introduction when he says that the idea that we shape much of our reality through perception would be offensive to "radicals" as it would seemingly imply that "poor people" could think themselves out of poverty instead of needing government assistance. Perhaps this is the lapsed libertarian or ever-present socialist tendencies in me but I rolled my eyes at this barb. Perhaps it is simply the tribalistic inability to take criticism of your impressions seriously, but my experience working with lower socioeconomic families does indicate that government assistance is necessary to help people move out of poverty. Indeed, a large part of that upwards momentum is due to attitude change and setting higher goals, but for those parts to be in place, basic needs must be met. In the words of Bertolt Brecht:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving

Not that Wilson was ever a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type of guy- he writes very bitterly about the necessity of social safety nets and those who would deny those systems in Cosmic Trigger. Nor was he ever the type of moralist that Brecht targeted in this song, and it is very necessary for those stuck in “the cycle” to disabuse notions of learned helplessness, but in this case, I believe the radicals would be right to be annoyed. Besides, the notion of “learned helplessness” only being applied to the poor is also ridiculous. The amount of learned helplessness in all levels of our society is astounding. Remember, in The Time Machine by perspicacious and farsighted Wells, that the Eloi with the withered arms are the descendants of the posh.

Furthermore, poor 1972 RAW, now robbed of his radicalism, is subject to silent editing by Wilson, as is 87’s Wilson, which leads to a couple bits of anachronism. In his 1987 Preface, Wilson notes that Ken Starr’s career is a perfect illustration of Menken’s definition of “puritanism.” While Starr had been a federal judge and Bush the Elder’s Solicitor General, I could find little about his career during those years. In my ignorance, Wilson must then be referencing the Starr Report, which left that barmy Christian bitch’s dubious mark on history. Starr is a particularly odious man who defended rich ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Trump during 45’s first impeachment. This was after Trump had described the man as “a lunatic,” “terrible” and “a disaster” back when he was friends with the Clintons in the late-nineties. I wish I had Trump’s ability to make allies out of people I had previously disparaged. Capping off Starr’s litany of skeeviness is his shameful resignation from Baylor where he seems to have covered up sexual assault. A good, Christian man indeed.

The second anachronism can be found in the Introduction where Wilson cites “our current President” as an example of behavioral evidence that men enjoy fellatio. Wilson did love to speculate about the sex lives of world leaders; in Illuminatus! he memorably describes the sexual habits of the leaders of the United States, Soviet Union and China identically as having been impotent with their wives for nearly ten years yet being able to achieve “orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes." While Nixon was certainly the model of the President in Illuminatus!, and the man certainly was a cocksucker, I don’t recall him being as notorious for his enjoyment of oral sex as Bill Clinton, ergo the President Wilson would have been referencing in 2000. These “anachronisms” are trite observations, but I found them interesting.

In each Preface and the Introduction, Wilson encourages his reader to keep an open-enough mind to hear his arguments and try the experiments as well as to have hope for their and the world’s betterment. I am happy to follow the well retrodden footsteps of our staunch opponent of entropy. Perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth after all.

False Start

I apologize for the non-standard schedule posts. I'm afraid this is going to be a bit of a moveable feast, at least at first. We're experience some turbulence right now so just remain seated and wait patiently. 

Sex, Drugs & Magick Week Three: Mourning for a Lost Century and It's Lost Hopes

Dadd

Sex, Drugs & Magick: Preface to the 2000 Edition

My first job out of college became immediately uncomfortable because I was promised the Human Resources manager's job after the first manager left. The quick transition to discomfort was caused by this; before I learned the actual job description, I had to fill out the standard application on my first day. The application included a page about a mandatory drug test to be taken the first day- I immediately texted my friend, whose family I was newly-employed by, in a state of panic. In fact, he and I had smoked a copious amount of cannabis the night before. Of course, the mandatory drug test wasn't necessary for office workers and by my friend's unnecessary, asked for, intervention, I was disqualified for the job. You see, the human resources branch of this office was mostly concerned with insurance and piss: it was grotesque. Perhaps it was the taste of sour grapes, but I do feel I had a true moral opposition to the requisition of urine. When I heard of one man being tested by an unwilling hair sample, whose results go back further in time than piss, I almost flipped out in the office. That was unconstitutional! (I was naïve.) That was unconscionable! (I was dumb.) That was against Natural Law! (I am an idiot.) It was wrong. (But the world has never really cared about "right" and "wrong.") Thus I failed at yet another job.  

And yet, for all the parentheticals, even in this starry horizon of the loosening of drug laws, I can still relate to the red-hot iron anger of Wilson in his 2000 Preface. The "Book of Urinomics" is juvenile, crass and ridiculous, but it could never be as ridiculous as the societal trends which inspired its writing. Perhaps it is because I still live in an uncivilized land where cannabis is not completely legal; more likely it is because of my utter moral revulsion about the amount of prisoners with marijuana charges who remain in prisons all over this failing state, but I am still troubled by the state of our society's relationship to drugs. In the most basic, legalistic sense. Later in the book, Wilson will discuss a middle-class couple with a combustible, tamper-proof safe in which they stored their marijuana. While the paranoia is bizarre, and perhaps fictionalized as Wilson notes in this preface, I can understand its genesis in this society where a drug charge, or a hospital bill, can land you in the most dire of circumstances. 

When I first read my New Falcon edition, I was struck by the most recent preface because of Wilson's honest, striking analogy for no longer being the person who wrote the original book. As an adolescent/young-adult I developed a neurotic fear that I would continually turn into someone who felt nothing but scorn and disdain for the person he was last year. Thankfully, age has proven that I grow gentler in my reminiscences, recognizing my flaws and Wilson's original Enemy, "ignorance," within myself. And Wilson's expansion into Fuller's enemies is similar to my own: I don't own property, nor am I an architect, so I don't understand the malignancy of zoning laws. I am not immune to fear; indeed, I am full of it, but I focus on understanding that fear "is failure and the forerunner of failure", and my desires are simple enough where I desire little beyond what I have as an admittedly unambitious part of society. 

The second half of Wilson's preface, penned right before the iris of the twenty-first century,  is full of the same righteous rage but the target has moved. The barbs don't land as surely as they did twenty two years ago. That's space-time for you. While the federal government remains a fucking mess, it also seems much more reasonable in many ways than current state governments that seem to be contesting who can pass the most egregious, regressive law possible. The policies against drugs and the lack of civil liberties is not ideal; however, that does not make me sympathetic to the alternative health community that cheered on reactionary bullshit during a worldwide crisis and pushed anti-vaccination conspiracy theories to the point where people who question the FDA, a perfectly intelligent stance, can start spouting fluoride-in-the-water type insanity in a split second. 

I'm not an expert on Ruby Ridge. I don't know what happened, which sounds like a lame, post-truth cop-out. It was a situation that was escalated. I'll admit that I don't agree with Randy Weaver's ideology and believe he put his own family in danger. Weaver had an extreme worldview and took a course of action that was so extreme that it remains notable years later. The echoes of the Ruby Ridge disaster resonated when Waco erupted in flames. At first, many viewed the Branch Davidians as the ultimately wronged party. Janet Reno and the Feds had violated all that was good and true about America's guiding light of free expression with armed assault. Then one reads about Koresh and his batshit ideas, the facts of the Branch Davidian way-of-life, replete with pederasty and abuse, and that his idiot followers were the ones to set fire to the compound on his moronic, self-aggrandizing orders. 

Where do we go when we cross the wires of illegality and equate certain verboten matters to others? I don't think it is anywhere "good." Wilson couldn't have foreseen this a couple decades ago, in the autumnal years of his life, but as (one of) his chroniclers, I would be remiss if I didn't note incongruities with today's world. Wilson was no Saint, nor am I a hagiographer. I am against a strain of antigovernmental thought in today's world.  As quaintly horrifying as the Ruby Ridge incident might have seemed in the 90s, fodder for enflamed opinions and twenty-four-hour news, we are not living in the relative comfort of the past. The sentiment that led Randy Weaver to sacrifice his family's wellbeing in favor of his fanaticism has led to unnecessary strife and death. Whether it is COVID-misinformation, Q-Anon inanity, or pro-Putinism, there is a clear and present danger. What does one do when one simply wants to smoke weed and not endorse partisan fatuousness or the excess of the ancien régime? This is not the best of all worlds. 

Sex, Drugs & Magick Week Three: Incoming

 

Apologies, we have a few days off for break this week and I lost track of my obligations. I'm trying to finish a proposed introduction for Hilaritas during this time and will have our third post up soon! 

Sex, Drugs & Magick Week Two: The Morning Chorus

For the first time this year I heard spring peepers on the air. Like frogs asking for a king, we shall now consider the words of magicians. 

Sex, Drugs & Magick: The Four Forewords 

Howdy, friends and foes! It's time to paw into Sex, Drugs & Magick a little further than quotes and my personal reminiscences- instead, you'll get my tiresome opinions on the forewords that have been newly included in the Hilaritas Press edition. And there was much rejoicing...

I have to ask myself, am I allowed to be dismissive here? Will I drive my few readers away if I bristle? I don't want to be unpleasant, but I have searched and searched for something to say about Morrison's foreword but it seems phoned-in and uninspired in the light of prefacing such an integral text. Their original writing for this edition seems like Moore- or Wilson-lite (that's reaching) and, overall, the short matter seems awfully trite. However, I'm not a famous author, don't know what other demands were upon them at the time and can't criticize too much. I don't think there is much to say about what they have to say about the book at hand. Perhaps I am being pedantic, but I appreciated their foreword to Ishtar Rising much more. 

Damien Echols also doesn't talk much about Sex, Drugs & Magick in the particular, but that is understandable. Echols discusses, with an underplayed sensibility that is still haunting, the unconscionable circumstances of his introduction to magic; and in the cell walls which shadow his prose- Echols finds something strong and eternal. The feat of Will carried out by Echols cannot be overstated, when he had every reason to "curse god and die," he walked through the walls. His foreword is more of an Ode to Wilson, and one of the most moving I have read. We all owe a lot to the Grand Old Man, and many of us have bared our heart/hypothetical-souls to express How Much, yet Echols' story is unique, honest and profound. His reflections on the living nature of art and the continuing conversation between ages of humanity and human achievement, enabled by Hermes, Friendliest of Gods to Man, are succinct and worth rereading. I wish him health, wealth, strength and length of days. 

I really enjoy Phil Farber's books. I've found ATEM and Brain Magick to be a couple of the most useful grimoires I've ever read- my copy of FutureRitual is scarred and mangled from its in-the-moment use during rituals and ritual-practice. It is predictable that I would enjoy his foreword as well; from his charming story about cheering Wilson in a Chinese restaurant to his substantiated optimism about the state of the War On Some Drugs, Farber exudes the authenticity I have always appreciated in his writing. Furthermore, he includes this very important statement: "And through all his books, Bob did more to raise awareness of magick as a form of brain-change than anyone since Aleister Crowley himself." To which I say- "Hear! Hear!" (Farber's High Magick, I read it through this summer and it still remains on my bookshelf to revisit as occasioned, is another typically efficient grimoire and I might incorporate some its exercises into our reading group for those who are game, in their way.) 

I know little of the last author aside from his glowing reputation amongst the modern Discordian milieu, which isn't an insult, but a compelling praise. The cunning-man's foreword is our lengthiest, multi-faceted and apropos. He also convinced me I need to watch Dark City as soon as possible. Can't believe I missed out on that one. Vincent also updates Wilson's writing a little bit- by pointing out, in spite of some cynical remarks, that the contrivances and twists of expression should be welcome to any neophile-leaning person. A good dose of Wilson's anti-xtian rhetoric is always refreshing and the snapshots of London circa-Cosmic Trigger on stage has all the charm of nostalgia and cultural history. The spiral motif of the subheadings even works out with Wilson's ring and the Hilaritas symbol! If that isn't synchronistic synergy, I don't know what is. I share Vincent's prayer that these tools will help us navigate the age that is to come. 

Other nets, that's typically how I view the words of magicians. We are all of use trying to encompass all like Indra whilst also crudely fingering fibers into the barest of sensory and survival mechanisms, still numb-tingling-awakening to Athena's art. We are not weavers, nor are we, to duly avoid Christian associations,  fishermen. We are, if anything, the people who enjoy casting our nets and catching a glimpse of what wriggles through. Forgive me for what I missed and enlighten me to your perspective! Next week we dive into the (R)aw meat of the matter. 

 

Guided By Memory, a Tintinnabulum to Ward Our Studies

I really hope Bobby is okay with me using this.

Editor's Note: Nothing will ever be "sharp" with me, angels know nothing of Time.

We will begin with the beginning- with the six quotes especially included in the Hilaritas Press edition of Sex, Drugs & Magick as well as Rasa and Christina's Foreword to the Forewords/Afterwords to the 2021 Edition. 

My memories of Sex, Drugs & Magick are appropriately hazy. For many years, I kept it as a constant resource, constantly referencing chapters three and four while occasionally revisiting the interludes. I can vividly remember the sense of pure disgust I always felt at the denouement of the "Slouching Towards Bethlehem: The Story of Leonard." I can also vividly remember how Wilson guided me to an understanding of the Ninth Degree Ritual of the O. T. O.. Teaching moments that are buried deep inside whatever construct I am after years of trying to be something beyond the realm of the rational. My New Falcon copy is properly tatty at this point, so I am glad to have another before me. 

At first, I avoided this book. I wasn't interested in the "drugs" part and believed that I could entirely avoid the "drugs" side of sex, drugs and magic. Which is entirely laughable, almost Shakespearian in how my prudish, classist conceit was brought to its knees by the sweet, smokey lure of chronic cannabis usage. Reading Sex, Drugs and Magick probably became viable because of an early, overly-solemn, in only the way a young magician can be, wintertime experience with psychedelic mushrooms. And then a further three experiments, in quick succession, over the Spring. Because of one of the authors quoted in the first pages of the text that we are beginning to explore, I somehow believed it was more responsible for me to try psychedelic mushrooms than smoke a joint- I was, and continue to be, very dumb. But I did the mushrooms and as I geared up I excused myself to watch something, I wasn't quite sophisticated enough yet to remember to memorize Crowleyean rituals beforehand- ha! What I watched was Moore's eulogy for Wilson, given in London a few months after our Great Human's Great Feast.  Later that night the world fell apart and I heard the story of Tulsi Das and His Monkey Army. Good stuff. (Moore)

So months later, after reconciling myself with what I had perceived as the rambling and hippy-dippy language of Illuminatus! and Promethea, I read Sex, Drugs and Magick. There were secrets here, primed to slip into a spellbook; descriptions of potent drugs and the states of consciousness they could engender. Lush historiography of mankind's gropes towards ἐλευθερία  (eleutheria) coupled with suspension-of-disbelief-requiring accounts of its grand, occult successes.  Is it crude, bold and somewhat foolish compared to Wilson's later writing? Sure, but that's why I love pre-Illuminatus!-being-published-by-Dell RAW. He was brash and silly and full of It. He had the broken spectre and glory of a newborn magician. Wilson the Magician. I wouldn't argue that this is our closest contact with that persona, but I would argue it is one of the more straightforward. 

I started smoking cannabis on the reg a few months after reading Wilson, and almost wouldn't have been ready for it. I wasn't ready to have that many laughs with my friends. It was a brilliant blanket experience that spread over me and filled my mind with a royal road that united disparate sections of myself- the euphoric, the abstract, the mundane and the foolish. I am a being of smoke whose pleasure imitates the Prophet's, peace be upon Him, in that I love, above all things, perfume, prayer and women (woman) with the addendum of certain drugs. (The Koran, as well as the Bible, is imminently more entertaining and lucid under the influence of THC. I believe, if hazy memory serves, this is mentioned in Sex, Drugs and Magick.) Needless to say, all I have said in this paragraph is entirely based on my own experience and mileage may vary. (Marincolo) (Thompson) 

I have changed since the last time I read Sex, Drugs & Magick. Changed in many ways. The cannabis abuse still remains; I find myself in complete agreement with Alan Moore's alter ego in Jerusalem,  Alma Warren, that "anyone who doesn't think marijuana is addictive isn't trying hard enough." The magic remains; I will bang my head against this door until it cracks. The sex, thankfully and improbably, continues- which is more than I deserve. If someone were to ask me what was good about life, I would easily answer "sex, drugs and magic." Still can't mark the purpose, not yet. But with these tools, these necessary cyborg tools that cling and peel from our innermost selves, we continue to grope towards something beautiful, something harmonious, something immortal. That's the Art that we all strive for- life is nothing less than drudgery without that hard-pressed vintage of the human imagination, that faculty which brushes against the (underbelly?) of something greater and grander than our fleeting impressions. (Eno) (Havens) (Crowley)

Thus do I end my catechism. 

And, according to Christina and Rasa's promising words, we will be treated to the reflections of eight, much more impressive, magicians by the time we are done with this fanned-out edition of Wilson's tome- written during the tumult of the counter-Revolution and the first nuclear-blast blindness of the post-Sixties era--in this blessed year of Our Lord 2022. The world has changed--I have changed--since this was published last year and it landed in my hands. I wonder how we shall change before we have concluded. 

(Havens)