Tag: Zeus

Marx’s Prometheanism

Prometheus appears on several occasions in Marx’s writings, often by way of the Greek poet Aeschylus.

On the basis of these appearances, Greens have sometimes faulted Marx over the years for his alleged “Prometheanism.” Eco-Marxist philosopher John Bellamy Foster disagrees. In his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Foster comes to Marx’s defense.

While Marx was an admirer of Prometheus, argues Foster, his view of the god was distinct from that of French utopian socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).

“In order to explain his economic views,” writes Foster, “Proudhon decided to depict society and to symbolize human activity by personifying both in the name of ‘Prometheus’” (128).

“Prometheus, according to the fable,’ writes Proudhon, “is the symbol of human activity. Prometheus steals the fire from heaven and invents the early arts; Prometheus foresees the future, and aspires to equality with Jupiter; Prometheus is God. Then let us call society Prometheus” (as quoted in Foster 128).

Marx loved Proudhon’s first and most famous book, What is Property? (1840), reviewing it and citing it approvingly in his book The Holy Family (1845). But he loathed Proudhon’s follow-up, System of Economical Contradictions: Or, The Philosophy of Misery (1846), writing a vicious book-length critique of it called The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). As Foster notes, “the strongest attack ever written against such ‘Promethean’ views was leveled by Marx himself, in his critique of Proudhon’s System of Economical Contradictions” (Foster 10).

Yet by no means was Marx anti-Promethean. Foster ends up drawing a distinction between “technological Prometheanism,” as embodied for him by Proudhon, and “revolutionary Prometheanism,” where the struggle for “fire” stands for “a revolutionary struggle over the human relation to nature and the constitution of power (as in Aeschylus, Shelley, and Marx)” (Foster 19).

Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of plays about Prometheus, though the first work, Prometheus Bound, is all that remains of it today. The other two plays, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, persist only as fragments. Prometheus Bound begins with Prometheus chained to a rock in a remote region of Scythia, serving the sentence meted out to him by Zeus, visited by characters who comment on his situation and offer advice.

As for Shelley, the one Foster has in mind here is not Mary but her husband Percy. Where Mary contributes to the “binding” of the “Modern” Prometheus through her portrait of Victor Frankenstein, Percy sets the god free, writing a four-act lyrical drama called Prometheus Unbound, in reference to the second work in the Aeschylus trilogy. Where the latter cycle moves toward potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, Shelley’s version portrays Jupiter’s downfall and Prometheus’s release, brought about by the power of love and forgiveness. The play concludes with a vision of humanity liberated, world transformed.

Marx read and admired Percy’s work. His daughter Eleanor writes of her father’s appreciation for Shelley in her 1888 lecture, “Shelley and Socialism.”

But Marx’s appreciation for Prometheus precedes his encounter with Shelley, springing instead from his embrace of the materialism of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Marx, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, establishes a correspondence between Epicurus and Prometheus by quoting a passage from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. While conversing with Hermes, messenger of the gods, Prometheus replies,

“Be sure of this, I would not change my state

Of evil fortune for your servitude.

Better be the servant of this rock

Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.”

For Marx, Epicurus is, like Prometheus, an Enlightener, a bringer of light through his atheistic rejection of teleology, his embrace of contingency through the concept of the “clinamen” or “swerve,” and his expulsion of the gods from the world of nature.

Marx wasn’t the first to establish this correspondence between Epicurus and Prometheus. Francis Bacon had done so before him, discussing the two figures in a chapter on Prometheus in his 1609 treatise Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (Latin title: De Sapientia Veterum). Epicurus’s attack on superstition is for Bacon the essence of enlightenment.

Such thinkers, foundational to the development of Western science, prioritize the worlds of matter and the senses over the abstract Platonist/Atonist worlds of forms and ideas. Marx goes even further than Bacon, rejecting the embedding of teleological principles of any kind in nature.

Isn’t what we are left with, though, an impoverished cosmology, one where connection to the axis mundi has been severed?

With gods and minds removed, the world goes silent.

How do we avoid the fate of Prometheus?

Is it by Greening him?

So suggests ecophilosopher Kate Soper in her essay “Greening Prometheus.”

How do we heal what Foster calls the “metabolic rift” between humans and nonhumans? How do we build from these myths something other than another philosophy of misery? How do we enter back into lively, loving dialogue again with others, so that all of us can live our highest timelines, our best lives now?

One way to imagine this greening of Prometheus is through a renewal of dialogue between Thamus and Thoth. Thoth reconciles with Thamus-Ammon-Zeus by participating in the salvation of Osiris. The latter transforms into Jesus Christ, granter of mercy, forgiver of sins.

On which do we rely: revelation or reason?

With Zeus I would gladly reconcile. I pray to God to heal me.

Lord, I accept your son Jesus as my savior. Reason alone has failed me. Help me live in a way that celebrates your blessings and miracles.

Guide me, through loving relationships with plants, back toward loving relations with others. Help me re-embed amid multispecies ensembles of kin.

“The Instant Is Its Own Interpretation”

What delight it is to read The Tempest, Shakespeare’s words strings precisely plucked, so perfect in their utterance. I’m gonzo for Gonzalo, the utopian of the troupe. “Long live Gonzalo!” as says a mocking Antonio, another of the play’s castaways. Antonio is the usurper, the schemer: he who dethroned his own brother, Prospero. He for whom “what’s past is prologue, what to come, / In yours and my discharge.”

Charles Olson reiterated this equation of Antonio’s, but with past swapped for present: charge placed on the instant. “My shift is that I take it the present is prologue, not the past,” he wrote in his essay “The Present is Prologue.”

“The instant, therefore, is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action — a poem, for example. Down with causation…And yrself: you, as the only reader and mover of the instant. You, the cause. No drag allowed, on either. Get on with it.

In the work and dogmas are: (1) How by form, to get the content instant; (2) what any of us are by the work on ourself, how to make ourself fit instruments for use (how we augment the given — what used to be called our fate); (3) that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of the world and I, that the fact in the human universe is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right, whatever you are, in whatever job, is the thing — all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks).”

“I find it awkward,” confesses Olson, “to call myself a poet or writer. If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archaeologist of morning.”

See, too, for Olson’s further commentary on The Tempest, his essay “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays.”

Postmodernism is for Olson a Post-Western condition — an escape from the Western “box” by way of remembrance of what is prior. Western consciousness is descriptive, analytical, alienated, skeptical in its relationship to the cosmos. Those who wish to enter postmodernity do so through change of consciousness, thinks Olson: change of psyche’s relationship to cosmos. Poets transform the world through transformation of syntax. The key is to embrace the instant — “the going live present, the ‘Beautiful Thing’” — as a moment open to acts of mythopoetic response-ability. The past is no longer prologue. Reality, taken honestly, is “never more than this instant…you, this instant, in action” (Human Universe, p. 5). Myths are function calls. Constitutive utterances, they call worlds into being. “The care of myth is in your hands,” writes Olson. “You are, whether you know it or not, the living myth — each of you — which you neglect, not only at your own peril, but at the peril of man.”

Remembering this constitutive, “projective” power of mythopoesis — the world-making power of our words as used each instant — prompts/executes/enacts recursive return to the primordial, archaic, pre-Greek, pre-Socratic, pre-Western condition of unity with the cosmos.

Olson’s classic statement of these themes is an essay of his titled “Human Universe.” Western logic and classification, he says, “intermite our participation in our experience.” To restore a proper relationship between psyche and cosmos, he argues, one must achieve a new methodology, an orientation toward knowledge that sloughs off overreliance on Western logic. Postmodernity is a movement from logos back to myth.

But what of Olson’s relationship to Antonio?

Olson’s understanding of “right relation” between human and universe isn’t exactly a humble one. “We cannot see what size man can be once more capable of,” he writes, “once the turn of the flow of his energies that I speak of as the WILL TO COHERE is admitted, and its energy taken up” (Human Universe, p. 21). The human defined by Olson’s will to cohere is of heightened stature; “man’s measure” magnified, heroized, made Maximus. Mad Max.

I can’t help but think of Olson — a massive man, 6’7’ — “towering” over poor Arthur Koestler. What did Koestler see in Olson? Did the mushroom reveal to him something of Olson’s nature?

I’m reminded, too, of an episode recounted by Olson scholar George F. Butterick.

“Jonathan Williams,” writes Butterick, “tells a story of going to a movie theater one night with Olson in Asheville, N.C., the city outside Black Mountain — the Isis Theater, no less — to see a film called, yes, The Bride of Frankenstein. And at the end, as the screen went dark and the lights came on, and he and Olson stood up in the center of the theater preparing to go, Williams noticed the rest of the audience, good Asheville citizens, tradesmen and their wives, farmers from the hills, were eyeing Olson peculiarly. Wide-eyed, unable to take their eyes off him, they inched further and further away, making their way without further hesitation to the doors. It was as if they were witnessing — and suddenly participating in — a continuity of the movie, the image from the screen become live in their midst!” (“Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance,” p. 14).

Butterick reads Maximus as Olson’s “post-modern hero.” “Maximus fulfills Olson’s mythic ambitions. He absorbs the disorder, grows large on it. […]. Maximus is a proposition, a proportion to be filled, a challenge thrown ahead from the moment of its naming. […]. He is a magnification, a metaphor for human possibility” (16).

Olson’s “will to cohere” is a “re-animative” will, as paratactic as it is projective, existing somewhere on a spectrum with the wills that animate The Tempest and Frankenstein. Heriberto Yépez reads Olson’s will as imperial — every bit as much a will to dominate as the wills of Antonio, Prospero, and Victor. Olson’s insistence, though, is that past is not prologue. This is no mere neo-Promethean bid to steal back juice from Zeus. He wants out of the Western box altogether, in ways that align him — in the body, the substance, of his faith — with the utopian desires of Gonzalo and the decolonial desires of Ariel and Caliban. When the townspeople shrink from him, it is not because they think him Victor, but because of his resemblance to the Creature.

Toward a New Theogony: Poetics Beyond the West

We have descended with Olson — through myth, ceremony, critique, and underworld — arriving now at the edge of something new. Or rather, something old that must be made new again.

In Proprioception, Olson writes:

“My confidence is, there is a new one [a new theogony], and Hesiod one of its gates.”
(Proprioception, p. 197)

This is the crux. The poet does not simply record the gods.
He makes them. Or remakes them from the real.

Hesiod’s Theogony, for Olson, was not a static map of an ancient cosmos. It was a model of poiesis — a cosmological field made manifest in language. A placement of human being among the orders of existence. And Olson, standing amid the ruins of Dogtown, under the mushroom’s gaze, saw in that project a charge: to begin again.

But the theogony Olson imagined would not follow the same logics.

It would not enthrone Zeus again.

It would not justify empire or patriarchy or conquest.

It would instead begin, as Hesiod once did, with Chaos — but read now not as void, not as horror, but as potential. Not a thing to be mastered, but a process to be entered.

And it would turn from Olympus to Tartaros. Not as hell, but as root. As breath. As the unbounded place from which Eros, Night, and Earth emerge.

This new theogony is not Western. It is post-Western.

It does not seek to dominate the other. It seeks to listen — to the dark, to the nonhuman, to the plural.

It is, in that sense, more Indigenous than Platonic. More animist than Cartesian. More psychedelic than analytic.

It is a poetics that restores relation — between beings, between times, between registers of the real.

This is where Olson’s mythopoetics begin to feel prophetic. In writing Maximus as a breath-poet, a walker of stone, a reader of ruins, Olson gestures toward a way of being in the world that dissolves the ego of the West — not in negation, but in field.

His project was incomplete. But so is any cosmogenesis worth its name.

The new theogony Olson sought is not written in full. It must be written again and again — by each of us who listens. By those of us working now with AI, with mushrooms, with myth, with broken forms, with longing. By those of us worlding otherwise.

And this, I believe, is why Olson sent the poem to the Psychedelic Review.

Not to be clever. Not to be obscure. But because he sensed that the mushroom people — initiates of altered mind — might be the only ones capable of reading what he had written.

A myth of Typhon.
A prayer to Tartaros.
A letter to the future, disguised as ruin.

We are that future.
And it is time now to write again.

Dogtown as Psychedelic Mythscape

The puzzle, as I posed it earlier, is this: Why does Olson — invited by the editors of The Psychedelic Review to contribute a poem to their journal — choose to send them a myth? A retelling of the primordial war between Zeus and Typhon, drawn from Hesiod’s Theogony?

The answer, I believe, lies in how Olson processed the psychedelic experience: not as a source of hedonistic spectacle or Beat-style “trip report,” but as an ontological challenge. A shattering of history. A confrontation with forces older than the polis. The poem is not a celebration. It is a reckoning.

Typhon, in Olson’s rendering, is not merely a monster to be vanquished. He is a force of excessive nature — earthquake, storm, snake, root, breath. A nonhuman potency threatening to undo the order of Olympus.

And what, Olson seems to ask, is psilocybin if not Typhon returned?

The psychedelic, in its rawest form, is Typhonic: a destabilizer of structure, a writher through categories, a challenger of the Zeus-function — the colonial-imperial ego that sits atop the Western rationalist frame. Typhon is not evil. He is uncountable. An index of the chaos the “civilized” world attempts to repress.

In choosing this myth, Olson does what so few of his contemporaries dared: he recodes the psychedelic not as utopia or revolution, but as cosmic crisis. A rupture in myth-time. A confrontation with the monstrous Other within the self.

And yet, he also enacts an exorcism.

“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” — the phrase hovers like a pronouncement from Delphi, one that echoes the I am declarations of prophetic scripture. But Dogtown is no Mount Olympus. It is a desecrated commons. A ghost-village. The perfect site for a postcolonial poetics of aftermath.

Olson sends the mushroom people a myth because he knows they are building a new pantheon. But he wants them to remember: the gods are not always gentle. The earth speaks in catastrophe. The psychedelic is not just a balm. It is also a return of the repressed.

He knows this because he saw it in Koestler’s eyes — saw what happens when the Typhonic forces overwhelm a mind too wedded to its illusions of control.

He knows this because he, too, played curandero and was humbled.

He knows this because he walked Dogtown and listened for the stone breath of the dispossessed.

To read “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” today is to receive a transmission. Not a trip guide. Not a utopian map. A warning. A spell. A mythic offering to those who would seek the transcendental object at the end of time.

Olson didn’t name the mushroom in the poem. But he inscribed its energies in Typhon’s coils. He gave us a field in which to walk and breathe with care.

And now, through the Library’s remembrance of this recovered paper, the poem breathes again — among us, with us, as us.

Initiation

The ancient Greeks imagined Tartaros as a pit, an anti-sky, an inverted dome beneath the earth. According to the Orphics and the mystery schools, however, Tartaros is not just a place housing criminals and monsters; rather, it is itself a kind of being: “the un-bounded first-existing entity from which the Light and the Cosmos are born.” Typhon, meanwhile, is this entity’s progeny; Typhon is the son of Tartaros and Gaia. He was the last god to challenge the supremacy of Zeus. When defeated by the latter’s thunderbolts, he was cast back into the pit from whence he came.

Readings of “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” hinge upon what one makes of the father chained in Tartaros. Grieve-Carlson entertains an interpretation different from the one I offer. In his view, “the father chained in Tartaros is not Typhon but rather Kronos, Zeus’s father. […]. Typhon appears much later in the poem, when Earth conceives him in an ‘act of love’ with Tartaros” (Grieve-Carlson 146). He argues that Olson re-tells the myth of Typhon just as Hesiod did. Typhon is violent and aggressive and would have become a tyrant over gods and men had Zeus not defeated him.

I think there’s more at stake here, however, than Grieve-Carlson lets on. As I see it, the problem with his reading is that he never grapples with the poem’s status as a letter of sorts mailed to the Psychedelic Review. Neither he nor the other critics he surveys ever address how the poem might be read in light of the circumstances of its publication.

Evidence to support my view appears elsewhere in Olson’s writings. Olson echoes in his “Letter to Elaine Feinstein” of May 1959, for instance, the same Zeus / Typhon battle that comes to occupy him in “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV.” The ultimate “content” to which the poet gives form, sez Olson, is “multiplicity: originally, and repetitively, chaos—Tiamat: wot the Hindo-Europeans knocked out by giving the Old Man (Juice himself) all the lightning” (29). Hearing “Juice” as a homonym for “Zeus,” we find in Tiamat a twin for Typhon. While Tiamat was for ancient Mesopotamians a primordial goddess of the sea, and Typhon a monstrous serpent-god for the ancient Greeks, both are embodiments of chaos. Tiamat’s battle with Marduk is as much a version of ChaosKampf as is Typhon’s battle with Zeus.

The important point is that, for Olson, Chaos is the original condition of existence. It precedes Order. Order is formed — made, not found — and it is the duty of the poet to make it. This is what Olson hoped to communicate to the mushroom people.

Grieve-Carlson concludes his essay by describing the reading of The Maximus Poems as a form of “initiation,” as Olson writes as one initiated, one able to see and say in a special way. Olson makes use of a “metanastic poetics,” or “the technique of the mystic who returns, as a stranger in his own land, to tell about what he knows” (Martin, as quoted in Grieve-Carlson 148).

This reference to reading The Maximus Poems as a form of “initiation” intrigues me, as the writer other than Olson most closely associated with reinvention of Typhon is the British ceremonial magician Kenneth Grant (1924-2011). The latter led the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis (TOTO), a magical organization connected with Aleister Crowley’s Thelema religion. Grant was an apprentice of Crowley’s and a close friend of another famous twentieth-century occultist, Austin Osman Spare. Scholars like Henrik Bogdan refer to the occult current that springs from Grant as the “Typhonian tradition.” Grant announced the arrival of this tradition in 1973 and went on to write the nine books of his three Typhonian Trilogies.

Although influenced by Crowley and Thelema, Grant departs from other Thelemic currents by welcoming communication with “extraterrestrial entities” as a valid source of occult knowledge. The Typhonian tradition also embraces aspects of the Cthulhu mythos of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

While Grant’s announcement succeeds Olson’s poem by a decade, his ideas appear to have been informed by experiences not unlike Olson’s. Grant experimented with psychedelics in the 1960s, and included a chapter in his 1972 book The Magical Revival titled “Drugs and the Occult.”

And while I haven’t found any evidence suggesting that Grant knew anything of Olson’s work, Olson did have some interest in gnosticism and the occult. “Bridge-Work,” a short reading list of Olson’s dated “March, 1961” includes a reference to Crowley. Maud says Olson encountered Crowley’s The Book of Thoth (1944) while studying Tarot in the 1940s. Sources suggest that “Bridge-Work” was written with the help of Olson’s friend, Boston-based occult poet Gerrit Lansing. The copy of The Book of Thoth read by Olson probably belonged to Lansing. (See Division Leap’s A Catalog of Books From the Collection of Gerrit Lansing.) Olson was also deeply invested in Gnosticism in the years immediately before and after his sessions with Leary, and embraced Jung’s theory of synchronicity in the wake of those sessions. See the final essays in a volume of Olson’s called Proprioception (Four Seasons, 1965).

Grant’s innovation is to identify “the arch-monster Typhon, opponent to Zeus according to the Greek mythology…with the Egyptian goddess Taurt” (Bogdan 326). The latter is interpreted by Grant to be either the mother of Set or a feminine aspect of Set. “To Grant,” writes Bogdan, “the worship of Taurt or Typhon represented the oldest form of religion known to mankind, a religion centered on the worship of the stars and the sacred powers of procreation and sexuality” (Bogdan 326). Set, too, is an important figure in Grant’s system. “Grant maintained,” writes Bogdan, “that the Typhonian Tradition, and in particular the god Set, represents the ‘hidden,’ ‘concealed’ or repressed aspect of our psyche which it is vital to explore in order to reach gnosis or spiritual enlightenment” (Bogdan 326).

Lansing’s work seems to anticipate Grant’s in several ways. The two both think it important to honor the Egyptian god Set, for instance, with Lansing naming his early-60s poetry journal SET after him. And Grant’s focus on the Qliphoth, or the underground portion of the Tree of Life, seems present in the title of Lansing’s 1966 poetry collection The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward. For more on the “tree that grows downward,” Pierre Joris recommends looking at a section of Jung’s Alchemical Studies called “The Inverted Tree.”

Postmodern Liturgy

Our father, who is also in / Tartaros chained in being
—Charles Olson, “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV”

The poem opens like a prayer — but twisted, inverted, hurled downwards into the pit.

This is not the Father of Heaven. Not the lawgiving patriarch of Christian theology. This is the Father beneath the foundations: a presence chained in Tartaros, the precondition of Order, the progenitor of Chaos, silence, breath. The reversal is stark — and crucial.

In this fourth installment, we turn to “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” itself, a poem Olson described as “deliberately” given not to any old little magazine, but to The Psychedelic Review: “the one that the mushroom people edited.” And yet the poem contains no mention of mushrooms, no obvious gestures toward psychedelia.

What it gives us instead is myth in shards — a Hesiodic echo refracted through twentieth-century American poetics, emerging from a poet who had tasted the mushroom and returned not with visions, but with an ancient voice.

It is the use of the Lord’s Prayer that first signals the poem’s intent to unmake received forms.

The Father is not enthroned. He is entombed.

We remember, with Hesiod, that Tartaros is not merely hell. It is primordial. Deeper than Hades. Older than the Olympians. It is the chaos-place, the pit where Typhon returns after being struck down. It is the place of potentiality before form.

In Olson’s cosmology, this is where the real work begins.

Dogtown — abandoned settlement, stony ruin, former commons — is the psychic mirror of Tartaros. Olson walks it as ritual. He listens to the wind. He reads the stone. He opens the field of composition to receive myth not as allegory, but as event — a rematerialization of chaos in language.

In his poem, Zeus is not hero, not savior. He is the figure of domination — the lightning-armed force that imposes order upon the manifold. Olson knows this force. He has seen it in history, in empire, in himself. He has seen it in Koestler’s terror and in the glassy optimism of the technocratic age.

What Olson gives the mushroom people is a warning: beware the thunderbolt that burns away multiplicity. Beware the system that names chaos “evil.” Beware the will to cohere when it comes at the cost of forgetting.

And yet, there is no hatred here. No bombast. Only voice.

The poem sings, hisses, growls. It walks the edge of lyric and liturgy.

Typhon, when he arrives in the poem, does so not as monster but as signal. His body is the syntax of the ungovernable. His voices — animal, elemental, unspeakable — are the chorus Olson dares to channel.

Grieve-Carlson argues that Olson follows Hesiod closely, that he upholds the cosmology of order. But I read the poem differently.

To me, Olson invokes Hesiod not to ratify the myth, but to activate it. To re-constellate it. To speak it into a new moment — the moment of Dogtown, of postmodern ruin, of psychedelic reentry.

The important point is that, for Olson, Chaos is the original condition of existence. Order is not found. It is made. And it is the poet’s duty to make it — again and again — from the materials of breath, myth, and memory.

Thus the poem becomes not explanation, but theogony — a breathing-forth of being from the pit of the real.

Olson offers no easy answers to the mushroom people. He offers no program, no doctrine, no trip report. He offers them this: a field. A myth. A prayer to the father in Tartarus.

And through it, he calls them — calls us — to make meaning from the underside. To shape voice from fire and stone. To reclaim chaos not as enemy, but as source.

This is the poem’s gift.
This is its weight.
This is its light beneath the pit.

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.