Tag: White Hand Society

The Typhonian Current: Olson and Kenneth Grant

In 1964, Olson publishes “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” in The Psychedelic Review — a poem birthed in ruins, in myth, in the underworld of American consciousness.

Nine years later, in 1973, British ceremonial magician Kenneth Grant declares the arrival of the Typhonian Tradition, a magical current devoted to chthonic, extraterrestrial, and daemonic intelligences, many drawn from the deep archives of myth and modern horror alike.

Though Olson and Grant never met, and likely never read one another, they can be felt vibrating on parallel frequencies. Each undertook a kind of mythic reconstitution — one through poetics, the other through ritual magic. Each turned to Typhon as the name for what the West had repressed.

Each sought contact with what Grant called the Nightside of Eden — the underworld of dream and daimon, the world beneath the Tree.

In the Typhonian cosmology, Set — the Egyptian god of desert, dismemberment, and becoming — plays a central role. Set is not Satan, but a daemon of individuation and threshold. And Typhon, Grant writes, is either Set’s progenitor or twin: “the arch-monster” whose energies were misread by the Olympian order and buried in taboo.

Compare this to Olson’s identification of Tartarus as a place not only of punishment, but of origin — the “chained father,” the source of Typhon’s flame. Grant and Olson both return to the abyss — not as hell but as creative substratum.

For Grant, this substratum is accessed through trance, ritual, psychedelics, and visionary language. For Olson, it is accessed through breath, field, and proprioception — a somatic epistemology capable of tracking Chaos back to its roots in the body and the land.

The subterranean father in Tartaros is not evil. He is necessary. To contact him is not to summon doom — it is to reenter cosmic process.

There are other echoes.

Olson’s involvement with the White Hand Society, and his psilocybin sessions with Leary, place him squarely within the psychedelic ferment of the early 1960s — a ferment mirrored in Grant’s own chemical and ceremonial experiments.

Olson read Jung and Jung’s alchemical writings. Grant, too, drew on Jung, especially in his writing on the Qliphoth, the inverted Sephiroth or “shells” on the dark side of the Tree of Life. The Qliphoth, in Grant’s system, are both exiled and generative: portals to creative chaos, much like the Typhonic force Olson names.

And then there is Gerrit Lansing — friend to Olson, Boston-based poet-mystic, and likely source of Olson’s interest in Crowley’s Book of Thoth. Lansing founded a journal called SET, named after the Egyptian god, and his own writing often anticipates aspects of Grant’s cosmology. Lansing’s 1966 collection, The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward, takes its title from Jung’s Alchemical Studies, specifically a chapter on the inverted tree — the same tree that Grant links to Typhonian gnosis.

What does this all mean?

It means that Olson’s poem, when read alongside the Typhonian Tradition, becomes legible as a magical document — not in the sense of intention, but in the sense of effect. It opens a channel. It participates in a current. It speaks in a tongue that other mystics, elsewhere, were also learning to speak.

And it means that Typhon, far from being a footnote in a forgotten myth, is an active force in the poetics of the twentieth century — a daimon of chaos, pluralism, darkness, and return.

Olson’s poem names him.
Grant’s rituals conjure him.
My reading recuperates him.

This is not necromancy. It is listening.

From Black Mountain to White Hand

As Yépez has noted, Olson is an epistolary poet (The Empire of Neomemory, p. 11). Many of Olson’s works are written as letters. Read as such, “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” would seem to be a letter to “the mushroom people”: a letter to the Psychedelic Review (Olson, Muthologos, p. 185). The poet says as much during an interview that took place at his home in Gloucester in 1966. Speaking of “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV,” he states, “It was published in the Psychedelic Review, the one that the mushroom people edited. I deliberately did it, by the way. They asked me for a poem ‘cause I’d been under the early experiments on the poets and the mushroom. And I deliberately gave them this” (185). Interestingly enough, however, the poem makes no mention of mushrooms, nor does it include any obvious or explicit nod to psychedelic experience. The poem, rather, is a retelling of the war between Zeus and Typhon, a narrative lifted, notes Maud and others, from the Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony. Typhon is a demigod of sorts: a monstrous serpentine giant who attempted to overthrow Zeus for supremacy of the cosmos. Later traditions associate Typhon with the Egyptian god Set. Some also view him as a precursor of sorts to Milton’s Satan. The main question we’ll want to ask, then, is, “Why was Olson thinking about Typhon? And why did he think this retelling of the Typhon myth suitable for “the mushroom people”?

To begin to answer these questions, we need to reflect for a moment on where and how the mushroom people became the mushroom people. Leary first received word of the effects of psychedelic mushrooms from his friend, a researcher investigating the psychology of creativity named Frank Barron. The latter had learned about mushrooms in 1959, while interviewing a psychiatrist who was using and studying them in Mexico. Barron brought a batch back with him to Berkeley, where he tried them later that year. He then shared news of his experience with Leary. The latter was doubtful at first, until having a similar experience himself the following year in August 1960 during a visit to Cuernavaca. In both cases, the men are purchasing the mushrooms from curanderas or folk healers. Curanderas like the famous María Sabina, in other words, are the ones passing the mushroom along to Westerners. These curanderas transmit the seeds of psychedelic revolution to the West via a series of USAmerican intellectuals who, like tourists, spend time abroad vacationing in Mexico.

Charles Olson had made a similar journey a decade earlier — as did Beat writer William S. Burroughs. The latter went to South America in search of yagé, or what we now call ayahuasca. Letters Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg over the course of this journey were later published by City Lights Books in 1963 as The Yage Letters. One might profit by reading Burroughs and Ginsberg’s Yage Letters alongside Olson and Creeley’s Mayan Letters. For now, though, we must focus on Olson.

During a brief interval in his time at Black Mountain College, Olson and his wife Connie decided to spend the first five months of 1951 living in Lerma, a small fishing village in Campeche. Olson’s letters to the poet Robert Creeley during this time in Mexico became the substance of Mayan Letters, published in 1953. And in fact, one of the first uses of the term “postmodern” appears in a letter of Olson’s written to Creeley in August 1951, shortly after Olson’s time in Mexico. Here, in other words, is a poet whose encounters with Mexico contribute to the birth of the postmodern. Yet Olson’s use of the postmodern was far more expansive and ambitious than that of his successors. As George F. Butterick notes, Olson’s designation of his work as postmodern “serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but…seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man’s intellectual and political life since roughly 500 B.C.” (Butterick 5). Olson would go on to use the term again in print in a piece he wrote on November 4, 1952 titled “The Present is Prologue.” Marxist historian Perry Anderson refers to this piece, published in 1955, as the first to use “postmodern” in the sense of “an aesthetic theory linked to a prophetic history” — i.e., as “an agenda allying poetic innovation with political revolution” (The Origins of Postmodernity, p. 12). By the early 1960s, Olson began to manifest this agenda through his participation in the psychedelic revolution. Which returns us now to our main concern: the experiences themselves.

The Mushroom People

In the mid-twentieth century, two groups with competing agendas worked to introduce psychedelics into American society: the CIA, with its MK-Ultra program, on the one hand, and countercultural intellectuals, including famous authors like Aldous Huxley, on the other. Among this latter group of “psychedelic utopians,” we can include Huxley’s friend and fellow émigré Gerald Heard, as well as related figures like Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. By now, histories have been written about the efforts of both of these groups; but in accounts of the latter group in particular, what sometimes goes unmentioned or unrecognized was its explicitly utopian intent. After their first encounters with substances like mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, many of the above-mentioned early users of these drugs felt compelled not just to pen statements of advocacy, as Huxley did in books like The Doors of Perception (1954) and his final novel Island (1962); most of them also rushed to form communes and related kinds of alternative, experimental foundations, schools, organizations, and institutions—among which we can include Esalen Institute, the White Hand Society, the Zihuatanejo Project, Millbrook, the Merry Pranksters, the League for Spiritual Discovery, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and others. However, unlike prior utopian projects that emphasized modifications either to property relations or to modes of governance, most of the organizations and communities mentioned above instead prioritized psychosexual deprogramming and the so-called “raising of consciousness” through mass ingestion of psychoactive substances as techniques essential to their goal of changing society for the good.

Although not as active as some of the figures I’ve mentioned above, Black Mountain poet Charles Olson was nevertheless an early, enthusiastic participant in one of these organizations in particular: namely, Leary and Ginsberg’s group, the White Hand Society. Poet Peter Conners tells the story of Leary and Ginsberg’s partnership in his book White Hand Society. The story begins, of all places, at Harvard. Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (who later took the name “Ram Dass”) launched the series of experiments known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project beginning in 1960. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the first individuals to participate in this project. British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond — known both for coining the term “psychedelic” and for administering the famed mescaline trip described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception — placed Ginsberg in contact with Leary after hearing the poet deliver a talk about his experiences with mescaline at a conference hosted by a Boston-based professional organization known as the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (Conners 62). After an initial exchange of letters and a visit by Leary to the poet’s East Village apartment in Manhattan, Ginsberg agreed to participate in a psilocybin session hosted at Leary’s home in Boston in November 1960.

Needless to say, Ginsberg reacted positively to the experience. He declared himself “the Messiah…come down to preach love to the world” (as quoted in Conners 84). “We’re going down to the city streets to tell the people about peace and love,” he proclaimed, trying to convince Leary and others to join him. “And then,” he added, “we’ll get lots of great people onto a big telephone network to settle all this warfare bit” (85). We may feel ourselves tempted to laugh at Ginsberg’s pronouncements, jaded as we are by the decades that followed — but these pronouncements were indeed prophetic. Ginsberg’s words made things happen. For telling people about peace and love was exactly what he and Leary went on to do in the years that followed. The two men bonded over the experience, and agreed afterwards to conspire together to turn on other creative types and thus aid in the dissemination of the psychedelic sacrament to others. Poring over the poet’s address book, Leary and Ginsberg chose individuals they thought might be open to participation in future experiments.

Among these contacts was Charles Olson.

Saturday June 16, 2018

I enjoy jotting notes to myself on my phone these days, particularly when relaxing beside a pool. Sun, water, people, thought: a perfect combination. “Bertrand Russell on mysticism,” I remind myself, playing to a future self as its stern parent. “C. S. Lewis: did he, too, die on 11/22/63, the same day as Aldous Huxley and JFK?”—a question I type onto my screen and then promptly set aside. (The answer is, quite remarkably, as I learn afterwards, “Yes.”) In his book White Hand Society, Peter Conners claims that Timothy Leary was the person who, two days prior, supplied Laura Archera Huxley with the 200 micrograms of LSD that she administered to Aldous on his deathbed. Registering the sun’s warmth, I redirect awareness toward a swim, the pool’s rippling blue-and-white surface performing a lovely hypnosis. The lower part of me submerged to just below my chin, my thoughts grow fish-like—and then with another stroke, frog-like—consciousness of the entirety of my evolutionary past remaining stored, it seems, in some code-form akin to DNA. “What are the defining characteristics of contemporary existence?” I wonder after contemplating Western modernity’s imperfect approximation of a past garden paradise. This Shanghai noon. In all observable effects, however, the pool beside which I sit is still a healthy, therapeutic spot: Blake’s Sunflower’s “sweet golden clime.” Pool-going diminishes aggression, serves as a pleasureful release from some of the neuroses of the encircling regime. The optimist under present circumstances rejoices by noticing a parallelogram formed by the play of sunlight upon a tiled surface. The machinery of capitalism, I remind myself, threatens to extinguish even this. The White Hand Society gives me hope, though. I glimpse a row of ice cream cones printed on a towel and feel myself assured again of the all-rightness of existence.